Walter Benjamin

“In modernist art, obscurity can be a conscious strategy. It is one of the ways in which the artwork can avoid being consumed too easily. Poems need to thicken their textures and scramble their syntax if they are not to slip down too easily, which is the fate of the commodity. Everyday language is no longer a medium of truth. It has grown stale and threadbare, and only by wreaking violence on it can you force it to yield something of value. Literary modernism sends language on a spree, but that’s because it is so distrustful of it. Jameson has some comments here on Benjamin’s idea of an ur-language, an original speech in which things speak their own names. Then comes the Fall, in which the bond between word and thing is broken. Words become arbitrary signs of things, and language degenerates into a Babel of tongues. ...