Curation Over Creation
In Praise of the Anthologist
In an age when AI can write songs and poems for you, the human edge will come not in what we generate, but in what we save, what we collect, and how we arrange the data. We find this idea in Walter Benjamin, who praises the collector as one who redeems objects, by bringing them into constellation with one another. We find it in the work of Mallarmé, for whom chance is the great anthologist. We find it in Nietzsche’s revisionist philosophy of history, according to which the task of the historian is less to remember the past as it was than to use it, recontextualize it. We find it in the art of Joseph Cornell, for whom art is fundamentally arrangement.
Academic proponents of Biblical criticism use “R” to refer to the “redactor” of different Biblical sources. The Jewish theologian, Franz Rosenzweig, however, said that “R” refers to Rabbeinu, our teacher, i.e., Moses. What some saw as a kind of argument against the divine authorship of the Torah, Rosenzweig saw as evidence of the divine-human partnership: the greatness of the Torah is not expressed in its words per se, but in its arrangement. What matters is not the diversity of sources, but the unity of their constellation. The work is incomplete without a redactor, thus the redactor is the author, and only a divinely inspired author could redact the Torah in its finished form. What skeptics see as contradictions and inconsistencies, Rosenzweig (and the Midrashic tradition) see as deliberate editorial contributions.
Nietzsche bequeathed us the idea that we should make our lives works of art. If art is arrangement, it is not enough to have experiences, or bursts of inspiration—what matters is the arrangement of life’s variety into a kind of anthology. In this way, nothing is random, or randomness and divine (and artistic) inspiration come together. When reading both literature and memoir, we often see the hand of serendipity (some might say, providence) at work. Whether that is because we are meaning making machines or because there is some mystical force beyond our comprehension, or both, this should give us pause.
The ability to make art out of life requires less creation of something from nothing and more a curator’s sensibility.