My Semblance, My Brother: Reading the Flaneur in The Arcades Project

So I was takin' a walk the other day, and I seen a woman—a blind woman—pacin' up and down the sidewalk. She seemed to be a bit frustrated, as if she had dropped somethin' and was havin' a hard time findin' it. So after watchin' her struggle for a while, I decide to go over and lend a helping hand, you know? "Hello, ma'am, can I be of any assistance? It seems to me that you have lost something. I would like to help you find it." She replied: "Oh yes, you have lost something. You've lost . . . your life." [Gunshot]

—Kendrick Lamar, "Blood" (2017)

This calls for a work whose urgency is still hardly grasped.

—Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1 (1994)

We are all chimeras.

—Donna Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985)

What kind of entity is the flaneur in Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project?[1] Is it a man, or a woman? Is it a scrap of language? A gun? Is it a historical figure or a mere abstraction? I want to speak here about what the flaneur might be, but I also want to acknowledge a certain flanerie in the desire to speak itself, in the very reading of this figure. I want to bring forth the constitutive flanerie of language. Are such things possible? How do I write and read a text at the point at which writing and reading are implicated? Have I already failed? Is that aporia the actual relevance of the flaneur, the thing to which the figure, the form, the conception of the flaneur provides access?

The characterization of the flaneur here will be recursive, a performance of reading itself. Our access point is in fact convolute M, "[The Flaneur]," in The Arcades Project, but it could perhaps be anywhere, if in fact our reference is to an "outside the text."[2] But of course this begs the question: what is this text in relation to which we might possibly be "outside"? We'll break in to the text then, with no other intention than to break out. The flaneur is that fugitive figure, an outlier and outlaw, and the text beyond which we locate him is: the crowd. There is no flaneur without a crowd to pass through, and as many shapes as the flaneur takes in The Arcades Project, the crowd takes just as many. We break into the text at M21,1:

Description of the crowd in Proust: "All these people who paced up and down the seawall promenade, tacking as violently as if it had been on the deck of a ship (for they could not lift a leg without at the same time waving their arms, turning their heads and eyes, settling their shoulders, compensating by a balancing movement on one side for the movement they had just made on the other, and puffing out their faces), and who, pretending not to see so as to let it be thought that they were not interested, but covertly watching, for fear of running against the people who were walking beside or coming towards them, did, in fact, butt into them, became entangled with them, because each was mutually the object of the same secret attention veiled beneath the same apparent disdain; their love—and consequently their fear—of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all men, whether they seek to please other people or to astonish them, or to show them that they despise them." Marcel Proust, A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Paris), vol. 3, p. 36. [M21,1]

We want to follow a process of uncovering the meaning of this text, and I'll say now that that immaterial process of reading and recognition is posited throughout The Arcades Project as the constitutive nature of material itself: it is where both spirit and matter coincide, change places, exchange roles. The crowd is found nowhere other than in physicality, and our location of this crowd, our filtering through it, is inherently "violent," cast within a dialectical machinery. To continue with this excerpt then, we see how "all these people," designated by the opening comment as a "crowd," are engrossed as a group in a tragicomic physicality of dialectical responsiveness, passing through each other and intermingling as any movement is compensated "by a balancing act" with some other movement. But even with the elaborate avoidance tactics, the members of the crowd still "butt into" each other, in fact become "entangled" with each other, an entanglement that is the effect of an immaterial force, their own attentiveness to each other.[3] Through their attentiveness, an extension of their negotiation of physical proximity, they draw on and absorb one another through an affectivity of love and fear that is "one of the most powerful motives in all men." While there is a performance of objectivity, of being distinct individuals, there is beneath this surface a subjective desire for de-individualization. The "secret attention" and the "apparent disdain" are the "same" in all members of the crowd. The flaneur will pass among this crowd, but it's important to continue mapping our reading process here and uncovering the progressive layers of referentiality in Benjamin's presentation of language.

We want to note how the crowd is circumscribed by a built environment. The first is the large, stable structure of the retaining "seawall," a public construction that holds back the natural force of the ocean. This wall is then metaphorically contrasted with the quite unstable and undulating "deck of a ship," on which we should imagine the crowd sloshing back and forth as they butt into each other and intermingle. Even as they promenade along the wall, they also in a sense ride, "up and down," the surface of the water, living out the rise and fall of the waves as they circulate within the structure of the ship. It's useful here to cite a nearby passage, M21a,2:

The most characteristic building projects of the nineteenth century—railroad stations, exhibition halls, department stores (according to Giedion)—all have matters of collective importance as their object. The flaneur feels drawn to these "despised, everyday" structures, as Giedion calls them. In these constructions, the appearance of great masses on the stage of history was already foreseen. They form the eccentric frame within which the last privateers so readily displayed themselves. (See K1a,5.) [M21a,2]

The seawall would have been a building project on a mass public scale, with "collective importance" as its object. It parallels the "railroad stations, exhibition halls, department stores," as well as the arcades themselves, the glass-covered promenades on which Benjamin's text is modeled. An important aspect of these structures here however is the way they are the product of (capitalistic and egotistical) foresight. The nature of the crowd is in some sense pre-ordained by the built environment, which supply another element within which the crowd, and hence the flaneur, operate and interact. This "thing" (to again cite Hodder) by which they are defined and in which they are physically contained—and which protects them from nature, in some sense defines the contours of the natural world—predicted their arrival in the mode of an infrastructural logic, space of anticipation, or "technological unconscious," as described by Nigel Thrift, "whose content is the bending of any cognitive inputs, a pre-personal substrate of guaranteed correlations, assured encounters, and therefore unconsidered anticipations" (213).[4] What is happening here as well is that distinctions between ego or individual and collective begin to recede, since it is the "privateer" who makes the collective frame in his own image, eccentrically, bringing the masses onto the stage of history according to his own will. Hence the flaneur does not appear as either individual or member of the crowd but someone or something that circulates between and among the two forces.

To return to M21,1, we can continue our reading—in some sense the progress of our embodiment as flaneurs—by emphasizing two additional points. First, highlighting again the notion that the seawall (and in many respects the ship deck) are stand-ins for the communal structures of the Paris arcades themselves, we then extrapolate to the book that is The Arcades Project.[5] We engage here in a kind of allegorical reading of reading itself, where "all these people" are in fact "all these passages." The Arcades Project is of course a vast collectivity of passages that consists almost entirely of the voices of other people, in the form of citations. It is a "collective structure" created by Benjamin, bringing these "great masses on the stage of history" through his role as "author" or "privateer." What the Proust passage is an allegory for is the interaction of these passages, how they intermingle and co-constitute each other through thematic links and symbolic connection. The passages "butt into" and become semantically "entangled" with one another throughout the book. Like the individuals and crowds being referenced, they exist both individually and as a collective, making clear the convergence of linguistic constructs, material structures, and human personality and behavior. In this context flanarie comes to have multiple locations, within Benjamin himself as creator but within any given reader as well. The network of meanings coincides with and is superposed with a built environment that is at once historical, literary, and taking place within our own minds, the implication being that our reading of passages, and passage through reading, is as much reflected in material constructs as it will have been in any "past" we might encounter.

But this reading falls short if indeed we fail to expand our notion of the crowd into what we could say is the "ocean" of the historical past, as the citational format invites to us to do. It is clear throughout The Arcades Project that the word "crowds" always invokes this wider conception, such that the present is always infiltrated by and negotiating both the ruins of defunct structures and the ongoing impact of the dead, a material and immaterial impact that, again, consistently destabilizes the very distinction between the two. The linguistic practice of citation consistently broaches notions of space and time to expand the "crowd" exponentially. This circulation of all possible citational "particles" is the implied ocean in the Proust citation in M21,1 and the true substrate of The Arcades Project, the ground from which it is constantly arising and receding.[6] M20,2:

"London Bridge." "A little while ago I was walking across London Bridge and I paused to contemplate what is for me an endless pleasure—the sight of a rich, thick, complex waterway whose nacreous sheets and oily patches, clouded with white smoke-puffs, are loaded with a confusion of ships. . . . I leaned upon my elbows. . . . Delight of vision held me with a ravenous thirst, involved in a play of a light of inexhaustible richness. But endlessly pacing and flowing at my back I was aware of another river, a river of the blind eternally in pursuit of [its] immediate material object. This seemed to be no crowd of individual beings, each with his own history, his private god, his treasures and his scars, his interior monologues and his fate; rather I made of it—unconsciously, in the depths of my body, in the shaded places of my eyes—a flux of identical particles, equally sucked in by the same nameless void, their deaf headlong current pattering monotonously over the bridge. Never have I so felt solitude, mingled with pride and anguish." Paul Valéry, Choses tues, pp. 122–124. [M20,2] (italic in original)

