The Flâneur and the Arcade: Hypertext on Walter Benjamin’s, The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk: Reading in the Ruins by Giles Peaker is a hypertext project that brings together passages from Benjamin’s The Arcades project on themes like the the flâneur and the prostitute. Benjamin’s project is about fragmentary spectacle in the city, it is itself a collection of fragments, and the hypertext by Peaker re-represents thus. In some sense, this pre-modern moment of the flâneur and the arcade, is the urban precursor to the liesurely browser in the arcade of the web – watching, and through his (her) blog, posing for others.

The arcades were replaced after the convulsions of 1848 in the Second Empire by the great halls of industry of modernity according to David Harvey in Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003). The arcades were scaled up to the modern exhibition spaces from Les Halles to the Crystal Palace. The Paris arcades, thanks to critical interest Benjamin, have become a way to think through the spectacle of the hypertextual (and therefore fragmentary) web. Thanks to Marcel O’Gorman for pointing this intersection out to me.