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• 1 2025-02-13T18:34:44+00:00 Epistemological & epistolary frames 3 plain 2025-05-08T23:23:15+00:00 December 16, 2024
  
  Dear Jolene,
  
  A critical question is how can we understand this work we are doing? What is this assemblage?
  
  Frame 1:
  Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.
  Benjamin's monumental work, really just a man's version of a craft or sewing box filled with stuff that might be purposed later, emerged from his observation that existing conceptual models were inadequate to describe the kinds of experiences of modernity that he was living. Abandoning the discrete form of the book, with its tidy covers and beginning, middles, and ends, Benjamin turned to ragpicking to find a mental model.

  "Organized as an extensive set of folios or ‘‘convolutes’’ much of The Arcades Project consists of elaborate, strategic citations from a wide variety of works originating in or commenting on nineteenth-century Paris. These citations originate in a heterogeneous multiplicity of genres, ranging from poems and novels to police reports, travel guides, and advertisements, as well as works of criticism, history, philosophy, and social theory. They stem from or refer to an uncountable number of cultural and social practices and historical figures: Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, Nietzschean eternal return and Marxian dialectics, Auguste Blanqui and Charles Fourier, the street plan of Paris and street names, politics and revolutions, urban gardens and department stores, the interior of the bourgeois domicile and bourgeois subjectivity, commodification and phantasmagoria, Jugendstil and the cartoons of Grandville, photography and fashion, iron and glass construction in architecture, the gambler and the collector, colonialism and prostitution.” (“Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project”, 2003, p. 8-9)
  
  “Not only do the extracts, which are filed by topic, succeed one another in ways that often form implicit patterns of crosspertinence and association (which supplement explicit cross-references to other entries that are sometimes noted in the text). Nested within the mass of citations are notes and luminous commentaries by Benjamin that establish this goal. Furthermore, these commentaries include theoretical, generalizing indications. Whatever their immediate significance within a given convolute, then, they also evince Benjamin’s ambition for a methodological and philosophical breakthrough in modes of historicization as well as the conceptualization of modern culture and society.” (“Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project”, 2003, p. 9)

  As Heidi Craig underlines, rag picking was primarily used for papermaking. We can see in Benjamin's practice of collecting, as a new way of doing philosophy in complex times, an interest in the ecological materiality of thought itself. Has anybody written about this?
  
  Frame 2:
  Vernacular photography (slide show, family album)
  Growing up in the 1970s, late summer would be peppered with invitations to neighboring houses to see the slides from people's summer holiday. Adults and kids would gather around a wall, usually in the basement, while the travellers narrated fun episodes from their trip.
  Jolene, you and I find ourselves reaching into our cell phone archive for many of these images. How much does that experience of show and tell resonate for you?
  
  Frame 3:
  Rock (or shell) collecting
  I was, as would not be a surprise to anyone who knows me, a child who collected rocks, and I still find them in coat pockets. A rock collection is intriguing to think about as a way of thinking into and out of these feelings we can't yet find a language for. Rocks are generally selected because of a pleasing shape texture color or weight. They become decontextualized from their geography, but attached to feelings that were once embedded in place.
  
  
  Sometimes people assemble shells in situ and leave their assemblage for others to find. I came upon these whale bones left by persons unknown in Mexico. What a gift.
  
  Frame 4:
  Field Notes, field guide
  Something preparatory, including sketches, unfinished thoughts, logged as we're living.
  
  
  As always,
  
  Monique
  
  Works Cited
  Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1999.
  
  Craig, Heidi. 2019. “Rags, Ragpickers, and Early Modern Papermaking.” Literature Compass 16 (5): e12523. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12523.
  
  Gunning, Tom, Howard Eiland, Henry Sussman, and Lindsay Waters, eds. “Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project.” Boundary 2 30 (Spring 2003).