On My Convoluted Relationship With Walter Benjamin

 Walter Benjamin and Stephen Alexander illumined by

Paul Klee's blessed Angelus Novus (1920)

 

 

Readers familiar with this blog will know that I have a thing for writers whose names begin with the letter B: from Baudelaire to Baudrillard; and from Georges Bataille to Roland Barthes [1].  

 

To this list might also be added the name of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish cultural critic and theorist whose convoluted (unfinished) work about Paris as the capital of the nineteenth-century - known in English as The Arcades Project (1927-40) [2] - affirms the figure of the flâneur as having crucial philosophical significance. 

 

Often regarded as a seminal text for postmodernism, the Arcades Project also anticipates the world of blogging and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that, in some ways, Torpedo the Ark is my very own version of Benjamin's posthumously edited and published masterpiece [3].  

 

For example, like the Arcades Project, TTA relies heavily on compositional techniques including paraphrase, pastiche, and plagiarism [4] - affirming the idea of intertextuality and attempting to create a kind of literary-philosophical collage that defies any attempt to systematise ideas or enforce any kind of grand narrative.    

 

Like Benjamin, I dream of being able to simply stroll through the ruins and piece together found fragments of text from old works by dead authors, thereby creating something new and idiosyncratic, but not something that pretends to be an entirely original work born of individual uniqueness or any such Romantic fantasy. TTA is shaped by (functions and circulates within) a wider cultural history and a shared linguistic network of meaning.

And, like the Arcades Project, TTA has grown and mutated in a monstrous manner. Initially, Benjamin envisioned wrapping things up within a few weeks. However, as the work expanded in scope and complexity, he eventually came to view it as his most important achievement. 

 

Similarly, when I began TTA I thought it would provide a window on to a wider body of work. But it then became the work, absorbing huge amounts of time and energy and without any conceivable end point other than death (the final post may very well be a suicide note) [5].

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post dated 17 August 2022 in which I discuss these four French writers: click here.   

 

[2] Das Passagen-Werk consists of a massive assemblage of notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin assembled between 1927 and his death in 1940. The manuscript (along with additional material) for the Arcades Project was entrusted to Benjamin's pal Georges Bataille when the former fled Paris following the Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war. The full text was published in an English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999, having been first published in a German edition in 1982. 

 

[3] There are, of course, some important differences between Benjamin and myself and our respective projects. For one thing, my work has been influenced less by Jewish mysticism and Marxism and more by Jewish comedy and the punk philosophy of Malcolm McLaren.

 

[4] I know the idea of plagiarism is one that some readers balk at. However, it's one I'm happy to endorse; see the post entitled 'Blurred Lines' (21 January, 2016): click here. And see also the post 'On Poetry and Plagiarism' (13 December, 2018): click here. 

 

[5] Readers unfamiliar with the biographical details of Benjamin's story, may be interested to know Benjamin ended his own life, aged 48, on 26 September, 1940, in Portbou, Spain (a small coastal town just over the border with France). Fearing he was about to fall into the hands of the Gestapo, who had been given orders to arrest him, Benjamin chose to overdose on a handful of morphine tablets. 

 

 

This post is for Anja Steinbaum and Natias Neutert. 

 

 

On Poetry and Plagiarism (with Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole)

America's most wanted: Ailey O'Toole
poet and convicted plagiarist 

The poem-as-text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, 

blend and clash [...] a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."  - RB 

Ho hum, another week, another plagiarism scandal in the ridiculously small and self-absorbed world of poetry ... The young offender being hauled over the coals this time by moralists who police the above and zealously enforce intellectual property rights, is prize-nominated American poet Ailey O'Toole.

There's no question that Ms O'Toole paraphrased lines in her poem 'Gun Metal' from a work by Rachel McKibbens - she even contacted the latter to admit as much. But whether we describe this as theft or borrowing, inspiration or intertextuality, isn't quite so straightforward.

In my view - and I'm saying this as a writer - O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about. Indeed, if I were her, I would tell those sanctimonious bores who sit in judgement and threaten to derail her career - her publishers have already cancelled her first collection and spoken of their pain and anger - to go fuck themselves.  

For the fact is, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style.*

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred.     

After Ms McKibbens went public with her accusation, several other poets came forward and claimed that they too were victims of a terrible literary crime committed by O'Toole. Some even spoke of being violated, or having their identities stolen and experiences belittled.

In part, this hysterical overreaction is due to the p-word itself, which, etymologically, means kidnapping - thereby encouraging writers to regard words as their precious offspring.** This, however, is a laughable turning of the truth on its head; for it isn't authors who give birth to language; it's language that gives birth to them.  

Ultimately, whatever we might think of her and what she did, O'Toole's plagiarism demonstrated a good deal of art; her selection of lines was clever and she skillfully wove them into her own text, tweaking them as she saw fit.

Surely then, we can, in the words of the Irish novelist, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith - commenting here on Sterne's cheerful habit of plagiarism - "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".  

Notes

*I'm aware, having read several interviews with Ms O'Toole, that she would find the view expressed here anathema. For she subscribes to a conception of poetry as something highly personal and highly political; a therapeutic art form that helps individuals deal with their mental health issues and other traumatic experiences (child abuse, rape, domestic violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.).    

**We have the first century Roman poet Martial, known for his epigrams, to thank for this; he first used the Latin term plagiarius to denote someone guilty of stealing someone else's verses. The word appeared in its modern form in English c.1620 and the Romantics, who valued ideals of originality, sincerity, and authentic feeling etc., regarded plagiarism as the greatest of all literary sins. 

Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. I discuss this essay at some length in a post on postmodern approaches to literature that can be read by clicking here. 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, (1766), Vol. V, p. xviii.

Readers interested in knowing more about this case, might like to read Kat Rosenfield's piece published on the arts and culture website Vulture (4 Dec 2018): click here. 

Blurred Lines (In Praise of Plagiarism)

Photo of Helene Hegemann by Leonie Hahn (2013)

I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination … because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It's not where I take things from - it's where I take them to that matters. 

The bourgeois concepts of intellectual property and copyright - not to mention the romantic fantasy of individual originality - are increasingly made to look ludicrous and untenable in this digital age of hyperlinks, file-sharing and promiscuous information exchange.

Cutting and pasting, copying and sampling, and other forms of postmodern pastiche and plagiarism have changed the way a generation conceive of authorship and their own relationship to a text or image. In the utopia of cyberspace, everything is freely available and all lines between what is and is not permissible are blurred.

We live in a world of simulacra and simulation and I’m cool with it: I’m not concerned, as a writer, with presenting myself as a unique identity who speaks with a distinct and singular voice; I don’t see the problem with wearing masks and mimicking those writers I admire, trying on different personas and playing with ideas that I don’t necessarily understand or believe in. Artists have always been magpies, happy to steal things that catch their eye - that’s the very essence of inspiration. Even cave painters copied one another.

Those with a moral objection to plagiarism - such as publishers and professors - arguing, for example, that it promotes intellectual laziness and ultimately stifles creativity, are simply subscribing to what Malcolm McLaren termed a greengrocer mentality; they want to protect their own little patch and feather their own little nest, beneath a nice sign that proudly proclaims the family name. They want to sell their goods, not share them.

In sum: the creative process always involves some form of borrowing, theft, imitation, or recontextualization. Ideas don’t belong to anyone and there’s no such thing as an original thought; we all stand on the shoulders of others. The only proviso I would add is that when one takes an idea, one has a duty to do something new and interesting with it; mutate it, redirect it, produce a bastard child or a monster - not simply a clone.


Note: this post was suggested by Maria Thanassa to whom I am grateful.