'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.
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