Emergence of an Experiment:
The Story of The Arcades Project Project
Project Prospectus (2006)
". . . we are all so weary because we have no plan." (AP 560)
". . . I went on to a thousand pages of it" (Stein, Composition as Explanation 518)
I. The Why
The beginning again has long since past, and I am writing this introduction 542 files, 17 folders, and 7 years into the process of composing this project. It all began at the University of Charleston, South Carolina in Dr. Joseph Kelley's course on the Modern British novel where I was first introduced to the figure of the flâneur during a lecture on Joyce's Ulysses. Under Dr. Larry Carlson's guidance I took the subject on as the topic of my master's thesis which I was invited to pursue as a fellow in the University of Charleston's Teaching/Research Fellowship Program with the Universite de Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines in France, a fantastic opportunity to do a little hands-on flânerie in the Paris streets myself. The Flâneur as Self-Referential Narrator: Hidden Texts and Roving Eyes in American Autobigraphical Prose and Poetry (May 2000) turned out to be a study of the strategic use of the figure of the flâneur as a narrative device in the composition of the autobiographical writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and John Dos Passos.
During the course of my initial investigation, Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project was not yet available in English and so his Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism was the best source I could find that addressed the figure of the flâneur directly. It was in this way that I was first exposed to the writings of Walter Benjamin, a theorist who only recently found his way into the undergraduate classroom mostly in the form of his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." At the time that I began my research, there were only a dozen or so articles on the flâneur, most of them in German, and neither the concept nor its most astute student--Walter Benjamin--had been discussed at great length in scholarly discourse. Since then, Harvard University Press has made available Benjamin's The Arcades Project to readers of English, and so Benjamin and his flâneur have slowly emerged as topics of literary conferences, special journal issues, and scholarly articles from all over the world. Now, both Benjamin and his primary trope, the flâneur, are not only well-known by academics, but have served as an entry point into several discussions surrounding the rising interest of American scholars in Continental philosophy, as well as students of British and American literature and New Media studies.
It was at the University of South Carolina that I was to be diverted from what was originally a rather traditional critical approach to the subject of flânerie. Dr. Susan Vanderborg in her Modern American Poetry course introduced me to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons a text, the study of which resulted in my questioning of the critical approach to literature that had comprised my education and my own scholarly process to that point. Through my encounter with her work, I was forced to question my entire method of literary engagement. I became less interested in defining texts, interpreting or locating their "meaning" and arguing that this or that may be "True." I chose to follow her lead and, instead of attempting to construct texts that were "right," I chose to take, like Stein, a more experimental approach to literary studies.
Shortly thereafter, I encountered Eiland and McLaughlin's edition of The Arcades Project, a mammoth work that reignited my interest in Walter Benjamin's writings and subsequently, the flâneur. At the same time, I was also playing around with free online web editors and the possibilities of working in hypermedia. The Arcades Project, to my surprise, provided me with just the thing I needed to bridge my interest in Paris, the works of the aforementioned American writers, and the new media experiments I was working on in my spare time: Eiland and McLaughlin's omission from their English edition of The Arcades Project of Benjamin's "Blinks" which might be described as hard copy attempts at creating hyperlinks (see Arcades Project section for more information) posed the challenge of connecting my prior work on Benjamin and the flâneur with another project that I began while experimenting with hypertext and teaching Advanced Composition at the University of South Carolina: a small classroom experiment which involved the conception and creation and the eventual shutting down of a non-profit online literary e-zine called The Lemmingthat aimed to "max out the medium" in so far as going beyond the standard literary e-zine format of text-heavy pages in which footnotes and tables of contents have been merely replaced by hyperlinks. (If you would like to know more about the inception of that project, click here.) I was interested in placing interactive multimedia texts in dialogue with still images and written texts in a way that did not simply transpose the limitations of the traditional idea of the book onto the much more malleable, cost efficient and accessible medium of hypermedia.
