Biblio-polis: Passport Perish the Thought (of Sorts): Reading Missing
Manuscripts / Lost Lives from the Archives; Xenos and Bios, Musselman
Begin with Night and Fog
And Toute la Memoire in order to make the camp as archive move more clear;
also add the xenonos and bios distinction.
Then go to the passport as example of closed reading of the archival thing
Then to WB and the lsot manuscript which actually takes us to WB’s
correspondence about his papers, his kinds of papers, his arhchivalization and
auto-archivalizaiton (following up form Fichus discussion in hcapter two) and
Agamben on facsimile; also micrographia (script as work of art) Which oges
back to WB’s monument as work of art—no return –either to Palenstine or to
New York—hidden wound.
And that would go to Musselman (Pure homo sacer) versus Marrano (bios as
xenos).
What remains hten is the detetive genre—reading out of Perec—reading to death. The
secret in the secret becomes an exercise for Derrida in identification—with himelf—or
with Marx. But it the identification is hwat prevents reading in Derrida’s cse of the failure
of the lapse, of the archive in relation to the novelization of autobripgraphy. Perec
becomes the key case—going back to WWII.
Tee book as posthumous.
The second htreshold becomes , in relation to xenos and zoe the htreshold of
publication—the link Wbmakes between publication and passports (in Chapter two).
See also his description of Manuscripts in Unpacking my library.
and Marrano
Can cross reference homo sacer—bios at the limit with Derrida on the xenos,
stranger or freogner in Of Hositality. Also, the intro Aporias.
Also notonly the work of art, but the facsimle—the mircroscript online, or the pages in
WB’s Archive book. Also fasimile not read as such by Agamben
Turnagainst his critique of deconstrucitonas thwarted messianism—ignores his own
Catholic hermenutic, his own need to read by not looking, or by turning a text into an
image, by dovorcicg word and image.
The time that Remainsa microredaing—one line by Paul.
Clsoed reading is not about the hidden (the lsot mss being a version of the hidden) tat can
be revealed, the lost that can be found, but the secret of the secret, for Derrida,but also
about what Derrida does not engae—lapse, acsimile, image and text—and following
chapter would be about counterfeiting and foregery and ash (assh of the archive)
It’s the lapse that is central here—the problem of title,a sof technoirony nad transmission
thatstalls out (Concept of Irony, first paragraph) and
The crossing of borders always
announces itself according to the
movement of a certain step [pas]-and of the step that crosses a
line. An indivisible line. And one
always assumes the institution of
such an indivisibility. Customs,
police, visa or passport,
passenger
identification--all of that is
established upon this institution
of
the indivisible, the institution
therefore of the step that is
related
to it, whether the step crosses it
or not.
Jacques Derrida, “Dying—
awaiting (one another at) the
“limits of truth” Aporias, p. 11
Possibly add Balzac and Rivette on The Unfisnshed Masterpiece.
Come back to the camp—with Perec—connect detective genre in this chapter to
sci-fi Las t Man and hopcalypse genre in the Conlusion.
Possibly connect Derridaon the ssue of title in chapter two to de Man on the title
in Concept of Irony and Kirkegaard.
Poijnt of departure for de Man essay would be the footnote on the tape
recording of the lectures. The posthumous publication.
Possibly INCLUDE BELOW:
The Non/Sense and Im/Materiality of Securityi
The passport is not a passe-partout; some countries do not allow you to visit
others; some require visas; etc.
Issuing a passport is by definition a process of selection—, a vehicle of passporting people and (no)pass-deporting people.
How to do you talk about things? Question of genre. Life writing. People write
about things as if they were people.
Bios is Agamben and Bryson as zoography Overlooked
Social Life of Things second essay on biography of things.
I think we can underline the graph in bios—biographies—that biography as a
form of writing already complicates what bios is, starting from the material thing
of the passport. Then we can go to Derrida and Paper Machine and complicate
the notion of what a person is when being processed, and conclude in a way that
sets up the intro—people processing through storage, shelf-life as a response to
bare life-- and also transport(ation)—teletopical reading.
Papers, Please
Alles ist in Ordnung
The biography is the uncritically assumed default people use when they
Lively effects of the genre produced by the medium of YouTube.
(Just) Passing Through, Passing Around (Barely)ii
We lead with the Youtube segment about passport as figure of
processing citizenship through paper and the problems of what the
passport is (thing then book) and narrating when it is what is. The
passport as thing / book raises a problem of form, its materials already
mediatized.iii The passport works as a figure for a problem of form related to
materiality, a problem of determining the form of the object / thing (see de Man
on Riffaterre in “Hypogram and Inscription”). The passport as “book” offers
resistance to a narrative, especially a genetic narrative of its construction and
assemblage; it resists both as an open and closed book since when it is open it
still hides microchips with data loaded on them; and it puts into question the
difference between reading and skimming, and the corollary distinction between
machines and humans as readers (Humans read and skim, but machines only
read). Moreover, the passport is a hybrid, both a printed book and yet also a
kind of Kindle that doesn’t function (you can’t read the digital data or subtract
from it, add to it / alter it).
Cover Stories
The cover of the passport book is
foreign, an import, and the entire media story occludes the foreigner.
It was as if the guy were saying that the passport protects you from
non-Americans entering the U.S., as if it were not about being away
from the U.S. but being safe from foreign nationals" while residing in
the U.S.
It's the security of the object that matters, not the security of the
citizens (which is never mentioned). And it is spoken of only in terms
of entering the U.S. as if the only way anyone could enter the U.S. is
with a U.S. passport (as if foreigners never visited or resided as
aliens in the U.S. legally).
Somehow the narrative of the thing starts playing out inadvertently (because of
the narrowly nationalistic focus on the U.S. passport rather than on passports in
general) in all sorts of weird ways about human rights versus rights as citizens
(“We, the people,” not “we, the citizen”)
How A US Passport Is Made (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/how-a-us-passport-ismade_n_215287.html
Note that the passport has a “life”: it is first a “thing,” then a “book” with fine print
and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing) with three blank but
formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) when assembled (the
paper covering over the foreign chips, which were loaded and locked), and finally
a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing). Only machines “read”
the passports (officers “skim” them). This narrative of passport production
reveals and hide its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside
(chip) being covered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover): the made in
America for Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in
America (printing, stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model
of assemblage in which non-American digital parts and cover get imported and
data then gets “loaded on” to the imports and covered up without Americans
even knowing (unless they watch this video).
“There’s nothing there. You can buy these chips all over the world simply
because they’re memory chips.”
“So it is not until this piece of plastic (waves the cover around) arrives in the
United States that you actually, really, in my opinion, start producing a passport.
This piece of plastic will arrive at a secure U.S. government facility, the
Government printing offices clinic in Washington, D.C. and they then begin the
work on it. They then print the cover. They then print . . . the fine detail printing in
the passport that makes it clear that not just anybody made it,
Interview:
There’s lots of security embedded measures, like in a five dollar bill
Yes, there’s microprinting, fine printing . . . then laminates it all together, stitches
it into a book, and the only thing they do in the process of it to the chip is format
it.
Interviewer: put the operating system into it.
Right. . . But after they put the format on it, they lock the chip. And then they
load a load of passport books into an armored car, and the armored cars takes
these to one of the sixteen facilities around the United States to take the next
step. we have in this country.
But as I mentioned they lock the chip; they ship the key in effect to these chips .
. . via separate means.
There's no passport, raw book, until after it hits the United States. But even if
someone were to get hold of these things, they wouldn’t be able to do anything
with these books.
Then they are what is called “personalized.” The personal data is put onto the
passport, typed on here, and then they’re also at the point loaded onto the chip.
And then is when it really becomes an American passport book.
There's an anti-skimming feature, if the book is closed.
So let me ask you a crazy question. These chips can’t be used to track people
when they are carrying them, can they?
No.
The only time it can be read is when it is opened--scanned by the officer at the
point of entry, as he or she skims this, the machine reads the chip.
if you tried to cut out the chip and sew another one,
the chip will give the officer different information [from what the passport has
printed on it].
What about using the covers to fabricate a passport?
Or if you were to order similar plastic covers to fabricate a passport?
Because of the material that we load onto this chip and how that chip lines up
with the material here and what the computer at the customs border, what that
machine is taught to read, if you have a phony passport with the chip, that chip
will go tilt.
People claim they can hack these chips?
Is that possible?
No because we have what we call PKI, public key infrastructure, a type of
security algorithm loaded on the chip. We believe that that algorithm cannot be
compromised.
The passport can't be skimmed because it is closed.
Me:
So, like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American
citizens from their own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover,
literally secreting the chips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their
"owners."
Technopoly
By attending to sediment, we link question about the polis,
citizenship, who can travel legally where, what they can travel with
and carry on or not, in relation to materials by rephrasing the question of
biopolitics and citizenship, on the one hand, and the storage of materials , on he
other, as a question of what happens when the State becomes a Host and turns
its citizens into parasites. The question of biopolitics is thus also a question of
thantopolitics, of the ways in which citizens are alienated from their own data—
the printed pages of the passport as book become a cover, literally and
metaphorically, for the storage of citizens as data, their reduction to microchips.
And the question of “reading” and skimming” the book is all the more bizarre
since there is no narrative to read, just a profile reduced to one’s life span and
home. (Gaining a passport is thus already a process of people into persons in
that you have to have a home—you have to reside in your property or someone
else’s—before you can become a person who can reenter the U.S. without a
passport, you always a potentially illegal alien. And you have to know English to
apply and you have to be literate or know someone who is. The Youtube does
not say what is stored on the chips (the word information is not used) whether it
is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it. It is information
about us, however. That much is clear. But we are alienated through our data
processing, we are booked by the State even, just into persons through
personalization. But we are only informed by change of how our passports are
made. Their making would usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the of
effect of the ideas hat we are learning seeing something that we are not
supposed to see, know. I think that’s how the Huff Post links—like posting info
on how to make a bomb. The video is itself a threat because it gives forgers
information they could use to forge. But the issue is that persons are stored as
data) when they are turned form persons into citizens. Citizenship passes
though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, unsettling
distinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside
citizenship (equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so
on) hostage and hostage taker. Citizenship not as securing of human rights but
as Host-age taking. iv
occurrence” or Jacques what Derrida calls an “event.”v
close/d reading of the passport as thing.
The thing requires a double reading even as it becomes units.
Renais's Night and Fog again. It has a passport sequence that is perfect for us.
Also has a photo of notes written by Jewish prisoners. I remembered I wanted to
juxtapose it with the book as prisoner in Toute la memoire du monde.
Bare Life and Adorno’s Damaged Life (aphorism, fragment—taken from
Nietzsche—almost a direct rip-off formally).
In the epilogue to Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry,
Lacoue-Labarthe talks about "appropriating the means of
identification" being more important than the means of production.
An image of one of Robert Walser’s microscripts (see The Microscripts, to be
released soon by New Directions: http://www.amazon.com/Microscripts-RobertWalser/dp/0811218805).
Susan Bernofsky writes:
The microscripts, now housed in the Robert Walser-Archiv in Zurich, were tiny,
densely pencil-jotted manuscripts in which Walser composed the rough drafts of
his texts starting as early as 1917. The paper he used for this was an assortment
of small sheets of art-print paper, halved calendar pages, envelopes,
correspondence cards (often he wrote between the lines of the notes he’d
received), and even single-sided advertisements cut from magazines and books.
The microscript texts are so difficult to read that when this collection of 526
diminutive pages was first discovered after Walser’s death, they were thought to
be written in a sort of secret code. In fact the microscripts were written in Sütterlin
script, then the standard style of German handwriting, but in a script that varied in
height from one to two millimeters, executed with an often none-too-sharp pencil.
These drafts seem to have been primarily an aid to composition: Walser
generally recopied his texts within a few days of having written them, and it is not
clear whether he himself would have been able to read his own writing had he
waited too long.
The microscripts in Walser’s literary estate, which were painstakingly deciphered
in over a decade of labor by Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang after the first
transcriptions by Jochen Greven appeared in 1972, proved to contain a full six
volumes of previously unknown texts (as well as drafts of various pieces
published elsewhere). Since Walser left a number of his late prose works
uncopied - being largely unable to get them published - the microscripts are a
rich source of new material for hungry readers of Walser’s work. The Robber in
manuscript occupies a mere twenty-four pages of octavio-sized sheets (Susan
Bernofsky’s introduction to The Robber, (Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 2000), p xii).
http://beetleinabox.tumblr.com/post/538315142/an-image-of-one-of-robertwalsers-microscripts
Chapter Three:
Perish the Thought (of Sorts): Detecting Missing Micro/Manuscripts / Lost
Lives
Post-Humous versus Post-Human
Work in Blacnhot line about the posthumous being inexhaustible; his essays on
Kafka.
Derrida’s story about his trumped up drug bust in Prague near the end of "Before
the Law," as if identifying with Kafka—his attorney says his case is Kafkaesque.”
"P.S. Roger Laporte has reminded me of a stormy encounter which took
place five years ago. During this encounter (although I am unable to
recount the occasion for it here) we found ourselves, for other
reasons, in disagreement with a certain hermeneut who in passing had
resumed to ridicule the publication of Nietzsche's unpublished
manuscripts. "They will end up," he said, "publishing his laundry
notes and scraps like 'I have forgotten my umbrella'". We discussed
the incident again; those who were present confirm this. Thus I am
assured of the story's veracity, as well as the authenticity of h the
facts which otherwise I have no reason to doubt. Nevertheless I have
no recollection of the incident. Not even today. (I.4. 1973), Spurs,
pp 139; 141
Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1930-1940
for your Walter B briefcase chapter?
“Throughout the volume’s 180 letters, the editors’ scrupulous referencing and the
extensive footnotes help us to decode the hermetic web of enquiries about close
friends, in-jokes and mutual favours spun by the correspondents. The English
translation skilfully navigates Benjamin’s effusive idiosyncrasies and softens the
clipped directness of both authors to reveal the comfortable familiarity beneath.”
Times Literary Supplement
“The correspondence between Gretel Karplus Adorno and Walter Benjamin
documents a remarkable friendship. Benjamin valued “Felizitas” as a critic who
was at once acute and sympathetic, and these letters bristle with some of the
most challenging formulations of his thought in the 1930s. Yet their relationship
also enabled Benjamin to reveal aspects of his life that remained hidden from
even his closest male friends, including Adorno himself and Scholem. The letters
thus offer a moving and surprisingly intimate account of the fate of a great
intellectual struggling to survive – and to write – in exile.”
Michael Jennings, Princeton University
Product Description
We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is
nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon. So wrote Walter
Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly
before he took his own life.
DOESN"T THAT SOUND LIKE SHELF-LIFE ALREADY, A SELF ARCHIVING
AS WRITING UNTO DEATH THROUGH LETTERS?
The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published
here in its complete form for the first time, is the document of a great friendship
that existed independently of Benjamin's relationship with Theodor W. Adorno.
While Benjamin, alongside his everyday worries, writes especially about those
projects on which he worked so intensively in the last years of his life, it was
Gretel Karplus-Adorno who did everything in her power to keep Benjamin in the
world.
