DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE.
criticism. decorum. innards. bric-a-brac. nostalgia. nausea. polemics. diatribes. litanies. symphonies. polaroids.
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The good writer says no more than he thinks. And much depends on that. For speech is not simply the expression but also the making real of thought. In the same way that running is not just the expression of desire to reach a goal, but also the realization of that goal. But the kind of realization, where it is precisely adapted to the goal, or whether it loosely and wantonly wastes itself on the desire – depends on the training of the person who is running. The more he has himself in hand and avoids superfluous, exaggerated, and uncoordinated movements, the more self-sufficient his position will be and the more economical use of his body. The bad writer has many ideas which he lets run riot, just like the bad, untrained runner with his slack, overenthusiastic body action. And for that very reason, he can never say soberly just what he thinks. The talent of the good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not to his benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he says.
Walter Benjamin, 1928 -
On Les Demoiselles.
Leafing through, but trying desperately not to read (for the 3rd time), Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, I discovered a line that lends even more to what last July’s issue of Newsweek called the world’s most influential work of art.
“Feminine fauna of the arcades: prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers, female street vendors, glovers, demoiselles. - This last was the name, around 1830, for incendiaries disguised as women.” - Walter Benjamin, 1926
Later, from the monumental critique The Philosophical Brothel:
The insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the picture’s address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomfuI of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides. So far from suppressing the subject, the mode of organization heightens its flagrant eroticism. -Leo Steinberg, 1972.
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