While the built (and contaminated and corrupted) environment of the present, of London Bridge, is full of implication and sensation, it is overwhelmed by the infusion of the vast crowds of historic potential. This is indeed the "landscape" of the opening Mallarmé epigraph for convolute M, "A landscape haunts, intense as opium." Again, the "particles" are not only the individual—and deindividualized—souls of the collective but the individual citations and passages in the literary and historical production of The Arcades Project, each also functioning as "dialectical images," or material compositions that open on to historical truth but that also enable that truth to materialize as the present. Passages again and again treat this dynamic in some form or another, as for instance with M20a,2:

Beneath the roofs of Paris: "These Parisian savannahs consisting of roofs leveled out to form a plain, but covering abysses teeming with population." Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, ed. Flammarion, p. 95. The end of a long description of the roof-landscapes of Paris. [M20a,2]

This passage immediately precedes the Proust passage quoted above, M21,1, so that the theme of "abyss" is echoed in the vision of the ocean beyond the seawall. But again here the built environment, now the roofs of Paris, or, that is, Paris, the city itself, is seen as a container of the living multitude that is the Parisian population. At this stage in the flaneur convolute however we understand the crowd, the idea of population, to also encompass the no longer living. These are the true "abysses teeming with population." This crowd is not anchored to one moment in time or another, not anchored to any particular city. Here is a force that, as with the Valéry citation, emotionally overwhelms its perceiver with both a heightened sense of life itself but also a kind of loss of consciousness, as the root of one's individuality is dispersed into a transhistorical collective. This is the act of reading, a relinquishing of consciousness into the linguistic flux of citation, since all language is citation in the way that built structures are these "eccentric frames" (M21a,2). We note how the Balzac quote is in some sense a climactic moment, the "end of a long description," and indeed the idea of surface, skin, skein, is reflected in the book's very title, La Peau de chagrin.[7]  And the architected environment, the network of the city, is metaphorized, here as elsewhere, in natural terms—the savannah, the plain, the skin/peau in the Balzac title—calling into question the status of literary language in relation to the informational "descriptions." Here our outline of the flaneur, for whom figures like Balzac and Proust are in many ways ciphers, takes the shape of one who might use or access language to achieve these literary pathways into alternative visions of denotative history.

Much of what we've discussed so far relates to the Deleuzian notion of assemblage, as discussed by Manuel DeLanda:

Assemblages have a fully contingent historical identity. . . Because the ontological status of all assemblages is the same, entities operating at different scales can directly interact with one another, individual to individual. . . To properly apply the concept of assemblage to real cases we need to include, in addition to persons, the material and symbolic artifacts that compose communities and organizations: the architecture of the buildings that house them; the myriad different tools and machines used in offices, factories, and kitchens; the various sources of food, water, and electricity; the many symbols and icons with which they express their identity. The day-to-day practices of neighbors and co-workers take place in well-defined locales populated by heterogeneous material and expressive objects, so any concrete community or organization, when treated as an assemblage, must include these locales explicitly. (Assemblage Theory, 19–20)

As we've seen in passages such as M21a,2 above, Benjamin's crowd operates within a machinery that is nearly identical to what DeLanda depicts here. The built, the social, and the symbolic filter through individual and collective identity almost seamlessly, particularly when we highlight the citational, since when we take the linguistic entity of the citation into account it reveals, in this core translatability of language, the merger of authorship with the disappearance of that same authorship, the merger of historical personages with the living present, the merger of the idea of human population with the population of available meanings from which to cite or translate.

I'd like to return to M21,1 to open further this citational dimension of the discussion before looking at other elements of how the crowd and the flaneur co-mingle and co-constitute each other, how we can bracket a distinct though relational identity of the flaneur. As readers, we must note the particular intertextuality and cognitive textual world that Benjamin puts in play as the core performance of The Arcades Project, as history itself, as historiography. This reading, this absorption and projection, is how we come to know the flaneur. We've looked at M21,1 from a number of perspectives, but this additional angle exists at once at the most tactile surface level and at an impenetrable depth. It is the polyvalent textuality of the Benjaminian citation. M21,1, really any "particle" or passage in the vast encyclopedia of The Arcades Project, is something material that Benjamin presents as an example of the overall thrust of the topic of a convolute, of this convolute M. In this case he detaches from the book A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur by Proust a citation that of course he then inserts within his own argument (indirect argument, to be sure, yet all the more cogent for its indirectness) for a certain status of the crowd and the flaneur. He frames the citation as a "description of the crowd in Proust" and yet the informational mode of objective "description" is also upended by the status of Proust's text as literature, a figurative use of language. And this destabilization is prelude, an opening act, to what we will witness as the citation progresses, since what we imagine and emulate (a requirement of reading) here is two things: (a) the scene in which Benjamin sits and physically copies out the passage from the volume of Proust, and (b) his own reading, which infiltrates, a potentially violent act, Proust's text with the thematics that are operative in The Arcades Project. For instance, Proust would not have been thinking, when he mentioned the seawall, of the myriad implications of communal building structures, as discussed above, that the presence of this text in The Arcades Project imports; nor would Proust have considered, say, the particular way his text would enact a butting into and entangling with other fragmentary texts. As we have seen, even the rudimentary notion of the "crowd" is taken in a number of directions Proust would not have engaged. But along with this idea of the act of reading and citation as the imputing of outside meanings, in some sense we can say that it's also true that Proust would have imagined or intended such things, and Benjamin's activation of his text, as with the vast majority of citation and commentary in The Arcades Project, and as the sine qua non of Benjaminian citation itself, points at this underlying substrate of language and meaning themselves, where many of the texts actually do touch on the interpretive structures seen as inherent to language, what Benjamin refers to in "The Task of the Translator" as "pure language." It is in this way that the passages in The Arcades Project acquire as well what Benjamin refers to as a "nonsensuous" correspondence ("On the Mimetic Faculty"), or a correspondence that exceeds perception to the degree that it constitutes that very perception. Hence this "copy" of Proust enters the citational crowd as in part its own flaneur, jostling against all the other citational bodies of text, all the while "covertly watching" and containing a "secret attention" that is a type of secondary reading that taps into their pre-ordained commonality with every other type or use of text.[8] We must imagine the flanerie of our reading of and entry into the citational crowd of The Arcades Project at this particular level, at this remove that is simultaneously a closeness to the perception and generation of meaning.

I'd like to take a brief moment here to touch on the way in which this paper itself is progressing, which is through an analytical reading of a section, M21,1, of The Arcades Project that is openly, obviously, or directly citational. Simply put: it has quotation marks around it, a bare minimum of text introduced by Benjamin (that opening clause), and carries along with it its bibliographic information. I want to point out that this mode of analysis is almost entirely absent from the criticism of Benjamin's work, including of The Arcades Project. As I've tried to show, however, it is not only by following the traces presented by such quotations, but by theorizing the process of following those very traces that the core identity of The Arcades Project as a kind of living entity comes to the fore. Without entering into the multivalent referentiality of these concrete citations we miss the direct contact with the phenomenon of material/immaterial reversal, with what Benjamin terms the "phantasmagoria" or "dialectics at a standstill" (that is, moving motionlessness) that defines at once contemporaneity and technology. We cannot become the flaneur without opening this portal and crossing through. In almost every instance where scholarship either treats Benjamin's work as a primary or secondary source, one sees the reliance on what is thought to be his direct voice. This tendency, which is in fact didactic, denotative, and informational, and can be seen in all of Benjamin's major commentators, from Rolf Tiedemann to Susan Buck-Morss to Samuel Weber, comes through in the analyses of The Arcades Project as the unquestioned gravitation to discussion of convolute N, the first half of which includes passages framed as straightforward methodological statements. These statements are quoted and discussed in a straightforward manner, with no irony or assessment of how they filter into the larger concerns of The Arcades Project (even as many of these passage touch on those larger concerns). What Benjamin clearly asks of us is quite different from the tack criticism has taken thus far. As he writes:

Say something about the method of composition itself: how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand. Assume that the intensity of the project is thereby attested, or that one's thoughts, from the very beginning, bear this project within them as their telos. So it is with the present portion of the work, which aims to characterize and to preserve the intervals of reflection, the distances lying between the most essential parts of this work, which are turned most intensively to the outside. [N1,3]

Citing convolute N and guilty now of what I'm taking issue with, I'd like to simply read the surface of this passage to point out that Benjamin not only here mentions how he intends each passage to contain "everything one is thinking," what we can take as multiple valences, aspects that we can see operating in M21,1 and other passages quoted above, but that the "present portion of the work," convolute N, should be taken, not directly, but as "intervals of reflections," "the distances," and that the "most essential parts of this work" are in fact the citations, "turned intensively to the outside." Criticism of Benjamin's work needs to find here its starting place and the citational monument of The Arcades Project says nothing less. Given Benjamin's centrality to the discourse of technology and to modernity writ large, this absence in our consideration of his work is stunning.

