Reading the entirety of the Arcades Project

"[The Arcades Project] is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast." 

—T.J. Clark

N7a,6: It is my intention to withstand what Valéry calls "a reading slowed by and bristling with the resistances of a refined and fastidious reader."

Something to be said about reading the entirety of the Arcades Project. I'm not the greatest reader, so some of this might not be true for others. But I want to point out the two possibilities here, a fast and a slow reading. The fast reading might get us through the entire book in the weeks we have set aside for this task. I feel like the general idea we might have of reading would assign this number of pages to that time frame. A slow reading, which is a reading I believe the book insists on, could take a week for 10 pages, which would potentially give us 10 weeks for 100 pages, about 100 weeks or about 2 years to work through the whole book. A fast reading is one that glides over the text, not truly making sense of what is there, that is, grasping why a particular passage is placed the way it is, how it means what it means, reading in effect informationally, a type of reading that it is exactly the goal of the Arcades Project to contradict. I'm not sure that the book makes sense with such a reading. It is incumbent then on anyone approaching this book to read it slowly, imaginatively, very much like a flaneur walking the city streets, using details to dream oneself into levels of meaning that include the informational but that are also much more. In this way the book slips outside of the information economy that we're perhaps so used to, that defines our expectations of reading as we assume that a work like this can be absorbed according to our time frame, ideas of subject matter that implies, ideas of response. I want to say that our responsibilities as readers are not unfounded: our attention to detail, our inclination to read closely and to pull out any meanings we can from a particular text, to see everything a text is doing. I believe that this book relies on that inclination, which seems to be a desire to know, a human trait. And Benjamin in essays like "The Task of the Translator" refers to a type of reading that is a "fidelity," such that "only if the sense of a linguistic creation may be equated with the information it conveys does some ultimate, decisive element remain beyond all communication—quite close and yet infinitely remote, concealed or distinguishable, fragmented or powerful." To read the Arcades Project is to live among this element "beyond all communication," the actual and perhaps living content of any given "passage." Our world is not set up for this kind of reading; it expects just the opposite. How do we plan accordingly? Responsibly? The readers of this world. I would say there is a certain modernist invocation, as with a work like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, or Stein's The Making of Americans, of phenomenological experience of reading or being that results from an almost incantatory revisiting of the impossibility of a "normal" progression through the linear accumulation of meaning that the vast majority of books imply, reflect, and insist on. These works exist in opposition to that kind of reading, specifically that kind of experience of reality and history. One of the remarkable aspects of the Arcades Project is that it accomplishes or presents this alternate form of reading and experience precisely through text that is set up to be read informationally, meaning these texts of the citations. Perhaps one of the great characteristics of the Arcades Project is to show how informational reading, even our simple everyday use of language, our everyday modes of perception, contain and lead at every turn into alternate modes of existence and perception. Indeed it's finally these latter that seem to take precedence over and direct the other uses of language, though both types of use are materially determined (meaning part of historical materialism).

We could map out a plan for a 4 week engagement with the Arcades Project that takes into account an actual reading of the book on its own terms. According to what I've said above we could realistically expect to get through 40 pages, then as we've said we'll turn to the secondary scholarly material on the book. Alternatively we could skip the secondary material and get through another 40 pages in the second month, then construct a 25-pg paper from the blog posts that are processing the actual reading of the book. This Oct. 6 collection of blog posts, which does consist of some more minor notes, is at nearly 20 pages double spaced so that by the end of the semester we could have about 160 to 200 double spaced pages of notes and reflections that process the Arcades Project on its own terms, though again I will have gotten through only about 80 pages. I want to hold this out as a theory of response in the time frame we have.