Clearly the
feuilleton is yet another cipher for the Arcades
Project as a whole. Consider the Wikipedia definition of the feuilleton as
a genre:
The Feuilleton
is a writing genre that allows for much journalistic freedom as far as its
content, composition and style are concerned; the text is hybrid which means
that it makes use of different genre structures, both journalistic and literary.
The characteristic of a column is also the lack of the group of fixed features
in strong structural relation. . . The tone of its writing is usually
reflexive, humorous, ironic and above all very subjective in drawing
conclusions, assessments and comments on a particular subject. Unlike other
common journalistic genres, the feuilleton style is very close to literary. Its
characteristic feature is lightness and wit evidenced by wordplay, parody,
paradox and humorous hyperboles. The vocabulary is usually not neutral, and
strongly emotionally loaded words and phrases prevail.
Picking up from m3,4
we can recognize the journalistic mode, but this time a supplemental relation
to the overriding informational purpose of the newspaper. It was a type of
interlude that opened up new ranges of "immediate experience" that were
in contradistinction to the "ordinary experience" of reading the
news. Benjamin even outlines the subtlety of how this experience is
"intravenously injected" and is, as a "sensation," in fact
"poison." That said, it is an alternate experience of the overwhelmingly
mundane city, which thereby has a "heightened need for immediate experiences."
Thus the Arcades Project offers through its supplementary passages a kind of
alternate city characterized by reading experiences that bring life back to
something more recognizably life-like. We can see clearly however that the
process is anything but straightforward, given the existence of the feuilleton
within the newspaper itself, how it is defined by such a position, and given that the feuilletonist is at heart a
"technician" called up for not much more than to oil the machine of
capital (cf. first passage of One-Way Street).
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