I'd like to pick up here as well another key component of the operational space of the flaneur, that is, the interval between passages. In N1,3 Benjamin is referencing a period between working on separate passages, a point at which he is only considering how various passages might work, which passages to choose, a period where he is, perhaps, not sitting at a table and laboring to copy out a certain text. He wants then to capture these extra-citational thoughts and record them as part of The Arcades Project itself. He is concerned with his experience that is "outside the text" and duly brings it into the text. This is an extremely interesting process in itself but I want to suggest that it implicates what our own experience is as well, between passages, after for instance we have "read" and fully assessed, even lived through, something like M21,1 and before we move on to any other passage, for instance the very next passage at M21,2. With the passage between each passage, we can't anticipate where Benjamin or we ourselves are going to end up, resurface, what link he is going to make, what theme is going to be continued, expanded, or introduced. We are constantly, within a kind of shadow text, re-presented with our own spectacle of great anticipation but also the spectacle of our own ignorance, our own basic need to re-imagine, a reading that is over and over an arrival in the world anew. So that reading is the fundamental experience of our own ignorance, and if reading then is the producer of knowledge, then it is this knowledge, of the experience of not knowing and what that brings forward in the mind, the love and consequently the fear (M21,1), the possibility, the radical un-linking from pre-existing forms of knowledge that then crosses into the radically linked textual experience of the passages. We could even say the more thoroughly each passage is linked or leads out to multiple levels of meaning and connection, the greater the "intensity of the project," the more this contrary experience can then take center stage or enter into the dialectic. In the dialectical image there's certainly a passage through something like pure language, but there is as well this "external" dialectic happening between text and the absence of text, text's negative or shadow, or citation and its opposite, non-citational being. Benjamin refers to this in "What Is Epic Theater?" when he writes, "interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context." In many respects, we need to theorize this space as one that both defines the flaneur and within which he/she/it operates. This certainly does not mean the flaneurial is not a space of the commodity—in fact one of Benjamin's key points is that it is pre-eminently commodified, may well be the commodity itself—but it is quite central to how we make sense of modern society, constantly performing each our own flanerie. Judith Butler treats the interruptive moment in Parting Ways:

If, following Benjamin, we are to allow the memory of dispossession to crack the surface of historical amnesia and reorient us toward the unacceptable conditions of refugees across time and context, there must be transposition without analogy, the interruption of one time by another, which is the counternationalist impetus of the messianic in Benjamin's terms, what some would call a messianic secularism that relates clearly to his work on translation: how does another time break into this time, through what vessel, and through what transposition?

Is the flaneur an interruption? In many ways with Butler we are "beyond the sphere of art." But what we can do here is associate the inter-citational, interruptive and  immaterial energies of reading, which we are identifying with flaneurial consciousness, with both that building and breaking of context. Indeed what Benjamin would like to say is that this "surface of historical amnesia" is not only broken but built, insofar as the flaneur is in service of the commodity (an idea I return to below). Here what we can note is the way in which our notion of the crowd extends across time, that the landscape, the geography of present experience is in every way haunted by both material and psychic forces (co-constitutive as they are), such that we are not so much remembering dispossession as constantly enacting it. The refugees are always already flowing into the very temporal structure of experience. Benjamin speaks in "The Task of the Translator" of the supplementarity of all languages that contributes to the existence of pure language, and a key transposition that we can apply from this citation of Butler's comment here is the way in which linguistic translation works according to the same conceptual structure as does national identity. The idea of pure language is also the idea of a unified global identity, as much as this is transhistorical and brings past reality into the present as a wholly living moment in all its dispersion and distinction, "without analogy." If the figure of the flaneur is not interruption itself, or its catalytic force, then certainly the flaneur bridges these contextual and non-contextual zones of force.

Before moving to a discussion of the flaneur in relation to the commodity, I'd like to look at the passage immediately following M21,1 in The Arcades Project, M21,2, and consider how some of these themes reach into that next passage, to consider what goes into suspension and the type of work the reader is asked to do, distinctions to be made, landscapes to be constructed (both the perceptual and generative work of the flaneur). M21,2:

The critique of the Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires which Armand de Pontmartin publishes in Le Spectator of September 19, 1857, contains a sentence that, although aimed at the overall character of the book, would nevertheless have its rightful place in an analysis of the "man of the crowd": "It was certainly there in a striking form, that implacable democratic and American severity, reckoning human beings as no more than numbers, only to end by attributing to numbers something of the life, animation, and spirit of the human being." But doesn't the sentence have a more immediate reference to the Histoires extraordinaires, which appeared earlier? (And where is the "man of the crowd"?) Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Translations, Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaries, ed. Crépet (Paris, 1933), p. 315.—The critique is, at bottom, mean-spirited. [M21,2]

Placing us even further in suspension, before looking at this passage in detail I want to ask, what is scholarship? I'll point out some of the ironies at work here, as a way to build a context or groundwork for this question. The Arcades Project is a work of scholarship. It is a work of the telling of history. What does that mean? Part of the answer is perhaps what I am engaged in by citing this passage, the centrality of which is another citation. What I have just done is sit with the physical book The Arcades Project in a way that echoes and extends the physical act or performance of the historical figure in question, Walter Benjamin, sitting we presume with the 1857 copy of Le Spectator, which itself was the text of a writer sitting with the Baudelaire translation of Poe's book Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires. These readings echoing across time are in this very moment, whichever it is, echoed in your reading, whoever is reading this paper, if anyone is, positioning some sort of physicality of text before you. The refugees Butler speaks of are these other-dimensional texts that are really landscapes, that are really cities and populations. And perhaps as Butler defines it, scholarship is that borderless letting through. How do we build our worlds there? This seems to be an area for substantive consideration, since what has scholarship made of these far-reaching implications for its own mode of discourse as outlined in The Arcades Project? And then setting aside actual responses and engagements, potential new or experimental modalities for the presentation or conception of research or what research is (crucial at a time of digital transformation), there is the perhaps separate story to be told of the resistances of scholarly discourse and outputs to these larger circumstances.

We are crossing, cross-dressing, translating, transgendering, everything that is the contemporary and that holds its own contradiction in the conservative movements playing out through figures such as the flaneurial Donald Trump and seemingly deposed Marine Le Pen (from the perspective of the commodity as well as the return of European fascism). A reading of M21,2 can most productively begin from questioning what it says and why, and again we want to end up at a point here where we can highlight the interruptive moment and activity between M21,1 and M21,2, as a single example of how we characterize both The Arcades Project and the activity of reading that presumes the presence of the flaneur. Simply put, the quote from de Pontmartin is taken to apply to the "man of the crowd," rather than the book Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires as a whole, to which the critique was originally directed. Benjamin displaces the quote in this way, but then he in some sense returns to the idea that the quote applies to a whole book and wonders whether the quote makes more sense in the context of an earlier Baudelaire translation of Poe, Histoires extraordinaires. He then wonders, in parentheses, how to apply this latter idea to the "man of the crowd," if it's true that the quote applies more to the earlier volume. Benjamin then includes a full bibliographic citation of the later Baudelaire volume (in fact published in a 1933 edition), after which, at the bottom of the passage as it were, he critiques the critique itself, whether of the book as a whole (either edition it seems) or of the "man of the crowd," as "mean-spirited," presumably because it was not inclusive of the earlier volume or because it discounts the actual value of either the book or the man of the crowd.

