Hollywood, we might find the revolutionary potential that the Surrealists discovered in

the grand pianos and the old-fashioned dresses of an earlier generation. What, then, is the

method for writing this history? Here is how Benjamin put it: "the method of this work:

literary montage-I have nothing to say, only to show. I won't purloin anything precious,

nor will I appropriate witty turns. But the rags, the remnants: I do not want to inventory

them, but let them come into their own in the only possible way: by using them" (qtd. in

Vinken 67). What would a history composed with the rags of 1930s Hollywood look

like?

 Interestingly, Wohlfarth observes that the only place where Benjamin explicitly

portrays the ragpicker as an intellectual is in reference to film historian Siegfried

Kracauer. From Benjamin's point of view, "what we see when we visualize [Kracauer]

going about his solitary business is a ragpicker at daybreak, impaling verbal rags, scraps

of language, with his stick" (Wohlfarth 154). As a ragpicker, the historian can afford to

dabble in rags because he no longer conforms to any predetermined ideology. While

impaling these rags, Kracauer refuses to accept history's desire to make order out of

chaos. "Whereas academics," Wohlfarth concludes, "vainly arrange the chaos of their

'lumber-room' into neat piles of facts that nonetheless accumulate like so much debris,

thereby reflecting the chaos of history without reflecting upon it, the ragpicker throws all

the litter out almost without comment. He has 'nothing to say,' 'only to show"' (156;

original emphasis).12 Thus, even the most insignificant detail, the most undesirable piece

of refuse, makes its way into history. In that process, the ragpicker comes to embody "the

intrinsic connection between refuse and refusal" (155). For it is in the refuse that