the collector the gambler the flâneur

Walter Benjamin writes the Passagen-Werk as a fragmented archive of reflections on what he sees as a homogenised development of the city of Paris. The arcade was a new typology, where façades of shops on the street were inverted to become two walls of interior space, making a passage through the embodied city where things could happen. The play between interior and exterior seems crucial for Benjamin’s interest, as it works like a shortcut for anyone that wishes to pass and as exhibition hall with shop windows where society could regard their modernity being molded. 11

“Arcades as temples to commodities, first building type of modernity. First specifically mass structure, ambivalent half dream-world, half marketplace. Getting away from noise, shielded from weather. In a distracted state of being exposed to embryo of elements of mass-culture; fashion, flaneurs, prostitutes, commodities. “ 11

Confronted with the microcosms of the arcades, Benjamin establishes the three mentioned characters, collector, gambler and flâneur, and lets them become forced into their nature within an attention-distraction dialectic.

“Three figures who embody this dialectical process are the flâneur, the gambler, and the collector, all of whom are at home in the modern world of stimuli and shocks, taking in the fast-changing spectacles of modernity in a state of permanent intoxication.” 11

This thesis explores Benjamin’s triad of urban characters as a conceptual framework to dissect a field of subjective perception and as an aid in

Methodology

the process of understanding epistemology in the philosophical foundation of the following place and program encounters. The characters are gradually more informed by my reading to explore the understanding of archived objects in relation to space.

Benjamin rejects the conception of history as a continuous, ideological narrative connecting past to present. As he argues, the past can never be reconstructed as it really was; rather, the aim of the materialist historian is to engage with the past as it appears from the present perspective. 4

Benjamin’s urban archetypes constitute the edifice of the architectural process of this thesis.

“The fragmentary character of the Passagen-Werk is thus not merely the result of its unfinished status but stems from a deliberate montage technique which displays, rather than conceals, the eclectic nature of historical evidence. Benjamin’s attention is directed not at the obvious, the landmarks of cultural achievement, but at the debris of history, at those objects and phenomena that have been excluded from collective consciousness.

Benjamin argues that fruitful historical engagement should always have repercussions for the present. Rather than just enabling access to a remote period, the exploration of the past should provide critical insights into the current situation, in particular into its structures of power and oppression, which are prefigured in previous periods. Part of the challenge is thus to write a history not from the perspective of the victors, of rulers and monarchs, but from the perspective of the defeated and oppressed, whose experiences are commonly absent from official records and accounts (1.2, 696). Ultimately, such an engagement with the past can yield the realization that the present is not inevitable but can be subject to transformation or, as Benjamin puts it, salvation.” 4

“Only when they no longer circulate, as is the case with decent goods, do things begin as shelf warmer to give signs of another, subversive potential” This stance requires a particular form of attention whose alertness, coupled with a nondiscriminatory openness is reminiscent of Freud’s “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit” (377). In a similar manner, Benjamin stresses the “need to listen for many years keenly to any random quote, any fleeting mention of a book”, as the bedrock of his critical methodology. 4

“the sun throw dreamy dark mantle upon the child of insight I move deeper into the library, down through the layers of time frozen action, the sheen of letters”

In continuation with the maze’s spatial typologies and research, I encountered a Renaissance painting by Antonello da Messina entitled St Jerome in His Study that captures notions of knowledge among an assortment of symbolic things within a complex spatial setting. The melancholia in this painting may lie in the relation between the inward and outward worlds that it represents. It is a beautiful day outside and St. Jerome spends it inside, studying. The space is depicted with a personal but heightened level of focus.

His shoes are left on floor – he is not going anywhere in a while, symbolic animals – the wilderness in proximity, and objects synergize his mode of focus. In an explorative exercise, I try to distinguish each of Benjamin’s characters in relation to St. Jerome’s space of study. The collector, the gambler and the flâneur provide me with new readings of the painting, and in return, I was able to learn more about themselves. St. Jerome in His Study’s painting as a representation of knowledge became in itself a tool for it.

ST. JEROME IN HIS STUDY

the collector reads objects apart from their context the flaneur sees past the objects to capture what is beyond the gambler speculating what is possible original description translation essential question time relation