On its own this passage might seem inconsequential, in the mode of almost pure notation of a curiosity, even containing at its end two casual unanswered questions that don't seem much related to the first part of the passage. This is an important point, since it would define a type of generic, informational reading that plays a significant role throughout The Arcades Project, which after all is arranged like any encyclopedia, the quintessential informational format. This type of reading is what we would expect in a journalistic document, like Le Spectateur wherein the review is published, with here in this passage the precise numerical date of publication given, an obvious piece of information. Indeed we can note that the appearance of the literary document of Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires within an informational context will run parallel to the content of the de Pontmartin sentence that questions the treatment of "something of the life, animation, and spirit of the human being" as a piece of numerical content. One modality of reading and life is folded tightly within the other, just as above in M21,1, there is the idea that members of the crowd are "covertly watching," observational behavior that the publication title Le Spectateur references, or have "secret attention." Entangled modalities, each emerging and acting through the other, is a common theme in both passages in this way. What we should watch for more than anything else, however, is perhaps the treatment of the book as a generic entity interchangeable with the human figure. This is a construct that in fact begins Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd," which is referenced throughout the flaneur convolute, with the statement, comparing the man of the crowd to a book, "it does not permit itself to be read." In M21,2, the enclosed citation is said to refer to "the overall character of the book," Nouvelle Histoires extraordinaires, and this commentary actually has its "rightful" place phrased in terms of the man of the crowd. The book itself and the human figure, which we might understand as the flaneur, change places, and since as we've seen in convolute M the crowd is indeed a transhistorical and multi-locational figure, this brings to light the way in which the secondary displacement of the sentence with a temporal reconfiguration onto an earlier edition makes sense, Benjamin declaring that the "more immediate" reference is in fact to an older volume. The "implacable democracy" of the de Pontmartin citation will pick up the theme from other passages, particularly from M21,1, of the wider conception of the crowd operative in the convolute, which as we've seen includes the citational passages themselves, making it apparent that the "extraordinary history" in the book title resonates with The Arcades Project itself. The passage then informs us that it is The Arcades Project that functions as a man of the crowd. It is the body of the flaneur that we hold in our hands as The Arcades Project, even as we will never grasp it. In this way the intervallic progress from passage to passage points directly, purely through indirection, at its own material presence. It is no more than material, no more than a number in that sense, and yet, as we've seen, anything we know as life, animation, or spirit is contained here as well. This dynamic feeds through the chiastic structure of M21,2 so that as with the Proust in M21,1 Benjamin implies, through another author's words, his own project, all the way to the superposition of The Arcades Project and the citation of Baudelaire's "Oeuvres complète, Translations, Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires." He steals Baudelaire's body of work in this way, in this passage, as the actual underlying import of what appears to be a footnote of thought.

It is the performance and play of these outer-directed, "turned most intensively to the outside," citational passages that bring the flaneur to presence, that make the point of The Arcades Project, that both dispense with the old and form a kind of new scholarship. To pick up on the entanglement of journalism and literary writing, and to bring in another important element of how we think of the flaneur, the commodity, I'd like to investigate M16,4:

The social base of flanerie is journalism. As flaneur, the literary man ventures into the marketplace to sell himself. Just so—but that by no means exhausts the social side of flanerie. "We know," says Marx, "that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labor materialized in its use value, by the working-time socially necessary for its production" (Marx, Das Kapital, ed. Korsch, p. 188). The journalist, as flaneur, behaves as if he too were aware of this. The number of work hours socially necessary for the production of his particular working energy is, in fact, relatively high; insofar as he makes it his business to let his hours of leisure on the boulevard appear as part of this work time, he multiplies the latter and thereby the value of his own labor. In his eyes, and often also in the eyes of his bosses, such value has something fantastic about it. Naturally, this would not be the case if he were not in the privileged position of making the work time necessary for the production of his use value available to a general public review by passing that time on the boulevard and thus, as it were, exhibiting it. [M16,4]

At this point we should note our actual real-time approach to this passage, having worked through a number of passages already and expecting a certain type or layering of meaning to emerge. We have a certain set of expectations perhaps. There's a way in which we take the immediate or surface meaning with a grain of salt. We anticipate more than the surface, watching for connotative connections to other passages and frameworks of meaning but also a connection perhaps to the very architecture of The Arcades Project as a whole. The passage should be performative in this way. I'd like to suggest that the character of this expectation is the product of the interval as I've discussed it above, that it indirectly designates, in its approach to the world, to any thing or person in the world, a flanerie that is of the here and now, contained within each reader, equally as much as it is contained in this wider conception of language itself. Flanerie is that openness, which takes on the character of a dream or a drug, an openness to the operation of meaning itself. We are ready for the "appearances of superposition, of overlap" [M1a1], the "colportage phenomena of space" [M1a,3], the "true masquerade of space" [M1a,4], we have achieved the "category of illustrative seeing—fundamental for the flaneur" [M2,2]. I'll include here another citation as we continue to anticipate a look at M16,4:

We know that, in the course of flanerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment. When the authentically intoxicated phase of this condition announces itself, the blood is pounding in the veins of the happy flaneur. [M2,4]

Our "outside the text," then, our intervallic experience, is both hallucinatory and viscerally of the body. A dichotomous dynamic we have witnessed with other passages, it is simultaneously an experience of complete abstraction and chthonic grounding. This is the place at which thinking and experience meet. We might put the seminar room in this context, but also expanding outward into the periodicity of educational experience itself, the rhythm of classes for instance, as this shapes and anticipates how participants processing instruction outside the classroom and between classes.

To cut back to M16,4, we immediately note the entanglement of the journalistic—that informational discourse for the crowd, the masses—and the literary, to which the flaneur has special access but also a singular ability to bring the literary into "the marketplace." This passage works to show the contours of the flaneur's incarnation as such a commodity, both selling himself and his journalistic product, as much as we lack any way to distinguish between these. Indeed the social here is shown to be that multiple and crowd-like element of the flaneur, what is outer directed, what is of the open market, but this is complemented by what is held up as an in some ways hidden sociality, a "secret attention" (M21,1), whose blueprint is provided by the quote from Marx, one of his key statements on the commodity function. Thus Benjamin moves to define what we might perceive as an immaterial aspect of reality as precisely what exhibits the laws of the commodity. And then of course within that definition of the commodity it is entirely the way in which something, labor, is "materialized" that is at stake. We're presented, then, with a number of binaries that are operating at once, journalism/literature, in some sense outward/inward, immaterial/material, and a bit further on in the passage labor/leisure.

All of this forms the basis of the Chaplinesque humor that suffuses the passage, where the social display of leisure is taken as work, taken as the work of the energetic display of non-work. M5,8: "The idleness of the flaneur is a demonstration against the division of labor." This throws into relief the equivalence of the status of the flaneur and the status of the commodity itself. Just as the "literary man" behaves as the flaneur to make a sale, so the journalist puts on his flaneur act as well. They both make a living by, as it were, reading Marx and behaving according to his tenets, using them as a script. The journalist and literary man behave "as if" they are "aware" of Marx's statement. Das Kapital reads as the sketch for a comedy routine, one that makes money. Finally the end product, the commodity, that thing that all production and use value are calibrated to, is the pure evanescence of a show of "working energy." The secret to success is to "let" any leisure hours "appear" as actual working-time, within, according to Marx, the social register. Thus the improvisatory back and forth between work and leisure is in fact the flaneur transparently tracking the movement of the commodity itself, to the point of their indistinguishability. And in this case it is in fact a bourgeois "privilege" to merge with the identity of the commodity as performance, not as we might expect as an aspect of the proletariat. Here what we see functioning through the flaneur is not simply the production of journalism or literary texts, or the presence of a certain character of and within society, but the institution of the illusion of capital itself, the business of the leisure-time exhibition of business. Here we cast back to our own reading practices as they wend their way through the marketplace of The Arcades Project passages and realize exactly what part we play as we translate leisure-time reading hours spent on this particular boulevard into something our bosses might approve of, whether with scholarly output or simply returning to our daily lives with a rejuvenated sense of imagination and the possible. That is, textual input and output is always going to be center stage. M16a,1:

The press brings into play an overabundance of information, which can be all the more provocative the more it is exempt from any use. (Only the ubiquity of the reader would make possible a utilization; and so the illusion of such ubiquity is also generated.) The actual relation of this information to social existence is determined by the dependence of the information industry on financial interests and its alignment with these interests.—As the information industry comes into its own, intellectual labor fastens parasitically on every material labor, just as capital more and more brings every material labor into a relation of dependency.  [M16a,1] (emphasis in original)

Baudrillard writes that "the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy" (Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pg. 81). But there is a decidedly different theory at work in this passage. First we note that the flaneur is identified, through the spectacle of uselessness that is the topic of the immediately preceding passage M16,4,[9] with information itself, its circulation through the social network paralleling the circulation of the (anti)humanistic energy source that is the flaneur. Whereas with Baudrillard there is an overall destructive entropy that seems to be tumbling out of control, with Benjamin we track something more strategic: the financialization of uselessness, idleness, leisure time as an extension of literary or literate activity. What we have in this passage is the infusion of the flaneur as literary/informational connoisseur with the intimate capitalization of the social. The machine is oiled at every level by the coordinated performances. The superposition of the flaneur with any or all of these opposing forces is neither here nor there, just that they circulate in a type of suspension, even as it is a suspension picked up, located, and read by the flaneur.

