Arcades Project Research Articles

Aura ex machina

The essay has three main objectives and therefore is divided into three parts. The first is to dispel some misconceptions related to the notion of aura, in the centre of Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (§ 1). First and foremost, is criticized the claim that Benjamin intends the decline of the aura of the work of art (its crisis) in terms of an irreversible end. In response to this misunderstanding is then analyzed the concept of aura in the light of fundamental opposition between the two conceptions of technology (as magic and as perfective mímesis) at the centre of the second version of the essay on the work of art (§§ 2-3). The theme of the aura is so is explained in the context of Benjamin’s other works (especially the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire), in close relationship with his political theory of experience and with its original historical materialism (§ 4). The third part of the essay, finally, concerns the contemporary metamorphosis of aura, in relation to art practice and digital interfaces that shape social life (§ 5).

Awakening from the nightmarish slumber of phantasmagoria

Walter Benjamin is discussed in this article to speak to the character of our experiences in the world as we try to animate our freedom in the midst of phantasmagoria. While we may indeed be trapped in the slumber of phantasmagoria and its many nightmares of despair, it is still possible to blast away the sands of sleep and awaken to a morally redeemed world fashioned through our engagement with various dreams of freedom. First, this article will explore the concept of phantasmagoria, which is a symbolically rich term used by Benjamin to speak to the complex ways in which we are mired within the combined material and aesthetic trappings of an advanced capitalist world. Such an exploration will consider three archetypes of character (the gambler, the flâneur and the collector) and their corresponding experiences (fashion, boredom and interiority) in an attempt to unite various convolutes from The Arcades Project to consider freedom in a world spectrally haunted by such phantasmagoria. Second, we will consider the possibility of becoming dialectically startled before the angel of history and its potential to animate our weak Messianic power. Such an act must involve the building-up of a redemptive imagination as a means to speak the truth of our place as the makers of value in the world challenged to destine our own journey in the ongoing project of justice.

Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon's <em>Paysan de Paris</em> and Walter Benjamin's <em>Passagen-Werk</em>

This paper looks at the role Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Paris Peasant played in the composition of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project . How we might theorize the literary appeal of the Arcades Project , as evidenced in contemporary poetry and visual art; and, more broadly, what is the relation between the aesthetics and the philosophy or politics in Benjamin’s text? The model I propose is one of a Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” By looking at Benjamin’s earlier writings and his correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, we see not only that Benjamin’s work shared much with Aragon’s brand of Surrealism, but that Benjamin recognized this proximity as problematic. The quotations of the Arcades Project are thus a record of his conscious attempts to forge a separate, or negative, literary space around this influence.

Dickens's London: perception, subjectivity, and phenomenal urban multiplicity

This phenomenological exploration of the streets of dark London opens up new perspectives on the city and the writer. Taking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as its model, Dickens' City offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens' City presents in twenty-six episodes (from Bells, Bridges and Butlers via Inns and Interiors and Public Houses, the Police and the Post to Todgers and the Thames) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both. Key features: major reassessment of writing on the city; dual focus on methodology and the historicity of Dickensian urban consciousness; philosophical reflections on urban tropologies through key passages from texts recreate the experience of Victorian London; and, inventive structure offers the reader an experience of the disordered multiplicity of London.

Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture ed. by Susan Harrow, Andrew Watts

