Document Type
Essay
Abstract
“Read your city anew” and “awaken from the spells cast by signs” are the mantras of this article. In Toronto, the radical spirit of revelation present in Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) is embodied in an experiential approach to the capitalist city's hidden, forbidden, and inaccessible areas. Infiltration is a multifaceted phenomenon (a zine, a website, and a practice). The project is dedicated to the investigation, exploration, and mapping out of Toronto's abandoned buildings, defunct subway stations, luxury hotels, metropolitan marketplaces (i.e. the Hudson's Bay Company) and more. Circulated to encourage citizens of today's cultural metropolises to go where they are not supposed to, Infiltration is a postmodern form of historical materialism in praxis. Instead of awakening the sleepwalking consumers wandering Benjamin's nineteenth-century arcades, however, the zine is dedicated to snapping today's pedestrians out of their zombie like, routine-bound trances. This project, despite its strong theoretical and intellectually complex elements, is first and foremost a hands-on approach to (re)reading the urban environment—to demystifying the architectural cityscape. A look at the zine's unique form of production (its balance of textual and visual sources), its website's parallel existence with the text, and a close reading of its third issue concerning surveillance in the 21st-century marketplace reveals Infiltration's theoretical connections with and departures from The Arcades Project. Michel de Certeau's distinctions from L'Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) as well as J.L. Austin's and Della Pollock's conceptualizations of the performative all contribute to the article's argument that Benjamin's "flâneurs" and Ninjalicious's "infiltrators" are complimentary figures of resistance.
Repository Citation
Culpepper, Joe. "Flâneurs and Infiltrators (How to Read Cityscapes via Textscapes)." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss2/9