Walter Benjamin, Wikipedia, and the Task of Childhood

A memorable moment from a Cornell graduate coursework?Susan Buck-Morss? comment that Walter Benjamin, the quintessential collector, would have been a veritable Wikipedia junkie.  She likewise suggested an especially ordinary and innovative final assignments for her seminar on Das Passagen-Werk, or The Arcades Project, a collective revision of the existing Wikipedia article on the subject.  

Another of Susan Buck-Morss? point of emphasis: the contemporary valance of Benjamin?s insights in her students? personal experience.

Since my recent academic efforts have restricted my participation in fascinating events, I thought that, in the spirit of The Arcade Project?s emphasis on interiority and heterogenous experience?whose dispersed form, by the way, is not without affinities to blogging? that I might simply share a consideration.

Or rather, a question concerning one of his many mysterious and compelling passages.

The text in question (M, 20) comes from the ?First Notes? in the ?M? section, which corresponds to the section on ?The Flaneur.?  (The translation is mine and is not meant to be exact.)

Benjamin:

?Task of childhood: to bring the new world into symbolic space.  The child can do that of which the adult is thoroughly incapable-- recollecting the new.  To us, since we had come across them in childhood, locomotives already had symbolic character.  To our children however, the automobile, whose new, elegant, modern, sleek [kesse] side we ourselves solely appreciate.?

Evidently for Benjamin, an amorphously shifting pool of indeterminate signification. (whatever it may exactly be), attaches itself to new technology.  Many questions might ensue at this point?the relation of machine to narrative consciousness, the possibly special role of the train, the function of concentrated light, not to mention his particular, peculiar conception of the ?symbolic??but it may initially suffice to ask what our ?locomotive? is?  Upon what emergent object, if an ?object? at all, may we find our own ?symbolic space??

(An immediate association from my own field, but one that is decidedly not ?new?: the arrival of the train in Robert Wilson?s Einstein on the Beach.)