Walter Benjamin’s essay on collecting, published in 1931 under the title “Unpacking my

Library”, treads a treacherous path for a Marxist. In presenting a thesis on the fetishistic
engagement of the collector with artifacts of material culture, which is an almost
exclusively bourgeois domain, Benjamin seems to reject a certain puritan ethos prevalent
in Marxist thought, while at the same time introducing a sphere of material historicity
removed from the fluid swiftness of capitalist practice. He is unique in celebrating the
constructive, creative and even critical value of mass consumer culture, as distinct from
Capitalism per se. If from a Marxist perspective, the joys of shopping belong to the realm
of false consciousness, a form of mass deception, contemporary corporate discourse is
equally moralizing in its justification of consumerism via green ethics, fair trade and
other mitigating circumstances against an almost universally abhorred materialism. There
is therefore something almost transgressive about Benjamin’s positive account of the
possession of objects. However, with the increasing dematerialization of consumer
products in the current creative economy, does collecting retain the complex relation to
consumerism outlined by Benjamin? How does one unpack a virtual library?

Benjamin presents collecting, this particular mode of consumption and ownership of

material goods, as a quasi-mythical process of attachment to the world of objects, similar
to the way children become invested in their environment or the way they “accomplish
the renewal of existence [through] the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition,
from touching things to giving them names”1. From a stricter Marxist point of view, it is
of course easy to criticize this position as deliberately naïve and irresponsible, and this is
to an extent the tone that Hannah Arendt adopts in her biographical introduction to
Illuminations, the collection of Benjamin’s writings in which “Unpacking my Library”
was included. In Arendt’s sympathetic portrait, Benjamin is typical of a generation of
middle class Jewish intellectuals at the beginning of the last century who refused to
become part of the bourgeois Capitalist order and yet would not commit to a life of
impoverishment outside of it. Arendt finds it “striking that despite [Benjamin’s]
permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his
library”2. As a man who did not manage to hold down a single job in his entire life,
Arendt’s Benjamin is certainly not a conformist, but, depending on a monthly stipend
from his father, the successful art dealer and business man, for his sustenance, nor does
he live up to the ideal of the uncompromising rebel. Arendt presents Benjamin as a relic
of the 19th century hommes de lettres, a man whose passionate dislike for the bourgeois
work ethos is equaled by his love of the vast network of fictions and histories that sustain
the middle class city. This obvious paradox is also why Benjamin’s writing on collecting
is still interesting: it is a reminder that critique should not only be a one sided resistance
to an existing order that in any case precludes such attacks from the outside, but could
also be a more subtle process of breaking down such dichotomies of for and against.

In his defense of collecting, Benjamin traces a different kind of engagement with objects
than the one permitted by bourgeois reason. The collector, he claims, has “a relationship
to objects that does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is their

1
Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library”, Illuminations [Harry Zohn- tr.], Fontana: London, 1973, p.
63.
2
Arendt, Hannah, “Introduction”, Illuminations, p. 30.
usefulness”3. So far, this is obviously in line with the classic Marxist analysis of the
difference between a simple mode of economic exchange, where money is only a
mediator between two commodities – e.g. linen sold in order to buy vegetables – and the
capitalist mode of exchange in which “Money begets Money” and objects only
transitorily assist the multiplication of capital. But collecting is only interested in the final
object: it is neither a way of obtaining use value (like food or shelter) nor a way of
earning more. This special way of dealing with commodities, adds Benjamin, is the joy of
“the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final
thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.” If this sounds similar to a type of
narrative still dominant in advertising – the transformation of ordinary matter to a
Disney-esque magical item via capitalist ownership or the elevation of an anonymous
mass produced object into a particular one containing a special meaning specifically for
its unique owner – Benjamin is quick to take the opposite view. Whereas in Capitalist
discourse the object is transformed from the common (the market) to the particular and
personal (my home), for Benjamin the interest lies in the object’s history, in the opposite
movement from the private to the common. The object is valuable only because it is a
receptacle for privately owned moments that have accumulated in it as a socio-historical
entity. The story told by the object is never the story of negotiating individuality in a
mass market; rather it is rescued from the anonymity and loneliness of private taste and
reintroduced into the social through contact with the knowledge of previous owners and
other objects in the collection. According to Benjamin, the collector is a link in a chain of
events, owners and histories that make up the biography of the object. A collected book
is therefore the synthesis of a dialectical relationship between two modes of social
history: the more private “chaos of memories” and the impersonal “the order of its
catalogue”4. This insight leads to a curious dilemma. Although invested in the socio-
political benefit of democratic display, Benjamin ends up siding with the private
collection against the public museum: “Even though public collections may be less
objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects
get their due only in the latter”5. The collector considers himself an heir, one responsible
for the transmissibility of the collection to the future, and the kind of care invested in this
relationship to the object transcends that of a duty to a present public represented by the
state’s role as guardian of an archive.

