Events
HyperStudio Talk: Reality as Palimpsest
····················································································
Tuesday, February 23, 5 – 7 pm
Lecture
Room 2-135
····················································································
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 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 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, 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
