Page 26 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 13

seen again,’ writes Benjamin. 26 The discontinuity and transitory qualities of these
individual experiences prevent us from weaving dream images together into a
coherent picture of a common mythic past. Instead, they can become the basis for a
critical, dialectical form of historical knowledge. 27
The dream image becomes dialectical in the instant that we recognize it as a
glimpse of the past in the present. Benjamin is careful to point out an important
distinction: what we experience is not the temporal relationship of the past casting
its light on the present, nor the present seen in light of the past. The image is rather
an instance of what-has-been coming together ‘in a flash’ with the now to form a
constellation. He writes of ‘rescuing’ these fleeting images from the past (and here he
includes objects that evoke the image), ripping them out of a narrative of historical
development in order to make each one accessible to critical analysis ‘in the now of
its recognizability’. 28

The relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature
but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical … images. The
image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability
– bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on
which all reading is founded. 29
In Benjamin’s footsteps, Michel de Certeau has argued that city practices open up ‘an
‘anthropological’, poetic and mythic experience of space’. James Donald adds ‘the city
we actually live in is poetic’, and ‘there is no possibility of defining clear-cut bound-
30
aries between reality and imagination’. Benjamin’s understanding of history as non-
linear and constructed out of sudden conjunctions between dream images of the past
and the present carries important implications for the study of this contemporary
environment that is a labyrinth of passages, images and stories. The various and
contradictory impressions, descriptions and histories of Solna Centre are also a
labyrinth of interconnected meanings that offer a continual challenge to methodo-
logical clarity. In the pages that follow we look more closely at how conflicts between
these various histories play out in the ambiguous construction of Solna Centre as a
space that is simultaneously public and private. These apparent contradictions can be
traced to the interplay between on the one hand the political and economic histories
inscribed on the place, and, on the other, the ways that people today use it. A further
complication is the transient relationship many people have to the place, at the same
time that there are multiple references to other places that tie Solna Centre and its
visitors to other localities. This complexity carried methodological implications for
each phase of our study. While many of the problems we faced are common to any
ethnographically based study of a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon, we managed
to develop new ways of addressing many of them, largely through the efforts of a
cross-disciplinary group of researchers intent on exploring media consumption
through a collective research process.

Locating Media Practices 13