We can see at this point where Benjamin might position himself in relation to things like Roger Burrows's 2009 comment that:

the 'stuff' that makes up the social and urban fabric has changed—it is no longer just about emergent properties that derive from a complex of social associations and interactions. These associations and interactions are now not only mediated by software and code they are becoming constituted by it. (emphasis in original, quoted in Thrift)

Clearly Benjamin was already working in the 20's and 30's with the idea of the co-constitutive nature of the technological and the social, with the added complexities within which he would contextualize that co-constitution, its perception and suspension (by the flaneur), and the material outputs of that perception as a performance of capital. The work in which he couched these insights, The Arcades Project, would have as one of its overriding concerns the interrogation of its own status as a function of this identical performance.

Rather, more to the point here would be the way the flaneur, particularly with reference to the flaneur's status as information or as actual medial content, parallels the status of "mediality" as described by Jonathan Sterne:

communication technologies are a fundamental part of what it means to speak, or hear, or to do anything. . . . . Mediality simply points to a collectively embodied process of cross-reference. It implies no particular historical or ontological priority of communicative forms. . . the mediality of the medium lies not simply in the hardware, but in its articulation with particular practices, ways of doing things, institutions, and even in some cases belief systems. (10)

Benjamin is suggesting an extremely similar status for the flaneur as a medial entity that intersects materiality where it informs and emerges as an episteme (though I don't think he would use the qualifier "in some cases" when referring to belief systems). Benjamin sees informational and literary "communicative technologies" and the dialectic between them as implicated precisely in this "collectively embodied process of cross-reference," one that also extends materially and affectively across space and time. The critical component of The Arcade Project is that the project itself at every turn, unlike any scholarly work produced before or since as far as I can tell, points to its own self-awareness as a node within this medial network, an awareness that runs in parallel with its embodied reader, not to mention the reader's own awareness of the very idea of embodiment. The flaneur is truly the book that will not be read.

And let me emphasize that "not reading" once more, that intervallic detachment that synchronically speaks to different worlds at once. This is articulated in M4a,1 as follows:

The peculiar irresolution of the flaneur. Just as waiting seems to be the proper state of the impassive thinker, doubt appears to be that of the flaneur. An elegy by Schiller contains the phrase: "the hesitant wing of the butterfly." This points to the association of wingedness with the feeling of indecision which is so characteristic of hashish intoxication.

I won't unpack this passage to any degree other than to note this intervallic hesitation and distance, here interpreted as a component of song and the natural world, is a wingedness that echoes in the central image of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front to his feet.

Perhaps no paper dealing with Benjamin would be complete without a reference to the Angel of History, but I think here we can make the case that indeed the flaneur is that irresolute angel, wending through the crowds of history. Has this paper been about the Angel of History all along? If our primary critical project is to figure out the basis of our entanglement,[10] then the flaneur may be that (non)method. We can also return here to Judith Butler and the appearance of the unconscious in the hesitant space between technological repetitions:

If every performance repeats itself to institute the effect of identity, then every repetition requires an interval between the acts, as it were, in which risk and excess threaten to disrupt the identity being constituted. The unconscious is this excess that enables and contests every performance, and which never fully appears within the performance itself. (quoted in Thrift, 225)

With our reading of the flaneur we need to both confirm and take issue with this statement at almost every turn. We have discussed, for instance, the superposition of the performance of the flaneur and the commodity, the way that they in important ways trade places, so the performative character of reality needs to be seen as a central component of capital itself. These repetitions, which are neither more nor less than the repetitions of the passages of The Arcades Project, the incarnation of the flaneurial body, achieve what Benjamin might term the technologically based phantasmagoria of identity, which to perhaps anyone but the flaneur might be repulsive. On every level these repetitions imply the synaptic leaps that lead into and out of them, not just at an entry or exit point, but at every level of our engagement, or our reading through them. Those intervals are not just between repetitions or passages, but uncovered in the very substance of each material node, so that even as we "use specific locations in the network to track the intersection of different flows,"[11] we hold these entry points in suspension as well. The threat of risk and excess is present, but not simply in the intervals, and not simply as threat. We need to keep in mind that whatever identity has been formed in the nodal landing of the flaneur has already been interrupted and that what we're theorizing is in fact the phenomenology of the disruption itself, which takes the contradictory form of immaterial contemplation and, as Butler seems to indicate as well, is entirely an extension of the same performance. Whether we can locate the "unconscious" in this intra-identity phase seems still to be an open question, unless as Thrift seems to suggest that unconscious is technological, which seems apt in Benjaminian terms since anthropomorphizing technology and hence capital by attributing to it the obverse of human consciousness is to perhaps work with the arche of thinking itself. What Benjamin actively and, crucially, formally invokes that Thrift, Butler and others fail to do is the additional overlay of the flaneurial consciousness in the construction of the arguments for the nature of language, materiality, or interruption. As we have seen, The Arcades Project not only invokes this additional element but structurally performs it. The new scholarship will have nothing less. As Donna Haraway writes:

No layer of the onion of practice that is technoscience is outside the reach of technology or critical interpretation or critical inquiry about positioning and location; that is the condition of embodiment and mortality. The technical and the political are like the abstract and the concrete, the foreground and the background, the text and the context, the subject and the object. (quoted in Bowker and Star 2000)

Our performances are situated at every level, though as the flaneur circulates through technoscience and the like there is also the awareness that the layering itself is a component of technics. Here we keep in mind that once we reach either an experience or understanding of "the condition of embodiment and mortality" we remain firmly in the grasp of the realization that embodiment and mortality are "nodes," that therefore an alternating force will return us to the equally operative experience of abstracted disembodiment, and that what we have been discussing as the intervallic space between these two is ripe with the excess and risk described by Butler. Indeed what Bowker and Star describe as the dynamics of boundary objects within information seems to capture this multiplicity:

A fully developed method of multiplicity-heterogeneity for information systems must draw on many sources and make many unexpected alliances. If both people and information objects inhabit multiple contexts and a central goal of information systems is to transmit information across contexts, then a representation is a kind of pathway that includes everything populating those contexts. This includes people, thing-objects, previous representations, and information about its own structure. (Bowker and Star 2000, 293)

Here there seems to be an expansive notion of what Benjamin might term "the crowd," even while this formulation is perhaps less haunted than Benjamin's, alongside a need to theorize a more or less conscious conceptual framework or pathway that circulates as a function of representation among a vast dispersed multiplicity, which we might think of as the arcades, Paris, or the city itself. Again:

Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are thus both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become strongly structured in individual-site use. (Bowker and Star 2000, 297)

Of course the flaneur would at least momentarily be overjoyed here at the prospect of steady employment.[12] And the comic or Chaplinesque nature of the boundary object makes sense here, since as noted above the use value derives more from exhibition than anything else. Benjamin theorizes the flaneur as boundary object but identifies or superposes it with commodity structure. Here I'd like to continue by citing M1a,1 (more on my trail of citations in just a moment), one of the primary passages in convolute M. It is not technically a citation but it references how elements, members, or particles of what we are understanding as the crowd appear and disappear, and how a flaneurial consciousness, the dream or drug state, in fact intersects what is quite close to a type of technological unconscious of the city:

The appearances of superposition, of overlap, which come with hashish may be grasped through the concept of similitude. When we say that one face is similar to another, we mean that certain features of this second face appear to us in the first, without the latter's ceasing to be what it has been. Nevertheless, the possibilities of entering into appearance in this way are not subject to any criterion and are therefore boundless. The category of similarity, which for the waking consciousness has only minimal relevance, attains unlimited relevance in the world of hashish. There, we may say, everything is face: each thing has the degree of bodily presence that allows it to be searched—as one searches a face—for such traits as appear. Under these conditions even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing opposed to it. In this way every truth points manifestly to its opposite, and this state of affairs explains the existence of doubt. Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counterstatement displace each other in order to think each other. [M1a,1]

This passage is effectively a guide to the appearance of the larger conception of the crowd as discussed above, particularly with reference to Valéry as flaneur in M20,2. The vision is one of resemblance and superposition of both present and past dispersed as material and immaterial forces. Here Benjamin references the heightened consciousness of the flaneur as brought on by hashish, which is an intoxication he invokes throughout the convolute. M1,3: "An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets." M1,5: "The anamnestic intoxication in which the flaneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge." And we referenced earlier at M2,4 the "authentic intoxication." We have to keep in mind that the very definition of the flaneur is as the figure who consistently enters or exists within this realm of similitudes, who sets out across the oceans of unlimited "faces," or populations as we referred to them at M20a,2 and M21,1. It is in this way that the flaneur is a boundary object, constantly at the "boundless" point of entry into appearance. This passage, M1a1, introduces the concept of similitude to this phenomenological process of appearance, "similitude" occupying a central place in Benjamin's other writings, such as "Doctrine of the Similar," where he outlines a history of the capacity for generating similarities, which is finally a form of reading the world that makes its way into the experience of language itself. Here at M1a,1 there is the radical notion that "everything is face," and what this indicates is that each object of perception rises out of and leads into some similarity with some other nominally distinct object. But of course the experience is one of pure subjectivity, each object in effect another "face" so that in fact with the flaneur the more appropriate term is "boundary subject" rather than "boundary object." The processual nature of reality becomes clear to the intoxicated, a conditin which itself echoes or is a similitude drawn with Poe's "Man of the Crowd," where the "convalescent" narrator slips into the oblivion of trying to capture the "decrepit old man" in his description, effectively attempting to "search his face." I believe there are a number of readings of M1a,1 possible here but I want only to point out before moving on the way in which the passage clearly references The Arcades Project itself, each passage, consisting of words and sentences, a type of face, registering its own similarity to those "opposed" or adjacent to it in the book. As readers we ourselves then become flaneur figures (if we weren't already) by participating in a modality of language that "lives" in this realm. The truth of The Arcades Project is that the multitudes of faces of the passages are reading themselves in this way and that by becoming intoxicated readers with our participation we also actually "live" in any comprehensible sense of that term, living our way into the ruin of history, living our way into a timeless identification with, a lostness inside of, the crowds of appearance of all kinds.

