Benjamin the Scrivener

Sieburth, Richard

doi:10.2307/3171042

Cited by 12 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…But the problem Benjamin confronted was one familiar to the Mass-Observers: how to identify a single, luminous moment without inadvertently attempting to collect everything. As Richard Sieburth has put it: ‘on the one hand the Arcades Project would appear to be governed by a law of infinite expansibility; on the other, this tendency toward centrifugal proliferation is countered by a centripetal impulse toward contraction, toward reduction’ (Sieburth, 1988: 8). In Benjamin’s own words, his desire was to ‘detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, discrete moment’ (quoted in Sieburth, 1988: 8).…”

Section: The Aesthetics Of (Dis)ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork

Jardine

2018

History of the Human Sciences

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British social survey movement ‘Mass-Observation’ (M-O) was founded in 1937 by a poet, a film-maker and an ornithologist. It purported to offer a new kind of sociology – one informed by surrealism and working with a ‘mass’ of Observers recording day-to-day interactions. Various commentators have debated the importance and precise identity of M-O in its first phase, especially in light of its combination of social science and surrealism. This article draws on new archival research, in particular into the ‘paperwork’ practices of Charles Madge, arguing that M-O is best understood as an attempt to define a new relationship between the survey subject and information organiser. The latter – as sociologist, planner or artist – was a distinctive interwar persona, central to ‘scientific humanism’. Bathos, as a formal strategy in modernist aesthetics, is introduced as an explanation of the failure of this particular part of the M-O project. Questions of subjectivity and data link M-O to a longer history of heterodox sociological inquiry. This analysis resolves some of the apparent paradoxes that have been prominent in studies of M-O, and draws attention to the unfulfilled promise of a vast archive of social data.

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Section: The Aesthetics Of (Dis)ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork

Jardine

2018

History of the Human Sciences

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“…In this experience, the archaic and Other is not to be found in remote places or times -but "at the very heart of the familiar, in the uncanny passage of modernity into instant antiquity, instant ruins". 69 There are layers and layers of ruined past at Tropical Islands Resort: that of the Soviet military airbase (built on the ruins of a German dream of world dominance); and that of the CargoLifter (built on the ruins of the airbase, trying to revive the failed Zeppelin dream). The resort itself, which only opened three years ago, has from the beginning existed under the sign of obsolescence.…”

Section: Awakeningmentioning

confidence: 99%