(132) also in the romance heroine to whom she compares the epic figure. She suggests that romance influenced epic. Here she reinterprets the longstanding tendency to discuss epic as expanding backwards to include the childhood of a hero in the larger narrative context,biography and genealogy increasingly forming parts of adult identity. Examples are wide-ranging, including well-known and lesser-known works, with careful contrasts of epic and romance characters (for example, Guillaume d’Orange and Gauvain). Part three,“A Slow Conversion of Sensibility,”illustrates the cultural changes of the twelfth century concomitant with change in literary taste, from noble women’s roles and instruction to marriage laws and changes in the administration of the sacraments , arguing convincingly for a“shifting change of direction in the history of mentalities ” (195) that endures today. “Works Cited” are divided into “Primary texts,” “Secondary Sources,”and“Reference Works.”Gaffney has read widely, and intelligently includes both collections of essays by title and by articles cited. There was a missing reference, Harf-Lancner 1994 (153, n145), but other items were present. Not only is this volume wide-ranging and thoughtful, it is also extremely readable. Though Gaffney carefully introduces her arguments and reviews her findings, she does so in a rhetorically pleasing way, not repeating words or structures that she has just illustrated . Furthermore, the volume is beautifully produced: no typographical errors, footnotes for easy consultation, and careful proofreading. This volume provides food for thought and suggestions for future projects, in a useful and readable way. Loyola University Maryland Leslie Zarker Morgan Harrow, Susan, and Andrew Watts, eds. Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-4203458 -7. Pp. 331. 66 a. Memory studies, now with their own eponymous journal, have become a vibrant, rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field.Holocaust and trauma studies have been their major foundations in the United States, whereas in France and the United Kingdom, a more pervasive sense of place and home long ago associated personal with local, regional, and national histories. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is the best-known example. Memory studies allow history and literature, the textual and the factual, and the material and the metaphysical to illuminate each other. All sixteen contributions are excellent.Among the best are Colette Wilson’s“Remembering the Paris Commune in the Twenty-First Century” (37–57), which uses Internet sources effectively. French schools and textbooks still suppress information about the Commune. This basically pacific, naively utopian movement generated a battle to control popular traditions, waged with plaques, statues, street names, and memorials. Rémi Dalisson’s “La Fête nationale”(157–73) traces successive nineteenth-century regimes’attempts to construct a triumphalist master narrative concluding with the ideal present of their ascendancy. 228 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 229 Priests generally presided over holiday ceremonies until the mayor and local instituteurs replaced them around the end of the nineteenth century. The Entre-deux-guerres period adds an element of ‘war culture’that emphasizes Armistice Day (11 November) and Joan of Arc. Sarkozy tried in vain to revive it. Lucy Garnier and Cécile Meynard’s “L’écriture du souvenir dans les‘Journaux’ de Stendhal”(209–33) explores Stendhal’s theories on the relationships between sense impressions and memories, which anticipate Proust. Stendhal records memories in the present in order to project the past into the future. He keeps several different kinds of records running parallel to each other, and allows himself to rewrite a past memory without obliterating the first version, as if on a magic writing pad or palimpsest. Tim Farrant’s“Remémorer Rabelais en France au XIXe siècle” explains that avant-garde writers of the 1830s emulated Rabelais and his contemporaries. Under the Restauration, Rabelais appears to offer “une riposte plus authentique, plus française, plus nationale, aux impostures du nouveau régime” (227). Chateaubriand broke the ice by calling Rabelais a transcendent genius; Nodier, Balzac, and Hugo took up the torch, as Michelet, Verne, and Jarry did later. Denis Saint-Amand’s“Souvenirs zutiques”(241–56), unveils serious opposition to Napoleon III and to the Third Republic underneath the superficially frivolous,obscene surfaces of mocking poems by...

