P1,1 (textual city)

Convolute P discusses the city, specifically the streets of Paris, as a linguistic construct. As with P1,1, the "life of the city's layout" is not only compared with but described as "no less important" than the "unconquerable power" of names of places and structures. And the power of these names persists "in the face of all topographic displacement," meaning that even after a place or structure has been destroyed or renamed, the power of their former names, of their presences, can be seen to continue. Thus multiple places, multiple cities, exist in or beneath the city as we know it, the one that appears, in a model of how the past inhabits the present, via forces that "never stop moving." This is how the city operates—and this is how language operates—there being little ability to tell which, the city or language, is inspiring or leading the other. In a passage such as this we can go back to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama for the importance of the act of naming, of names or words themselves. As Benjamin writes there:

Truth is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality. The state of being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is that of the name. This determines the manner in which ideas are given. But they are not so much given in a primordial language as in a primordial form of perception, in which words possess their own nobility as names, unimpaired by cognitive meaning. (pg. 36)

Here "this power" indicates that which is able to realize itself in empirical reality, which is what the city streets represent. The city streets are part of "phenomenality," but this passage makes clear that the name, words, language and the way it functions, are what determines the shape of that phenomenality we know as the city, as materiality in general. The depth of the overlap of linguistic structure with empirical reality is also a theme in Benjamin's One-Way Street, written contemporaneously with Origin. As Michael W. Jennings writes in his introduction to that volume, "subliminal connections between textual passages are complimented by overt thematic and formal echoes and rhymes," and these rhymes are incarnated in the city streets, where "the streets of Paris / Were set to rhyme" (epigraph to convolute P).

But indeed in P1,1, there are a number of ways in which things, names, appear and reappear or resurface, echo and rhyme, streets appearing through other streets, names and meanings appearing through other names and meanings. In this way, we are given three main versions of "topographic displacement." The earliest glimpses of the city and language are described as "little theaters" from the anciene regime of Louis Philippe, when the temple was the operative structure. These structures are torn down but resurface in a physically different location, but with the same purpose, theater, and names. Here "to speak of 'city districts' is odious to me" makes sense, since a district would confine a certain activity to a certain geographic location, which clearly contradicts how the city operates in a kind of cycle of rebirth that is not topographically specific. (We can quickly note that the refrain "to speak of" here and at the start of this passage emphasizes how the city is defined through language.) The second form of displacement is one where a street or property continues to be named for someone who died long ago, or some feature or use that has long since disappeared. This is a kind of haunting or ghostly presence about the city that specifically attaches to language, the resurfacing being far less physical than a structure reappearing in a different place. Again Benjamin places these earlier uses in a feudal context of the "landed proprietor" with a "demesne," so that, particularly as a part of language, it's not clear that the ownership has not continued to have material influence. Finally, a third type of displacement relates purely to the spread of contemporary forms of meaning, where as soon as an idea takes prominence (or a restaurant become popular) that particular name or form of understanding spreads out across the linguistic landscape, like a meme, and becomes part of general usage. Construction and naming of a restaurant that is, so to speak, part of a chain accounts for both physical and linguistic movement.

These three versions of "topographic displacement" are part of this passage, which itself works to linguistically characterize the linguistic nature of the physical space of the city, of how city streets function. "Such is the movement of the streets, the movement of names." But we can productively look here as well at the concluding moment of the passage, which seems to raise a new issue: "which [meaning streets and names individually and in relations to each other] often run at cross-purposes to one another." The "cross-purposes" are indeed what the passage has been indicating, the way in which meaning may not correspond, at least in appearance, with the "empirical reality" we are presented with, names typically indicating people or things that have disappeared or that originate elsewhere. However, with this last moment, last phrase in the passage, we also have a vision of city street criss-crossing one another, moving in opposing directions, mapping over the landscape in a back and forth frenzy of commotion, movement that never stop, the city that never sleeps. What I've been describing thus far have been elements of this movement, but in fact the point is along the lines of a frenetic simultaneity that characterizes the phenomena of language and the city as a whole (as well as the Arcades Project itself).