A sense of affinity between Benjamin and Wittgenstein helped produce the
signals in my subtitle, when, with the memory in my head of Benjamin's
frequently cited letter to Scholem (17 April 1931) in which he expresses a
phantasm of his writing as a call or signal for rescue from the top of the
crumbling mast of a sinking ship,2 I came upon a piece of his with the
title "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater" containing these
sentences: "Almost every child's gesture is command and signal," and "it is
the task of the director to rescue the children's signals out of the
dangerous magic realm of mere fantasy and to bring them to bear on the
material."3 One hardly knows whether Benjamin is there identifying more
with the director than with the child, whose world Benjamin of course
enters elsewhere as well (apart from his interest in the history of
children's books, I cite Jeffrey Mehlman's fascinating Walter Benjamin for
Children: An Essay on His Radio Years).4 And I know of no other major
philosophical sensibility of this century who attaches comparable
importance to the figure of the child with the exception of Wittgenstein in
the Investigations, which opens with Augustine's portrait of himself as a
child stealing language from his elders, an autobiographical image that
haunts every move in Wittgenstein's drive to wrest language back from what
he calls metaphysics, and what we might perhaps still call the absolute.5
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/v25/v25n2.cavell.html