Indeed I want once more to point out the ways this paper participates in this same "searching of faces." I track the flaneur or man of the crowd, just like Poe's narrator, only in this case it is also pursuing Benjamin himself in some sense, also needing to pass into the labyrinth of the broader notion of the crowd, history itself, to do so. Only by the close reading of "outside" texts are we able to do this, so that the progress of citations herein mimics that same type of citational accumulation and interpretation in The Arcades Project. In a very real sense here we create each other as "boundary subjects" as well, since I look to whoever my reader might be to participate in exactly the same (non)method. In all idleness, we pass the pipe. But that too is how we materially attain to truth and life, that is constantly our work, a performance that finally makes completely indistinguishable the concrete and abstract, use value and leisure, the commodity and the human person. We are this "existence of doubt" and "hesitant wing," how we understand theory wrapping itself into how we understand the body, and vice versa.  As Butler writes, a "topographical or even architectural regulation of the body happens at the level of theory," and this process is in fact a performance of capital in The Arcades Project. It is good to keep in mind in this context the Rimbaud epigraph that opens convolute A on the first page of The Arcades Project: "For sale the bodies, the voices, the tremendous unquestionable wealth, what will never be sold." It is always the case that as readers, again, we are never outside the text, that it is exactly what we imagine as "what will never be sold" that is in fact "for sale," and that the text is decidedly a department store. This equates to a kind of death in life.

There are many ways the emergence of life here parallels life's emergence via technics as discussed by Bernard Stiegler. As he writes in Technics and Time 1 (Stanford University Press, 1998):

There is an indecision, a passage remaining to be thought. At issue is the specificity of the temporality of life in which life is inscription in the nonliving, spacing, temporalization, differentiation, and deferral by, of, and in the nonliving, in the dead. (140)

It is true that in the crowd, or in the time of the crowd, what Stiegler calls "epigenetic sedimentation," or the infiltration of what we know as the human by the technological down to the level of its genetic makeup, has already long since occurred. It is the "already-there." But to truly grasp this emergence in The Arcades Project we need again to consider citation and the singular manner in which it embraces language as technology, the invention of which for Stiegler is indistinguishable from the invention of the human. What we see Benjamin doing in The Arcades Project, and this constantly defines both the figure of the flaneur and our own readerly embodiment as I have been discussing it here, is simultaneously inventing the human and the technological.

[T]he human invents himself [sic] in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically. But here the human is the interior: there is no exteriorization that does not point from interior to exterior. Nevertheless, the interior is inverted in this movement: it can therefore not precede it. Interior and exterior are consequently constituted in a movement that invents both one and the other: a moment in which they invent each other respectively, as if there were a technological maieutic of what is called humanity. The interior and the exterior are the same thing, the inside is the outside, since man (the interior) is essentially defined by the tool (the exterior).

Benjamin, the flaneur, circulates within this maieutic, where the human is almost palpably inventing itself but at the exact point at which language and technology do not simply participate in the process but guide it, and this exactly at the point at which that process is most authentically human. To refer back to the Proust citation in M21,1, the crowd is a function of the techne of the seawall. Here citational reading, the flaneur, puts us at the place of their co-constitution, where différance doubles as and bridges the human and the built. This provision of agency to language can be seen in Benjamin's work as early as his 1921 "The Task of the Translator," where he points to the moment in translation where language moves from a kind of tool nature as conduit for what is symbolized over to an agential force capable of symbolizing:

Whereas in the various tongues that ultimate essence, the pure language, is tied only to linguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy, alien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized itself, to regain pure language fully formed from the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. (261)

The play of agency contained within the technology of language itself is quite clear from this passage (as much as, on a close reading, there are a series of reversals taking place, matter for another essay). I want to posit that The Arcades Project and the flaneur, the city itself, circulate where this exchange and double appearance takes place, the constant handoff from the human to the technological and back again. As Stiegler points out, we recognize this moment, the very framing of history, as mere appearance, semblance, performance:

This double constitution is also that of an opposition between the interior and the exterior—or one that produces an illusion of succession. Where does this illusion come from? . . . [L]et us say that it comes from an originary forgetting, epimetheia as delay, the fault of Epimetheus. This becomes meaningful only in the melancholy of Prometheus, as anticipation of death, where the facticity of the already-there that equipment is for the person born into the world signifies the end: this is a Promethean structure of being-for-death, a structure in which concern is not the simple covering-over of Eigenlichkeit. This the question of time. (142)

In its most radical remembering, we must remember, citation is an equally radical forgetting of the self, the concept of authorship, the trademark de-individuation of the flaneur. The promethean technological leap cannot be other than the moment of death, the pure facticity as pure language that citation reaches, which as we have seen is a matter of the destructuration of time itself. The intoxication and lostness of the flaneur, a reading enacted by capital, plays at this deadly crossroads, even as it is a vision of life itself.

As Donna Haraway writes, "This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." She uses her 1985 essay "Cyborg Manifesto" to describe a figure, the cyborg, that has great affinity with the flaneur. "The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (292). While mapping a logic of repression, Haraway makes a quite flaneurial argument for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries" between human and animal, between organism and machine, and between physical and non-physical. "Cyborgs are ether, quintessence." "They are about consciousness—or its simulation." But one of the key elements in the way Haraway's essay functions is in its relation to capital itself. While as in The Arcades Project this relationship is confronted again and again, Haraway's essay remains formally contained within scholarly discourse as we have known it for decades. Her radical message does not infiltrate her own subject position vis a vis language or material output. Capital is in many respects placed on the shelf as nearly irrelevant:

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (293)

Even as Haraway states that "'advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment," this statement assumes that those fathers were ever present to begin with. And there is finally little grappling with the exact genetic, following Stiegler we might call it epigenetic, implications of this particular heritage, which is admitted. Haraway critiques earlier theories of technological determinism and its prioritizing of the organic body, but even as she resolves these issues with the idea of the cyborg the discussion does not consider exactly how technics and the human constitute each other at the deepest level, how the "who" and the "what" will not appear without each other. But all of this aside, it may be that what makes Haraway's work so crucial is her ongoing awareness of the urgency of her project, of the possibility and the need to demarcate zones of resistance within a contemporary landscape of de-accessioned subjectivities, of being female without possibly in the least bit being female. I want to say here that Benjamin works with that same technology of resistance, that same rescue mission for what must in the end be humanistic values. The love for the radical is how these projects take shape, their only avenue. Haraway cites the "oppositional consciousness" of Chela Sandoval's "women of color": "Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of color. . . . Thus, she was at bottom a cascade of negative identities" (296). This is what Haraway calls "learning how to craft a poetic/politic unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation and taxonomic identification." Again, "what kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective—and, ironically, socialist-feminist?" (297)   

In many ways Haraway can show us here how it is only by situating our project within a tradition of resistance to the "matrix of dominations" that we can legitimately approach any type of methodology, unless of course our aim is strictly "management." Not unlike this paper, her manifesto is an "attempt" and a "sketch" toward "an epistemological and political position." The approach to "household work" and the "feminization of labor" within a context of late capitalist economies reinforces, though I would argue does not extend, Benjamin’s formal performance of the labor/work dialectic through the flaneur, which radically implicates the reader and the reading process itself. As much as Haraway discusses how "microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures," there is a type of linearity and stopping short in the analysis of the cyborg, even in the midst of its "powerful infidel heteroglossia" and flaneurial joi de vivre, a resistance in fact to the exploration of the full implications of embodied form and language, a version of historical amnesia seen particularly clearly when we integrate large-scale technological evolution and the notion of the expanded crowd.