It is not a simple future, however, that Benjamin sees in the collector’s attachment to the
object. The collected item becomes distinct from Capitalist accumulation precisely
because of the different temporal direction of its movement in and beyond history.
Financial markets exist in a constant flux, in which rapid ‘real time’ approximations pave
a fictional way towards an unstable speculative future. Objects are often unable to re-
materialize after their breakdown into tradable pieces of data, liquidized assets discarded
and forgotten in the future oriented frenzy of trade. Benjamin’s objects, on the other
hand, exist in a different time. They live in the rift between the stale present and the
speculative past which projects forwards, between the unfulfilled promises of the past
and the historian’s re-writing of the object’s chronology and origin. This is similar to his
3
Benjamin, Ibid. p.62.
4
Ibid, pp. 61-2.
5
Ibid., p. 68.
analysis of the architecture of the Parisian arcade:

Being past, being no more, is passionately at work in things. To this the historian trusts for his
subject matter. He depends on this force, and knows things as they are at the moment of their
ceasing to be. Arcades are such monuments of being-no-more… the dialectic takes its way
through the arcades, ransacking them, revolutionizing them, turns them upside down and inside
out, converting them, since they no longer remain what they are […] And nothing in them lasts
except the name: passages6.

In a chapter on Benjamin’s collector, Kevin McLaughlin, writes that the desire to

preserve is not merely an attempt to overcome the commodity or a response to the
decontextualization imposed on objects by industrial culture with its anxiety inducing
abundance of gratuitous consumption. Preservation is in fact more of a mirror image of
commodification, actually relying on this decontextualization. The collector’s collection,
as Benjamin asserts in the Arcades Project, is never complete – there is always a piece
missing, which feeds the drive to collect further, in the knowledge that the whole can
never be owned:

[…] the collector, for Benjamin, knows that what he collects are such empty forms – mere pieces
or patches that can be invested with meaning or value only because they are decontextualized (like
labor products in exchange, which, we recall, no longer speak of themselves but of social
relations). The collector may try to “decipher” or “get behind” the objects he collects (in the way
we might try to “decipher” or “get behind” commodities to uncover the social relations that hide in
their “hieroglyphic” character). But with regard to what they once were, the collected objects are
empty (as the commodity is empty with regard to the labor product)7.

This is why collecting is also a creative project, an emptiness to be filled. For Benjamin,
the writer is the collector who cannot find the book that will complete the collection:
“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor”, and so cannot
afford them, “but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but
do not like”8. In this way, the collector’s emotional investment in objects is transformed
into a productive activity. Here, the collector steps out of the shadow of the auction house
and the ‘secondary market’, in which the dealing is made, and brings the Marxist analysis
of commodity relations to its logical conclusion. Replacing the financial drive to create
fiction as a form of wealth on the back of an impoverished and repressed material reality,
the collector cum writer fictionalizes objective reality in order to reinforce it. Fiction is
not the shaky bond holding together an unstable and depressing material reality (as is the
common narrative found not only in the financial markets but also in a strand of neo-
Marxist writing from the Situationists to Baudrillard), but an anthological big bang
moment. The writer doesn’t simply create something out of nothing, but from a
potentially extant future archive which would include the work, predating a point of
origin that has not yet occurred in time.

6
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project [Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin – trs.], Harvard:
Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 833
7
McLaughlin, Kevin, “On Benjamin’s Collector, Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-
century Literature, Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA, 1995, p. 82.
8
Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library”, p. 63.
The reversal in time fits in with Benjamin’s conception of historical materialism as
opposed to historicism. Foucault describes the museum as an expression of “the idea of
accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in
one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all
times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing
in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place”9
(a heterotopia – not unlike Benjamin’s description of the 19th century museum as a
“dream house”). Benjamin’s historical materialist, a type analogous in his writing to the
collector, has no such desire to set himself or a body of knowledge outside time. The
“irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present which does
not recognize its common relation to that image” is exploded by the historical materialist
out of its reified continuity: “For him, history becomes the object of a construct
(Konstruktion) which is not located in empty time but is constituted in a specific epoch,
in a specific life, in a specific work”10. Just as the historical materialist constructs a
narrative of the past that does not stand outside time in contemplation, so the collector
finds an ultimate realization of his passion in the production of the material for his
archive.

