Collecting

Collecting

In any collection there is always a danger of contamination: intoxication by the past, the materiality of the object, this is what drives the collector to collect.
Containment is such a key issue for Benjamin in The Arcades Project because collecting is its primary method of organization. Instread of interpreting various passages from the project, through juxtaposition the parts that make up the collection are forced to enter into conversation with one another, a conversation of differences and similarities (See Benjmain on similarities--).


Chronicles versus Collections: (See Benjamin’s “Theses on History” where he challenges the idea of Chronologies because of their adherence to a belief in a grand narrative (might be “The Storyteller,” not sure) [do collections need narrators? Can their placement – arrangement – aurangement – function as such? Assemblingnarratives as opposed to weaving--Deleuzian felt of the nomad vs the thread woven fabric of the city dweller....



The flaneur as provider of narrative--as synoptic link--the pulse of continuity, the "plane of consistency"--the flaneur moves through the city as through a smooth space, mapping, leaving behind personally striated traces of narrative loci.“. . . it was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history, the half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of the ‘the collective,’ that was to be the object of study, and with the aid of methods more akin—above all, in their dependence on chance—to the methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or indeed to the methods of the nineteenth-century ragpicker, than to those of the modern historian.” (AP ix).
SEE MUCKELBAUER'S 
NEW HISTORICISM NOTES

See Translator’s Introduction:
"TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR"

This idea of refuse—the ragpicker—attaches to the concept of ruins; just a different kind of ruin—one that was never hailed as “significant” for its own sake, but one that acquires its significance later on through rediscovery and through a narrative of reconstruction.

INCLUDE REFS TO ARCADES:

Collectors evade the challenge of seduction and seek complete CONTROL: "He [the collector] prefers the possessive spell cast by a collection of dead objects--the dead sex object being as beautiful as a butterfly with florescent wings -- to teh seduciton of a liv ing being who would demand his love in return. He prefers the monotonous fascination of the collection, the fascination with dead differences, this obsession with the asme, over the seduction of the other" (Baudrillard Seduction 123).

CONSIDER NEW MEDIA AND 
THE MATERIALITY OF REFUSE:  
"site trash" might be an interesting way in.

Again, from the Translator’s Intro:

. . . from the late Twenties on, it would appear, citations were incorporated into these materials—passages drawn mainly from an array of nineteenth-century sources, but also from the works of key contemporaries (Marcel Proust, Paul Valery, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Georg Simmel, Ernst Block, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno). These proliferating individual passages, extracted from their original context like collectibles, were eventually set up to communicate among themselves, often in a rather subterranean manner. The organized masses of historical objects—the particular items of Benjamin’s display (drafts and excerpts)—together give rise to “a world of secret affinities,” and each separate article in the collection, each entry, was to constitute a “magic encyclopedia” of the epoch from which it derived. An image of that epoch.” (AP x)
What is NOT a collection really? Even randomevents, objects, etc. are arranged by the mind into constellations of meaning.