One area Haraway references explicitly that Benjamin does not is race, even as Benjamin's status within the radically marginalized Jewish community informs his work at its deepest levels. It is at this point that we see the flaneurial consciousness take on some of its most significant characteristics, however, because it is precisely the discourse of marginality for the which the flaneur accounts. We can see the formation and working through of this type of discourse in work such as Stephano Harney and Fred Moten's The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013) where a fully integrated cultural critique goes hand in hand with an ontology of resistance and definitional fluidity. Any number of points in their book bear out a type of flaneurial project. Consider the following statement, from "Blackness and Governance":

The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially—poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal—is blackness. (47)

This is an extraordinary statement that I won't offer a full exegesis of here, but it is important to note how blackness is positioned vis a vis a flaneurial consciousness as we have been investigating and constructing it. The "anoriginary drive" is in Harney and Moten's book a modality of black cultural activity that includes citational practice, and the quote situates this practice of externality and "outside" as very much simultaneously internal, a drive that seems to have equal parts agency and a collective or crowd aspect. Much like Benjamin's flaneur as well, this tenuous back and forth is couched in phenomenological terms, as much grounded in historical specificity (that is, citational) as it is a component of "being." And we see the flaneur as "outlaw" reflected here in the "criminality" of the drive, which also as with the flaneur doubles as the deeply conservative impulse of the commodity, bringing "the law online." It is a criminal, runaway, fugitive, and anarchic force that nevertheless is the "ground of . . . untold wealth." And debt here works in nearly identical fashion as the flaneur's relation to the crowd as broadly conceived through citation, the only way into the contemporary being a relation to a ruined or absent past that is nevertheless always already present and future. Of course the specificity of debt here is the debt of slavery, but that mass slaughter of what we know as the human is also contained in the paradoxical notion of the flaneur as simultaneously pure human and pure capital. Finally, the singular performativity of the flaneur is through and through this "world theater," its momentary appearance very much in line with the Benjaminian "flash" or "dialectics at a standstill." There is every case to be made for the flaneur as blackness itself, as the manifestation of the very complexity of the human as "other" in the depths of the machine.

One final linkage here, particularly as we more overtly broach the ontological dimensions of flanerie, is to Martin Heidegger's essay "The Question Concerning Technology." There Heidegger discusses technology or techne as very much an abstract process, one of "revealing" but also that of "questioning" technology itself. It is most appropriate to discuss The Arcades Project here as itself a technology that brings forth this revealing. Techne means:

to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. (5)

What we have in The Arcades Project is a being "at home" in the technology of the citation, in the actual anticipated reading process as we have discussed it above. The passages and citations, crowds of sociotechnical beings, work as access points in just this way. Benjamin, and by extension his readers, becomes "expert" in each passage, thereby opening up a being at home in history, which is thereby "revealed." Techne "reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us." "Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." Citation and citational reading function as technology, through the technology of language, in precisely this way. They are this opening up to historical truth.

All well and good. But one of the decisive turns in Heidegger's essay is from this more handicraft based mode of technological revealing to the treatment of what is "new" in "modern technology," which Heidegger terms "challenging" of what is understood as natural resources through the incorporation of large-scale machinery. He provides a concrete illustration in the following paragraph:

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, "The Rhine" as dammed up into the power works, and "The Rhine" as uttered out of the art work, in Hölderlin's hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. (7, italic in original)

As much as the final sociological critique seems to take its cue from Adorno, one senses an extraordinary anger here. That said, the flaneur will be in that tour group, vacationing and doing business. But the crucial move in this passage is of course the approach of technology to the natural world such that nature then become derivative of technology, such that the very being of nature is displaced into the machine, in this case into electricity that functions on the scale of public works, large projects that echo M21,1 above.[13] This displacement is at the core of The Arcades Project and frames the haunted landscape within which the flaneur circulates. Heidegger calls out this displacement as "monstrous." The Rhine is no longer a river, the being "at home" of earlier iterations of techne, the artwork itself, is no longer an option other than as an extension of capital. This situation reaches into the depths of The Arcades Project insofar as the arcades double here as the power works, though The Arcades Project takes account of the entire scene here, including the river, power works, electric network, vacation industry, tourists, and finally the zeroing in on language itself in the phantasmagoric shift of meaning in "The Rhine." We have only to return to M2,4 to see Benjamin constructing an analogous tableaux, though here implicating the railroad rather than a hydroelectic plant in the technological displacement, a kind of mechanism at the very "heart" of the flaneur:

We know that, in the course of flanerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment. When the authentically intoxicated phase of this condition announces itself, the blood is pounding in the veins of the happy flaneur, his heart ticks like a clock, and inwardly as well as outwardly things go on as we would imagine them to do in one of those "mechanical pictures" which in the nineteenth century (and of course earlier, too) enjoyed great popularity, and which depicts in the foreground a shepherd playing on a pipe, by his side two children swaying in time to the music, further back a pair of hunters in pursuit of a lion, and very much in the background a train crossing over a trestle bridge. Chapuis and Gélis, Le Monde des automates (Paris, 1928), vol. 1, p. 330.  [M2,4]

Compared to Heidegger's more or less straightforward presentation in discursive prose of a relatively contained shift from handicraft to modern technology, the wide-ranging implications of this passage are staggering. Its density rivals a Nietzchean aphorism, or indeed the opening Mechanical Turk tableau of Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History." For now I only point to the relationship between a bucolic vision of the natural environment (where the old Rhine might appear) and the way in which the deep background is characterized by the introduction of the railroad. Of course the whole scene is a "mechanical picture" so the unfolding complexity might start from there.

Conclusion

Have we then broken in, to the text, and broken out, again? What have I been able to say, or point to? When and where has the crowd, or the flaneur, displaced what I have to say, the way I am speaking? My only object is to point to The Arcades Project, and a figure therein, one that in many respects points to itself, does nothing but that. By way of conclusion perhaps the most appropriate move is to return, like any conclusion, to the opening question, asking again, what is the flaneur? In that way we re-enter, perhaps this time with a different brand of cognition, the ontological terrain of Heidegger's "questioning concerning technology." But there is always something else, a kind of way we get there. Not a before and after, since any "before" is always changed by what we pass through on the way in. Any before is revealed as part of the passage itself, in this extensive network of passages, a Passengen-Werk (the German title of The Arcades Project). We conclude a look at the flaneur perhaps best exactly by leaving ourselves in the dream of reading, by not forcing ourselves to "wake up." We certainly don't conclude with an informative, discursive summary of our major points—the flaneur as extension of mass culture, as built environment, as transhistoric interval, as capital dressed up as a tramp—since that might call our whole project into question. No, we want to ask again after the unanswerable, the untrackable, the disappearing, that very thing that perhaps compels whatever comes to the surface at all about the flaneur. We comprehend our status, then, as somehow wrapped in darkness, intellection's fog, "convalescent," as in Poe's "Man of the Crowd." Time passes in our pursuit, to be sure, and as much as clarity can be reduced to small nodes of existential authenticity, still a phantasmatic slippage dominates. As Poe's narrator writes:

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghosty confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convlusion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. (506)

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[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999). The book, on which Benjamin worked from about 1927 until his death in 1940, was first published in German in 1982. Benjamin referred to the work as "the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas."

[2] I'd like to keep Derrida's remark that "there is no outside the text" clearly in view throughout this discussion, though I will not return to it explicitly.

[3] As Ian Hodder writes, "Entanglement is compounded by conceptual abstractions and bodily resonance." (206). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

[4] Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, Sage, 2005. Thrift also cites Tim Ingold as stating that "the environment of persons is no more reducible than is their organic existence to pure molecular substance. It is not merely physical, and it is certainly not blank."

[5] Here I'd like to point out that, contrary to the explicit and implicit statements by the vast majority of Benjamin commentators, The Arcades Project exceeds any designation as simply a "collection of notes" toward some other project. It is structurally constituted by its character as a labyrinth and by the "poetic act" of negotiating that labyrinth. Two consecutive passage bear out this theory quite clearly, M9a,4 and M9a5:

"To leave without being forced in any way, and to follow your inspiration as if the mere fact of turning right or turning left already constituted an essentially poetic act." Edmond Jaloux, "Le Dernier Flaneur," Le Temps (May 22, 1936). [M9a,4]

 "Dickens . . . could not remain in Lausanne because, in order to write his novels, he needed the immense labyrinth of London streets where he could prowl about continuously. . . . Thomas De Quincy . . . , as Baudelaire tells us, was 'a sort of peripatetic, a street philosopher pondering his way endlessly through the vortex of the great city.'" Edmond Jaloux, "Le Dernier Flaneur," Le Temps (May 22, 1936). (M9a,5)

As with Proust, the assoctiation of any given literary figure with the flaneur continues here. But the "turning right or turning left" is obviously associated with the experience of navigating a labyrinth, envisioned as the city streets, as the labyrinth of the crowd itself. It seems overwhelmingly clear that The Arcades Project is set up as such a labyrinth, intended to be navigated in precisely this manner. Of course this does not mean it is not also a collection of notes, and indeed passages often reference their empheral nature (eg. m1,1), but this is a considerably different sense of the word "note."

