Abstract

This ambulatory work takes at its heart Montreal’s Plaza Saint-Hubert as a magical quétaine dreamland akin to Walter Benjamin’s beloved and perplexing Paris Arcades as it undergoes refurbishment. Distracted by a “failed” audio walk made for her doctoral thesis, the hunt for the dialectical image, and a scholarly trip to the UK to study audio walks from the 1990s and 2000s and explore questions of urban space and place (and questions of the heart), the narrator of Spectre’s Arcadia meets with Walter Benjamin himself on the Plaza Saint-Hubert, a street of “fruitful juxtapositions,” in the hopes of decoding the language of glass and steel presented by the Plaza’s (in)famous marquee. The work collects the voices and stories of people who have lived near the Plaza or observed its myriad transformations from the 1960s to the present day. There are essays—many originally written for courses or conferences—on the role of fashion in urban space, on the history of the Plaza’s 1920s “movie palace,” on Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, and on the history (and utopic future) of the Plaza Saint-Hubert, embedded in the experimental prose. There are also walks, a tour of the Plaza, a walk along the M11 highway in East London wielding a radio receiver to experience Graeme Miller’s audio walk LINKED, a walk along the Thames river to hear Toby Butler’s “Drifting,” and a walk through Whitechapel to hear Janet Cardiff’s “The Missing Voice: Case Study B.” The narrator sees these audio walks as inspiration for her own and also as spectral narratives of walks that no longer exist as they once did. Spectre’s Arcadia exists within the constellation of academic dissertation, experimental New Narrative prose, theory, urban geography, oral history, fashion studies and poetry. This project mobilizes the moving bodies of the narrator, contributors and participants through the transforming Saint-Hubert Plaza as an instrument for introducing disequilibrium to traditional academic methods of “knowing” and “writing” a place.