Reminiscing fragmentedness

Last October J and I spent about 6 days in Paris. His second time there; my first. I have already posted photos of that wonderful experience, but I think that some of these were left behind. The impression that the images of fragmenting building create continues to intrigue me. An odd mix of silence, suspension, relief, and unrest inform such impressions. I miss the various feelings of first encounter I experienced walking the streets of Paris as I remembered the fleeting flaneur of Benjamin. I find fragmented images to be indexical at their core. The fragmentation points to something that lies both inside and outside the frame as well as content of the actual photo. Fragmentedness points to something that may not be visual, let alone obvious, but cannot be denied in its abstracted presence.  

In his essay "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" Benjamin writes, "Corresponding in the collective consciousness to the forms of the new means of production, which at first were still dominated by the old (Marx), are images in which the new is intermingled with the old. These images are wishful fantasies, and in them the collective seeks both to preserve and to transfigure the inchoateness of the social product and the deficiencies in the social system of production. In addition, these wish-fulfilling images manifest an emphatic striving for dissociation with the outmoded--which means, however, with the most recent past. These tendencies direct the visual imagination, which has been activated by the new, back to the primeval past. In the dream in which, before the eyes of each epoch, that which is to follow appears in images, the latter appears wedded to elements from prehistory, that is, of a classless society. Intimations with the new to produce the utopia that has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions" (148). 

Paradoxical thinking remains a defining characteristic of Benjamin's ideas, and the above passage exemplifies it eloquently. Benjamin speaks of relating to the new to generate the no-place or no-thing that, without having ever existed has left remainders in multiple dimensions and degrees. What Benjamin proposes in this complex passage (and essay) can be grasped only fragmentarily even though a simultaneous yet failed movement toward a whole cannot be denied.