PASSAGE’S PASSAGES: APPOSITIONS IN ROBERT DUNCAN, SAMUEL JOHNSON AND

WALTER BENJAMIN

The paper examines the confluence of “text” and “dwelling” in the architectural sense of the term “passage.” In what sense and in what manner do quotations “dwell” in surrounding formats through the critical deposition of “passage” (in its double sense as conduit and textual fragment) in both architecture and poetics? The architectural ramifications of the logic of transit are read against those brought up by the textual fragment in literary passage. The paper debates Robert Duncan’s serial poem “Passages,” the implications of Dr. Johnson’s lexicographic method (i.e. the citational supplementation of definitions) employed in compiling his Dictionary, and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project). All three embrace a methodology of textual ragpicking (to steal a phrase from Benjamin) but to different ends and consequences. The implications of these citational methodologies are compared to the well-known appositions in post-modern architecture’s attraction to semiotic double-coding, fragmentation and quotation, as well as pertinent architectural endeavours by Piranesi, Tschumi, Liebskind, and Constant’s “New Babylon,” and against the broad and unstable relation of architecture to informatics. The paper concludes with ruminations on Paul Missac’s provocative observation that “architecture no longer serves as a stimulant or guide for literature but sets limits to the ambitions of discourse” (170)