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Before the Law of Human Motor Functions

This essay examines a cognitive and perceptual shortcoming exposed in section thirteen of Walter Benjamin's ‘Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproducability’. Although we have a basic understanding of walking, writes Benjamin, we have no idea what transpires in the moment of taking a step. At the same time, Benjamin's writing seems to encounter a block in attempting to describe an impasse in our perception of the most elemental mode of passing through space: of the five published versions of this passage no less than four are syntactically or punctuationally distinct. Such writing about deviant movement invites speculation into the deviant movement of writing. Given the emphasis in the artwork essay on the capacity of film to explore, expose, and explode unnoticed details, and given its insistence on departing from commonly accepted accounts of movement, the staggered and staggering writing of this section likewise merits the quasi-photographic parameter of scrutiny facilitated by philology. Out of the undifferentiated movement of walking emerge unperceived possibilities of articulation – a poetics of the step – as well as new ways to articulate the performativity of Benjamin's prose.