Excerpts from Uncreative Writing

The greatest book of uncreative writing has already been written. From 1927 to 1940, Walter Benjamin synthesized many ideas he’d been working with throughout his career into a singular work that came to be called The Arcades Project. Many have argued that it’s nothing more than hundreds of pages of notes for an unrealized work of coherent thought, merely a pile of shards and sketches. But others have claimed it to be a groundbreaking one-thousand-page work of appropriation and citation, so radical in its undigested form that it’s impossible to think of another work in the history of literature that takes such an approach. It’s a massive effort: most of what is in the book was not written by Benjamin, rather he simply copied texts written by others from stack of library books, with some passages spanning several pages.

Borges proposed it in the form of Pierre Menard, but even Menard didn’t copy—he just happened to write the same book that Cervantes did without any prior knowledge of it.

Benjamin’s gesture raises many questions about the nature of authorship and ways of constructing

literature: isn’t all cultural material shared, with new works built upon preexisting ones, whether acknowledged or not?