James Kennel l , Univers i ty o f Greenwich&

Wesley Rykalsk i , B i rkbeck Co l lege , Univers i ty o f London

Images of the liminal: seaside promenades through the lens of

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

The Arcades Project

Incomplete, fragmentary work left by Benjamin in Paris

A collection of notes, photographs, observations, folders and quotations

Ostensibly ‘about’ the Parisian arcades, but also a methodological and conceptual experiment

A cultural materialist form of historical practice

Parataxis as method

“Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall

purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the

refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.” [Benjamin AP N1a,8]

Dialectical images

“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on

what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with

the now to form a constellation.  In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.  For while the relation of the present to the past is

a purely temporal one, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is

dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (Benjamin AP N2a,3)

Why Promenades?

Provides a focus for study of the development of and current context of the seaside as a cultural-political construct

Similarities to the Parisian arcades in terms of: Class divides Architectural forms Development of leisure Commodification of space

Photography and the collective method

Key aspect of our methodBuilding on the missing archive of the

Arcades ProjectUsing the possibilities of 2.0 technology to

extend both collecting and parataxisRandom (ish) collection and random(ish)

presentation using picassa

Reading the Arcades / Reading the Promenades

Reading the Arcades / Reading the Promenades

http://arcadespromenades.wordpress.com

http://www.twitter.com/arcadeproms

The non-liminality of the shore

Liminality must be more than an edgeThe concept needs to offer some form of

ritual transformationIf ‘just’ topography then liminality is

everywhere and of limited use‘limits’ have been areas of control,

fortification and transformation by force and coercion

Seaside tourism is not transformative, it is the relocation of the rituals of the every-day

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/William_Turner_-_Sunrise_with_Sea_Monsters.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Wreck_of_the_American_Ship_General_Grant.jpg

The anti-carnivalesque of the promenades

Limanality is usually aligned with the carnivalesque in discussions of the seaside

The carnivalesque is not a zone of freedom, it is a temporo-spatial form of control

Fundamentally, what people get up to on the promenade shows very little evidence of liminal ambiguity or carnivalesque license

The promenade as a social space

What we did find was lots of evidence of the promenade as a managed and managing space

Key activities – regulation of behaviours; display; observation; commerce

Leads us to the idea of managed liminality - the frissons of the historic shore have now been effectively brought into the capitalist mode of production, including the production (and productivity) of leisure

If not liminality, then what?

Benjamin collapses the distinction between inside / outside and private / public by showing how ‘leisure’ works by transgressing these divisions

We find this too, in the architectural form of the promenade

Without these oppositions, liminality loses it’s use

A cultural materialist approach seeks to engage with the practices, forms and governmentality of space

Avoids a mythology of space, which can mask the power relations of capitalism

Flânerie as practice and method

“The crowd is the veil through which through which the familiar city is transformed for the

flâneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria, in which the city appears

now as landscape, now a room, seems later to have inspired the décor of department store, which thus puts flânerie to work for profits. In any case, department stores are the last precincts of flânerie.” (Benjamin 1939: 21)