From Space to Time and Back Again on the Transit Lines of Memory

Do past events get frozen in the stream of time getting father from us with every second or we mobilize changing constellations of past events as we ply our way in the maelstrom of becoming? If objects can carry the agential intention of their makers, why can't events extend their purchase on scale that exceeds their occurring? Likewise, can not places be embedded into far-going networks of action that would make their paradigmatic spaces into semiotic imprint of their relations and acts, each a scene of sociological forensics, to borrow the textual trope from fictional Sherlock Holmes?

Heavily signified environments where public existence in our cities can take place bring in the textual relations of ruling in the mostly abstract of work of selecting, showcasing, and positioning layers of text that make one day different from the other in memory only that we carry with us from one moment of reading to another. The shock of the new has something to do with the flux of news that for Lash hit us with unmediated ferocity of informational projectile that probably tear our symbolic systems into shreds from the remains of which we recollect what real we can have access to.

As possible is the ascendance of the power over mobility over the bio-power of the micro-politics that Foucault saw as encroaching on the everyday life of peasants that the state was turning into Frenchmen and -women. Subjectification by decree. The geometry of Paris that fondles memories of the Sun-King has ghosts teeming along its lines of flight, refuge, and transit. From palatial splendor to guillotines, the transformation of Paris into republican cities became condensed in the buildings and places that post-revolutionary time memorized.

Time became space. Not only in the memory but also in the formulas of architectural, literary, and artistic grandeur that the reciprocity of links between the flux of events and the paths that open and close casts in durable forms of spatialized correspondences. After all, maybe Walter Benjamin meant just that with his reference to aura as that space that each artwork used to produce.