“Flânerie,” Walter Benjamin observes, “can transform Paris into one great interior”.[^1] Impelled by association, the flâneur embraces a form of acquiescence: to the tactile landscape impressing upon the attention, to the constellation of fragments flourishing in the consciousness, to the “far-off times and places (interpenetrating) the landscape and the present moment”.[^2] The nature of this process is inexorably indexical, through which an arrangement of signs prompts the liberation in the present of a series of recollections. From its trace emerges the subject, a combination of associations linked by memory, interiority, and spatiality.
From Emily Furhrman’s Mapping Indexicality in “The Arcades Project” (2015), which tracks the spatial and temporal context of the word “this” to create visual representations of Benjamin’s convolutes as meandering paths. [[link::https://emilyfuhrman.co/portfolio/mapping-indexicality-in-the-arcades-project.html]] The analysis of the text was performed using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLK) [[link::https://www.nltk.org/]].
Footnotes [^1:] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 422. [^2:] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 419.
[[Ragpicking]]
[[A Mosaic or Field Approach]]
[[A Pious Work of Salvage]]
[[Timekeeper]]