README.1ST / LISEMOI / GUCKMAL! If you want to figure everything out for yourself, you can just start by clicking on one of the topic boxes a little further down. But I would rather that you not expend your concentrated mental energy on "solving the structure;" spend it instead on thinking about how text and images combine on the pages you see. So I have made some notes which set forth the structure briefly but explicitly.
Walter Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project" was driven by his desire to write a different kind of social history--one which would present "images" without very much abstract theorizing, interpretation, and connection. These "images" are notes of varying lengths, mainly citations of other historians and commentators from his period, which is roughly Paris of the nineteenth century. These are grouped by topic in 28 folders ("Konvoluts"), among which are the topics indicated below, and some cross-references are indicated. Reading in the "Arcades Project" does set loose the mix of voices Bakhtin calls heteroglossia (as for example in Dickens), though they are not all connected and refracted through a narrator's mind.
Benjamin also collected reproductions of images (cartoons, engravings, even some photographs) which presumably "spoke for themselves" in the way the texts cited do. (To be sure, Benjamin does often reflect on the text passages a bit, and the images are not commented on in this way.) Unfortunately, almost all of these images were lost, and we do not know how Benjamin planned to use them. There has been a tradition among Benjamin scholars to attach photographs and other images. In general, the most traditional scholarly approach is to attach the images firmly and clearly to individual notes, making them all look like illustrations of the notes rather than "alternative" entries weaving in "another way of telling." The present project attempts to loosen the images from their text anchorage and to make them backgrounds against which the notes are read, backgrounds which may modify the notes as much as illustrate them and may themselves be modified by different notes. Most of these images are not found in the Benjamin scholarship and most were found on the Web.
Accordingly, each of the sampled Konvoluts below has 4-6 backgrounds against which the notes can be read. The background that opens with the note is randomly selected from the set, and if you want to read the note in relation to the other backgrounds, keep pressing the Reload button. Each Konvolut is represented by four passages, so there are at least sixteen possible combinations of text/background within each group.
The other major context for a page of hypertext is the page that sent you to it. Each note has at least two (mouseOver) links; these links are also randomized in a limited way, taking you from one to four different other notes which have some connection with the sending note (that is, there are no flat-out discontinuous links, though some are of the word being used in different ways; the connection is lexical rather than topical). This makes a certain kind of goal-directed navigation and seeking difficult; the purpose is to move associatively through the juxtapositions the machine provides. Nonetheless, if you insist on greater control of your movements, I have provided a Location bar so that you can, for example, run through the four texts in the Light group by entering light1.html, light2.html, and so forth in the Location bar. The Back button will always take you back to the preceding note, but the note now may well have a different background and so present the same words in a different aspect. Since the links are lightly randomized, if you don't want to go where a link took you, Return and mouse over the link a few more times and you will go somewhere else. Some links have four different possible targets, but many have fewer than four, some with greater probability than others. There are only one or two links with a single target (and so behave in the standard HTML way). These are instances when the single connection was so apt that I would not risk your not seeing it.
Many of the notes refer to a particular year, either contemporaneous with the writing of the note or prior to the writing, sometimes by as much as 50 years. So some of the notes are retrospective and others in the moment. The dating draws one in the direction of laying out a consecutive narrative on a time line with, say, several columns, as in a history book. The content also invites this, as technological development is a central theme, and no era was more devoted to the notion of progress than the nineteenth century. This is the kind of history Benjamin wanted to avoid; enforcing discontinuites and doubling back with the random hypertext links is one way to try to realize his designs and desires. Further, photographs can be used to disrupt narrativizing, since they slice moments out of the continuities of experience. This is not to say that they cannot be renarrativized in another story woven around them. Even more, many of the images used here suggest recurrence ('eternal return') rather than linear development. There are images, including photographs, from nineteenth century Paris, but also from the Paris of Eugene Atget and of Benjamin, Brassai and Germaine Krull, and from contemporary sources as well. (See Credits.) Further complicating the simple flow of time is the recycling of restoration: the Arcades, which had fallen into shabbiness and neglect by Benjamin's time have been undergoing restoration; today they both do and do not resemble Arcades in their original glamour and glory. So be warned: these images do not primarily try to depict "what it was like back then" or convey "how it is different now than it was back then." Rather, they attempt to depict the jumbledness of then (several thens) and now, and their interpenetration.