Archival Cinephilia in The Clock

Archival Cinephilia in The Clock Catherine Russell (bio) This is how the accelerated tempo of technology appears in light of the primal history of the present. Awakening. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Art critic Rosalind Krauss called The Clock a “tour de force,”1 and novelist Zadie Smith wrote enthusiastically about it in the New York Review of Books.2 It is clearly an event, both a novelty event for the general public and an intellectual event; and yet film scholars don’t seem so sure. Thom Andersen sums up the grumbling cynicism that I’ve heard from several cinephiles when he asks, “Is the clock dumb enough?”3 The problem for Andersen is primarily curatorial, as Marclay’s corpus of films is severely limited historically and geographically, fairly predictable, and not always accurate in terms of the actual synchronization of movie time and clock time. Marclay borrows heavily from film history, but the question of his own contribution to that history remains unresolved, perhaps because it is not precisely a film. The Clock may be a video collage, but it is very much a cinematic experience, drawing the viewer into a hermetically sealed world of cinematic time and space. The continuity principles of editing, sound, and performance create a fluid, endless text that is at once seductive and engrossing. Marclay arguably invokes both forms of cinephilia as Thomas Elsaesser has described them: the older version of immersion in the spectacle and the more recent version of the collector and interactive user of digital cinema.4 The Clock also invokes several principles of [End Page 243] collage-based film practice that have been a cornerstone of the avant-garde since the late 1950s. Marclay’s techniques of appropriation and recombination are, however, neither challenging nor critical. The Clock begs the question, “Where is the détournement?” Instead of interrupting narrative flow, Marclay has successfully reconstructed a kind of narrative that seduces and entertains. Marclay has appropriated not only the film clips but something close to the mechanism of desire that interpellates the viewer into the flow of narrative film. If The Clock challenges engrained notions of political modernism that are very much still at play in experimental film practice and criticism, it also opens up some key questions about cinematic representation in the digital age. Despite the viewing pleasure and critical rewards of identifying hundreds of movies and actors, The Clock is nevertheless an experimental work made by an artist and exhibited in museums and galleries. It might be best described as an essay on cinephilia, if that isn’t too much of a backdoor way of talking about secondhand or borrowed pleasures. This is not to say that the work offers a coherent argument regarding cinephilia, or that Marclay intended it as an intervention into the ongoing scholarly debate regarding cinephilia. In fact, The Clock is not exemplary of the essay film as it has been defined either by Timothy Corrigan or Laura Roscaroli, who both stress the subjective aspects of a form that engages with the world through various creative modes of cinematic address.5 The Clock offers no first-person reflexivity whatsoever, and arguably inverts all principles of cinematic subjectivity through the use of exclusively borrowed footage and its lack of voiceover—although there is definitely an authorial inscription registered in the montage and in the sound-image relations. However, if we consider The Clock in terms of its production of knowledge, it may nonetheless be aligned with the video essay as a genre of film studies practice.6 Moreover, I want to argue here that whether one understands the piece as a good object or a bad object, it foregrounds a crucial tension in film aesthetics between genre cinema and the avant-garde and art cinemas. Rather than press the issue of the essay film, I will explore this treatise on cinephilia by way of key concepts in Walter Benjamin’s thought. As a cult phenomenon, The Clock evokes the aura of the pre-cinematic artwork, and yet its strategies of sampling clearly embrace the reproducibility of the cinematic image that Benjamin endorsed for its potential engagement with progressive social politics. Going beyond the artwork essay...

Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance

Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance

Afterimages of Steel

This essay works with afterimages of the steel industry to explore the material legacies and many afterlives of industrial remains in Dortmund. Inspired both by Walter Benjamin’s writings on the afterimages of capitalist modernity in the Arcades Project, and by the afterimages of steel produced by Haiko Hebig, the article gathers fragmented encounters in an account that evokes the materiality, textures, co-habitations, and memories of Dortmund’s postindustrial landscape.

The Ballistic Flight of an Automatic Duck

This article analyses Jacques de Vaucanson's automatic duck and its successive appearances in Thomas Pynchon's work (both Mason & Dixon and, by extension, Gravity's Rainbow) to discuss the correlations between (self-) evolving technologies and space age gadgets. The Cold War serves, therefore, as the frame of reference for this article, which is further preoccupied with the geographical positions that automatons or prototype cyborgs occupy: the last part of the essay analyses Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, where mechanical hens stand at the entrance to dreamworlds. Automatic fowl guard, and usher into being, new technologised worlds.

Chiffonnier contre flâneur

Dans cet article, nous reconstruisons le dernier travail de Walter Benjamin, le Livre des passages, comme celui d’un « chiffonnier ». Nous allons ainsi contre le courant qui consiste à considérer cette somme comme un livre achevé, écrit par un « flâneur » ambigu, et l’appréhendons au contraire comme une collecte systématique de rebuts de l’histoire, habituellement ignorés par les historiens, et qui attendent leur classement. La forme définitive doit venir d’une nouvelle dialectique du passé et du présent, qui part de la position historique et politique de Benjamin. Le Livre des passages documente une méthode et une technique d’écriture que nous pouvons reprendre aujourd’hui.