Benjamin’s collector must therefore not be confused either with the museum curator or
with the contemporary art collector, whose highest aim is to preserve the art in an
appropriate context, to care for the work, understanding and conserving the artist’s
intentions. In caring for the preservation of the authentic art object, the art collector
develops an ethical position towards the collected artist. Art funds, for instance, carefully
select appropriate works to be purchased for big public collections and force their cash
strapped partners to display the object as authentically and with the utmost respect to the
artist’s vision. In this way Capital is re-invested in a project of civilization and self-
critique and artistic authenticity is preserved as an ethical instrument, even though, as
Benjamin points out, it has long lost its referent in socio-economic terms. This attitude is
in part a critical development from earlier forms of the museum display, like the
Wunderkammer, in which objects acquired at random were displayed with little
consideration for their context mainly to produce a sensationalistic effect. Later curatorial
discourses attempted to impose the ordering narratives described by Foucault. But
perhaps the collectors of the curiosity cabinets where right all along: the theatricality of
their disrespectful colonialism seems far more contemporary than any care invested in
artistic intention. Someone like Jim Shaw exhibiting paintings bought in yard sales in an
exotic freak show of weirdness is more interesting as a collector than the philanthropic art
investors increasingly supplanting public funding for the arts. And indeed the slippage
between artist, curator and collector is far from exclusive to Shaw – there are few art
practices left around that do not share it to some extent, be it in the collection of images
used by painters who transcribe them to canvas or the careful assemblage of objects so
beloved of art students venturing into installation. The balance Benjamin strives for

9
Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias” [Jay Miskowiec – tr.], 1967 in:
Repository of texts written by Michel Foucault at: http://foucault.info/documents [accessed 21.7.08].

10
Benjamin, Walter, “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
[Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt – eds.], Continuum: NY, 2005, p. 227.
between objective classification and the subjective production of meaning has nothing to
do with an attempt to uncover the historical truth of any specific item in the collection.
His investment in mass-produced objects means that the genius of the author is taken out
of the equation: “The historical object removed from pure facticity does not need any
‘appreciation’’”11. Instead, it is the history of the objects reception that makes it worthy of
attention, allowing for the invention of a lost meaning that never was in place of the
preservation of a sacred intent.

It is tempting to use this account of collecting as propaganda for material objects as

subject to decay over time and against the immaculate immortality of virtual data. Thus,
we find Benjamin cropping up in accounts of record collecting that celebrate the
independent record shop and bemoan the thrill-less immediacy of online music
accessibility. But the ways in which information is stored, lost, rediscovered and
organized suggest it is too early to eulogize the collector type posited by Benjamin.
Buying records on eBay, for example, may seem to be an impersonal experience, lacking
interaction with the shop assistant and fellow consumers, but in fact the website offers
new ways of tracking and identifying music through mutual interest that can be too easily
dismissed. Even the downloading of music as mp3 files from peer to peer sites involves
looking through other people’s record collections and deciphering their cataloguing
systems. Just as the age of mechanical reproduction proposed new ways of thinking about
visual culture in Benjamin’s best known essay, so too does the information age generate
virtual cultural economies that have yet to be theorized in their own right. If the transition
from painting to photograph and moving image increased the object’s exhibition value
(distribution) at the expense of its cult value (rarity), the accumulation of online data is
driving cultural production even further from the notion of authorship as something from
which these values emanate. Something of the object’s ‘life-story’ survives through
online auctions, for example: bits of information about the item in the description, seller
location, other items from the same seller and from competing bidders and the physical
markings on the objects when it finally arrives all tell something of its past ownership
and situate it in a continuum with others like it. But the ability to make spurious
connections between unrelated bits and bobs and bytes in the hybrid space formed by
digital information and physical objects is greatly enhanced by search functions online,
and by software providing more tools than ever to use this raw material as a starting point
for that missing item in the series that turns the collector into an author. Ironically, it is
the fact that data is so susceptible to mutation and corruption, distancing it from a point
of origin or producer, that encourages the transformation of the collector into an author
more than ever. We don’t know who shot that archive footage appropriated in a given
YouTube clip, but we know that we can easily make one of our own to add to our
favourites.

Despite its supposed unbearable lightness, data is never entirely immaterial, and the
clogging up of space, whether in a living room library that overflows with books like
Benjamin’s or on a hard drive, is an essential aspect of collecting. The obligation to the
object implicit in purchase or even download, however temporary, does not comply with
the simplistic idea that consumerism is merely the production of infinite desire in which
11
Benjamin, Walter, “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian”, p. 235.
the object itself is discarded in favour of ever-newer models. In fact, collecting can be as
much an obstacle to the flow of information and currency as it is a form of participation
in its boundless thrust, from stamps and coins extracted from normal usage to spam email
archived for its aesthetic and poetic qualities. The collected archive in these cases is a
visible testimony that undermines the fantasy of Capitalist modernity as transparency.
The collection is always contingent, a specific, unique arrangement of objects marked by
their individual path in history which has somehow escaped the banality of the
accumulation of dead moments. It does not share the transcendental aspirations of the
Capitalist project to replace matter with the pure energy of monetary circulation. In this
respect, the deepest fear of the collector is that of stepping out of time, moving one pace
ahead of the pure circulation that he reifies. This is the source of the horror of Tove
Jansson’s Hemulen, from her children’s novel series about the Moomin family, who
becomes hopelessly depressed when he manages to purchase all the stamps in the world
and has nothing left to collect. The collector avoids being carried away by the currents of
Capitalism’s flow and prefers to slowly follow their course, picking up and throwing
back in the discarded detritus from which to construct an identity at once individual and
rooted in a deeply social experience of a history yet to be written.