She urged him to emigrate and told him about Adorno's plans and Bloch's
movements, thus maintaining the connection between the old Berlin friends and
acquaintances. She helped him through the most difficult times with regular
money transfers, and organized financial support from the Saar region, which
was initially still independent from the Third Reich. Once in New York, she
attempted to entice Benjamin to America with her descriptions of the city and the
new arrivals from Europe though ultimately to no avail.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745636691/ref=s9_simp_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf
_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center2&pf_rd_r=06WGYMXV9H2EXK96KC0T&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_
rd_i=507846
Text and signature are specters, and Benjamin knows it, so well that the event of
the text "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" consists of this strange ex-position; before your
eyes a demonstration ruins the distinction it proposes. It exhibits and archives the
very movement of its implosion, leaving in place what one calls a text, the ghost
of a text that, itself in ruins, at once foundation and preservation, accomplishes
neither, occurs to and reaches neither one nor the other and remains there, up to
a certain point, for a certain amount of time, readable and unreadable, like the
exemplary ruin that singularly warns us of the fate of all texts and all signatures in
their relation to law--that is, necessarily (alas), in their relation to a certain police
force.
Derrida, "Force of Law," 277vi
Connect Derrida on the “marionette, the dead machine” and “the theological
machine” in “Faith and Knowledge” (86-87) to the machine in Typewriter writer
Connect the account of the cut and the machine and Oedipalization in Typewriter
Ribbon, Inc to Derrida’s discussion of the cut and castration in “Restitutions” in
The Truth of painting. 339-340
Also “where to stop?” 352; you hae to now ho w to stop. 277Out of service”
spectral analysis (360, 376) Derrida quotes himself from the purveyor of truth
364 , like letter, a pair is divisible. Unconscious p. 367 projection 366-68
The title of the picture, its legend: Hoc est corpus meum. 369 “Nobody’s being
accused or above all condemned, or even suspected” (371) uncanny p. 373;
379returns alte to the opening, 379—to p. 256
“to render onself in painting and to red=ndrsomething to oneself, to pay onself
Connect Adorno Bibliographical musings with Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library”
in terms of the hidden collector who disappears in his books at the end of WB
and the various personifications of books in Adorno’s essay, especially the
crucial final section of the essay.
Note 1 Benjamin’s source was either a lost letter form Gretel Karplus, a
telephone conversation or a common acquaintance.” (86)
Put all the WB and Brecht detective fiction stuff in the conclusion, perhaps in
relation to Perec’s 53 Days? Or maybe in chapter three with Fittkow? Or return
to chapter three in the conclusion?vii
Baudelaire wrote no detective story because, given the structure of his instincts
[Triebsstruktur], it was impossible for him to identify with the detective. In him, the
calculating, constructive element was on the side of the asocial and had an
integral part of cruelty [Grasaumkeit]. Baudelaire was too food a reader of the
Marquis de Sade to be able to compete with Poe.”
WB, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet (Verso, 1973), 43; Cited by Derrida,
GivenTime,166
If now one considers seriously what Benjamin presumes about the “structure” of
Baudelaire’s “drives” that would have prevented him from identifying with a
detective, if one judged it were possible never to identify with a detective (which,
of course, is open to doubt), if one took the figure of the detective to be
determinable, determined, one figure among others to be established, judgment
to be formed, account to be rendered, story to be continued, inquisition, search,
interrogation, inquiry, or investigation to be conducted to its term, in a word,
knowledge, then in fact one must recall that on two occasions an identification
must be suspended: the identification, which in a certain manner is structural, of
Baudelaire with the narrator or with the friend (both of them seem to “play” at
detective); then the identification of these characters with the detective they
seem to play. They are not literally detectives, in particular because one of them,
the narrator, seeks above all to reach a moral judgment, however non-moral may
be his investment in it; and because the other, the friend, is now more concerned
with deceiving justice or in any case with never permitting a truth, conclusion,
and a judgment to be established.
Derrida Given Time, 166-67, same footnote
Fittkow’s book has “Jewish Lives” as a subject heading on the copyright page,
and the back cover description says that she and her husband were both Jewish
even though her husband was a Protestant. There is a classification and
canonization of certain accounts here, just as the “scrolls of Auschwitz” canonize
more or less legible fragments. Is the document’s fragmentation, its resistance to
being read in whole (because part of it is missing or left untold) a condition of its
canonization?
Fittkow’s book is novel and a document and is composed of various documents
that generate narratives that can turn out well or badly. The book is written with
a discontinuous way that insists on the local links between papers and stories
and the heterogeneity of the stories she tells, often as transcriptions/ dictations.
She refuses to classify her story, subject it to archivalization, to order. Instead
chronology is just one order among others. The “Case” she tells is only “based
on the reports of Varian Fry and ?” It’s a second hand account. She does not
include a facsimile of the document or a transcription of it as an appendix (as at
the end of Mark Bernhard’s Scrolls of Auschwitz. She does not list her sources—
she does not offer any documentary kinds of corroboration (that give her
testimony more evidentiary value—it is not written as a legal brief). She does not
giver her birth history. She is not really telling ”her” story but the story of her
experiences with problems attached to the state’s auto-archivalzation (forgery,
counterfeit, bribing, errors, bad paper quality, and so on) to delay to resist,
knowing always that a list can perilous in one case and life saving in another; that
an exit visa can be of value then of no value when the date of expiration is
reached. She navigates but does not control the process of her auto-archivo-biobiblio-graphization. There is no way to predict or to tell when is a good time or a
bad time. Even forms may be filled out with intended error to be read as
unintended error. Transportation, translation, language (expand on langue versus
parole in Agamben) as a medium (W Benjamin) and uncanny. There is a kind of
tracking system (chip passport; cell phones; dates on passports that are stamped
and scanned). The camp includes selection, processing, photography (initially)
tattooing, ordering, and so on. Fittkow offers various kinds of formal resistance
to being read as a coherent person, in terms of ego psychology or anthropology.
She refuses to be classified (like Arendt’s account of WB as unclassifiable),
processed, read. Her life is a series of fragments akin to Adorno’s aphorisms in
Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life that are not metynyms for a
whole but have the unlimited space (a fragment can be infinitely small and
infinitely large) Blanchot discuses in The Writing of the Disaster.
Text in Venice: Perec and Mathews essay on Roussel and Venice
Pereec had a memory of a visit to Venice and wrote a novel using htat memory
asa point departure. See Geroge Pererec A Life in Words.
reading it as a kind of allegory of the protocols of reading attached
to publication of the complete works of an author, with his life
attached as well, and the way that reading depends on a the production
of a lost volume, a hidden--possibly complete, possibly yet to be
completed project--waiting to be found in the archives. Reading as
revelation (the protocol) and assemblage requires the fantasy of an
ash. The Aspern Papers works out somewhat similarly in that the
rejected woman burns the letters souhgt by hte critic who wants to
read and publish them. Perec and Mathews are writing a literary
critical short story, or a short story that is a work of literary
criticism. in which the hidden is not reducible to a lost manuscript,
which in the case of their story, turns out to be only partly legible
in any case, already haunted by revision and repeated returns to it,
by the author who already cut a book open to hide it, leaving behind a
wound that would never close. James delivers a coup de theater at the
end of his story (incidentally set in Venice) whereas Perec and
Mathews give a coup de grace to the protocols of reading that
Roussel's own writings have already shot down. Text in Venice arrives
d.o.a. even before Gustave Aschenbach does, already reduced by
narrative to unpublished and unpublishable ash of the archive.
In any case, the essay seems like an odd rehearsal of what is done with Perec’s
own “53 Days.”
Dead Perec/koning
Pewrecked
Different kinds of linearization in the novel that pull against its recursive structure.
Chapters 1-28,28 being the epilogue. But there’s the division after chapter 13
with fourteen beginning with a French phrase.
The novel is not exactly symmetrical, divided between 1-14 and 15-28. instead it
is divided 1-13 and 14-28.
The three boxes on p. 242are out of sequence: 2 nd, 3rd, then 1st story detective is
in a box in 2 and 1, but not in 3, and arrows point up and down from detective
and victim only in .
Then the drafts are not organized chronologically but according to color; each
ring file repeats parts of the novel and the pages in the ring file do not follow
linear order. The drafts have a recursive pull. Taking you back in order to move
you forward, but doing that repeatedly.
Some of the repetitions in the notes of passages in the “novel” so as to continue
a pattern of repetition (mirroring, doubling) already at wok in the “novel”
Take passage F11 on p. 250 as a way of reading the novel, a metacritical
commentary “What do you know when you’ve read the novel to the end? Nothing
. .” repeats pp. 115-16 in the novel.
See also “swallowed in cloak of citation” p. 241 repeats the same passage on p.
125; p. 250 repeats p. 112
There’s even repetitions within the drafts. Passage on p. 119 is repeated on p.
234, a passage which comments on the opening lines “also France under the
Occupation”
Becomes a kind of principle of reading—or one can collate passages to
assemble a practice of reading n relation to repletion as reading in a mirror and
reading in reverse order. So there is Story A and Story B, and Story B repeats
and reverses Story A so that Salini is framed by Serval, who becomes guilty. See
p. 97, 112, 161, 164, and police reading p. 147 as calling attention to the joke of
Salini’s logic (about him being incriminated by reading a novel)
“dead line: 15 May” p. 251
But in addition to making repetition into a redundancy, an excess that cannot be
integrated except insofar as it read as a comment from the outside on the inside ,
as it were of the “novel,” what does emerge in the drafts specifically is a historical
referent for the novel—namely the Nazi Occupation of France and the
Resistance, and more specifically , Klaus Barbie (who must have been tried
around the time Perecwas writing this novel). Barbie is mentioned on p. 253along
with 125 members of the Resistance, five of whom were turned by the Gestapo
(252)
Body of a member of the resistance never found (252) (a missing corpse which
repeats the missing corpse of Serval in the novel.
And “state of emergency” (252)
Boxes with words inside “Circumstances of disappearance in context of State of
emergency” (251)
But “History” in the form of the liberation of Grenoble (Sept 44)see p. 228
But here we see how different the earlier version on p. 112 where there is no
mention of the Resistance, on chapter 19, and then comment on chapter 19 on p.
227
“19th chapter
At the heart of this story
1942
is a disturbing episode which perhaps forms
4 Sept: STO
the cornerstone of the whole affair
introduced”
and the rest the page outlines the liberation of Grenoble ending with “4 Oct
Tribunal against collaborators”
“Barbie” mentioned on . 229
“Write Story A in the first person” (151)is itself a figure of turning, of repeated
escapes(230-31, the guy escapes twice from the Gestapo)
“the mirror reversal[?]” p. 247 “mirror book” (147) “theme of the mirror” 213; see
pp. 216-17 for multiple mentions of mirrors.
Mirror held aloft . . Mirror, glass, Miroir, Speigel, 1 per page! (or per 2 pages)!”
(150)
53 Days is the inverted mirror of reality” (151)
“what else is here in the suitcase?” (152)
French Resistance is mentioned in chapter fourteen ring file p. 105, then again
on p. 106
“it uncovers elements of story 1” (247)
Passage on p. 99 repeated on p. 203
Passage on p. 97 repeated on p. 207
Passage on page 180 repeated on p. 18 (the box with the
“to rework” (204) name in caps), then p. 188
“hooked by that missing chapter” (204) repeats p. 100
“a different sequence should
“lead towards “truth”=treason” (247)
“What happens when Serval receives the novel” (255) play on the word “receive
here—most clearly, it means that Serval got the mss from the Consul—the
Consul gave it to him. But it also calls up Serval as a receiver, like he
understands , like on a telephone—he is getting a transmission.
Reception as reading.
Serval’s status in the Resistance is unclear (246)
Barbier mentioned by last name p. 244
Even “THE END” is put inside two rectangles and followed by a colon “THE
END:” p. 239. It is boxed, nested.
“dead end” 211
Perec becomes a character in the novel, p. 239
See Perec’s book about himself Perec/rinations
Serval’s enquiry parallel to the police 256. As in Kafka, there is no escaping the
law.
Self interview on p. 255 “What is the function of 53 Days? BUT: . . .”
The editors of 53 Days assemble it in order to publish and uncritically make
certain assumptions as they organize and assemble it. They present the text as
incomplete, linearize and divide it into three parts in order to make the whole
novel readable:
1. Chapters 1-12 are complete (publishable)
2. Plans for chapters 13-28 and epilogue (incomplete and unpublishable
because unreadable)
3. drafts, notes, ring files, and so on listed without rhyme or reason of parts
of he book, each linearized and sporadically readable).
4. Note on the text, not on translation, page with intellectual bios of the
author , editors, and translator. We also get the liner notes on the inside
flaps of the book cover and blurb and Perec’s bio on the back cover
Why is the book organized this way?
1. Assumption: the materials are divided up in order of their readability, into
intelligible segments (chapters), then semi-intelligible plans for segments
(chapters), then fragments.
2. Assumption: One can edit the text just like any other text (without regard
to its author or genre).
3. Perec wanted to complete the novel and publish it. He left it unfinished.
His death does not affect the publication of the book nor its ordering.
4. A complete novel is the same as a finished novel, and Perec didn’t publish
the novel in the form the editors did because he hadn’t finished it.
What can we conclude from these everyday editorial assumptions about how to
read “53 Days?” Is it in fact readable in its published form?
The book’s editing attempts to normalize the book, to suggest that we have all
the extant pieces that enable us to get an idea, at least, of what the completed
novel would look like. What we actually get, however, is what would never have
been published had Perec finished the novel (parts 2 and 3).
The novel as published inadvertently thus opens some speculative questions
about how to read it. What if Perec left it unpublished on purpose but
nevertheless wanted it to be read, but only in typescript and handwritten drafts
and notes? What if the published novel is the complete novel disguised as an
incomplete novel? What if the very conditions of posthumous publication are part
of Perec’s planned resistance to reading his text after his death? What if he
gambled that someone would read the papers, at least, if not publish them?
What if the novel in its incomplete state is Perec’s last will and testament,
unstated as such? His final legacy? These questions carry some weight
because the novel is not just any unpublished text found after its author’s death.
It is a self-consciously modernist detective novel about detective novels. Some
further speculative questions. Can the incomplete chapters (13-28 and epilogue)
be read as a key to chapters 1-12. In other words, does the novel inter /encrypt
its first twelve chapters in is remaining 16? And does it further present such a
project as a ruin, with part three being a key inside a key, a key made of
fragments that cannot be reconstructed and recognized as a key. Is the novel
then D.O.A. when it is published? Did Perec write himself to death, or into death
by not completing the novel? Did he leave the relation between his life and work
open in such a way that we can’t close the coffin / book, close the case, as it
were? If Perec a sort of Ray Johnson of the modernist novel?
To be sure, none of these questions can be answered, but would you agree that
they are nevertheless preliminary to any critical reading of “53 Days”? Or not? Is
a critical reading of the published edition possible ? Would a better edition have
published everything without any subdivisions as if it were all part of one
manuscript on the basis of the assumption that such an edition would be more
“Perecian” (what Perec’s “ghost” would want)? Or would that be irresponsible?
How is responsibility to be determined when the author’s wishes are not known?
Should the author’s wishes be respected (Kafka wanted his editor to burn all his
manuscripts.)
As you read the novel, keep these two broad questions about the novel’s
(un)readability in mind and read it looking for evidence to support one case or the
other.
Perec does include diagrams, one of which is a diagram of a nested narratives.
Also the initial search for Serval includes not only the author but a briefcase
containing his last manuscript, which is apparently encrypted (echoing WB’s lost
manuscript). It has to be deciphered. The narrator is advised to “read between
the lines.” This seems like self-reflexive advice to the reader of 53 Days—the
manuscript is partly missing, the author is dead, no crime scene can be
reconstructed; the editing will clean up and destroy the crime scene (of Perec’s
suicide), photos of the manuscripts as they were found, in what condition, how
organized or disorganized, and so on. The edition represses / cleans up the
process of editing itself.
Has Perec, however, sporadically abjected his book that it cannot be (properly)
published, or published only in ways that deny its self-abjection or reproduce its
abjection inadvertently?