Entre sueño y despertar: la recepción del Surrealismo enWalter Benjamin

Few intellectuals of the Weimar Republic have engaged so intensely in French Surrealism as Walter Benjamin. In this movement, the German-Jewish thinker found his own concern reflected: the politicization of art on behalf of social emancipation. Facing a Republic in decline, the intellectual’s task could not be merely contemplative any longer. Benjamin’s concept of a “profane illumination,” put forward on the basis of Andre Breton’s narration Nadja (1928), can be conceived as a response to the crisis of European intelligence. The present contribution traces his approach to Surrealism starting from the correspondent essay of 1929 until his posthumously published Arcades Project and analyzes its implication for Benjamin’s own work.

Benjamin's Wager on Modernity: Gambling and the Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin wrote about gambling during his youth and the topic remained important through his project on the Parisian arcades that dominated the last decade of his life. In the Arcades, Benjamin analyzes gambling in relation to capitalism, religion, and psychoanalysis, and to our experience of time. Like prostitution, with which it is paired in Convolute O, gambling is a kind of ritual or game with a long history that has taken on a new guise in the exchange economy of capitalism. Benjamin believes that a genealogy of the practice can uncover aspects of its former, transformative meaning, expressed in bodily innervation. I claim that gambling is related to Benjamin's idiosyncratic idea of prophecy, in which looking toward the past opens up new possibilities of meaningful experience. It signals a possible rupture in capitalistic society, one that has revolutionary political potential, precisely because the practice is so ubiquitous.

Modernist Literature in the Modern Media Ecology

Modernist Literature in the Modern Media Ecology

Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong Elsie B. Michie (bio) Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong; pp. 449. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. $71.83 cloth. Winner of the James Russell Lowell prize, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 represents the capstone of Isobel Armstrong’s extraordinary career. In it, she brings her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature, particularly Victorian poetry, together with a vast amount of research on the various uses to which glass was put in the Victorian era. The result is a rich compendium of knowledge, a book that is as beautiful to look at as it is fascinating to read. The closest model for this work would be Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, except that Armstrong focuses not on multiple objects but on a single material. She argues that particular materials, glass in this case, might be thought of as characteristic of an era. Her book then asks what kind of social cross-section we would get if we were to examine a culture by looking at the uses and images that surround that material. What would such a study tell us about both the culture and the material? Armstrong’s book implicitly reverses the terms of the phrase “material culture” by exploring the culture of a material. Though Armstrong explicitly seeks to complicate approaches to objects or materials that emphasize “socio-political and economic meanings” (15), her book opens with a socio-economic and political focus. In the first section, she explores the making and breaking of glass by examining accounts of glass factories by such notable authors as Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau, the history of the factory that provided the glass for the Crystal Palace (the Chance Factory), and the accounts of glass-makers’ trade union journals. Nestled somewhat uneasily in the midst of these accounts of production is a story of destruction that recounts the way that glass-breaking has been consistently used as a form of political protest. Throughout this section, Armstrong emphasizes that Victorian glass, like the historical period itself, “straddles awkwardly between modernity and history” (31). Though modern factory conditions had begun to be introduced, the Victorian trade unions still functioned much like medieval guilds. Though glass was being produced in large quantities, most of it was still blown by hand; “it was partly ‘petrified’ breath and partly frozen liquid, a breakable liquid” (4). As the beauty of this image suggests, Armstrong’s project involves more than the practical uses of glass. In it, she undertakes to set forth what she calls, following the work of Gaston Bachelard, the poetics of glass. As she notes in the introduction, materials function both usefully and “expressively. A buttress is both a symbol of and is force” (15). The middle section of Victorian Glassworlds reads glass both poetically and culturally. It begins and ends with considerations of glass’s symbolic functions. The opening chapter considers reflection in a myriad of locations, from the mirrored curtain of the Royal Coburg Theatre to the novels of Thomas Hardy and the paintings of Édouard Manet, Edward Burne-Jones, and James Tissot. The ending chapters deal with the Cinderella story and what Armstrong calls glassworld fictions: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and [End Page 226] Dickens’s Bleak House. Between these chapters, Armstrong explores the visible manifestations of glass in Victorian culture, the plans for a glass arcade, the development of the conservatory, the popularity of cut glass, and, most prominently, the building of the Crystal Palace. What unites this section is its emphasis on windows, mirrors, and glass walls, its interest in the way glass “interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen” (3). In the third and final section of Victorian Glassworlds, Armstrong explores the intermediary role glass plays when it functions as a lens; “with the lens not things, but images, were at issue” (253). Here, we move from the rich catalogue of Victorian objects that fills the book’s middle section, its largest, to the pleasures of looking through glass. Once again, as in her discussion of mirrors and windowpanes, Armstrong moves...

