a perfectly organized world...?
The German literary critic Walter Benjamin, as much an avant guardian as anyone yet mentioned in these pages, once saw the revolution in an advertisement for this salt. Bullrich’s. He tells the story in his unfinished Arcades Project, his massive collage of historical ephemera drawn from nineteenth century Parisian street life. Benjamin left his manuscript of the Arcades Project in the hands of Georges Bataille, then a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, while he attempted to escape Nazi persecution in America. He ended up committing suicide on the Spanish-French border, despairing this endeavor. His masterpiece languished in tantalizing obscurity for many years until it was published in German in the 1970′s and translated into English at the turn of the millenium. In the meantime, his work slowly attracted considerable interest among artists and radicals the world over.
The story’s a bit longish, but has stuck with me for many years, so I’d like to pass it along to you. Here goes:
“Many years ago, on a streetcar, I saw a poster that, if things had their due in this world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes and copyists just as surely as any great poem or painting. And, in fact, it was both at the same time. As is sometimes the case with very deep, unexpected impressions, however, the shock was too violent: the impression, if I may say so, struck with such force that it broke through the bottom of my consciousness and for years lay irrecoverable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only thaty it had to do with ‘Bullrich Salt’ and that the original warehouse for this seasoning was a small cellar on Flottwell Street, where for years I had circumvented the temptation to get out at this point and inquire about the poster. There I traveled on a colorless Sunday afternoon in that northern Moabit, a part of town that had already once appeared to me as though built by ghostly hands for just this time of day. That was when, four years ago, I had come to Lützow Street to pay customs duty, according to the weight of its enameled blocks of houses, on a china porcelain city which I had had sent from Rome. There were omens then along the way to signal the approach of a momentous afternoon. And, in fact, it ended with the story of the discovery of an arcade, a story that is too berlinisch to be told just now in this Parisian space of remembrance. Prior to this incident, however, I stood with my two beautiful companions in front of a miserable café, whose window display was enlivened by an arrangement of signboards. On one of these was the legend ‘Bullrich Salt.’ It contained nothing else besides the words; but around these written characters there was suddenly and effortlessly configured the desert landscape of the poster. I had it once more. Here is what it looked like. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words ‘Bullrich Salt.’ One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words ‘Is the Best.’ But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word ‘Bullrich Salt.’ Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life had experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia?” [G1a,4]
It is not perfectly told, indeed there are huge gaps we have to make up. Since Benjamin’s time, advertising only gets better at promising a well-choreographed next world, and then getting our forgiveness for failing to deliver. His keen eye has helped many a contemporary artist pick up on the revolutionary hints in advertising, the seeds of utopia it holds out and then extinguishes in constant repetition. If only we could see our minor slaveries of consciousness like we see the real chains of Rome, or America’s own feudal past, who knows what liberations might become?