David Bellos. Georges Perec : a life in words
London : Harvill, 1993.
LIBRARY WEST General Collection
PQ2676.E67 Z531 1993
53 Days as a dead end
“He allows the latter to know it, by showing him his book without an ending, the
denouement would show the Consul’s guilt (96, repeats 95: Serval encrypts this
manifestly dangerous truth in an unfinished detective story which he gets the
Consul himself to read. The Consul quickly grasps that he is being blackmailed
directly: unless he complies, the book’s ending will be so cast as to put the only
too obvious culprit Rouard-Mirouet, in he clear.”)
“None of these elements allows me to go any further or to try to imagine who else
could have pulled it off.” P. 96
other kinds of doubling in the novel—“the frequency of the word mirror and its
cognates” (111)
distorting mirrors (119)
Salini finds himself in the same position as the narrator of 53 Days (18) author
and narrator are doubled, just as the title of the novel is a citation of a novel in
the novel.
(121)
resistance leaders take their name Chabert from the film adaptation of the Balzac
novel 1943 by Rene le Henaff121
A plot summary is provided on p. 94 after the typescript has ended—summarizes
from chapter ten through 12
pp. 96, 97
“a comedy scripted by the Consul also as to murder Serval and steal his
manuscript, which proves that the Consul did it.
He destroys the ending, the “real proof.” Pp. 97
Missing corpse—Serval never found—faked his own death? P. 108
Consul’s corpse found where narrator expects to find Serval’s. (p. 97)
The book as a diary (101)
Why is the formula in French at the head of part II not translated? It is the title
Perec assigned it.
“Gave up listing them all” p. 110
I'm finding it resonates very well with Derrida's Archive Fever
Are the drafts ostentatiously self-titled as filed or editorial descriptors.
Is 53 Days Perec’s suicide note?
The drafts are not drafts but files. Within the files, there are numbered pages—
it’s a book that comes with an archive, but the archive is already dis/ordered,
pre-edited.
p. 215 story o Don Carlos –like an encyclopedia
history becomes ironic it’ too is recursive—footnote about the Roman emperor
being poisoned keeps circulating and attached to different historical figures.
It’s not ars moriendi it’s not a bibobiblio move that we are making. It is aobut
about the fact that he’s dying but it isn’t at all.
It doesn’t matter for us.
We can assume that this is the novel. The relationship to his death is not
operative, even if it is remarkable.
The novel makes that biblio move available to the reader but resists it. Then we
could think back form the briefcase of 53 Days to the briefcsase of WB—a trope
for figuring the archive in terms of the arbitrary start and end date for a human
life.
“Serval would have killed himself” p. 144
Son of survivors living in Paris and he’s at the Sorbonne in the 50s and then he’s
an archivist.
Drafts are linearized, sequenced) order of composition) so therefore the reader is
free to do what done skip around, treat it as random access files. The nondeterminative order of the which the material appears
The orange exercise book—“found on the study desk” puts us in the object world
of shelf-life—the paratextual becomes a way of setting up a hierarchy of
significance for the files; there’s a lure that the physical description will yield
something of significance? Why an orange notebook? that enacts the protocols
of detective fiction—you search the world for unmotivated details that actually
bear significance—like a fetishist with no fetish. You can’t find the right object for
your fetish.
“Mirror-book” 144
The key to the novel (the Resistance, Grenoble) is in the files, then it was never
operative.
as well as with WB's missing mss as well as the description of Fittkow's Escape
as a suspense novel.
The novel proceeds by way of plot summaries of books, their summary
execution, and then a book review or philological practice of reconstructing a text
to read it between the lines or between the book using the sources the writer
used. Each decoding leads not to a solution, but a solution that produces
nothing except for more enigmas that in turn recircle the philological / detective /
spy fiction / genres.
By the end of chapter eleven, I ended up with a reading of the novel as an
allegory of the impossibility of writing legible history. The second part (drafts)
makes it clear that the novel is about the Occupation of France (Granita also
seems to be Algeria). But the "Real has to be "smuggled" into the text. History
involves illicit trafficking, danger, but what happened historically is not reducible
to the above genres and the closure they provide. Ditto for archeology and for
the history of ancient Rome. There's a fantastic note on an anecdote that the
narrator says has to be false because it has been reused by so many other
authors). Fiction keeps overtaking history, even as fiction address the real
through nested narratives about books read by authors of books. At the same
time, the conspiracy plot becomes more credible--the BH change form seeing to
spread rumors about their crimes to actually committing all kinds of atrocities.
But this history, tied into art theft, then seems to reproduce an already
excessively reproduced ancient Roman history.
The unfinished manuscript (missing the last page) and destroyed (shredded
dictated notes from unreadable notes--readable only to their author) become a
way of allegorizing the unarchiv -ability / unread -ability of French history, of
occupying its desire to pre-occupy (forget / repress) the history of its Occupation.
Occupying is amounts to copious recopying, multiple versions, even editions.
So the very form of the novel I do think reads as finished if read as an allegory
about the unpublishability of unwritable and unreadable French history: the
allegory requires the literal death of the author.
I wonder if much has been written on the novel. There does seem to be a clear,
if loose, parallel between Perec and the narrator. Similarly, the "complete" part
plays with handwriting and typing, while the incomplete parts contain both typed
work and handwritten work as well as diagrams.
The novel then includes in its "unpublished form" all the reader need to read it as
the narrator reads Serval's mss in the completed part. See p. 119 "It's all there in
the opening lines." The incomplete parts are not layers, strata to be excavated to
figure out but boxes in boxes (see diagrams on pp. 145, 198, 199 that spatialize
both what the novel was / is / and would have been, assuming it was unfinished.
The multi-temporality of reading this in/complete novel force on the reader by the
novel's posthumous publication that announces but ignores the author's death or
its consequences of reediting or for reading the novel makes 53 Days a pretty
literally case of the not yet read as the not yet "unreadable" as writing between
the lines (p. 12, 56) and writing between the books (66). 53 Days is not a book.
It is and is not a complete book. It is several books, one ready to be published,
one to come that will never arrive, one that would never have been published had
the book been completed (part three--all the notes). It is a sort of parabook book
that allegorizes the conditions of its own posthumous publication, its editing as
"a book" like any other published book, that makes its reading a never to be
completed task, indeed makes it difficult to recognize how to read the book at all,
to determine whether it is finished or not, whether Perec suicided it, made
reading always a practice of suicitation, and also made reading it a question of
desire and ethics. How should we read it knowing its writing inscribes its own
author's writing himself to death? How do we want to read it? Do we want to
read it? Are we to read by assembling the parts? Should we reverse what the
editors have done? Should we decompose the book? Insist on reading it in its
prepublished, scattered form, on its enabling and blocking of its own
dissemination?
See "What do you know when you've read the novel to the end Nothing, except
that for quite unknown reasons Serval has been given the manuscript of a
detective story one of whose protagonists . . . has the same name as he does. .. .
53 Days is conducted on the basis of clues provided by the manuscript entitled
The Crypt. But when you see that, you see nothing" (250). The passage repeats
the same one on pp. 115-16. In that sense it is ideal as a point of departure to
read the book since it is a repetition. See also p. 97 and p. 112 for similar
remarks.
The title of the novel is in quotation marks because it cites a title in the novel that
refers to the time it took Stendahl to write The Charterhouse of Parma, 53 Days.
See the diagram on P. 154.
The list of titles in descending order or increasingly inner order is
“53 Days” by Perec”
53 Days by Serval
The Crypt
Le juge et l’assasin
Kca (Koala Code)
Thenarrator is redoubled
Truth swallowed by the cloak of fiction, p. 125
Some boxes have question marks in them.
We’re talking about a figural politics, an archival politics as opposed to producing
a positive discourse about what happened (which is what Vismann—you have to
have complete faith in treason, and you have to ignore the fact that the means of
production doesn’t conserve its encryption, and therefore opacity. It’s a sort of
domesticated Luhmann—conserving the enlightenment—Deconstruction is
second order—both god and bad..
Blank name p. 123
Unfinished sentencep. 120
p. 112 reconstituion repeats p. 106
“The investigation makes no headway.
The investigation makes no headway.” P. 107 These lines are also repeated.
Chapter twelve (cont)and Thirteen seem to be out of place. They are notes from
files, just like in part two. The typescript has ended. Yet the are not marked with
a separate title.
“I would be hooked by that missing chapter.” P. 100 repeated p. 204
narrator incriminates himself by taking the case—becomes the wrong man—
guilty , as in Kafka. p. 98
Book as a decoy to set up the narrator as the wrong man (98)
p. 170 White Exercise
Found on the Study Desk—this is the only file in “Drafts” that has a subtitle and
that relates information about the file, where it was found.
The editors also resist reading the text by normalizing it.
They supply a page of closure of their own. "The typescript ends here." (93)
not clear if this is from the French original or supplied by the translator.
Their list of additional documents is rather hilarious--either intentionally Perecian
(or Borgesian) or just unself-conscious listing of materials that really make little
sense. See the editor's commentary on pp. 129-30. The documents are
presented in "what appears to be their order of composition." (129)
The editors altered "the layout to allow for continuous reading" (130)
The French edition has six different facsimile pages
"In nearly all other respects this edition . . is a translation of the text published by
. . (130)
What does "nearly" mean? See the translator’s note on p. 26 where he explains
that he standardized the titles, took out brackets from the French edition while
adding his own, and supplied a few footnotes of his own.
This commentary has no title and is not listed in the book's table of contents.
That itself is not unusual, I suppose. What's odd is that this commentary is really
an intro and should go at the front of the novel (or so one might think). What
difference does it make to wait until the third part to talk about the text's status in
philological terms?
Looking at Fittknow’s book as being in dialogue with WB not as an instrument to
get to WB.
Fittkow begins with a telephone call to an individual, not an agency, and the
recipient; listener mishears it as a call about WB, when it is calls her beginning of
her story. So the story begins as a salvific narrative about WB which then fails to
deliver that salvific narrative—becoming a curious involution.Here is Blanchot on
the book and on the fragment in The Writing of the Disaster:
I return to the fragment: while it is never unique, still it has no external limit—the
outside toward which it falls is not its edge—and at the same time no internal
limitation (it is no hedgehog, rolled up and closed upon itself). And yet it is
something strict, not because of its brevity (it can be prolonged, like agony), but
through the tautness, the tightness that chokes to the breaking point: there are
always some links that have sprung (they are not missing). No fullness, no void.
(46)
Fittkow’s book has “Jewish Lives” as a subject heading on the copyright page,
and the back cover description says that she and her husband were both Jewish
even though her husband was a Protestant. There is a classification and
canonization of certain accounts here, just as the “scrolls of Auschwitz” canonize
more or less legible fragments. Is the document’s fragmentation, its resistance to
being read in whole (because part of it is missing or left untold) a condition of its
canonization?
the book Jewrassic Park and noticed that it begins by talking about the Jewish
Museum (by Liebeskind) in Berlin as a comedy, then as
a procedural ("Krimi"), then as a mystery novel.
Maybe do the detection fiction then with Perec in this chapter.
Foreword to Scrolls of Auschwitz the author, Ber Mark’s, wife “And yet he was
not given the time to complete his task due to his untimely death. It was I,
therefore, who was entrusted with its completion.” (xiii) “
Some of the Auschwitz-related material found in any or all of the archives is liable
to lead researchers astray.” (20)
French translation Des voixs des camps (scrolls of Auschwitz) ends with a
facsimile of a text by Zalamn L). The English translation includes a facsimile of
the book manuscript by Ber Mark, however. It also has the foreword by his wife.
So his manuscript becomes a kind of scroll as well.
[More Berlin CHildhood:
Mentions Robison Crusoe p. 145
Book as magic carpet, p. 147
Snowflake metaphor letters in “A Child Reading” Selected Writings, 1, 463
The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue.
When shall we actually write books like catalogues?
Vol 1, 457
The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when
the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his
books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would
then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of
commanding fingers.”
Vol. 1, 457
The card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing, and so presents
an astonishing counterpoint to the three dimensionality of script in its original
form as rune or knot notation.
“Attested Auitor Books” in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, Vol 1, 456
“Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning “attach”: you
attach five colors to the object.”
“A Glimpse into the Forgotten World of Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, vol
1, 435]
Link ash in Archive Fever to ash of Given Time
Paper Trails
Could mention correspondence between W Ben and Gretel over his papers, his
self-archiving, relate that all to Ray Johnson and Marina Abramovic as well as to
posthumous publication.
revise / reframe the WB chapter in terms of the work of art that commemorates
WB—the missing body / corpus/ manuscript returns as a work of art—uncanny
theology—Jewish and not Jewish. Self-archiving is the issue—papers ,
correspondence to Gretel, and so on. WB’s Archive (the book). Then missing
corpus, telephone, and so on.
To set up chapter four.
Even though chronology place regularity above permanence, it cannot prevent
heterogeneous, conspicuous fragments form remaining with in it.
Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire A lyric Poet
in the era of High Capitalism, 144
The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth century brought
forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt
movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps. This development is
taking place in many areas. One case in point is the telephone, where lifting of a
receiver has taken the place of the steady movement that used to be required to
crank the older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting,
pressing, and the like, the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest
consequences, A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited
period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.
Walter Benjamin, Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire A lyric Poet
in the era of High Capitalism, (131-132)
Also the posthuman—the posthumous precedes the posthuman.
Include in place of the WB manuscript chapter a chapter on the threshold of
publications: Lost manuscripts, lost lives—from asylums, to art books, to
performance art. That will set up art in the train. Pose the art in the train chapter
as both a question of boxing but also of reversible reading.
Montaigne begins “Of Friendship” by taking about being bequeathed the library
and papers of la Boetie, who published only an early work entitled Servitude
Voluntaire “rebaptized” (135) Le Contre Un. He ends by explaining why he won’t
publish his friends works, because of religious controversies have led to their
publication of or inflammatory purposes. Since la Boetie would have been
opposed to this use of his works, Montaigne says he will publish in exchange
something else by la Boetie that is light. The next essay is an intro to la Boetie’s
29 sonnets, but he says they can be found elsewhere and does not include them,
nor does nay supposed edition to have been printed ever been found according
to a footnote by Donald Frame. (145)
“now in exchange for this serious work, I shall substitute another, produced in
that same season of his life, gayer and more lusty.” (144)
this friendship possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sovereignty cannot
be doubled.” (141)
Still, it is far from being the best that he could do; and if at the more mature age
when I knew him, he had adopted a plan such as mine, of putting his ideas in
writing, we should see many rare things which would bring us very close to the
glory of antiquity; for particularly in the matter of natural gifts, I know of no one
who can be compared with him. But nothing of his has remained except this
treatise—and that by chance, and I think he never saw it after it left his hands—
and some observations on that Edict of January, made famous by our civil wars,
and which will perhaps yet find their place elsewhere. That was all I could
recover of what he left—I, to whom in his will, with such loving recommendation,
with death in his throat, he bequeathed his library and his papers,--except for the
little volume of his works which I have published. (135-36)
Because I have found his work has since been brought to light, and with evil
intent, b those who seek to disturb and change the state of our government
without worrying whether they will improve it , and because they have mixed up
his work with some of their own concoctions, I have changed my mind about
putting it in her. And so that the memory of he author may not be damaged in
the eyes of those who could not knows his opinions and actions close at hand,
only by way of an exercise, as a common themes hashed over in a thousand
places in books.” (144)
But he had another maxim sovereignty imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit
most religiously to the laws under which he was born. There never was a better
citizen, or one more devoted the tranquility of his country, or more hostile to the
commotions and innovations of his time. He would much rather had used his
ability to suppress them than to give them material that would excite them
further” (144)
Detecting / Narrating the Archive: (Not) Reading Books as Things, Storing
Persons as Archivists
WB's Archive might be a useful closer. For us, the most interesting thing is the
way the editor, at the end of the intro, "saves" the archive by depathologizing it
("care" or "careful"" are the crucial words--nothing OCD here), and "use" and
"productive" are terms of use--the archive is not there to be stored and
safeguarded but to be used. Was thinking we should read "The Storyteller" too to
talk about the relation between media and narrative in relation to the archiving of
documents as stored things. So there’s no reading of WB as archivist (or not
much of one) and no reading of the book as a reproduction of the archive,
offering its classifications and groupings rather than trying to approximate WB's
own. the pun implies a a double reading of "archive" as in the archive of
documents we now have that WB had dispersed around the world and also WB's
own archive of his own works and correspondence with others (and photos,
newspaper clippings, postcards, etc). So there is are shelving operation
happening in the table of contents. The editor also notes that WB made
photographs or transcripts of various mss that he then sent to friends to store
safely. So he turned people into external hard drives. The postal system
allowed for multi-media reproductions of the "auratic" mss, which really doesn't
exist. It's like he has already gone digital. But the main thing is that he sends the
copies to be stored, not to be read, and he stores his own scraps, papers, proofs,
etc in cardboard boxes, in desk drawers, in cupboards, and son. So the spaces
of the home, whether designed to store writing or not, all nearly all turned into
shelves. The editor doesn't "read" WB's own writing process involves storing his
mss as he wrote them, turning friends into archivists who store his mss for him.