Tattoo and taboo: On the meaning of tattoos in the analytic process

Tattooing projects a visual image in transference to form a backdrop for the most salient unconscious inner conflicts arising during an ongoing analytic process. Like a snapshot, the tattoo is a dialectic record of the mother‐father relationship, of desires for closeness and distance, commonality and difference, identification and individuation. As Walter Benjamin famously stated about the nature of visual images in his Arcades Project, the tattoo represents “dialectics at a standstill.” What seems paramount to the patient who participates in the act of tattooing is the need for stasis and immutability, as if bringing unconscious conflicts to “standstill” were to deliver a sense of stability. Unconsciously, the need is triggered by a threat to the inner stability resulting from fear of violating a taboo escalating to the point that fears of abandonment and fusion become unbearable.On the one hand, the tattoo is a visual symbolization of a taboo transgression; on the other hand, it activates the same through an act of self‐injury that resembles the magical ritual acts of indigenous peoples’ use of tattoos. The taboo thus serves as an ersatz for the actual violation of the taboo in real life, so that the tattoo may be ascribed a magical significance or totemic function. And yet the tattoo’s success as a vehicle for constructing a transitional object is always contingent on the tangible manipulation of the skin conjoined with the creation of a symbolizing visual image. The image then acts like a “patch” to repair holes blown into Winnicott’s “potential space” and to reconstruct it.

Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire

Most Americans’ knowledge of the French Intervention in Mexico (1861–67) begins and ends with the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the date of the epic Battle of Puebla in 1862. But Kristine Ibsen believes Napoleon III’s mad “Mexican Adventure” and the installation of Austrian archduke Maximilian as Mexico’s puppet emperor still resounds in Mexican national identity today, and that it has been appropriated by American and European artists, filmmakers, and writers over the past 150 years to focus public attention on the dangers of dictatorship and imperialism. Ibsen employs a cross-disciplinary approach to demonstrate how Mexico’s struggle against autocratic rule shaped the country’s political and cultural identity and, at the same time, served activists beyond Mexico who sought symbols of successful resistance movements and popular sovereignty. Inspired by the work of Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Mexican Imbroglio), Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project and Illuminations), and Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism), she first examines visual culture in Maximilian’s occupied Mexico, 1864–67.Maximilian and his child-bride Charlotte became Mexico’s Maximiliano I and Empress Carlota, affecting indigenous dress and customs while playing the roles of European royals, to the delight of their conservative Mexican allies and the disgust of Benito Juárez’s Republicans. Ibsen sketches Maximilian’s enthronement and brief reign, and then follows with a chapter that views the spectacle of empire gone wrong from the vantage point of Edouard Manet’s Paris and his publicly banned masterwork, Execution of Maximilian. Next she leaps to 1930s Hollywood to dissect and explore the use of Warner Brothers’ Juárez (1939) as a deliberate attempt by the producers and the director to alert Americans and the world to the threat of Axis totalitarianism. Finally she examines Fernando del Paso’s 1987 Noticias del Imperio (News from the Empire), a historical novel that treats the tragedy of Maximilian’s imperial delusion and Carlota’s descent into madness as a metaphor for the madness inherent in all imperialism.The Manet chapter consists of dense art historical interpretation examining, it seems, every nuanced brushstroke and every symbol that generations of curators and scholars have read into the work. The Execution of Maximilian is considered by many to be the artist’s greatest achievement, but more important to Ibsen is the fact that the painting was banned in Paris during the reign of Louis Napoleon, reinforcing her contention that the politically active artist appropriated the imagery of the Mexican Adventure to undermine the credibility of the empire-mad regime of Napoleon “le petit.” Ibsen’s chapter on the making of Juárez on the eve of American involvement in WWII is engagingly written and largely devoid of the jargon that creeps into the other chapters. The author does a masterful job of demonstrating Warner Brothers’ deliberate propaganda effort, which dodged the Production Code Administration’s censorial minefield and pressure from a then isolationist United States government.Ibsen concludes with del Paso’s Noticias, a monumental (668 pages) theatricalized microhistory presenting discrete moments that explain great events, an homage to Benjamin’s work. She detects in del Paso’s pages “a symphony of voices in which historical representation and meaning itself are exposed as unstable constructs, imaginatively distorted and sometimes even reinvented by the ever-changing perspectives of time and space from which they are read” (p. 126).The author employs a rich array of primary sources, from Mexican newspapers to Warner Brothers’ film and interoffice correspondence archives, as well as a thorough survey of art and film studies and literary criticism in Spanish, French, and English. While images are essential to Ibsen’s thesis, the reader is at a disadvantage when critical illustrations do not accompany the text. A single signature of only 11 plates helps us visualize the self-centered Carlota and foppish Maximilian, but the illustrations are too few to allow the reader to fully appreciate the visual imagery and cinematic impact of Juárez, which the author attempts to describe frame by frame to convey the symbolism and subliminal meaning intended by the director. The text in each chapter is broken by ornaments that seem to indicate new ideas or themes. These stops sometimes relate to an illustration found among the plates but, frustratingly, just as often do not.This is a very creative literary approach to history, not a book intended for the general public. Familiarity with the works of art, film, and literature examined are a prerequisite, as is grounding in the works of Marx, Benjamin, and White. In sum, Ibsen has presented academic historians with a new look at the Second Empire of Napoleon III and the doomed empire of Maximilian as depicted in visual art, film, and literature. She reveals that the varied interpretations of history — though appropriated, invented, and contested — have all played a role in shaping Mexican national identity and public opinion about the dangers of autocratic empire.

