Gleaning

The following essay approaches its subject, the objects of Walter Benjamin, with the unpretentiousness of an essay rather than the rigour of a treatise. In Benjamin’s texts, problems of history, society, writing and reading often seem to unfold in the light of certain small, seemingly insignificant, everyday objects. For Benjamin, these things give him the opportunity to collect and organise his thoughts. Likewise, this essay turns to certain objects when it collects, arranges, presents and comments on fragments of texts (fragments of the texts of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Goncharov, Baudrillard, Butor) to create itself. The focus of the essay is on the philosophical and at the same time practical-creative approach to art outlined in the Benjaminian texts, which helps us to compare the structural features of the work of art (writing, thinking) with the combinatorics of tinkering. In some of Benjamin’s writings, things and linguistic elements, symbols (letters, words) seem to be interchangeable or of the same nature, insofar as their multiplicity opens up to the free play of variations and, in the course of the play, they are arranged into shapes. The essay thus aims to reconstruct this perception by specifically addressing the objects, and to reorder it in a speculative way. However, in some respects it is itself no more than a collection that was created by arranging and inspection of Benjamin’s objects – it is also the result of the chance juxtaposition of objects, if its observations happen to be correct.