Being Equal to the Moment: Form as Historical Praxis

This essay argues that Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street offers readers a way of being historical that resists and redirects the meaning and significance of dominant symbols and personal experiences. In the interaction among its entries, it also tries to stimulate the growth of those capacities required by projects of social transformation. In Benjamin’s text, “form” is thus less a matter of literary organization than a potentially exemplary mode of political action.