The showplace of this literary confusion is the newspaper. Its content is “material” which refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the reader’s impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express his own interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers.
— I’m the first to advocate for the reading of primary texts (fully, footnotes and all); I’m also one to caution against the excerpting and/or displacing of said texts out of context. So, go. Go download Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer (this version ran in the New Left Review, back in 1970). Read it.Then, tell me if you don’t still feel a little wishful cheap thrill—no matter how much Benjamin or Adorno or _____ you’ve read, OK?— while imagining what the Frankfurt School would have done with the Internet.