Writing becomes a strange sort of auto-archiving in which one gets to catalogue
one's own works in eccentric, personal ways. I 'm thinking the Saxl essay on
Warburg's library would be a nice bookend to this book (opposite material
circumstances--Warburg is rich while WB is poor), yet same bizarre end result.
Warburg's library is not of immediate use to researchers because he organized it
so idiosyncratically. What Agamben says about Holderlin's poetry becoming apoetic (late Holderlin) could apply to Aby Warburg as well, given his nervous
breakdown and his unreadable Msynome Atlas.--reshevling becomes a collage.
Psychological classifications would be as undecidable as other kinds of
classifications (we could make this point as we transition into "Books by the
Mentally Ill." In that esay, reshelving is a proves of division (some books belong,
others don't) and redivision that leads to a new unity, a library within the library.
Yet that division itself may be readable only to Benjamin since the shelves do not
have labels attached to them. Some of the documents in WB's Archive are also
inventories, perhaps readable as constellations of a sort (or as just lists)--to
which extent can we read WB in Benjamin terms?. This in addition to the way
the editor reads and doesn't read the document, sometimes attempting to
produce a print version that looks like the facsimile, and other times not crossing
out words or lines, never putting "X" in, never comparing directly front and back
sides of a page.
This intro would also expand on the archive fever of the previous discussion in
chapter one, madness being a symptom of the breakdown between mechanical
auto-archiving and personal auto-archiving as well as other archiving), and the
breakdown between being an archivist and being an archive--WB being the
archivist who archives himself as his writings. This would make Arendt view of
WB as "unclassifiable" more concrete and more sophisticated since the
resistance to classification comes out of manifold ways of (self)classifying his
collection / archive of writings.
The other thing the title covers up is that the documents are not in fact in WB' s
archive (the title implies a unity of place , person, and property). Some of the
documents are stamped Th. Adornno archive. We could also pit it against
Agamben's last chapter in The Time That Remains and Agamben's use of a
facsimile of a WB manuscript page to turn a text into an image, which he then
doesn't read--he turns into a detective and follows the clues to Paul.
He gets all Saint Paul code on WB. Versus the editor’s references to Wb as
detective and WB’s own comments on detective fiction and collaborating with
Brecht.
Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to
make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of
reading).
we can work Weber in, just before the toys, to use him as support (something
good
rhetorically)
In other words, you have given us not only a breakthrough connection between
infrastructures of memory and infrastrategies of reading by connecting the camp
and the storage unit as you did but some very nice cards to lay down in order
clarify the importance of the toy--and also to elucidate WB perhaps even
better than does Weber as well as a totally brilliant de Man card to play (the
Uboat, which we can turn into a U-Turn Boat)-. Sorry about that last one.
Addressing the S/helf
Have you encountered Martin Gumpert over there? He is someone whom I knew
during my internment. Since he is going to publish his autobiography, I asked
myself whether I will by any chance appear in it.2
2 In his autobiography, Hoelle im Paradies [Hell in Paradie] (Stockholm.1939), p.
54, Gumpert write the following about Benjamin while describing his friends from
the time of the youth movement” ‘One of us, the most gifted, is an émigré
philosopher in Paris and has become a Marxist.’ (276; 277; 278
Notes and dossier , p. 28
Letter July 10, 1933
One the pictures enclosed you see me–thirty five years later—in front of a palm
tree. And even if it is not a house palm, the photo on which you now see it was
taken for no less external reasons than the masquerade of the childhood picture,
for it is a passport photo that I had taken in Mallorca.
Note 3, “The passport for which the photograph was taken has not survived.
Letter 12, 21-25
“The only project worth mentioning is a detective novel, 8 which I shall only write,
however, if I can be sure that it will turn out well. “23
“8. Sketched in GS, 7 [2], pp. 846-50. It is likely that the document entitled
“Materialien zu einem Kriminalroman’ [Materials for a Detective novel] was
written around that time (see also letter no. 34, note 11),” 25.
Letter 34, 63-65
I have been speaking to Bertold about the theory of the detective novel, and
perhaps these reflections will be followed by an experimental project at some
point.11
p. 64
11. Brecht and Benjamin were planning to write a detective novel or a series of
them. The notes and sketches towards a series of detective novels found after
Brecht’s death and published under the title Tatsachenreihe [Series of Facts]
(see Brecht, Werke, vol. 17: Prosa 2: Romanfraggente und Romanentwuerfe
[Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1989], p. 443-45) contain two longer episodes
from a novel, for which a scheme of chapters was found written in Benjamin’s
hand (see GS 7 [2], pp. 847 ff). The scheme and the following list of motifs (see
ibid., pp. 848-50) were probably written in Paris in the autumn of 1933.
p. 65
Mentions taking mescaline p. 106 (Mexican Indians)
WB’s “bare life”:
My wish for you is that you might settle down in the not-too-distant future, without
this constant tormenting worry about your bare existence, without a few pleasant
friends nearby, who could certainly include me, and the true success and
recognition of your work.
p.42
the begins noting that WB forget to give GA his new address.
Lost letter:
It would be a shame—though no tragedy—if it {WB’s letter to GA] had been lost.
For it also contained a description of my first impressions after arriving”
(198)
Constant references to books—requested to be sent, acknowledgements of
books that have arrived, frustration at not being able to get the books he needs,
etc, 22, 61, 63, 66, 77, 84, 99, 107, 134, 164, 170, 213, 215
and to libraries
“the library he is said to have here makes him gain prestige quite considerably”
(24); 57
working in the Biblotechque Nationale (71)
request for a pad of “white MK paper” (he’s run of it and wants to “preserve the
external uniformity of the extensive, meticulous manuscript”” of his PassagenWerk / Arcades project so he asks Gretel for a pad, “only the pad, no envelopes.
I will send you a sample page with this delivery.” (71).
“Gretel Karplus’s reply of 15 January, in which she complains that Benjamin
failed to enclose the promised sample of MK paper, proves that the letter
reached her.” (72)
WB’s notes in the margins of GA’s letter:
“Cardboard boxes . . Treatment of the library . . . Cleaning the library” (57)
and to WB’s archive:
“Your archive1 has meanwhile landed in the Prinzenallee . . . .
p. 26
1. Benjamin’s collection of his own manuscripts, typescripts and printed
essays. p. 27
“I would long since have answered your letter, but I was hoping daily for the
sample of M-K paper, which was unfortunately not enclosed in your last letter. I
want to get to to you as quickly as possible, as this is after al the only thing I can
do at the moment to support the writing of the arcades study.” (72)
WB describes his own letter as a model
“You can feel what ‘an island’ means, and let this greeting of mine glide into your
hands like a small model of it.”
You can imagine that current events are prompting me to seek naturalization
most vigorously. As ever with such matters, one is suddenly faced with difficulties
one had not reckoned with; at the moment they consist in acquiring a vast
number of papers. All this is consuming a great deal of time. . . . even if ere
simply to contribute a further dossier to the files to the Ministry of Justice.
(212)
GA on secrecy and names:
“I, at least, love a trace of secrecy, and I find it marvelous to hide in the names
reserved almost only for us.”
p. 41
Adorno published an essay under the pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler” and Ernest
Bloch wrote telling him he hated it (without knowing that Adorno wrote it!).
p. 134 GA calls Bloch’s letter “a bare-faced letter” (134)
Note 3. Benjamin published an essay “under the name C. Conrad . . . The fact
that Benjamin refers to this pseudonym suggests a veiled request for Greta
Karplus to procure the manuscript of ‘Berliner Kindheit” as well as the proofs of
his own publications . . . the only authentic texts.” (53)
WB and GA regularly refer to people using one initial. “ask B” (112)
This is just after she says “we should always stick to ‘Du’ in our private letters” (p.
40). They addressed their letters to pseudonyms: “Detlef” for WB and “Felizitas”
for GA.
“I am still without a passport” (77) letter by GA
“Wahl reported that according to [Henri] Bergson, the railways are to blame for
everything.” 219
Letter from G about NYC: “let us hope that this hiding-place will remain for awhile
yet” (215)
GA as storage unit, hand holder / signature as I.D.:
And I will not have peace of mind until I know that the rest of the journals with
things of mine, which I might require at any moment during my work, are in your
hands. But this should not make you fear that you will often be pestered with
requests for deliveries. There seems to be a possibility, rather, of having an
acquaintance of mine who is coming here send me the things you listed for me
as well as the journals, which my girl will hopefully soon bring you. His proof of
identity will consist in the other half of my signature, one of which I enclose.6
p.22
6. Unknown. The note with one half of the signature has not survived.
p. 25 (written while WB lived in Ibiza).
GA as distributor (by hand):
Is there really no possibility of producing an extended German version of the
reproduction study? I would be very happy to copy it out, so that I could at least
make some contribution to its dissemination if it is only in the form of hand copies
passed from reader to reader” (214)
WB describes a “precious fountain pen” he is using to write his letter as “the relic
of a great romance with a chamberlain of the Pope. (63)
“my Nansen passport” (58)
“Archive” as a keyword, p. 62
“constitute his entire archive. He remains a fool.” (52)
teddy “does not know about our ‘DU.’” (62)
guardian spirit 63
“you would know it is not lost” (63)
I have tried, through a number of official papers, to keep the option of a
withdrawal to my asylum here—which is becoming increasingly difficult for
Germans to enter—open at all costs.” (52)
“I am certainly not one for exaggerated secrecy” (142) in reference to GAs
“sending joint letters” to WB
“I ask you very urgently to destroy this letter immediately, it is intended purely for
you and it would be a disaster if anyone else laid hands on it. P. 142
GA also worked in a bookshop and tried to sell WB’s books, but not one sold.
“Nor have I sold any of your books yet” (62)
p. 62, 64
My sister, 4 who has been released from the camp, is here-in a rather precarious
state.” (289)
4. Dora Benjamin had been a prisoner in the camp at Gurs.
p. 290
Apparently Lisa Fittkow ever knew this.
GA as trash collector / archivist of TA, living a bare life:
Your books will be sent off soon the next few days; I enclose a copy of the list.1
Please send the Kierkegaard book back soon. . . . We have to find a space for
furniture from two different cities, as well as vast numbers of books, sheet music
and gramophone records in what is ultimately a rather small apartment. And then
worst of all: Teddie’s unsorted papers, 4 boxes of rubbish.” (240)
This passage could go in chapter one, if only as a footnote.
1. It does appear to have survived. (241)
2. The Adornos had moved into the apartment at 290 Riverside Drive on 15
August. (241)
The carbon copy had slipped while Adorno was writing on the back of the paper,
so that the mirror image of the text on the back imprinted itself between some of
the lines on the front.” (234)
3. this letter has not survived.” (230)
4. 14 These have not survived. (226
5. “My books” as keyword (216)
. . . in a future that is hopefully not too distant, flow into the bed of our shared
presence” (154) (Strange ménage a trois metaphor)
“the duty of the book as a whole.” (15)
The dialectical image does not replicate the dream . .. . a connection still needs
to be developed, a dialectic conquered: that between the image and
awakening.” (155)
Book publication (96) and the Chamber of Literature (run by the Nazis).
“I do not have my papers yet” (97)
John B. Thompson, Printing in the Digital Age
Buzz Spector: Unpacking My Library (1995), MOCA Installation
One of the more interesting show publications in MOCA's history, Unpacking My
Library's catalog is a 12 foot, accordion folded book showing an installation view
of Spector's piece. This installation consists of: All the books in the artist's library,
arranged in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest on a single shelf
in a room large enough to hold them. While short on text, a brief quote from
Walter Benjamin and the artist's biography, it is still long, quite literally, on
content.
we can get to Perec’s 53 Days by turning to Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.”
Given our interest in WB and our interest in boxes, it would seem that we have to
deal with “Unpacking.”
I think the essay makes a really interesting comparison with Perec’s novel 53
Days, which turns a novel into a serial sequence (days) and ends short. WB
starts his essay as a story “I am unpacking my books is the first sentence, written
the first person and present tense, already impossible since he is writing about
unpacking, not writing and unpacking at the same time, and then ends, or nearly
ends by saying he “ I am down to the last half of the last box.” The essay
linearizes itself by novelizing itself, turning the essay into a story that ends at a
time later than when it began. But the temporality of the unpacking story is
marked only by the emptying of boxes, and the number of boxes and books is
unspecified. We don’t know how far into the unpacking is when WB begins. So
there is a sequence, but it’s times are unspecified and measured in terms of the
non-serialized number of books, which he says earlier he measures in inches
(the number of books he has on his book are measured not by the number of
books but by their physical dimensions after being shelved together. Collecting
involves an abstraction of he books from space and time in terms of their
measurement. Anti-linear achronic kinds of time keep pulling against the linear
time in the way that WB describes collecting as begin about order and disorder.
Some of the dialectical sentences also enact time reversals, like the one about
irreplaceable books he has that were once acquirable. The logical sequence
would be that they were once available when he bough them but not have
become even more valuable because they are irreplaceable. But the meaning of
“irreplaceable” only becomes clear after you read the sentence a second time.
In addition to the weirdness already present in the story frame (which seems
deceptively clear and reassuring),
Property and possessions belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people
with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a
strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote
stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to
me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
This was a militant age, when no book was allowed to enter without the
certification that I had not read it. Thus I might never have acquired a library
extensive enough to be worthy of the name we, if there had not been an inflation.
Suddenly the emphasis shifted; books acquired real value, or, at any rate, were
difficult to obtain. At least this is how it looked in Switzerland. At the eleventh
hour I sent my first major book orders from there and in this way was able to
secure such irreplaceable items as Der Blaue Ritter and Bachofen’s Sage von
Tanaquil, which could still be obtained from the publishers at that time.
I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient.
So here travel links to the transient to transience (sentience as disappearance).
A real library . . . is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time
uniquely itself.
One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book
to which might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look because he
found it lonely and abandoned on the marketplace and bought it to give it its
freedom—the way a prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on the
shelves.
A perfect line for us to return to reshelving—acquisition is liberation form
enslavement, but freedom in turn becomes a kind of incarceration (as in Renais’s
Toute la memoire du monde).
