Fabulous article by J. M. Coetzee reviewing Walter Benjamin's
_Selected Writings_ Vols. 1 and 2 and _The Arcade Project_ in the New
York Review of Books
<http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010111028R>
The passage in Coetzee's review that summarizes the interest to me as
a VRML-lit-ist is:
"I needn't say anything. Merely show," says Benjamin; and elsewhere:
"Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars." If the mosaic
of quotations is built up correctly, a pattern should emerge, a
pattern that is more than the sum of its parts but cannot exist
independently of them: this is the essence of the new form of
historical-materialist writing that Benjamin believed himself to be
practicing.
What dismayed Adorno about the project in 1935 was Benjamin's faith
that a mere assemblage of objects (in this case, decontextualized
quotations) could speak for itself. Benjamin was, he wrote, "on the
crossroads between magic and positivism."...
The objects and figures that inhabit the arcades—gamblers, whores,
mirrors, dust, wax figures, mechanical dolls—are (to Benjamin)
emblems, and their interactions generate meanings, allegorical
meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory.
What of a world of gamblers, dust, mechanical dolls? Can an
assemblage, a collage, take the place of narrative?
Questions, but no answers.
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net
OK, I'll "just hit delete". You can be "Delete".
