By the time Walter Benjamin described the body that speaks, it (the body) was fully torn and rent from organic closure, dismembered and achieving apocalyptic revelation only in death. Corporeal fragments comprised for Benjamin the ‘authenticity’ that he sought in art, rejecting representation in favour of the embrace and presentation of actuality even in ‘the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life [that] says more than paintings … [or] the text’. So by the time he presented his famous address on authorial production to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, in the same year that socialist realism was sanctioned by the Soviet Writers’ Congress, Benjamin was more than pleased to reflect upon what he recognised as being the ‘revolutionary strength of Dadaism [which] consisted in testing art for its authenticity’ – the Authentizität that provided him with the category in which a sense of modernist realism was assembled, nailed and pasted together out of the actual material of experience (although Benjamin's conception of ‘experience’ as basis for authenticity may ultimately have taken too much for granted, and merits its own discussion). And added to the quality of ‘authenticity’ was, crucially, the ‘actuality’ (‘topicality’) or Aktualität of the fragment delivered in context, revealing the aura of its topicality in a process devoid of pretence and which was infinitely more productive ‘than showing off the rather … petit bourgeois idea of education for the masses’. The mimesis here outlined is understood as having been generated from creative as opposed to reproductive imitation (Kant's nachfolgen rather than his nachahmen), or alternatively from the productive as opposed to reproductive imagination (Nietzsche), extending in the process beyond sign and referent, and into the realm of experience and actuality to reflect the conditions of its production.

The creative imitation of structures of production, then, carries the potential to achieve something that is otherwise denied to the subject under capitalist relations – namely control over what the subject, he or she, produces.