The story of the purchase of Balzac’s le peau de chagrin and Ritter’s Fragmente
are a stories within the story of unpacking that become linear, following one after
the other. So the essay moves between novelization (linearization), conceptual
abstraction of time of this novelization, and novelization (a fairly straightforward
linear anecdotes) working I against the abstract toward the concrete.
WB’s description of the second book he bought .
After this had been repeated several times, I gave up all hope of acquiring the
book which I was most interested in that day. It was the rare Fragmenete aus
dem Nachlass eines Jungen Physikers [Posthumous Fragments of a Young
Physicist] which Johann Wilhelm Ritter published in two volumes at Heidelberg
in1810. This work has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its
preface, in which the author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an
obituary for his supposedly deceased unnamed friend—with whom he is really
identical—as the most important sample of personal prose of German
Romanticism.
The book he wants most is a book with an uncanny narrative structure, the live
author doubling himself as a dead object.
This kind of doubling is implicit in WB’s description of books: they are not
singular, but plural.
WB’s discussion of the fringe areas of libraries, the stuff on the shelves that is not
made up of books, is central to WB’s way of metaphorical animation of the
library:
There is no living library that does not harbor a number of book like creations
from fringe areas of the library, which become images through metaphor
(“prismatic”). They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph
books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become
attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or
typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the
prismatic fringes of a library.
So the “living library” “harbors” a kind of bare life zone of documents within to
which the collector has become attached. But the library needs a fringe, a
prismatic fringe, a division between books and sort of books, in order to live.
These documents are reproductions but not copies. He writes earlier about the
fate of the books that takes him back to where we see him in “Books by the
Mentally Ill”:
Habent sua fata libelli: these words may have been intended as a general
statement about books. So books like the Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and
The Origin of Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin
saying differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their
fates. And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with
him, with his own collection.
Here we find an early moment of the library as uncanny space (as we discuss it
in the first chapter). The difference between the earlier Mentally Ill essay and this
one is now that it’s not the books that are encountered that matter but he copies,
the doubles of the boo (as if the book had only one copy). This division is later
subdivided between copies and reproductions in other media (transcriptions),
facsimiles).
Along with the military metaphors, we can connect WB’s comments on children in
“Unpacking” to his essays on toys, the way children renew what they collect and
also destroy it:
I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an
book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles wit the
element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a
hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of
renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of details [I
call this destruction, like he toy train]—the whole range of childlike modes of
acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world—
that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and
that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than
the acquirer of luxury editions.
There is a kind of salvific aspect of WB’s take on collecting—old age renews, like
childhood, the new renews the old—but it’s not a Christian mode of redemption,
for sure. It’s not a preservation fantasy. The last lines seem especially “Jewish”
(mystical) in that the library becomes a hidden hiding place out side of which WB
remains out of plain sight.
For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that
for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—
ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects, Not that
they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his
dwellings with books as building stones, before you, and now he is going to
disappear inside, as if only fitting.
“the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it it loses its personal owner.”
It follows that collecting is a process not only of personalization but of its loss,
hence of depersonalization since collecting is on its way out, “this passion is
behind the times”
Attachment isles to books than to the extra book / book like documents on the
fringes of the library.
Finally, WB’ mixes childhood and old age (the collector is like a child and like an
old person) and also fights a kind of non-violent war. Military metaphors start
coming thick and fast—acquiring is a tactical sphere” etc.
In disappearing, WB / collector does exactly what Arendt describes as being as a
person—he evades classification. You can’t reshelve him—he resists being
read.
No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of
things and men classes and prescribed typos. This necessary classification is
the basis for all discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary
notwithstanding the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always
turned out to be sui generis. Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lost of the
unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor
introduces a new genre that lends itself to further classification. The point is that
in society everybody must answer the question of who he is—which his role is
and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not
because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be
meaningless. . . .
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations, 3
Thanks to the recent publication of his letters, the story of Benjamin’s life may
now be sketched in broad outline; and it would be tempting indeed to tell as a
sequence of such piles of debris since there is hardly any question that be
himself viewed it in that way.
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations, 7
Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority;
insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter
Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority that occurred
in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new
ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master. . .
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations, 38
The archive and tradition: “For tradition puts the past in order, not just
chronologically but first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from
the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, and which is obligatory and
relevant from the mass of opinions and data. The collectors passion, on the
other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not such
because it is a passion as it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—
something that is classifiable—but is inflamed by its ‘genuineness’, its
uniqueness something that defies systematic classification. Therefore, while
tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences.”
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations, 44
Recalled that the book Le Corbusier and the Occult and a chapter on he index
card and generally wanted to look at it because I suspected Spieker caricatures
Le C. Yes, i was right, but, more useful for us than my being right (happy as I am
to be, or think I am) is that the author of Le Corbusier and the Occult talks about
Le C archiving himself at the end of his career (business dried up). The
argument is that Le C was into occult symbology that became recognizable to
Masons (as Le C derived it from eighteenth ct stuff) and was then proscribed by
Vichy. Le C rebranded his work patriotic and then got recognition by the
Gaullists after II and by the Resistance even during the Occupation.
Kind of a weird French version of National Treasure (or vice versa)--in National
Treasure, the U.S. Constitution (the actual document) has the code to the
treasure in the film (the code is written on the back and all the Founding Fathers
were Masons).
Jo Steffens, Ed.), Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books (2009)
What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the
intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What
does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture?
Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal libraries of twelve
of the world’s leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance
of books to their careers and lives.
Photographs of bookshelves—displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic
organizational schemes, and the individual touches that make a bookshelf one’s
own—provide an evocative glimpse of their owner’s personal life. Each architect
also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to
theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature
and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of
architecture should read.
An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the
arts of reading and collecting.
Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books features the libraries of:
Stan Allen
Henry Cobb
Liz Diller & Ric Scofidio
Peter Eisenman
Michael Graves
Steven Holl
Toshiko Mori
Michael Sorkin
Bernard Tschumi
Todd Williams & Billie Tsien
The Dis/Appearance of Reading
the Dream of Book-Keeping
Peter Eisenman’s Recommended Titles:
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
William Faulkner, Light in August
About the Author
Jo Steffens is director of Urban Center Books and editor of Block by Block: Jane
Jacobs and the Future of New York City.
Product Details
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (November 30, 2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Unpacking-My-Library-ArchitectsTheir/dp/0300158939/ref=pd_sim_b_4
Close(d) Reading
We take up the question of reading as the resistance by readers to reading,
or what we called “closed(d) reading,” specifically in relation to treating questions
of cultural graphology as questions about things, things that have an order and
irreducible materiality, even if that materiality takes the form of dust. We insist
are being read even when critics, adopting an anthropological pose, think they
are merely describing and inventorying things, placing them in a sentimental
narrative that preserves their use(less) value.viii Things have to be staged, and
that means that the thing always becomes a topos with a topography in need of
being read, not used, and reading as close/d, reading as resistance to reading, to
boxing up and boxing in reading in order to dispose of it. As a useless thing, the
toy is an exemplary instance of toposography, crucial because the toy comes
with orientations and directions attached for use (and allows for the possibility of
misuse, arguably the definition of play). Here we follow Walter Benjamin’s lead
in his four essays on toys and child’s play.ix
In “The Cultural History of Toys,” a review of a book on a history of toys,
Benjamin expands his remarks in the earlier essay on the importance size has in
this history, but then begins talking about architectural scale rather than the size
of the times, moving from the exhibition space of objects on display to the
domestic space of use and storage: “It was only [when] children acquired a
playroom of their own and a cupboard in which they could keep books separately
from those of their parents. . . the modern quartos . . are designed to enable
children to disregard [their mother’s] absence. The process of emancipating the
toy begins. The more industrialization penetrates, the more it decisively eludes
the control of the family and becomes increasingly alien to children and also to
parents” (114). The change of space requires that the historian of toys move
beyond a classification of toys and to “consider the true face of the child at play”
and “overcome the basic error” of thinking that “the imaginative content of a
child’s toy is what determines his plaything” (115). For Benjamin, the exact
opposite is true: “A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse;
he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and
so turns into a robber or a policeman. . . . Imitation (we may conclude) is at
home in the playing, not in the plaything” (115; 116).
The double space and double time of the toy as object corresponds, in our
view, to two moments in critical reading held in tension: first, we have the
productive moment of building, construction, reconstruction, description of the
object on display; then we have the moment of play, destruction, critique. As
Benjamin transforms the toy it into a discursive topos, the toy becomes a trope
for reading as habit forming. And as Benjamin moves from display space to
domestic space, he also moves into Freudian territory, with the toy becoming
uncanny, animated and emancipated, not at home except when being played
with as the child becomes something else, human or animal, law-abiding or law-
breaking.x Unlike Freud, Benjamin frames repetition compulsion as a question of
habit rather than the achievement of mastery and hence closure that may be
narrated in anecdotal form. Benjamin ends his essay with a paragraph we will
quote in full in which Benjamin shifts from play to habit and elaborates on a
distinction between childish play and childlike play [that bears on close/
reading—spell this out]:
For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating,
sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the
struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery
rhyme. Habit enters into life as a game, and in habit, even in its
most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits
are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have
congealed and become deformed to the point of being
unrecognizable. And without knowing it, even the most arid pedant
plays in a childish rather than childlike way; the more childish his
play, the more pedantic he is. He does not recollect his own
playing; only to him would a book like this [under review] have
nothing to say. But when a modern poet says that everyone has a
picture for which he would be wiling to give the whole world, how
many people would not look for it in an old box of toys? (120)
Benjamin employs the parallel oppositions between childish and childlike, pedant
and poet to bring out has a double meaning of habit: on the way hand, play
produces habits involve “deadening” discipline and socialization of the child, or
what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing process.” On the one hand, play
intensifies and intoxicates, bringing out the positive sense of habit, if still stained
by a residual connotation of pathology, as habit forming, intoxicating, addictive;
habits have “rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves” (120).
Whereas mastery through repetition for Freud amounts to the disappearance
and then reappearance of the toy and its ability to function as a substitute object
for the missing mother, habit for Benjamin involves the destruction of the toy, the
train with the catastrophe car and its reconstruction; the ideal toy is the toy that
can be blown up, then reassembled so that it may be blown up again, and so on.
By thinking through Freud, Benjamin manages to revise repetition such that
playing with a toy allows a negative, critical moment when staging it as a thing to
be thought on: disabling and enabling are part of a dynamic, a circuit, or
configuration, that compulsively continues, allowing for its storage in an old box
that recollects old things with memories attached to them.xi
The toy is an exemplary instance of toposography as for close/dreading not
only because any reading worth the name is by definition compulsive, as Freud
has taught us, but because it allows to specify more clearly and exactly why
close reading fails, how close reading of things (and texts) becomes close(d)
reading.xii
Susan Buck-Morss, “Researching Walter Benjamin's Passgen Werk,” in Deep
Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, Ed. Ingrid Schaffner, Ingrid
Shaffner, Matthias Winzen (P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 1989), 222-25. xiii
Buck-Morss has two photos of the Bibliotheque Nationale, one of the “work
room” that is also shot in the end of Renais’ Toute la memoire du monde. Her
essay is a perfect work to use to critique the thinging of the archive, the art thing
of the archive. She takes about a postcard from Hitler’s mother as a thing.
“things mater.” Storage is naively about protecting (the card could be become a
neoNazi fetish!!!” OMG!!!!) like raiders of the lost arc(hive). So we would be
inverting her argument about documents / research as things rather than words,
sowing that the thinginess of texts has to be read. That matter does not matter as
such but only insofar as it is read. He also engages the kinds of paper that WB
used.
Here we can stalk about the paper as itself not just a matter of material,
anymore than his microscript is indifferent versus Goethe’s flourishes in his
calligraphy. The paper already is an artistic material. WB , like an artist, is
already making selections, decisions, exercising sovereignty over the subjectile
of his writings, using handwriting and typewriting, experimenting, playing.
Contrast her account of the archive to the book Walter B’s Archive, it’s WBian
disorganization, it’s use of facsimiles that render the text readable without turning
it into an image, as does Agamben in TheTime that Remains but turn it into a
work of art. Compare his postcards in the WB’s Archive to Hitler postcard
mentioned by Buck-Morss.
Robert Walser, The Microscripts Susan Bernofsky (Translator), Walter Benjamin
(Contributor)
“Benjamin gehoert zu den Papiersarbeitern. Die Arbeit am Manuskript war ihm
koeperlich elabbares Denken.
--Ermut Wizila “’Verzetttle Schreiberi’: Walter Benjamins Archiv,” in Topographie
der Erinnerug,
The German article on WB’s archive is all about how different collections were
gathered together gradually from 1940 to 1985 into one collection in the
Academy of Art.xiv
Staging Things, Telling Toy Stories
“In the twenties he was apt to
offer philosophical reflections as
he brought forth a toy for his
son.”
--Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 47 (cited
on p. 73 as an epigraph)
We are not taking about (pseudo)autobiography as a personal pathology of a
particular author, then, but an effect or, more precisely, a “de/f/fect” in narrative
when using the library or other archive as a database to process scattered
materials through a filing system and then assemble them into a unified, linear
form. In her book Files: Law and Media Technology, Cornelia Visman comments
on problems German citizens faced gaining access to their the Stasi files (the
East German secret police) when these files were released shortly after the
reunification of Germany in 1989. “The right of access to one’s records,” she
writes, allows one to use the Stasi files “for purposes of self-enlightenment in
much the same way as keeping and reading a diary.” But, she quickly adds, this
apparently neat equivalence between a autobiographical diary one writes and a
biography written and recorded by the state creates an insurmountable problem
of producing the complete story: because a clerk reads one’s file and decides
which parts may be read or not by the person who requested the file, effectively
tampering with it, the German Government, Viswan writes, fueled “the suspicion
that the legible file is nothing but an inferior secondary text lacking the truly
important pages. It does not contain the whole life. . . . one’s own story turns out
to be illegible, something that can only be found in the complete file.” The file
became, in the view of the person reading her of his possibly redacted file, an
envelope that “attract[ed] all kinds of phantasms” (156).xv
The Stammer und Drang of Materiality: Staging, Stuttering, and Sticking
Our close(d) reading of things is not closed off, either from history or from
politics; rather, closed reading rethinks not as open resistance or of opening up
as resistance but as reading readers as resistors. As our central trope for
things, toys provide children with no prophylactic against militarism, nationalism,
and patriotism, as Benjamin’s contemporary German-Jewish philosopher and
satirist Salomo Friedlaender, wistfully imagines. Instead, the toy and toy box are
our preferred metaphors for the resistance of things and their readings in that the
thing comes together and apart, more or less securely and reliably attached,
wrapped, tied, locked or sealed in a box or envelope of some sort. We are
interested in the relation between storage and story. As Walter Benjamin,
observes while discussing in “Demonic Berlin” the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann,”
there s a relation between finding things and telling stories: “For what purpose
did Hoffman write histories? Needless to say, he did not have deliberate aims in
mind. But we can doubtless read the tales as if he did have some. And these
aims can be none other than physiognomic ones: the desire to show that this
dull, sober, enlightened, commonsensical Berlin was full of things calculated to
stimulate a storyteller--things that were to be found lurking not only in its
medieval corners, remote streets, and dreary houses, but also its active citizens
of all classes and districts, if only you knew how to track down such things and
look for them in the right ways.”xvi In this genetic criticism of Hoffmann’s Tales,
there is no direct link between story and thing: indeed, we move from calculation
to a strategy of detection (tracking down) that cannot be programmed or taught:
you have to know how to look in the right ways, not just know the right places
where valuable things can be found.
