Fight Test

The "Translators' Forward" of Benjamin's Arcades Project picks up a conversation we've been having in my 'notebooks' class this semester. The class is predicated on the examination of three famous 'notebooks': Marx's Grundrisse, Benjamin's Arcades Project, and Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's S, M, L, XL. The AP forward proposes that, rather than simply offering a "blueprint" for a more cohesive, anticipated later stage of his collections, perhaps Benjamin was in the active process of creating a new kind of political writing as he pieced together (and revised) his Passagenarbeit. The translators propose that reading the notebooks compels a reader to take a stand regarding the "classic distinction between research and application, Forschung and Darstellung." They explain that Benjamin both worried over what use to which the notebooks might be put, as well as "the future construction of a literary form for this text." (xi)

As our class has recently taken heated positions regarding our receptions of the Grundrisse as either inferior predecessor to Capital in the hierarchy of "great" work, or brilliantly prescient cultural studies-like treatise, not only on methodology but also upon the historical emergence of capital, we are ready for round 2 of Forschung v. Darstellung.

Some of us felt persuaded by Antonio Negri's concern in Marx Beyond Marx that the Grundrisse not simply be subjected to a philological reading, because the import of the notebooks as a "theoretico-political" project might be located in its openness: "We can see in it the passion for totality, but only in the form of a multiplicity of sequences and leaps, never in a monolithic sense; we can find in it, above all, a dynamic which has the plurality and the same diversity of subjectivity, and is nowhere closed." (13)

We decided that we liked the sound of this phrase, "passion for totality." As we move into the AP, we will continue our consideration of the model offered by this predilection, and will ask ourselves whether or not Benjamin shared Marx's mania.