It was through my work with The Lemming that I developed enough web savvy to dare taking on a professional quality project in hypermedia. For nearly two years I learned the ins and outs of webdesign, focusing mostly on its usefulness in the deployment of the literary, visual and audio arts and the conversations surrounding them. Fascinated by the possibilities this new medium had to offer the world of the arts through its ability to be so easily and inexpensively disseminated, I began to look into the way its arrival has been handled in more scholarly circles. What I found at the time was that academics did, in fact, see the advantage of placing their material online: one need not look far on Google or any other search engine to see that what was originally a repository for porn and commercial enterprise is now replete with sites on every imaginable academic topic; however, few sites that I have encountered have exploited the medium's potential as part of the performative element in an engagement with the rhetoric of hypertext or the rhetorical strategies of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project. There was a hole that needed filling.
It was about at this point that I encounteredDr. John Muckelbauer, also at the University of South Carolina, who exposed me to Deleuze-Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus, thus sparking the interest in Continental philosophy that would provide me with various theoretical looms on which to frame my distracted musings. The first bridge being formed, I expanded my reading into a study of several thinkers whose work (albeit oftentimes indirectly) concerns some of the most pressing questions brought forth by the introduction of hypermedia into the domain of text construction: Derrida, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard to name a few. What I found these writers had in common was their preference for a type of "argument" or at least a type of scholarly discourse that does what it says or "means." I have taken their example to heart in this project, attempting to articulate through virtual installation the mode of scholarly engagement that hypermedia has made possible.
Through such an engagement, my search has reached out to include everything from cereal box illustrations to surrealist poetry to contemporary cartoons and Emily Dickinson--albeit, the inclusion is tangential. Naturally, through my exposure to scholars invested in a rhetorical tradition, I have also had to encounter mythology, whether it is Deleuze's Oedipus, Baudrillard's Narcissus, or Nietzsche's Zarathustra. I have made an attempt to offer a new metaphor, one which has previously been used by feminist scholars to indicate the type of writing Irigaray defines as ecriture feminine. However, evading questions of gender in favor of questions of medium and the structural apparati that partake of and compose such media, the myth of Arachne and the image of the spider not only comprise one of the most widely taken for granted metaphors of our times (via the world wide web), it offers a different way of looking at argument, one that supplants linear focused polemic discourse with one of relations, tangents and performance. Chance takes precedence over intention, adaptability over regulation, and fluidity over stasis, carving a space for a type of scholarly engagement that melds more readily into the rhizomatic world of thought our most recent technological advances in the field of dissemination have rendered visible.
I then met Dr. Judith Giblin James who encouraged me to situate this project within the scholarly conversation surrounding The History of the Book, yet another diversion that enabled me to focus this study on the following question: In what ways might hypermedia enable scholars to engage the subjects of their study, their audiences, and the work of other scholars differently? In other words, what might a hypermedia scholarly project be if not bogged down with the limitations of standard bookmaking practices?
I think the "answer" to this question emerges through this project in its mimetic as opposed to critical mode of engagement with The Arcades Project. By centering my project on this primary image of "the book" as something amendable, indeterminate, relational, borrowed, and constructed, I was able to get away from traditional academic modes of engagement (modes bound in many ways by the medium in which they are disseminated--namely "the book") which are inherently polemic and "Truth-seeking." In such a way I found that in this new medium, I could operate without the linear constraints of traditional argumentative writing and instead construct a web of interactive experiments which offer ways of encounteringvarious texts in a nonargumentative, inquisitory way. Once I began constructing the text that has become The Arcades Project Project, a work inspired by Benjamin's study much in the way that his study was inspired by the arcades themselves, once I stopped trying to "argue" something or find something to be "True," once I looked at the medium as a means by which to work through the infinite capacity for connectedness now possible in hypermedia, the project rooted itself in almost everything imaginable. Its rhizomatic nature poses problems of containment and definition, but it also offers freedom in composition that Benjamin himself attempted to attain with analogue materials. After many years of working in this medium, this space of thought, I began to see that it is not as McLuhan said: the medium is no longer the message. It is instead the method through which scholarship is enacted, and this method, this medium, is one that at this point in history is not bound to the economics of the book and may one day exchange the scholarly tradition of creating texts that can be owned, completed and referenced for those that educate through their enactment.
I then met Dr. Judith Giblin James who encouraged me to situate this project within the scholarly conversation surrounding The History of the Book, yet another diversion that enabled me to focus this study on the following question: In what ways might hypermedia enable scholars to engage the subjects of their study, their audiences, and the work of other scholars differently? In other words, what might a hypermedia scholarly project be if not bogged down with the limitations of standard bookmaking practices?