(Thread)bare Life
As a result of the thing like a toy being in transit, taken in and out of a box,
narrative threads about it may be generated. These stories do not always end up
in the form of collected, unified works of fiction, however. The narrative threads
may get lost instead tying up the thing or text into bound book lying, as it were on
a table of contents. In the case of literary theory and historicist criticism, a
biographical or autobiographical anecdote offered in the middle of a philosophical
argument deflect that argument, causing it to collapse, diverting us into
stupefaction. The narrative “thread” becomes a trope, a thing that also needs to
be read since its very metaphoric function of providing closure is that prevents it
from functioning as a the means of securing closure. Again, we turn to Paul de
Man for a wonderfully instructive example of threading as unraveling. In the
transcript of the that ensued after he delivered his essay on Walter Benjamin’s
“Task of the Translator” at Cornell University, Niel Hertz asks de Man about his
discussion of a passage concerning the problem of translation presented through
the examples of the German words “Brot” (bread) and “Wein” (wine). De Man
writes:
This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of
language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction,
in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of
meaning it. In the words Brot and pain, what is meant is the same,
but the way of meaning is not. This difference in the way of
meaning permits the word Brot to mean something other to a
German than what the word pain means to a Frenchman, so that
these words are not interchangeable for them; in fact, they strive to
exclude each other.
p. 257
So far, de Man’s exposition and argument are clear enough; the example of Brot
makes concrete the argument concerning Benjamin’s distinction between what
and how something is meant. But Hertz asks a series of questions about this
passage and about de Man’s desire to “hold on” to the word “’inhuman,’ that like
the Sublime, a singular noun, cover[s] a series of failed apprehensions” (95). De
Man interjects a series of “Yahs” in response, leading Hertz to say “It’s that
transition I’m puzzled by, how you get from what's really a contingent
impossibility—to reconstruct the connotations of Brot—to a major terms, like the
‘inhuman’” (95). De Man responds by confessing, with good humor, “Well, you’re
quite right. I was indulging myself, you know, it was long, and I was very aware of
potential boredom, felt the need for an anecdote, for some relief, and Benjamin
gives the example of pain and Brot, and perhaps you shouldn’t . . . whenever you
give an example you lose, as you know, what you want to say.” xvii What Hertz
calls a problem of “transition” occurs when De Man personalizes the problem of
translating Brot at rather great and humorous length. We quote the passage in
full:
How are we to understand this discrepancy between “das
Gemeinte” and “Art des Meinens,” between dire and vouloir –dire?
Benjamin’s example is the German word Brot and the French word
pain. To mean “bread,” when I need to name bread, I have the
word Brot, so that the way in which I mean is by using the word
Brot. The translation will reveal a fundamental discrepancy
between the intent to name Brot and the word Brot itself in its
materiality, a device of meaning. If you hear Brot in this context of
Hoelderlin, who is so often mentioned in this text, I hear Brot und
Wein necessarily, which is the great Hoederlin text that is very
much present in this—which in French becomes pain et vin. “Pain
et vin” is what you get for free in a restaurant, in a cheap restaurant
where it is still included, so pain et vin has a different connotation
from Brot und Wein. It brings to mind the pain, francais, baguette,
ficelle, batard, all those things—[now words have become things] I
now hear on Brot, “bastard.” This upsets the stability of the
quotidian. I was very happy with the word Brot, which I hear as a
native because my native language is Flemish and you say brood,
just like in German, but I have to think that Brot [brood] and pain
are the same thing, I get very upset. It is all right in English
because “bread” is close enough to Brot [brood], despite the idiom
“bread” for money, which has its problems. But the stability of my
quotidian, of my daily bread, the reassuring quotidian aspects of the
word “bread,” daily bread, is upset by the French word “pain.” What
I mean is upset by the way in which I mean—the way in which it is
pain, the phoneme, the term pain, which has its set of connotations
which take you in a completely different direction.xviii
Though de Man doesn’t say so, his turn to the personal is arguably unavoidable.
De Man had already told an anecdote about Derrida teaching a French
mistranslation of the essay and gone over some astonishing mistakes made by
the French and American translators of Benjamin’s essay.
A philosophical problem always comes when the metaplasmic verbal play
gets too hard and generates an anecdote about the play overwhelming the
sense. Language becomes the thing / gathering that distracts or which causes
the argument to lose itself. Yet this play also redirects: far from stopping you,
this play exerts its own gravitational pull and takes “you in a completely different
direction.” Translation becomes a material device, a device that materializes
language. The word or phrase that couples two words in translation becomes a
kind of toy, the Thing as a plaything that distracts you, leads you in a different
direction.
Yet any new direction inevitably quickly turns off into further detours in the
form of anecdotal attempts at elucidations that fail to advance the argument or
confess that failure as a human, all too human, failure to read. For example, de
Man rather movingly, with characteristic modesty and self-deflating irony turns
the general difficulty of reading Benjamin into his own personal difficulty: “The
Frankfurt School interpretation of Benjamin is shot through with messianic
elements which certainly are there, as a desire in Benjamin, but which Benjamin
managed to control by an extraordinarily refined and deliberate strategy of
echoing terms, allowing them to enter his text in such a way that an attentive
reading would reveal them. The attentive reading is very difficult to give. He
succeeded so well incorporating them in their displacement that you—it really
take along practice—it’s always lost again. Whenever I go back to his text, I
think I have it more or less, then I read it again, and again I don’t understand it”
(102). And when pressed, in the final question, on what he means by historical
events and occurrences that the questioner found “slightly obscure” ends the
discussion by conceding he can’t answer clearly: “What occurred was that . . .
translation. Then there are, in the history of texts, texts that are occurrences. I
think Rousseau’s Social Contract is an occurrence, not because it is a political
text, but because something that occurs, in that sense. I realize this is difficult—
a little obscure and not well formulated. But I feel it, that there is something
there. Something being said which is kind of important to me, which I think . . .
which isn’t clear” (104).
The Irony Thing
[I’m thinking one thing to sort out for us and also to motivate this turn to
unreading and even to irony is to think through how negative our critique
is, how insisting on the aporias of the archive [close to final section of the
essay] produces a stronger historicism for being a resistant strain of
historicism. The Habeas Corpus section and perhaps even a bit on the
passport would close out our intro by showing what our negative dialectics
can deliver (by not delivering)
In her book Stupidity, Avial Ronell interrupts her discussion about de Man’s
“The Concept of Irony” to tell a personal anecdote about writing her dissertation
with de Man. In this case, the anecdote itself, bracketed by marks on the page,
turns into a block, that lets us understand the resistant reading proceeds through
writing (Wunder)blocks:
But I have strayed from my intention of revealing an
autobiographical ordeal, something that would help you understand
my own avoidance of de Man, which was never absolute or even
remotely successful. I had avoided de Man even before he told me
that he thought Goethe was stupid. Actually, the scene of that
utterance went a little differently, with more nuance than I have
internalized. It took place in Paris. I remarked on him, in the
projective manner of upstarts, that he had avoided “my” authors; I
remember naming Goethe among them. His response was swift:
That’s because Goethe could be so stupid.” My bewilderment. “—
Theoretically, I mean, in his theory.” That could stop a girl in her
tenure tracks. Not that I had a job at the time. I ended up owing
him a great deal, as he had helped me when I was fairly destitute
and unhirable, having in fact been fired unceremoniously , no doubt
illegally, but nonetheless thankfully by the University of Virginia—I
am glad that destiny had spit me out of the university at that time,
for what was I, if I may invoke a hapless figure from Hellenic
comedy, an alazon in wonderland, doing in the South? After Paris
and Berlin, he sent me to California, to a system, he said, whose
digestive tract would not be able to eliminate me easily. That is how
he put it. In any case, I started in Riverside and ended up at
Berkeley, playing to the end a politics of the foreign body that was
neither thrown up nor excrete. (What was I, if I may borrow my
identity from Lacan, a petite alazon, doing out West?) I don’t know
why, but Paul de Man had taken an interest in helping me, and it
was only under his prodding that I crossed over from German
departments (which had succeeded in throwing me up) to what he
called the safer shores of comparative literature. (I had explained to
him that being in a German department exposed me to endless
reruns of World War II. With all sorts of phantoms surfacing and
attacking me. He understood those phantasms immediately,
offering safety in the less primitively Germanics precincts of
comparative literature.) He was sympathetic, strong, nonsexist; he
spontaneously offered me protection upon seeing how I was
slammed by one institution of higher learning after another. But
now I am getting ahead of myself, telling what happened later in the
c.v. Nonetheless, in purely empirical and historical terms, prior to
the inevitable hiring and firing squads, before I knew him and
before he became a counselor, my compass and friend, I chose not
to go to Yale when the opportunity arose but opted instead for
distance—for mediation and mediocrity, as it turned out—by
choosing a graduate school in New Jersey. I do not hesitate to say
in any case, when deciding to pursue graduate studies, I avoided
working in close proximity to de Man for fear that he would crush
my already nonexistent balls. And yet there was no one else to
work with. My relation to de Man would remain, for the most part,
teletopical.xix
Ronell’s hyperaware account of her avoidant relation to de Man and the various
narrative he spun around her is a non(auto)biographical moment that blocks us
out, letting everything and nothing slip. She still stopped in her tenure tracks.
Ronell helps us to understand Benjamin’s toy train even more fully. Reading
things involves a question of distance.xx Our practice of transforming a thing into
a topos always means that we are defining the topos as a teletopos; troping on
Ronell, we may add that it is a techno-teletopos, technology being that which
both draws closer and keeps apart the human and inhuman, inside the loop and
out of it.xxi
Ronell’s ironization of de Man’s irony, her “tell all that tells nothing” delayed,
straying autobiography that delivers diversion does not derail of history or politics
but gives a track to return to them through a (non)story of resistance and, as in
the case of Ronell, mourning for de(ad) Man (walking). Walter Benjamin and
even more radical case of an out of the way, prefatorial autothantography as
pseudo-obituary: “Posthumous Fragments by a Young Physician], which Johann
Wilhelm Ritter had published in two volumes at Heidelberg in 1810. This work
has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its preface, in which the
author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an obituary for a supposedly
deceased unknown friend—with whom he is really identical—as the most
important example of personal prose in German Romanticism.” p. 491
TO BE CUT OR Incorporated:
Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two,
Trans Shierry Weber (New York: Columbia, UP1992), 20-31.
Adorno tends to personify books.
Through “streamlining,” the newest books become questionable, as though they
had already passed away. (21)
Publishers are irrefutable when they point out to refractory authors, who after all
must live too, that their books have less chance of success the less they fit in
with that development. (23)
Books that have been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by assigned
places and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them disorder is not
being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often punished for
it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off. (24)
Certainly the collector demonstrates that books say something without being
read, and sometimes is not the least important thing. (25)
These unitary and too carefully prepared blocks of books [collected editions] give
the impression of having come into being all at once” (24-25)
At many points Marx’ [sic] texts read as though they had been written hastily on
the margins of the texts h was studying and in his theories of surplus value this
becomes almost a literary form. Clearly his highly spontaneous mode of
production resisted putting ideas where they belong in neat and tidy fashion—an
expression of the antisystematic tendency in an author whose system is a
critique of the existing one; ultimately, Marx was thereby practicing a
conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such even by itself. The fact that for al
the canonization of Marx there is no Marx lexicon available is fitting; the author, a
number of whose statements are spouted like quotations form the Bible, defends
himself against what is done to him by hiding anything that does not fall into that
stock of quotations. . . . The relief the lexica afford is invaluable, but often the
most important formulations fall through the cracks because they do not fit under
any keyword or because the appropriate word occurs so infrequently that lexical
logic would not consider it worth including: ‘”Progress” does not appear in the
Hegel lexicon. (26)
In speaking of Marx practicing “a conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such
even by itself ,”Adorno sounds surprisingly close to the mystical Walter Benjamin
as well as Freud on the uncanny. In Adorno’s account, the process of writing
and printing involving a secret that is hidden even from the author himself
(already described by Adorno earlier as estranged form his text when he reads
the page proofs (“the authors look at them with a stranger’s eyes”, 23)
“unrecognized as such even by itself.” Yet what is hidden (“hiding anything”)
from cognition by the violence of reading for the pullable quotation is not
reducible either to a secular Marxist account (book as commodity, reified means
of production) nor to an actual agency (the book continues to be personified) nor
to a particular theology but is detected through a series of metaphors, the last of
which is “fall through the cracks” based on resemblance, a topic Adorno takes up
most explicitly in the very last section of his essay, which begins “What books
say from the outside, as a promise, is vague; in that lies their similarity with their
contents” (29). Reading the book’s resistance to reading, understanding what
says withoutits being read, is a question of mimesis. Although Adorno refers
throughout the essay to the book’s external and internal form, his account of the
true book as the damaged book does not yield an a analysis based on
resemblance: he defines damage both as external and literal (what happens to
books when they are shipped around the globe, when they are read and reread
over time, when they are produced more cheaply) and also as external and
metaphorical (the way external coercion and pressure gets interiorized by the
author the damage internal to books (“The book[‘s] . . . own form . . . is attacked
within the book itself” 21.) The (his)story of books, for Adorno, is the story of a
dynamic and dialectical estrangement in which metaphors for the resistance to
reading books is personified but not personalized. Adorno’s metaphors for
reading a book focus on the paratext of the book—the vertical printing on the
spine, the removal of the place and date pf publication of the title page, the
book’s cover. This focus on the paratext transmutes the book from printed
(para)text as the “most eccentric features” to the book as image, “imago” (30),
“graphic image” (30) [kind of like WB’s “prismatic edges” metaphor in Unpacking].
Reading the book’s paratext is for Adorno a matter of attending to the book’s
graphic design.
The book has figured among the emblems of melancholy for centuries . . . there
is something emblematic in the imago of all books, waiting for the profound gaze
into their external aspect that will awaken its language, a language other than the
internal, printed one. Only in the eccentric features of what is to be read does
that resemblance survive, as in Proust’s stubborn and abyssal passion for writing
without paragraphs” [Adorno does not use paragraphs in his essay, just chunks
broken up by graphic markers and space] (30):
The eye, following the path of the lines of print, looks for such resemblances
everywhere. While no one of them is conclusive, every graphic element, every
characteristic of binding, paper, and print—anything, in other words, in which the
reader stimulates the mimetic impulses in the book itself—can become the
bearer of resemblance. (30)
By reading mimetically, Adorno becomes revelatory, a way into reading the
history of the book and of historicizing the book:
At the same time, such resemblances are not mere subjective projections but
find their objective legitimation in the irregularities, rips, holes, and footholds that
history has made in the smooth walls of the graphic design system, the book’s
material components, and its peripheral features. (30)
“What is revealed in this history” (30) is a totality the implosive dialectical
tensions of which may be detected in Adorno’s adoption of metaphors or literal
book damage to route the book’s materiality through a formal “graphic design
system” (30)
Adorno’s essay ends with a series of breakdowns in mimetic reading until
reading itself becomes impossible. First, a distinction between inside and
outside gets collapsed as a consequence of Adorno’s having made “anything” in
a book an occasion for mimetic reading:
The power history wields both over the appearance of the binding and its fate
and over what has been written is much greater than any difference between
what is inside and what is outside, between spirit and material, that it threatens to
outstrip the work’s spirituality. This is the ultimate secret of the sadness off older
books, and it follows how one should relate to them and, following their model, to
books in general.
