The Physiognomist and The Rag-Picker:

Reading the City-as-Text and Writing the Text-as-City

A city is a linguistic cosmos if the world is perceived as language, as is done by Walter Benjamin. It is an agglomeration of mute objects, the linguistic potential of which is to be translated into the human language of words by the attentive philosopher. A rag-picker is a person who collects rags and other materials from the streets for a livelihood, and it is in his image that Walter Benjamin “prefigures what it is to write a [city] text in the modern epoch: the slow piecing together of words and phrases, insights and instances, into a montage or mosaic of modernity.”(G. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996) p. 183) Besides writing about the metropolis with the attitude of a rag-picker, Benjamin also expects his readers to meander through his texts as a rag-picker to gradually assemble them, instead of a flâneur in search of amusement.(ibid., p.183) A physiognomist studies the outer appearance of a person in order to understand his inner personality. Similarly, urban physiognomists study physical structures and the traces left on them by the city dweller, in order to read the unwritten ‘text’ of the city. Walter Benjamin, while he “seeks to present urban readings and decipherments of the metropolitan environment”(ibid., p.6) by being the physiognomists of the city-as-text, gives the role of being the physiognomists of his text-as-city, to the readers. In Benjamin’s city writings that have transformed the city into a text and in which the text takes on the structure of the city, the reader does not only encounter the city-as-text but also the text-as-city. The task of discovering the phenomena of cities through literature, by following the guidance of Walter Benjamin is a two-fold one. Firstly, it requires the reading, analyzing, decoding and re-assembling of one of Benjamin’s texts adapting the role of the rag-picker and being the physiognomist of his text-as-city. Secondly, the task requires writing about a city, again adapting the role of the rag-picker, and this time being the physiognomist of the city-as-text. Eventually, while the unique linguistic cosmos of a Benjamin’s text is comprehended, the concealed linguistic cosmos of a city is deciphered.

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The article is originally published in Gadanho, Pedro and Oliveira, Susana, eds. Once Upon a Place – Architecture & Fiction. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio, 2013.

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