Around the Book: Systems and Literacy

4. Booking Benjamin: The Fate of a Medium

f o u r Booking Benjamin: The Fate of a Medium It’s time, as we say in English, to throw the book at that polymorphous miscreant of reading and writing, Walter Benjamin, to book him, in the patois of American film noir. We can see already that in English there are some hang-ups between the book, whether a material object or a volume or space of writing, and the notion and conventions of legality. But in German a bookseller, the manager of a market or trading place in which the historical Benjamin spent a good number of his happier hours, is a Buchhandler, someone who handles and touches books—it might not be excessive to say, who fondles them. By contrast, in French, the culture of books is caught up both in their physical weight, gravitas, and burden, and also in the promises in their delivery of what they, in the expanse of their open-ended and engendering space, convey, the democracy to come in language that they affirm and promise. Let us ponder, today, the vertiginous convergence of designs in books and the text that they encompass. Each text consequent and invasive enough 107 108 Booking Benjamin to be memorable as a book is as much the result of a design—above all of a visual nature—as it is the residue of the traces of thinking. When we enter the domain of stylistics, when we take into account the conditions of verbal density, the span and fluidity of inscription, the familiarity or surprise of semantics, diction, and syntax, which also add meaning and significance both to a singular text and to a body of works, even when we enlarge the scope to encompass the expectations surrounding the aesthetic genres in play, we are characterizing the discourse design in effect for that text. Contributing to schooled discourse, today as in Benjamin’s time, entails a crisis of discursive models or subgenres. As I detail in a recent book, The Task of the Critic, the contemporary cultural critic unavoidably trucks simultaneously in several discursive designs, at the very least in what is recognizable as poetics, philosophy, close reading, and critique.1 It is no exaggeration to assert, as I do in that volume, that German Romanticism inscribed the enabling legislation for what we continue to recognize as cosmopolitan criticism , distinguishable by its abrupt turns and linkages, its fragmentary constitution , and its irony or multiple, simultaneous levels of signification, in large measure by underscoring the discursive elements of this critique appropriated from the existing genres and media of culture—among them poetry, drama, fiction, and other narrative art, and even the fine arts. In such collations as the Athenaeum and Philosophical Fragments, German Romanticism launches modern cultural commentary, in other words, with a multifarious inquest into text or discourse design. As Benjamin devised specific and distinctive styles for his interventions, he was taking the Schlegels, Novalis, Tieck, and compeers both at their word and a step beyond. To decode and elucidate such diverse texts as ‘‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’’ ‘‘The Critique of Violence,’’ ‘‘Food Fair,’’ ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ One-Way Street,2 and The Arcades Project is to a significant degree an exercise, with a full visual component, in the discernment and teasing out of textual design. The plurality of styles mobilized by the invariably occasional writing projects we score, whether concertedly designed or not, constitutes our fullest exercise of the freedom available to us. Benjamin was a creature of the book at once voracious and overwhelmed by devotion. We all know this. This commonplace of cultural history can only make Benjamin endearing to us, just as we are endearing to ourselves by clinging to this eccentric medium, whose decisiveness in the storage and The Fate of a Medium 109 delivery or transmission of culture is already in question. A book encompasses a certain volume of text, itself, as we have already seen, the product of a certain process of design. The text’s material or content is embodied in a book medium with certain design features of its own: typography, scale and layout of pages, binding, contents and design of the cover, and so forth. Yet in the sense that a book is a free-standing structure, we can also say that it has been modeled after an architectural blueprint. We can speak more compellingly of the architecture of books than of the architecture of discourse or...