Reading a book through its graphic design is to encounter the book’s resistance
to reading. Marx’s marginal notes (of Marx) are not analogous to musical notes,
which may be heard by a reader:
Someone in whom the mimetic and the musical senses have become deeply
enough interpenetrated will . . . be capable of judging a piece of music by the
image formed by its notes, even before he completely transposed it into an
auditory idea. Books resist this. But the ideal reader, whom the books do not
tolerate, would know something of what is inside when he felt the cover in his
hand and saw the layout of the title page and the overall quality of the pages, and
would sense the book’s value without needing to read it first.” (31)
Adorno finishes his essay off by calling up an “ideal reader” rather than an
existing one. In speaking of “the work’s spirituality” and “the ultimate secret,”
Adorno ends by (re)tuning into a theological wavelength, a call from beyond the
grave of the book’s life, as it were, but there is no religious station identification.
On the one hand, a kind of Jewish mysticism may be heard in the metaphors of
hiding the hidden (even the act of hiding) from the hider; on the other hand, a
kind of Christian messianism may be heard as a “Passion of the Book” become
work of art: “Damaged books, books that have been made to suffer, are the real
books.” (24) “The bibliophile expects from books beauty without suffering . . .
Suffering is the true beauty in books; without it, beauty is corrupt, a mere
performance” (29). The books’ suffering is redeemed in aesthetic terms, as the
books’ true beauty. And yet Adorno’s account of suffering is clearly to messianic
nor eschatological in that he is not analyzing or narrating a linear history (of more
and more degradation of books due to changes in the book publishing industry)
nor is singling out a book in particular. His concern with damaged books is rather
with the conditions of book publication and how those conditions make books
both more accessible and more resistant. Adorno speaks at the end of
“Bibliographical Musings” both of a singular type of books (older books) and of
books in the plural, putting even more pressure on his personification of books by
highlighting even more clearly the differences between the non “coterminus” (24)
if analogous lives and deaths of books and the lives and deaths of writers and
readers. Books preserve and defend their value by becoming inhuman. Reading
a book whose value you cannot determine without reading it effectively reduces
reading to information processing.
the ending fits our notion of the book as being about metaphorology since at the
end books become metaphorical, stones for the building in which the collector
dwells. The last lines enact a split in Benjamin implicit in his impossible narration
(writing and unpacking at the same time, becoming only more clearly impossible
at the en—how could he have been unpacking as he wrote the essay?), WB
splits the collector into a third person and a first person. In the last sentence,
about the collector disappearing, e WB becomes a displaced person through his
collecting.
Although He and yet someone else dwell in the collection WB collects. WB does
not himself live in his collection, like the collector. He builds the dwelling for the
collector to dwell. The shift from “I to “he” in the last sentence is really quite
awkward even as the disappearing act is elegantly performed.
The disappearance of the collector is also posed in the oft-cited line about the
collector being comprehended only in his extinction.
I do know that I am running out for the type that I am discussing here and have
been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put, only when it is
dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector
comprehended.
The end of collecting is posed in terms of a metaphor of species extinction. But
it’s a very dialectally tense sentence, traversed by acid irony that is really
Schleglian rather than Hegelian—comprehension (knowledge of x when x has
been completed but also over, lost, hence non-knowledge). This dialectical
follows from the assertion that “collecting loses its meaning a it loses its personal
owner.” The phrase seem to assert straightforward analogy, a corollary between
collecting meaning, and personal ownership), when it really is about the selfnegating temporality of collecting, its drive toward loss of meaning and
depersonalization even as it becomes increasingly personal. The dialectical
tension is made more explicit in the following sentence: “Even though public
collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than
private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.” Private collections
have no use and no use value: objects (It’s interesting how WB shifts from books
in particular to objects in general] get the way they do because they are totally
private, without any exchange value either (though potentially it would seem they
could be sold or traded). Ownership turns into a state of being: some things
can be more deeply owned than others, and the more deeply they are owned,
the less value they have, the more they tend to move toward disappearance.
It’s as if the entire essay were setting up the last lines starting with “O bliss of the
collector, bliss of the man of leisure!”
The final turn to books as stones involves a kind of escape hatch for the writer /
collector—he displaces himself through metaphor and is thereby able to
disappear into his books, or perhaps almost literally into the book in which his
essay appears—perhaps we can now read the line differently because the essay
is in a book; the essay has taken on a self-referential function being now part of a
book series (complete works) on shelves in various libraries. In any case, the
collector, WB, can disappear only by building and welling for another collector to
disappear in—so WB remains outside the life and the collector lives in books. He
lives barely outside the box, the dwelling, in a position of extimacy (to him own
collection). In this sense, he survives, perhaps.
This kind of exteriorization and interiorization of the collector (WB and not WB, I
and he, inside dwelling and outside the dwelling) operates as a kind of
spectralization or virtualization of WB
The Reckoning
Restliness in Peace (R.I.P.)
How Do we Reckon with Benjamin’s Last Things?
Homo Sacer pp. 112-13 when Benjamin to distance Benjamin, give him a send
off, by turning Bataille into a fascist. Schmitt
Irrational, absurd, expenditure, Surrealism; Bataille is a double figure—he
presents one story about sovereignty and in Agamben’s hands a crypto-fascist
aesthetic, but on the other, he has this role as a repository, as a collector, and as
Benjamin’s for the archives and Perec as another librarian. Bataille becomes a
revolving door for these kids of issues he ends being a sort a not unproblematic
figure but we don’t need to dirty him in order to clean up Benjamin. Bataille is
indeed a weird figure, but Schmitt is even more so, and so the Critique of
Violence and Schmitt Political Theology both seem so problematic. A real
Marxist would say that the real problem with capitalism is that there is a rational
impulse within its tools of rationalization when in fact there ‘s another model of
the complete irrationality of capitalism.
Fittkow’s account of surviving bare life, what you bank on this is the absurdity
and rationality of your situation; acts of complete charity, the confusion that is
generated permits survival for some at the expense of others. Fittkow and her
husband give themselves to but WB resists, as a simply to exist, so an emphatic
exaggerated politeness towards things. Doubleness of WB in angel and WB
looking away from the audience; Klee’s angel looking over the viewer’s
shoulder—end of “Song and Glance” in Sam Weber, Fittkow misrecognizes as
WB being out of it, distracted. Fittkow sees him as disabled (as he were crosseyed) while Weber sees him as abled (as if hwere a visionary) because he can
see double, whereas for us is the doubleness enables another revolving door
toward resistance and redemption, an ability to seeing sideways (even on one
way streets) that necessarily has limitations, since he couldn’t see straight
(always getting high).
Benjamin and Bataille are both revolving doors. The revolving door has intervals,
or breaks (it’s actually four doors, right?), and it may get stuck, especially if
people enter it too quickly. But it never just stops; like the carousel, which
speeds up slows down, kids get off and other kids get on, the revolving door
keeps turning.
Redeeming for us is a getting things out of hoc, like a pawnshop—get out of hoc,
getting ad hoc. Ad hoc reading; it should not be systematic.
Bataille on prehistoric returns us to Benjamin (rescue operation of mss from
library) as Surrealist / Benjamin as Surrealist, and we may, if only in an endnote,
point out the importance of library research to Surrealism and of Surrealism to
WB and to GB.
The final box in an endnote would be the document dossier e/f/fect of “base
materialism” that informs the “formless” debate between Bois and Did-Huberman.
That would be the last endnote.
Being friends with the librarian in the Bibliothèque National
July 13, 2007
Lorcan Dempsey
Categories: Books, movies and reading ...
• The cultural and scholarly record
There is a passage in a letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno
where he suggests removing a reference to Georges Bataille from a
document. Bataille, in addition to his other accomplishments, was a
librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Benjamin writes:
And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be
adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both
because of his assistance at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and because
of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his
attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the
reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person
to react serenely to its contents. [Theodor W Adorno and Walter
Benjamin. The complete correspondence, 1928-1940. p. 276]
I was reminded of this passage as I read Jeremy Harding's discussion
in the current London Review of Books of Walter Benjamin's 'last day'
before his death in 1940 while trying to flee to the US.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n14/hard01_.html
Benjamin had left various papers, including the manuscript of his
Arcades Project, with Bataille for safe-keeping. Bataille hid them in
the library. The Arcades Project is a massive unfinished work, a
weaving of quotations and Benjamin's own text.
So the library comes in at three levels. At one, it is important for
the scholar to keep in with the librarian ;-) At a second, the
librarian receives a manuscript on the eve of flight and keeps it
safely in the library from where it is retrieved and published. At a
third, is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on
quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and
cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to
readers?
Through the Trapdoor
Jeremy Harding
The Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman Buy this book
Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in
1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime
companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest danger
were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion,
followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a
manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent. ‘Human
trafficking’ had become the order of the day and remained so, long
after the hope of leaving by boat had turned out, for most, to be
illusory.
The Narrow Foothold, a 16-page memoir, opens in Marseille, where
Carina Birman was waiting in September 1940 to get out of the country.
Birman had been the legal adviser at the Austrian Embassy in Paris
until the Anschluss, when it was shut down. She seems to have remained
in Paris and become involved in a human trafficking scam of her own,
helping ‘undesirables’ out of Europe on visas obtained from the
Mexican Consulate.
When she heard from some new arrivals in Marseille that her name
featured high on a list of people wanted by the Germans, Birman
prepared to leave immediately. That evening, she and her sister Dele,
accompanied by two friends, Grete Freund and Sophie Lippmann, caught a
train along the coast to Perpignan and an overnight connection that
brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small
town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous
southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’
who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her
friends followed suit and met someone in the mairie – she doesn’t say
whether it was the mayor – who offered to show them a safe way over
the mountains to Spain. If Birman’s memory is reliable, this would
have been 24 or 25 September. In the afternoon, Birman and one of her
party made a two-hour reconnaissance trip with their guide. He pointed
out the route and advised them to take a bearing on a large cross
which they would see a little further along, when they made the
journey in earnest. It all seemed straightforward, if a little
nerve-racking, and Birman returned to Banyuls. The four women left the
following morning at first light.
Lisa Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary
excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own
memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day.
Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist,
born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague
and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her
husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before
returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of
French internment policy, which was already ‘concentrating’ Spanish
Republican refugees in camps early in 1939. With the Hitler-Stalin
Pact and the onset of the Phoney War in the autumn, they were among
many thousands of German-speaking non-nationals detained by the
authorities. Hans was in central France at a camp in Vernuche; Lisa
was near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in Gurs, which had been
holding refugees from Spain. (Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s
sister Dora were also interned at Gurs, while Benjamin had spent
several weeks in Vernuche.) As the Germans advanced deeper into France
and the administration reeled, evasion or negotiated exit became a
brief possibility: many people, including the Fittkos, got out of the
camps. Hans and Lisa Fittko were to remain in France until the end of
1941, in contact though separated for much of the time. In their year
of clandestinity, they worked as successful agents enabling refugees
to escape through Spain. Both were in contact with the Emergency
Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young
American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including
Chagall, Ernst and Arendt.
Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in
Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly
impossible, but she also understood the uses of the city. Here,
prospective refugees could assemble the paperwork to get them through
Spain and from there to Portugal, which no one could enter without
proof of an onward-bound journey: a boat ticket from Lisbon or a visa
issued by a third country. Varian Fry had a friendly US vice-consul
who granted hundreds of visas breaching State Department norms. Thomas
Cook, Fittko remembers, were issuing bogus transatlantic tickets to
help people on their way – at 200 francs a shot – and the Chinese were
selling entry permits at 100 francs. Birman and her friends had visas
for Mexico. What nobody who needed to get out of France could lay
hands on was an exit permit; whence the necessity of a stealthy
departure and therefore of a Pyrenean route.
Fittko had already been to the mayor’s office in Banyuls by the time
Birman looked in. She had met the mayor himself, a man called Azéma,
who was well disposed to the refugees: he’d given her some provisions
and a map of the route over the mountains. That evening, walking back
to Port Vendres, her new base about four miles from Banyuls, Fittko
was in high spirits: ‘Milk and vegetables, and above all a new, safe
border route. I remember . . . the incredibly blue sea and the
mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold
between them, and a sky as blue as the sea.’ It was France as she’d
not had occasion to see it before. It extended south beyond the bays
and on to the shores of the Maghreb, over the Rif mountains, across
the desert and down into sub-Saharan Africa, as far as the northern
banks of the Congo: the westerly edge of a grand imperium, already
undermined by one world war and destined to crumble under the pressure
of another.
The passage Azéma favoured was known as the ‘Lister route’. Recoiling
from the Phalangist victory, Enrique Lister, one of the Republic’s
senior military officials – also a committed Stalinist – had fled up
this defile in 1939 on his way into exile in the Soviet Union. (Twenty
years later he was in Cuba, advising Fidel on the formation of his
Revolutionary Defence Committees.) The advantage of the route, as
Azéma explained to Fittko, was that for large parts of the way, it was
secluded by canopies of rock. Fittko had done well to establish such a
dependable lead so quickly. A few days later, Walter Benjamin arrived
on her doorstep in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US
Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted
her to help him escape through Spain.
Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element
of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not,
but it includes the most recent of many last words about Benjamin’s
death, a death on which, for his admirers, so much seems to hang that
it, too, seems suspended: symbolic to the point of unreality, an
enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christian messiah
and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of
ardent conjecture. In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to
Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice. Yet in the likeness
of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his
own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not
with the misdemeanours of his people on his head – ‘all their
iniquities in all their sins’ – but their innocence. At the same time,
he is tagged with a prophetic forecast of the impending cataclysm in
Europe and the terrible numbers of dead that few could really foresee
(probably not even Fittko, who claimed never to have kept count of the
people she led to safety in those early days, still less how many were
Jewish). As for Birman, she was deeply preoccupied with her own small
contingent. Her memoir elides a lot of detail; it can be infuriatingly
opaque; it is published with a wealth of footling apparatus, including
a photo of the publisher pottering around on the road overlooking the
town where Benjamin died. Nevertheless, it is an authentic,
pre-mythological fragment from a site strewn with the litter of
interested pilgrims and dunned to the substrate by regiments of
Benjamin archaeologists. What it amounts to, and where it fits in,
depends on what we make of other sources, Fittko in particular, and
our readiness to go over this dreadful story yet again.
Benjamin would set out for the border with two other people, Henny
Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph (or José), on what was, according
to Fittko, 26 September 1940, though others have it as the 25th. There
was an orientation trip the day before, like Birman’s, which involved
a visit to the mayor’s office in Banyuls followed by a walk up through
the vineyards in the direction of the frontier. Even this
reconnaissance was trying for Benjamin, and when the time came to turn
back, he refused, preferring to remain up in a clearing overnight. It
was obvious to Fittko that he didn’t mean to exhaust himself by doing
the first leg of the journey three times instead of once; despite her
apprehensions she left him. Early the next morning Fittko and the
Gurlands set out again, making their way with the grape-pickers. When
they reached the clearing, ‘Old Benjamin’, as Fittko called him, ‘sat
up and looked at us amiably’. She was alarmed by the dark red spots
around his eyes and took them to indicate the onset of something
fatal, ‘a heart attack perhaps’. In fact the dew had caused the dye to
run from the rims of his spectacles. ‘The colour rubs off when they
get wet,’ he explained, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Old
Benjamin was a very advanced 48, with a promising future behind him
and a number of medical problems, including lung trouble and a heart
condition.
Fittko describes the little party striking out at a steady pace, she
and Joseph taking turns to carry Benjamin’s black briefcase. Much
later, when people asked her if she knew, or he’d said, what it
contained, she was impatient. He was carrying a very important
manuscript, worth more in his eyes than his own life, as he’d
intimated, but that was as far as it went. Fittko was a militant
people-smuggler on her first run, not a scholar or literary hanger-on.
