The Arcades’ affinities: excursions into the corners and crowds of Johannesburg’s pasts

Abstract

This article joins the excursion in which the ‘Secret Affinities’ workshop organizers took participants on through the city of Johannesburg in March 2017 as the precursor to its deliberations. Given the intent of the workshop to follow the ‘endeavour’ of Walter Benjamin’s construction of a world of ‘secret affinities’ ‘in unpredictable, undisciplined ways’ this tour with its predetermined sites and routes seemed to be an anomaly. My intent on taking part in this excursion in the article is to offer the reader some notes, or what Susan Buck-Morss in referring to Benjamin’s Arcades project invokes as half a text; observations, images, reflections and guides to the city, traversing spaces of the excursion in a defined, regulated and incessantly punctuated temporal encounter, sometimes called an itinerary. On the imaginative journey in this article these fragments are at hand not so much as to guide the reader from the workshop venue – a themed guest house and museum, restored and renamed Satyagraha House in 2011, where the lawyer Mohandas Gandhi and the architect Hermann Kallenbach lived at the beginning of the twentieth century – through the city, but rather as a means to both orient and disorient the reader to their own historical and political associations of place. Accompanying the reader on this journey contained in this article is Mr. Benjamin – inserted as a creative, discursive character in my writing – who has written extensively on cities, their spatial configurations and social connotations. He sometimes intervenes and makes comments. But he is determined not to appear as the bearer of expertise. His intention is to establish a point of vision between being of the crowd and standing apart on the street corner, to become, as he wrote in an essay reflecting ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, ‘already out of place’.