Gesa Helms added a post to the album [almost titled].
i read Benjamin’s Haschisch in Marseille (though in English). i want to be annoyed at it and subsume it under that bourgeois bloke who meanders, flaneurs along, unguarded and naive, seeing universality in all he does.
of course i am not.
i never read much of Benjamin beyond the Berlin childhood and Mechanical reproduction (i think my younger self never considered herself bourgeois, cultured enough to be illuminated into the arcades). there is so much in his that i recognise as a well-known modality of my own, sans l’haschisch, the receptive introspection and the meaning that shifts along, tumbles forwards, connects out while being thoroughly with oneself (at once in fragment and complete). then there is the recording, the protocol, the account.
— there is also something incredibly tender at play, there is a curious affective touching that goes on, almost in passing. (and i am thinking of that loud pose that Springgay and Truman strike with their call for affect, which drowns out the above, or perhaps also doesn’t quite know what do with that that they can’t categorise/ identify as white settler self and his others).
i had, this morning, when i dreamt up the modality for the meeting, also figured the relational forms that i am tracing, holding and letting go in the moving-with that i am doing. it is quite different too from any of the participatory stuff and aims at a social, it may just be boring social geography after all. it needs that social, both to understand the violence (close and far) but also to conceive of the tenderness, the longing. it needs a little trippyness too, i know where i get mine from, Benjamin clearly described his.
(work in progress)
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Gesa Helms I download a new edition of Einbahnstrasse, and chuckle (a) at the age of modernism; and (b) at the datedness of my idea to use the separation between text and footnote as a line… of course in Benjamin’s time, the Feuilliton ran from page to page at the bottom of it (not like in my times as a supplement to worthy papers):
— And the textual diversity of One-Way Street ensures that the street resonates with the hubbub of many voices, with what Lionel Trilling once called the great “hum and buzz” of social interaction. Benjamin’s built environment, his “one-way street,” is a thoroughfare that requires not just mental agility but especially a kind of modern urban literacy.Edit or delete this -
Gesa Helms i find this ‘gem’ among those who reference Benjamin’s one way street:Edit or delete this
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Gesa Helms then I do find a fairly real gem: Savage 1995 on the urban in Benjamin’s writing. it works, on a number of levels… https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/d130201Edit or delete thisJOURNALS.SAGEPUB.COMWalter Benjamin’s Urban Thought: A Critical Analysis – Mike Savage, 1995
Walter Benjamin’s Urban Thought: A Critical Analysis – Mike Savage, 1995
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Edit or delete thisJOURNALS.SAGEPUB.COMThe Power of Distraction: Distraction, Tactility, and Habit in the Work of…
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Edit or delete thisETHESES.WHITEROSE.AC.UKPerforming as Mapping: An examination of the role of…
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Gesa Helms tangentially, I find this and feel rather nostalgic: both for the Feld but even more so to that praxis that was critical geography around Berlin around the second half of the 2000s. hey there, Uli. https://s3.amazonaws.com/…/Stanek__best_chapter_only…Edit or delete this
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Gesa Helms I also find a good piece in October by Trinh T Minh-Ha how documentary is not a thing. it goes towards a different pile.Edit or delete this
