Avant-garde
As the webmistress and primary editor of this student-based ezine, I began to wonder, “How might the limits of this medium be pushed and function differently in the composition of an online scholarly project or dissertation?” This second question which formed the theoretical impetus underlying The Arcades Project Project emerged from the first as I began thinking about how what I had learned with The Lemming might help me develop a new interest which had arisen out of an intensive study, in preparation for my master’s thesis, of Benjamin’s flâneur in relation to American Romanticism and writers in exile of Gertrude Stein’s géneration perdue. In this traditional scholarly project, The Flâneur as Self-Referential Narrator: Hidden Texts and Roving Eyes in American Autobiographical Prose and Fiction, I explored issues of exile, self and narrative voice as they manifested through walking narrators. This led me to the question, “What does the flâneur teach us about the construction, navigation and reception of hypertexts?” These two questions resulted in the development of The Arcades Project Project, to which this essay is a retrospective introduction. The project, as I explain later in the essay, has countless points of entry as it exists on the world wide web; however, as it exists on this page, it may be bookmarked at the following URL:
It also exists in static form as a collection of linked HTML files on the CD-ROM provided at the back sleeve of the hard copy manuscript. The essay that follows this preface is entitled “structure.html” on the CD-ROM in the folder entitled “home.”
The traditionally rendered framework that comprises this introductory essay begins with a discussion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a text commonly cited in conversations concerning technological progress and the impact of new media. In an attempt to identify an alternative to the revolutionary and fascist models presented in Benjamin’s best-known essay, I examine “The Author as Producer,” in which Benjamin distinguishes between two types of production that can characterize an author’s technique—the progressive and the regressive. Benjamin clearly favors the progressive mode and identifies it as a refashioning of the apparatus of perception and as the only means of eliciting change. However, one must acknowledge that the “progressive” for Benjamin when applied to technique is not to be confused with “progress” as it has been traditionally identified in relation to capitalism; unlike the capitalist view of “progress” which is guided by goals and visions laid out in advance, a view that would align progressive thinking with fascist thinking, a “progressive technique” as Benjamin puts forth in “The Author as Producer,” is not guided by a desire to communicate or realize a preconceived idea but by a desire to refashion the apparatus of perception and in thereby doing, open possibilities for the emergence of new previously unthinkable ideas.
I argue that when examined in light of “The Work of Art” essay, the concept of progressive technique posed in “The Author as Producer” might be encountered in what has recently come to be regarded as Benjamin’s magnum opus, The Arcades Project. This project functions as the anti-revolutionary, anti-fascist progressive model that Benjamin locates in architecture in “The Work of Art” essay and in the aesthetic engineer in the “The Author as Producer,” transforming as it does the Paris arcades (les passages) into an image of thought that lends itself easily to structural modification and improvisation. In this way the structure of the arcades, upon which Benjamin structurally bases his scholarly apparatus in The Arcades Project, is one that is accommodating to progress or passage--the concept most closely connected to what he calls the structure of awakening: “There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening” (The Arcades Project 389 [K1,3]). This notion of progressive writing as the refashioning of structures that forge new means of perception enabling access to “a not-yet-conscious knowledge” through its tactile appropriation in a state of distraction, combined with the organic and improvised image of thought which developed into The Arcades Project is then combined with the call by many Benjamin scholars to respond to his work, not through analysis and argument, but through continuation. My response takes the form of the website referenced above. The essay that follows is intended to frame the experiment in scholarly tradition.
What follows in this essay is an introduction to those writings of Walter Benjamin that I use to frame an online experiment in the composition of scholarly hypertext. This project examines the ways in which scholarly investigations behave in hypermedia, requiring from their readers not only a refashioned perception of the scholarly, one which observes the function of scholarship as ongoing an educational process, but the project explores a different manner of producing scholarship as well. In an attempt to continue Benjamin’s own experiments with scholarly structure that comprise The Arcades Project, my online project takes the form of The
Arcades
Project Project. I began to develop this website in 2003 after identifying two parallel questions that seemed answerable only through the enactment of such a project. The first question arose from a collaborative hypertextual experiment which I used as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of advanced composition to college students. This collaborative effort resulted in the production of an online literary ezine, which assumed the form of ten issues taking place between March 2002 and June 2004. As a means of introducing this project to my students, I contextualized our editorial process in terms of several avant-garde small press literary magazines from the 1920’s. Thus our project assumed the form of a “revolutionary” online literary magazine which we called The Lemming, striving to push the limits of online composition rather than electronically reproducing its paper counterpart. In order to “max out the medium,” we combined “subversive” poetry, fiction, editorial writing, cartoons, video games, discussion forums, comedy, music, and the voices of over sixty different contributors from all over the world with “edgy” content that attempted to challenge the status quo of the literary arts. These efforts were driven by a desire to build an online community of artists and writers that could help those involved to share, cultivate and improve upon their work. But the project was also envisioned as an educational tool, the enactment of which enabled students—myself not excluded—to study aspects of hypermedia composition that were not envisioned in advance, that could not be envisioned in advance. In other words, it was through the creation of the website that we were to encounter this new medium and develop responses to the new possibilities and questions such a medium introduced.
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