Some Thoughts on de Certeau, Benjamin, and Composition Theory

After reading Benjamin I felt the need to put him in context—that’s code for I couldn’t understand him—so I searched iTunes and found an informative discussion of him on Stanford University’s Entitled Opinions podcast. The episode’s guest commentator, a professor of German Studies and literary theory at UC Berkley, said that in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin says that film has great potential as a progressive medium because Chaplin empowers the common man more than Picasso does. I thought back to de Certeau’s allusion to Chaplin’s expanded use of his cane and of how frustrated I was by this example—which  I now realize isn’t an example of subverting the urban planner but an analogy of it, because it demonstrates how people can use objects beyond the limits of what their creators intended. And then, as I was rereading Benjamin, it flashed on me that street dancing subverts the designs of urban planners. Sidewalks exist to facilitate people’s access to the arcade. Street dancing represents a subcultural form of entertainment that impedes this, both in the sense that spectators are delayed from their bourgeoisie activities and others are inconvenienced, forced to walk around the crowd or into the street. Thus reading Benjamin helped me to interrogate de Certeau.

I made another connection from Benjamin. His binary between the decorator and the builder strikes me as analogous to the current debate in the schools between the “catch” and the “taught” methods of writing instruction. Briefly put, the catch method emphasizes content. Students are given assignments on topics that interest them and that allow them to be creative. The taught method stresses form. Students learn how to build the sentences that will become the containers for their ideas.* The reason that the taught method comports with Benjamin is that it privileges the rhetorical aspects of writing over the self-expressive. Just as painting outgrows art with the appearance of the panorama, clear and logical writing engages a broader audience. It’s expansive rather than inclusive, universal rather than cultish. As a Marxist, Benjamin’s interest in art centered on its ability to congeal the masses. I don’t know if the caught/taught debate breaks along political lines, but it seems to me that the taught method is more democratizing. 

*For those interested in reading an award-winning article on this controversy, I recommend “The Writing Revolution” by Peg Tye in the The Atlantic. It’s available on the web