Resumen de Anthology as Collection: Althusser vs. Benjamin
The objective of this article is to explore, within the scope of architectural research, the possibilities of the Benjaminian concept of Collection as an alternative theoretical device to that of Anthology. We will begin by analysing Sylvia Lavin's essay “Theory into History; Or The Will to Anthology” to expose the main deficiencies of the use of anthology in the current panorama of architectural theory. Next, Walter Benjamin's essay “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and historian” will be analyzed to try to understand what the advantages of using the concept of collection may be compared to the concept of anthology. While Anthology tends to stabilize the present, the Collection tends to destabilize it, to bring it to a critical situation. The anthology builds up an intellectual lineage for the present in which to support an architectural practice. The collection traces the map of its fractures, draws the cartography of its lost opportunities.
If in the Anthology it is the whole that determines the fragment, in the Collection it is the fragment that determines the whole. In the Anthology still survives, camouflaged under a multiple appearance, the shadow of the great story. That nostalgia that drags the editor to recompose the fragments and endow them with a new unit, now imperceptible, as if he were a discreet Dr. Frankenstein. In the Collection, however, the fragment maintains its irreducible autonomy, as if it were in a dissection table, available for an autopsy rather than for a resurrection. If the Anthology presupposes a concept of theory based on construction and conceives theory as a theoretical mold or formwork in which the relation between theory and practice is causal, evident and explicit, the Collection presupposes a concept of theory based on destruction, in the opening of a clearing in the forest of the overdose of speeches, manifestos and theories, in which the relation between theory and practice is not so evident.
