[A1,1]
Each entry in The Arcades Project comes with its organizing information imbedded within it, such that each quote stands on its own as single unit of data, preserving even when we view the individual entries in varying orders. This structure allows for multiple ways of navigating the text and myriad passages through which a reader can travel.
[A1,2]
While Benjamin’s imagining of historiography as dialectics marks a radical break from the past, his methods do not. Compilers, as Blair notes, have been engaging in this same work as early as the 16th century (Blair 175). The organizational structure that presents massive amounts of data in a form that can be shuffled and re-ordered, is not Benjamin’s own invention, but another piece of “historical refuse” that he appropriates. Though different in stated goals, Benjamin’s Konvoluts resemble the description of the Bibliotheca Universalis, which Markus Krajewski notes as the 16th century precursor to the card catalogue. The work, an “index of indexes” follows the following algorithm:
- When reading, everything of importance and whatever appears useful should be copied onto a good sheet of paper.
- A new line should be used for every idea
- Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters, which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary.
- As soon as the desired order is produced, arranged, and sorted on tables or in small boxes, it should be fixed or copied directly (cited in Krajewski 13).
The Arcades Project differs from the Bibliotheca Universalis with regard to the last instruction: the notion of “fixing” the order of work. Benjamin insists that meaning grow out of sudden chaos, out of a fluctuating constellations and not an imposed order:
Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things and incoming and disappearing meaning, are instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning. [N5,2]
Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Walter Benjamin’s Archive
[A1,3]
This liberation of his quotations from a fixed relation in the information web takes a potentially postmodern turn, radically refocusing the lens of historiography to privilege the particulars, the minutia rather than the grand monuments. Yet in focusing on the quotations as discreet units of information, The Arcades Project bears an obvious and yet surprising resemblance to its contemporary counterpart, the card catalogue.
For Benjamin, the “card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing”:
And today, the book is already, as the present mode of knowledge production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is found in the card boxes of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. (Selected Writing, 456).
The card catalogue, in Benjamin’s time, was primarily a tool for establishing order, rather than enabling re-orderings. As filing system, its popularity rose in the 1920’s and 1930’s (Krajewski 3). To Benjamin, it was a medium that resisted the singular, linear narrative presented by books. The individual labels on the entries in the Konvoluts – [A1,2], [A1,3], etc – enable a fluid structure, both easily accessible and easily re-configured. Yet, these “paper machines,” in other contexts drove the efficient production and systematic organization of knowledge; this filing system developed as an instrument of rationalization and bureaucratization (Krajewski 5). Benjamin appropriates the technology of bureaucratic order for its own undoing.
[A1,4]
Benjamin’s embracing of personal card indexes reveals a conception of information as presented in active and tangible way. His appropriation of the instrumental card catalogue into a compositional tool manifests in his own words, “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather, a medium” (Selected Writings 2:2, 576). This medium allows for democratic engagement on the part of the reader. In The Arcades Project, we see thus the possibility of re-thinking the hidden tools used to order information. Narrative order is thus made fluid and available to the reader. How much Benjamin, keenly aware of the systems of knowledge organization, anticipated the structures present in the era of the Internet will be explored later in the context of the database.
[A1,5]
Though the card-catalogue style of the entries make re-ordering possible, the enumeration imposes a subtle sense of oder on individual quotations. We see Benjamin’s project is thus constrained by the “book” form that it is presented in, and by the nature of implicit hierarchy in alphabetization and enumeration.
Researching Benjamin Researching 