The Gnostic Imprint on Parsifal, An Illumination of Ruins

Kunstwerke sind asketisch und schamlos. (1) --Theodor W. Adorno I begin by addressing the presence of Gnosticism in Parsifal in order to confront a more general theoretical problem about how the past is staged, both its impossibility and necessity. Richard Wagner's extraordinary originality in the creation of the character of his final drama and the combination of the typical with an extraordinary originality, make this work an appropriate ground from which to analyze an essentially theoretical position through the phantasmagoric evocation of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages: the representation of, obsession with, and recurrence of history in works of art. In Parsifal, a great work that belongs to the of history, Wagner's evocation of the Middle Ages establishes a very particular relationship with the past, one worth exploring from the theoretical stance that I have chosen. Furthermore, the work exemplifies another phenomenon of great interest: Gnosticism's recurrence in European culture as a marginal trend that is suppressed time and time again, but that always resurfaces, in many cases, as the important leaven in crucial works of the Western Tradition. The underlying hints of Gnosticism within Parsifal provide yet another example of the nineteenth century's obsession with medieval society, although our interest in its presence is not simply attributed to a widespread fad. Rather, it is motivated by a deeper commentary. Parsifal is one of the key works of a century that casts a hallucinated glance back to the past at the very moment when Europe begins its hallucinating voyage into the future. Parsifal precisely exemplifies some fundamental tendencies evolving within European culture at the time: it touches on the sacralization of art and the celebration of an imaginary past, conceived of as a model for the future. At the same time, it exemplifies the key to identity in the present, the transfiguration of eroticism, the fascination with the Orient, and the desire to regress from capitalism's all-measuring linear time to the circular time of myth. Within the Buhnenweihfestspiel there are also tendencies that reveal trends of the future: a rejection of theater as mere bourgeois entertainment alongside an attempt to revive its sacred character, an artistic asceticism that renounces brilliance in its search for authenticity, and a new language that will dominate the twentieth century's most remarkable music. My exploration is not limited to an analysis of the correspondences that can be found between Parsifal and the diffuse image of medieval heresy present in the drama. Instead, I turn my focus to a second constellation that tends to be forgotten. Wagner's work does not constitute a stable and fixed moment in July 1882. On the contrary, over time, the Buhnenweihfestspiel has been distorted because of its multiple interpretations and analysis. Both those who have been fascinated by Parsifal as well as those who have felt the horror within its music have irrevocably attached themselves in distinct ways to the work. Thus we can trace a second constellation to our present: Parsifal has become a ruin. It is an object that can be analyzed as Walter Benjamin analyzed decadent landscapes in his decisive work on ruins, a work itself in ruins, The Arcades Project. A Fascination with Gnosticism Gnosticism (2) has been associated with Christianity from the beginning, like an intermittent shadow deforming its image, but also, as if involved in a game of mirrors, like a sign revealing that perhaps the deformity occurs within the Christian Church itself. Gnosticism has been defeated time and time again and persecuted nearly to extinction, yet it has unyieldingly reappeared, in various incarnations. (3) First, during the Middle Ages, it appeared as heresy; later, when the church had lost much of its power to transform any departure from orthodoxy into heresy, it emerged in its inspiration of other movements such as Rosicrucianism, freemasonry, theosophy, and ritual magic. …

