A Technique of Closeness, an Art of Straying: Reading with Walter Benjamin

This essay takes the relation between the perceptive experience of flânerie and that of reading Benjamin's own writing as its point of departure, tracing what I contend to be fragments of a theory of reading from Benjamin's early writings on perception to the Arcades Project. The underlying hypothesis is that the theory of flânerie is developed parallel to—and ultimately also constitutes itself as—a theory of reading that interlinks notions of embodied perception with the possibility to experience sudden non-linear temporal recollections of the past in the present of reading. By untangling some of the complexities of what I consider to be scenes of reading in his works (readings both of texts and the cityscape), I suggest that Benjamin conceives of reading in a way that foreshadows the embodied, affective, and ethical aspects of contemporary theories of "surface reading" while also expanding them in important ways. Immersive and affective as the ways of reading are that he confronts us with, they are also keenly oriented toward historical realities. Benjamin imbues the surface of cities and texts with the depth of history, intimating that the attitude we take up in reading ultimately exceeds the text and informs the way we relate to past, present, and future realities.