THE SCRIBE AND THE LABYRINTH

Walter Benjamin, when speaking of writers, said that “the finished works weigh lighter than those

fragments on which they labour their entire lives.” His Arcades Project, a key reference for this course, is

a compilation and space where Benjamin performs his struggles and ideas for conceptualising the

modern age. Through a collection of quotations from several sources arranged and mobilized through

categories such as “fashion, boredom, dream city, catacombs, advertising”, among others, he represents

and critiques the experience of the 19th century, and simultaneously unearths its several faces.

The course uses the trope of the ‘Scribe’ to investigate, through rigorous documentation, the landscape

of the everyday, the politics of the personal, our interdependencies, our patterns of consumption, etc., in

order to aestheticise and through the aesthetic, review our worlds. The scribe is an archetype who is

able to record ceaselessly and tirelessly to archive the seemingly mundane business of living. The scribe

here sees value in the image, the poem, the account, the dialogue and the dream. The “arcades” of Paris

that Benjamin uses, here become a metaphor for the cluttered, crowded and busy forms of our living,

spatially without an inside and an outside, fractal, insoluble, tangled and fantastic, like a labyrinth.

The stress on the “unfinished” suggests that the work is capable of remaining suspended in possibilities.

There is a certain pleasure in contemplation at a juncture in a story and a satisfaction in things remaining

unresolved and unsettled. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Borges, which also invokes the labyrinth,

speaks of multiple possible timelines and futures that play out when many routes are explored. The

‘manuscript’ allows you to enter and loiter and leave at your will and allows for a subjective reading,

which is the charge of the everyday here.

Here, the everyday is not simply that in our lives which presents itself and remains readily available for

scrutiny, nor is it the dominant account of social lives as presented by a macro narrative telling of the

everyday. Rather, it is what is hidden, what is particular, our personal forms of pleasure and creativity,

and the ambivalence of our forms of living - the troublesome and the unruly along with the obedient and

the stable. The reclamation of this everyday through an archival practice is about identifying our forms of

resistance, recognising the practices of our quotidian lives that go against the grain of prevalent

conformism, and is also about bringing to the foreground, through a stress on dreams and experience,

the unreal, the mythical and the illusory that together comprise the everyday. As suggested by Freud, the

everyday is “both real and unreal, both actuality and the disguise of actuality”

In the act of recording the everyday obsessively, the ‘book’ becomes the realm for analyses that are

about the interpretations of dreams, and the individual and collective subconscious. The ‘book’ that the

course intends to produce here is a collection of documents, notes and reflections, drawings (especially

drawings!) and remnants of the paraphernalia of living that become a research diary, a sketchbook, or an

activity log. It is a garden that allows overgrowth and wilderness, where certain pages are detailed and

preserved, while others are incomplete, taper off, punctuated by bursts of intense, frenetic activity that

again give way to short, concise contemplations. The forms of the book are several, in some cases it

could be an elaborate system of a bookmarks bar with branching and splitting and several subdivisions in

the folders, a digital trove of annotations and references, a virtual “Arcades Project” if need be.

The driving principle of the work, and the structure of the work, is a continuous movement within the

form of the montage, which plays with distances, overlaps. intersections and transitions, which

individually and through their transactions speak of affinities and fully formed and intermediate relations

where the fragments then begin to substitute language. The montage functions as a device that I feel, as

Benjamin says, could “find the lost time embedded in the space of things”. The collected and built and

scripted and observed and drawn fragments, embody an infinite list (as suggested by Umberto Eco in The

Infinity of Lists). The boundaries of this list are unknown and its very definition is unclear, there is no

established hierarchical order to the appearance and sequence of the fragments. They serve to remind

us of, or to build for us, a specific image of the world at a particular moment through their place in the

collection but they do not adhere to the rules or the forms of writing or the “practical list”, where the

fragments would be contained and corroborated with the real object. Therefore, they constitute a

“poetic list” which is an imprecise, subjective exercise in world building.

The course will use the four weeks to develop the practice of the scribe. It will have lectures on visual

culture, referencing systems, methods of collection / organisation / curation of material and ephemera

to build manuscripts. Methods here include, transcriptions of conversations and soliloquies, observation

drawings, paper trails and evidences of interactions, among others. The ‘books’ could develop from

themes and patterns that the records throw up, explore a particular method of representation or simply

be bodies of disarranged likenesses of the inside and outside worlds and their blurs.

The aim here is to: Firstly, articulate the politics of the everyday and engage with it in newer ways and

through newer mediums; second, build a practice as a diarist / archivist through note taking, collecting,

reference building, intuitive drawing, etc; and lastly, to construct new forms of narratives through

organizing the material at hand by layering, overlapping, hyperlinking, building connections, and making

maps.