Benjamin’s Arcades Project today: From the European metropolis to the global city

This essay reads Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40) as an analysis of 19th-century Paris that anticipates non-western and global urban space in the postmodern age of a late capitalist consumer society. In Benjamin’s analysis, the French capital cites images of colonial or non-western cultures for the formation of its European identity. Conversely, the accelerating hybridization and virtualization of today’s global cities, here exemplified by Hong Kong, appropriate images from Europe, fusing these by borrowing from their own history in order to fashion their own metropolitan diversity. As a result, Benjamin’s Europe-centred text can be re-employed as a framework for analysing representations of non-western cities; correspondingly, focusing on a (western) description of a city like Hong Kong allows Benjamin’s reconstruction of 19th-century Paris to appear as a foundational space of today’s transnational capitalism.

The Angel over Alabama

This paper critically explores selected motifs and figures in Allen Shelton’s poetic and painful collection of essays Dreamworlds of Alabama, complex and convoluted texts which explore his native locality of Jacksonville through the lenses of (European) cultural theory, literary studies, and individual experience, affect and memory. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ and ‘Berlin Childhood Around 1900’, these writings intertwine to present a ruinous landscape haunted by catastrophic histories, personal misfortunes, and collective / individual grief, all set in the deep shadow of Crooked Mountain. Shelton excavates this terrain literally and metaphorically to discover how the commodity form and creaturely life are inextricably interwoven in dense networks of ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, spatial-temporal configurations of bodies, objects, flora and fauna which reach beyond the here-and-now to recall enduring and disturbing myths and legacies of the South. The paper seeks to trace such figures with respect to Benjaminian themes such as ‘natural history’ and mourning/melancholy, and in relation to what is termed, following Guy Debord, ‘psychotopography.’ In so doing, it is argued that Shelton’s essays offer us powerful and visceral accounts of localities as topoi of trauma and Trauer (sorrow).

Unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century

In Unoriginal Genius Marjorie Perloff explores a new development in contemporary poetry: the repurposing of other people's words in order to make new works, by framing, citing, and recycling already existing phrases, sentences, and even full texts. Paradoxically, she argues, this 'unoriginal' poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, 'personal' than the hermetic poetry of the 1980s and '90s. Perloff traces this poetics of Unoriginal Genius from one of its paradigmatic works, Walter Benjamin's encyclopedic Arcades Project, a book largely made up of citations. She discusses the processes of choice, framing, and reconfiguration in the work of Brazilian Concretism and Oulipo, two movements now understood to be precursors of such hybrid citational texts as Charles Bernstein's opera libretto Shadowtime and Susan Howe's documentary lyric sequence The Midnight. Unoriginal Genius concludes with a discussion of Kenneth Goldsmith's conceptualist book Traffic - a seemingly pure transcript of one holiday weekend's worth of radio traffic reports. In these instances and many others, Perloff reveals 'poetry by other means' of great ingenuity, wit, and complexity.