^[6] I'll point out in this context that the use of bold type to distinguish citations in The Arcades Project as published in English by Harvard University Press seems utterly random. For example, Y6a,4 (not bold) vs. Y6a,6 (bold): there is effectively an equal amount of commentary and citation in each, both being primarily citation. It's as if the editors were well aware of how tenuous the distinction between commentary and citation was and then distributed the emphasis scattershot. But indeed it's a reading of the book, a window into the editorial apparatus that's been applied to the work that is The Arcades Project. It is an intervention into Benjamin's text, which according to any interpretation he meticulously planned. The editors drape their conception of what is and is not a citation all through the book, giving the impression of a clear-cut oscillation. As we can see in the translator's foreword, the bold text derives from the German edition of The Arcades Project, where a larger typeface was used to designate "Benjamin's reflections in German," or, the commentary, and a smaller typeface "for his numerous citations in French and German." Again, "the larger type was used for entries containing significant commentary by Benjamin." Thus Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of the German edition, must have either introduced or at least approved of this technique of visually assigning one role or the other to certain pieces of text. The translators of the current edition, while they note that all this is "without textual basis in Benjamin's manuscript" (!), go ahead and maintain the technique, only now using the bold text rather than text of larger or smaller size to divide up commentary and citation, assigning bold to "citation." They say that using bold avoids the "hierarchical implication" of "privileging" "Benjamin's reflections over his citations," but in fact that's not the entire issue: as one can see in the text itself, the issue is distinguishing commentary and citation at all. Obviously it's not that the translators have no sense of how commentary and citation merge, but they do allow this massive formal element of the book as published to go forward, not only misleading readers into thinking that commentary and citation are distinct but not, as I've mentioned above, doing a very good job of it! To be fair, the translators state that "what Benjamin seems to have conceived was a dialectical relation—a formal and thematic interfusion of citation and commentary." This is quite true, but given this why let stand the deeply misleading use of bold for "citations," if in their dialectical relation to commentary they become by definition indistinguishable from commentary? "Seem" is troublingly tentative, and they then again tentatively reference J75,2 as a way to draw out or expand what they mean by this interfusion. But we look at that passage to find a Fourierist characterization of work not as inauthentically exploitative but as a form of children’s game play: "all places [both citation and commentary] are worked by human hands, made useful and beautiful thereby; all, however, stand, like a roadside inn, open to all." Here, the "act would be kin to the dream," not separated from it, as in inauthentic labor. The passage itself is in the mode of commentary (and not in bold), though in fact it is a citation of Fourier and Baudelaire (the last unacknowledged, as the translator's point out). The passage itself is perhaps thus an illustration of exactly the problem of working (an inauthentic labor), and asking the reader to work, to bring an inauthentic distinction between citation and commentary across the whole of The Arcades Project. We are left with the impression throughout The Arcades Project of a misperception or misunderstanding by the translators and editors of the very thing that is the defining characteristic of the entire project.

[7] It's important throughout The Arcades Project to acknowledge the linguistic status of bibliographic information. Book titles, author names, the names of publishers, place of publication, dates, even it seems volume and page numbers, achieve the status of portals into the same citational substrate as any other modality of language that arises in a passage. The Benjaminian vision of the material of the book, the status of any bit of language, the status of documentation, exists parallel to and integrated with the fluidity and transparency of other concepts, like "crowd" or "flaneur."

[8] A lenghty note of sorts makes sense here, to address the complexities of the physical citational practice as it is referenced in Benjamin's 1929 text, One-Way Street (Harvard University Press, 2016) specifically the section "Chinese Curios," which I'll quote in full:

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his "competence." Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

At the beginning of the long downhill lane that leads to the house of ———, whom I visited each evening, is a gate. After she moved, the opening of its archway henceforth stood before me like an ear that has lost the power of hearing.

A child in his nightshirt cannot be prevailed upon to greet an arriving visitor. Those present, invoking a higher moral standpoint, admonish him in vain to overcome his purdery. A few minutes later he reappears, now stark naked, before the visitor. In the mentime he has washed.

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas. (27–28)

This section, while it holds at its core a possible model of textual interpretation, is a play of reversals. The subject matter of each paragraph is fragmented, meaning that the paragraphs seem to have little in common with each other. We can see the central theme of "indirection" but our reading might be said to become quickly allegorical, a building up of equivalences, as we read. And we are reading here, not "copying," which is praised so highly, so that perhaps Benjamin's move to a much more citational style or method finally made more sense.

The first paragraph is reminiscent of Benjamin's praise of "immersion" or lack of "intention" in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998). The "decisive blow" must be delivered "left-handed," or indirectly: one lets go of any expectation of "competence" and works improvisationally, letting details float in and out as they may (not unlike the flaneur). Approacing an object directly is a mistake, since we make too many assumptions about what that object might be in the first place. But we should note the way the paragraph starts, "These are days when," which brings a lighthearted air to the whole section. The second paragraph moves into a more overtly allegorical mode, almost dreamlike, showing how Benjamin now approaches the house of his lover only indirectly, after she has moved, become inaccessible, as a kind of ruin. Here the "text" is an absence, but a nominally receptive one, a persistent shape of meaning. Next is the portriat of the child who struggles with what is appropriate, how direct to be, swaying from the extreme of the complete indirection of non-engagement and absolute refusal to give any greeting, to appearing naked before a group of strangers of "high morality."

This trajectory concludes with a description of two types of reading, normal reading and copying a text, or in other words quoting it, citing it. This latter is the mode of reading that uses indirection, presenting (re-presenting) words that are not your own in order to make your point or to engage a reader in a particular way. We need to note here that, the way the paragraph is set up, it seems that "normal" reading is going to be praised. We're not really aware that copying is going to be preferred until later. The contrast is between walking the road and flying over it. Benjamin sets up a parallel with reading and copying, in that order. Thus walking is the same as reading, flying over is the same as copying. The qualitative judgment comes only with the sentence "Only the copied text ... wheras the mere reader ..." Indeed indirection would apply to airplane ride here, not to a direct experience of a road "cut through the interior jungle." 

This is certainly a nuanced treatment of citation, and of how we should approach text in general. Copying comes in for high praise, as a way to "discover new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text." But with "his" we also think back to the boy standing naked and incomprehending in front of his parents' morally superior guests. What is Benjamin doing here? Where have we been led? The "curios" of the title by the end of the section are great Chinese "enigmas," and we're somewhat abandonned on a country road, far from the city street. We indeed are the readers of this passage, "following the movement of our minds in the free flight of daydreaming" (improvisation in fact, which Benjamin would otherwise recommend we'd think), our reading now more nor less than a copying, as we stand outside the house of our erstwhile paramour. Benjmininan allegory leads to an embodiment of something we start off by calling text but that has "lost the power of hearing," or speaking. The presentation of text invokes a dream of how text presents itself (in a dream of how text presents itself as text). The idea allegory leads to is an image, this contradictory, dialectical image we refer to now, a wisp of life at all times eluding any "comepetence," our textual stories, our histories, built around a nearly lifeless shell, a mask, a facies hippocratica at the heart of allegory.

[9] Note as well the start of M20a,1: "Basic to flanerie . . . is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious that the fruits of labor."

[10] To quote the opening sentence of the syllabus for John M. Ackerman's seminar "Readings in Communication and Technology."

[11] Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network, Duke, 2015.

[12] See "He Discovered the Secret to Living Rent-Free" in the New York Times for a contemporary version of flaneur as boundary object. John McGill lives in New York City as an artist rent-free by negotiating short-term deals with a variety of building owners for otherwise unused spaces. It is important to recognize, however, McGill's relation to the city real estate market as an extension of white male privilege, since his situation would be radically different for a woman or person of color. Which brings us again to the transgendered quality of the flaneur in Benjamin, who is not simply, as the flaneur appears in Beaudelaire, metrosexual or fluidly gendered on the surface, but in fact indistinguishable as either man or woman, based on analysis of passage such as M21a1, where the flaneur appears as "a woman of high rank," or others where female prostitution becomes the operative metaphorical framework. Gender circulates as a meme among other memes. (April 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/realestate/he-discovered-the-secret-to-living-rent-free.html?_r=0)

[13] We might interpret this in terms of the genesis of the hyperobject as discussed by Timothy Morton.