A Note on Method ... already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledgeproduction demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card-filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his own notefile. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse, 1928. In the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin has left us his note boxes. That is, he has left us "everything essential." Lamentations over the work's incompleteness are thus irrelevant. Had he lived, the notes would not have become superfluous by entering into a closed and finished text. And surely, the card file would have been thicker. The Passagen-Werk is as it would have been: a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience. Benjamin handled these facts as if they were politically charged, capable of transmitting revolutionary energy across generations. His method was to create from them, through the formal principle of montage, constructions of print which had the power to awaken political consciousness among present-day readers. The Baudelaire essays (1938, 1939) were two such constructions. Had Benjamin lived, the Passagen-Werk notes would have been the source of others. The Passagen-Werk, as the 1935 expose indicates, was to be a commentary on both "texts" and "reality." Benjamin recognized the difference. In the former case, he tells us, "philology is the fundamental science"; in the latter it is "theology" (V,1 574). Crucially important to a 1. The Passagen-Werk is vol. V of Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhiuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972-), cited here by volume number.
