"Fabelwesen" from Bertuch's Picture-Book for ChildrenPublished in 2007 by Reaktion Books
page 62-63
Just as children were attracted to scraps, they assailed the books they read, turning them into waste matter, using them up. Books were marked by the patina of grubby children's hands, which made them of no interest to book collector snobs. Some books allowed themselves to be further destroyed. Monochrome woodcuts—simple, plain illustrations—introduced children to the waking world of script. The images drew children out, making them complete the image, for instance by scribbling on it. In addition, Benjamin spoke with wonder of Bertuch's Picture-Book for Children, published in Weimar between 1792 and 1830, with its one thousand coloured and high0quality copperplate illustrations and countless other images, from the eruption of Vesuvius to the patent of an English washing machine, all mobilized in the service of 'spreading out the knowledge of the epoch before the child'. It was a book that Benjamin and Dora often showed to Stefan. Incredibly, Bertuch invited children to snip out pictures from the volumes. To appropriate knowledge meant grasping it actively, with the hand that scribbled, and with the scissors that tracked the outlines and clipped out the figures.
The fairytale world, as much as the abandoned wood shavings on a shed floor, allowed the child to imaginatively construct the world anew. Shavings and fairytales presented themselves as scrap, as waste, ripe for reappropriation. The emergent core of Benjamin's own practice was thus discernible. From this point on, fundamental to Benjamin's thought was the idea of montage, of juxtaposition, of sticking this motif next to that. Montaging, for Benjamin, cannot be disassociated from the act of rescuing, the efforts to recycle rubbish, detritus, scraps that appear to have no value. He deployed for the prupose of critical enlightenment what he called 'rags and refuse', a procedure later described in his Arcades Project. He planned a series of illustrated publications written by himself and others, such as Bloch, investigating degraded forms of material. His notebook from the period includes a list of topics, such as studies of the aesthetics of postcards, waxwork cabinets, kitsch, cabaret and advertising. Benjamin's procedure involved less a rescue of tradition than the rescue of experiences unacknowledged, experiences under threat, rejectamenta, materials on the point of disappearance.
page 78
The intellectual's work was not unchanged in this new world of 'international moving script'. The index card index became the new version of scriptural multi-dimensional and mobility. It too revealed the redundancy of the book, for all the mattered in the book was to be found 'in the card box of the researcher who wrote it' and the card box of the scholar who studied it.
page 84-85
A guide from 1852 described each glass-roofed and marble-lined passageway as 'a city, a world in miniature'....Parisian arcades were a miniature dramatization of the wider world, that is to say, of the antinomies of capitalism....
With their jumble of diverse commodities from across the Empire, the arcades turned shopping into an aesthetic event. They were perfect sites in which to loiter and to learn how to windowshop and be amazed by the absurdities of commerce, the same uncanny jumble of obsolescence that attracted the Surrealists. Benjamin uncovered decayed and forgotten things and impulses. He followed the Surrealist procedure to the letter, montaging disparate industrially produced fragments, trash and parodies of natural form. Rags and refuse were deployed—waste came into its own.
page 89
Benjamin insisted that to know texts you had to write them out. The handwritten word expressed the world. Words had to pass through your mind, your body, your hand, completing a full circuit from body into language and from language back trough the body again. In One-way Street he had indicated that only the copied text 'commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his iner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle; forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key the China's enigma.'
page 155
He concluded the Exposé with the comment that it was Balzac who first spoke of the ruins of the bourgeoisie, but it was Surrealism that allowed its gaze to wander uninhibitedly across the field of rubble that capitalist development of productive forces had left in its wake. This ruined matter was confronted by dialectical thinking, which was, for Benjamin, a name for 'historical awakening'. An awakened consciousness scrutinized the 'residues of a dream world', in the form of the arcades and intérieurs, exhibition halls and panoramas. Imaginatively, the emancipation of matter, nature, art and humanity jostled alongside enslavement in the commodity form. These spaces, these things were riven with contradiction, as was too 'the collective consciousness', which in its wishful response to all that has been socially produced 'seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequancies in the social organization of production'. The utopia of the classless society, traces of which were stored in the unconscious of the collective, in memories of a primal past, left deposits 'in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions'.
