Forster, E.M. Anonymity: An Inquiry

".. all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from their true significance. I do not say literature 'ought' not be signed, because literature is alive, and consequently 'ought' is the wrong word to use. It wants not to be signed.. .. It is always tugging in that direction and saying in effect: 'I, not my author, exist really.'

"Literature does not want to remember. It is alive - not in a vague complimentary sense - but alive tenaciously, and it is always covering up the tracks that connect it with the laboratory."

Anonymity: An Inquiry p. 90 What I believe.

Benjamin, Walter - The Ragpicker - Historical refuse

"Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry." This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse

SW 4, p. 48

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse-these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

AP, p. 460

Walter Benjamin's Archive p. 251

The Arcades project wishes to pick up the refuse of history. Like a poor and burdened man cleverly picking through the rubbish of the previous day, the materialist historian selects from amongst all that is disregarded and from the residues of history. At the library he is unconcerned with what has been accredited as precious and valuable, but rather is drawn towards historical refuse. Waste materials are to enter into significant connections and fragments are used to gain a new perspective on history.

The Arcades project never made it as far as a composition. It fell through, disintegrating in the collectors hands. The more he collected, the further away shifted any possibility of finding some presentational form for the material.

p. 252, 253.

Benjamin, Walther - Concept of the Archive

Benjamin's concept of the archive, however, differs from that of the institutionalized archives, whose self-understanding is derived from the origin of the word "archive." "Archive" stems from the greek and latin words for "town hall, ruling office," which, in turn, are derived from "beginning, origin, rule" Order, efficiency, completeness, and objectivity are the principles of archival work. In contrast to this, Benjamins archives reveal the passions of the collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds or something like iron reserves, crucial to life, and which for that reason must be conserved. These are points at which topicality flashes up, places that preserve the idiosyncratic registrations of an author, subjective, full of gaps, unofficial.

Benjamin, Walter - a Magic encyclopedia

'Comprehensiveness was neither possible nor sought after'

'Benjamin believed that the basis of collecting does not lie in "exactness," in "silk reeling" or "the complete inventorizing of all data" (GS III, p. 216). Peculiar to the collector is "a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value-that is their usefulness-but studies and loves than as the scene, the stage of their fate" (SW 2:2 p.487).

Benjamin designates the true passion of the collector as "anarchistic, destructive." He affiliates fidelity to the thing with "the wilfully subversive protest against the typical, classifiable." Possession of a thing generates completely irrational accents. For the collector his item, its origin and past all close ranks as " a magic encyclopedia, a world ordering, whose outline is the fate of the object" (GS III pp. 216f)

Walter Benjamin's Archive p.4 and 5.