“what matters is the thread of expression”

From Benjamin, ‘Convolute N’, The Arcades Project.  

Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and, accordingly, in the nineteenth century).

[N1a,6]

From Benjamin, The Author as Producer.

Before I ask: how does a literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a period, I would like to ask: how does it stand in them? This question aims directly at the function that the work has within the literary relationships of production of a period.

Yarners Bomb Coastal Town

Guerilla knitting has hit Hunstanton in the period running up to the Diamond Jubilee. With red, white and blue being a prominent colour scheme, as can be see in the following two photos (the first is the Princess Theatre, while the tree is outside Cafe Blah Blahh).

Also known as ‘yarn bombing’ and ‘graffiti knitting’, this colourful form of knit-one-purl-one activism has become popular in the last decade.

The following images were taken at the entrance to the Princess Theatre:

Here is another seaside resort hit with knitting fever: Contemplating Change

Miserable Method: flâneur & clochard in the study of the social

In Susan Buck-Morss’ article on the sandwichman (Buck-Morss 1986) there is this comment on the flaneur:

The flaneur records the merely apparent reality of the market place behind which the social relations of class remained concealed. The empathic relationships he establishes in their place make not only human misery, but “the [class] struggle against misery into an object of consumption.”

Which referes to Benjamin’s arguments in The Author as Producer about the commodification of misery & of the struggle against misery itself:

I spoke of the operation of a certain type of fashionable photography, which makes misery into a consumer good. When I turn to the ‘new objectivity’ as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has made the struggle against misery into a consumer good. In fact, in many cases its political meaning has been exhausted with the transposition of revolutionary reflexes, in so far as they appeared in the bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction and amusement which were integrated without difficulty into the cabaret business of the big cities. The metamorphosis of the political struggle from a drive to make a political commitment into an object of contemplative pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption, is characteristic of this literature.

This contemplative relation to misery is of course the mark of academic analysis and is built into the framework of assumptions of all orders of discipline such that the flâneur is already the standard form of the academic.  Methods of study that acknowledge this and are open & honest about this flânerie of study itself are necessary starting points for overcoming this comfortable orientation to misery.  Ethically we must be concerned with our position as flâneurs if we are to start developing means for being more than just perceptive.