‘For better or worse,’ she said of Benjamin’s luggage, ‘we had to drag
that monstrosity over the mountains.’ She also called it ‘his
ballast’. It’s likely, given the importance attached to it, that she
embellished her memoir – and indeed her memory – to make more of the
mysterious briefcase. Rolf Tiedemann, co-editor of the Suhrkamp
seven-volume Gesammelte Schriften, speculated that its contents might
have included a copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History; the
Harvard editors of the Selected Writings say the same. In any event,
the manuscript, along with the bag and whatever else it contained,
crossed the frontier and promptly disappeared.
On the journey, Benjamin kept up a routine of several minutes’ walking
followed by a minute’s rest. ‘I can go all the way to the end using
this method,’ he told Fittko. The trick, he added, was to pause
‘before I’m exhausted’. The going was tough and Fittko was struck by
Benjamin’s will power and courtesy. He was a model compared with some
of the fusspots she’d later deliver to safety. She remembers resting
up, eating ‘a piece of bread I’d bought with bogus food stamps’ and
pushing the tomatoes across to Benjamin, who’d asked: ‘By your leave,
gnädige Frau, may I serve myself?’ That’s how it was, she says, with
‘Old Benjamin and his Spanish court etiquette’.
In Fittko’s account there is no mention of Birman’s group. Fittko gets
her party to the high point of the climb, surveys the coast and feels
sure they’re inside Spain: the moment has come for her to retrace her
steps but instead she decides to continue a little longer and only
turns back when she’s seen the village of Portbou below in the
distance. During this first attempt to lead people across she was
naturally keen to take a look around. Fittko’s group, it seems, must
have caught up with the other party at – or near – the summit, where
Birman was in deep dejection. Recalling her guide’s instruction to
steer by a large hilltop cross, she was sitting on the ground, trying
in vain to match her hand-drawn map to a landscape of hilltops dotted
with crosses.
‘In the meantime,’ she remembered, ‘we were joined by an elderly
gentleman, a younger female and her son.’ She describes her new
acquaintance, who had failed so brilliantly to impress the German
academy, as ‘a university professor named Walter Benjamin’. Perhaps it
was Benjamin’s admirable unworldliness and civility that evoked the
faculty gown: a figure alert in mind and spirit, even if his physique
was no match for this crossing. He was, Birman says, ‘on the point of
having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely
hot September day . . . was too much for him . . . We ran in all
directions in search of some water to help the sick man.’
While the Birman party and the university professor’s trio aimed for
what they took to be the nearest customs post, Fittko was retracing
her steps. She had taken ten hours to climb from Banyuls to the
Spanish border with the Gurlands – it was fewer for Benjamin, who’d
slept up in the clearing – but she made it back in two. She was
basking in her first triumph, delighted with the route and – this has
an air of embellishment – gratified to think that ‘Old Benjamin and
his manuscript are safe now . . . on the other side of the mountains.’
Had Portbou remained a quiet fishing community it might never have
been bombed by Italian aircraft during the Civil War, but it became a
strategic railway station at the end of the 1920s and was still badly
damaged when the refugees arrived. On announcing themselves to the
authorities, they were told they’d be returned to France the following
day. Birman was mortified: evidently they should have gone through the
formalities at an earlier point of entry, which they must have missed;
their contact in Banyuls had warned against this eventuality. Birman’s
neck ‘was seized by a big male hand’. She was ‘turned around and
commanded by a stocky man to follow him closely’. Her destination was
the Fonda de Francia, a hotel in Portbou where she and the others were
placed under garde à vue. It was a watering hole for special services,
including the Gestapo (in those days undercover as shipping agents),
informers and spooks from both sides of the border.
Birman says that they all had to double up except for Benjamin, who
got ‘a room for himself: his companion with son another place, Sophie
and I a room, and my sister and Grete Freund a small cell’. The
situation could not have been worse, yet there was a trapdoor
somewhere in this despair and Birman fell through it when she and
Sophie Lippmann decided that the gold coins they’d brought with them
should now be used to pay someone – anyone – to intercede on their
behalf with the authorities. Lippmann felt the ‘hotel warden’ might be
biddable and predictably enough, when she went to look for him, he was
ready to help.
On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from
one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found
Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted
physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border
and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative
and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous
pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very
beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little
board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden
grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the
one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his
heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe
and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the
odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the
room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who
bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware
of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of
suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had
succeeded and was no more amongst us.’
Birman committed her story to paper in 1975. She was by then a
successful lawyer in New York. Published now, 11 years after her
death, it is in a slightly dubious sense the breaking news about
events in Portbou on the night of 26 September 1940. It leaves a few
odds and ends to consider. First, the reminders: Benjamin, who had
probably linked up with Gurland in Marseille, left her a note before
he lost consciousness. She memorised it, destroyed it as a precaution
and relayed its contents to Adorno once she’d got through Spain. ‘In a
situation presenting no way out,’ she remembers it saying, ‘I have no
other choice but to make an end of it.’ She also wrote to her husband
around the same time, mentioning the Birman party and describing the
journey to Portbou as ‘an absolutely horrible ordeal’. Later, at
various points in their lives, she and her son – and Greta Freund –
commented to the best of their abilities on the circumstances of
Benjamin’s death, but none could really explain the anomalies, to do
with timings mostly, that arose from the doctor’s notes, the death
certificate and the burial, recorded on one day in the church register
and another in the municipal file.
The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of
oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who
Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for
speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz,
a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the
evil empire, suggested that Benjamin may have been murdered by agents
of Stalin. It’s an opportunistic long shot, based on the premise of
Fascist-Stalinist co-operation in the mopping-up of Catalonia for the
duration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. If there must be a hidden hand,
it’s likelier to be the Gestapo’s. In several published essays
Benjamin had advertised his contempt for National Socialist culture
and ideology (‘the fusion of the nationalist idea with racial
madness’) far more widely than his misgivings about the Soviet Union.
Neither partisan view of Benjamin as the object of a specific hatred
gets us through the mire of old animosities onto the dependable ground
of record.
Mauas’s cagey, unsensational film depicts a little town with more than
its share of Phalangist satisfaction in the wake of the Civil War,
inimical to the sans nationalités coming over from France and
infiltrated by German intelligence. Worrying obscurities cloud the
medical record and even the identity of the doctor in attendance. Two
doctors were practising in Portbou, according to the residents
interviewed by Mauas, and somewhere in the disputatious memory of
these local elders is the suggestion that a Fascist sympathiser
ministered to Benjamin but that another – allegiance less clear –
later completed and signed off the paperwork in his colleague’s
absence. Sinister as it seems, this may simply be a function of the
duty roster in a small town. In any case Mauas steadfastly refuses to
assert that Benjamin was eliminated.
The Narrow Foothold is yet more anecdotal evidence in favour of
Gurland’s testimony, the only intimate testimony until now that Walter
Benjamin committed suicide. It also enables us to look more coldly at
the notion that Benjamin had been specially targeted by the Nazis and
that this fact was connected with the detention of the refugees in
Portbou: simply, once Benjamin was out of the picture, killed perhaps,
dead in any case, there was no longer a reason to return the others to
France. But if so, why was Birman, who tells us her name was ‘nearly
topping’ a German hit list, permitted to go on her way? Conspiracy
theory gets one large truth more or less right, but only
inadvertently: what happened to Walter Benjamin was essentially a kind
of execution, even if he’d decided to serve as delegate executioner.
Cloak and dagger plots in which low-level killers administer lethal
doses of contingency detract from this point.
Birman was misled about the importance of finding the ‘first’ customs
post: first, second or third was of no consequence. If there’s
anything as famous about Benjamin’s death as the briefcase, it’s the
fact that at the time he crossed, Spanish officials had been ordered
to turn back refugees – anyone sans nationalité, as Henny explained it
in her letter to her husband – and that this order was enforced for a
day or so, then set aside, or ignored, immediately afterwards. It was
Benjamin’s timing that was fatal: Arendt called it ‘an uncommon stroke
of bad luck’. Much has been said about this, but Momme Brodersen’s
remark, in his 1996 biography of Benjamin, is the one that lingers in
the mind: ‘It is hard not to ask whether . . . Benjamin’s death was
“preventable”, “unnecessary”, though these are unanswerable, pointless
questions. Hundreds of others were dying, unnecessarily, anonymously,
on the borders; millions were to die with no border in sight.’
The following day was probably more distressing to Birman than the
night before. News of Benjamin’s death, she implies, reached her in
the morning, though if the medical record is halfway true he may have
been lying in a coma. She recalls a bustle of activity around the
hotel telephone: ‘All kinds of personalities were reached and asked
for assistance.’ (Research done in Portbou and Figueres by Ingrid and
Konrad Scheurmann in the 1990s turned up evidence of four billed phone
calls, totalling 8.80 pesetas. They think it likely that the exchange
would have tried the number of the US consul in Barcelona.) The warden
was serving coffee to Birman, her sister Dele, Sophie Lippmann and
Greta Freund when two policemen arrived and announced that they’d all
have to return to the border and pick up entry visas. They left under
escort and made the ascent in a couple of hours. The only sign of a
customs point was a weather-beaten phone booth. The frontier itself
consisted of a rope and beyond the rope an ominous, bored assortment
of goons, French and German. The Spanish gendarmes turned back,
pointing out how honourably they’d refrained from untying the rope and
delivering them back into Vichy. They even left some coins for the
refugees to use in the phone booth: they should phone through, they
advised, to the police at Portbou, requesting permission to set foot
on the Spanish soil they’d been pacing in such desolation for the
better part of 24 hours.
There we were sitting on rocks and burnt-out slopes. We were so
depressed that we did not even notice that the sky was becoming darker
and darker, although it was early in the afternoon. A thunderstorm!
No, a rainstorm . . . We weighed our possibilities. There was only one
direction with uncertain issue, all the others meant death. So we
decided to return to Spain. There was no hope of walking down. There
were no passable tracks any more, one could only sit on stones and try
to glide down.
They slithered back to Portbou under driving rain and arrived at the
police station around six in the evening. The captain of the guard
thrust some papers in Birman’s pocket, told her their visas were in
order and advised them to leave before dark. He waved them on for a
baggage inspection, which they survived with their gold intact. The
‘hotel-keeper’, presumably the guardian Sophie had met the night
before, was watching eagerly, and once they were through he demanded
the promised reward. ‘Her offer had worked,’ Birman says, ‘even in our
absence . . . he must have communicated with the police captain to
rescind his previous order,’ but too late to stop them being marched
back to the frontier. Once the gold was handed over, everything
changed. The refugees were escorted to the Fonda de Francia as guests,
rather than prisoners, and a lavish spread was prepared.
Before they began the meal the lights went off and a priest led a
procession of monks through the dining room, carrying candles and
chanting a mass. They climbed the staircase to the first floor.
We were told they had come from a neighbouring monastery to say a
requiem at the death bed of Prof. Benjamin and to bury him. We had
quite forgotten this most unfortunate occurrence during last night,
and although we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no
remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said
anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct.
The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief
rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken
to catch the night train to Barcelona.
‘Benjamin Walter’, dead not from a morphine overdose but from a
‘cerebral haemorrhage’, was buried in the Catholic section of the
cemetery at Portbou, Roman anathema regarding Jews and suicides having
been neatly circumvented by the reversal of names on the death
certificate and by the given cause of death. The body lay in a niche
with a five-year lease. On her way through Portbou not long
afterwards, Arendt failed to identify the niche with any certainty.
The gold probably tipped the scales in Birman’s favour,
notwithstanding her all-round resourcefulness. If her story is true,
it might have held out hope for Benjamin too. But Birman’s ‘professor’
was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away
from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure,
non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the
investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as
he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might
come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of
grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic
utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The
European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the
child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he
could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest
means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as
Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically,
not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world
thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and
speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to
transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey
he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly
considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough
morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their
meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit,
which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may
have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little
intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead – his or anybody
else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic
time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating
the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance,
however.’
Birman and her sister were shocked by Madrid, ‘a city half destroyed
by the Civil War’, but they were able to look in at the Prado, ‘the
one luxury on our flight’. The group reached Lisbon on 1 October and
in due course they all left on visas, separately, for the Americas.
Birman travelled on the Nyassa, an old and overcrowded schooner,
formerly German and now Portuguese, in a state of anxiety about the
possibility of being hailed and searched by a U-boat, ‘as an
examination of papers and a selection of passengers to be taken off
was unavoidable’. The ship’s engines stopped and for several days
there was no movement. Finally, on 4 December 1940, the Nyassa entered
New York harbour. ‘We were all on deck,’ Birman wrote, ‘with tears of
emotion in our eyes.’
Italian horror/science fiction film based upon the Richard novel
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000627.html
Indeed, many curators will feel about their collections the way that
Benjamin felt about his.
O'Toole talked of the fate of library books, of how they create a
shared experience:
Books, like their authors, have biographies, they have passed through
other hands. The private experience you are having is one that is also
shared.
Books live in the lives of their readers. Readers also live in the
lives of their books. And, in the libraries that he is talking about,
I always thought that the mark of very good library staff was that
they understood their collections based on the readers in the life of
the book, but also understood their readers based on the books in the
life of the reader.
So books, and copies of books, have an aura. They bear testimony to
their lives and the lives of their users and owners. They may assume
significance as part of a collection. They may be annotated or
otherwise significantly marked.
However, to come back to my original point. For many books the aura of
the copy is low and the ability to transmit the content in new forms
may be welcome. That does not mean, of course, that for some books,
the user will be drawn back to the artifact, even when it itself is a
mechanical reproduction.
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000623.html
NOTES
i
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7634744.stm
Analysis: The first ID cards
By Dominic Casciani
BBC News Home Affairs reporter Biometric technology uses computerised
methods to identify a person by
their unique physical or behavioural characteristics.
Developments and uses have increased with demand to match concerns
over international, business and personal security.
Biometrics is more personal than a passport photo or Pin, using traits
such as fingerprints, face or eye "maps" as key identifying features.
Uses range from building access and laptop security to identity cards
and passports.
However, there are concerns about the storing of biometric data and
its possible misuse.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456993/html/
ii
I thought we could also do a redo of Lacan via Derrida around Dupin / Poe and
detective fiction or Derrida versus Shapiro (around the issue of Derrida feeling
policed in "Restitution") as Derrida and de Man in terms of researching as a kind
of policing (Interpol) but in our case it's all about the interval separated the polis
and the police, or the intersection (or interval between) of literature and
philosophy as more than the use of the paratext as clues (a sort of parodic
version of what I was doing in m last book). It would be closer to Derrida's
“Before the Law,” where the paratext, the title, and the text itself (part of The Trial
or fragment?) become the inescapable entry with no way out into reading.
Philosophical discourse , because it is also literary, can't rightly be separated out
from detective work (reading text against paratext and vice versa).
Reading is not entrapment, in that sense, but parapolitcal, if you will, as well as
paralinear.
(Maybe reading is a mouse(en)trapment.)
Subtitle of yesterday for discussion of Renoir's La Grande Illusion in The Train
chapter:
La regle du juif
Maybe (for today)
Policing the Valise
or
Polising the Valise
or Po-lease-ing the Valise
iii
iv
This is from an article about a recent and quite ridiculous military
policy in Israel:
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Who are the groups harmed by these decisions?
[Al-Ahmad] There are Palestinians in the West Bank who still do not
have identity cards. They have entered on the basis of visas they
obtained from the Israeli embassy in Amman, and have not left the West
Bank since then.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What is the number of such people?
[Al-Ahmad] No one knows their precise number. However, there are those
who assess the number as around 10,000 or slightly more. There are the
foreign activists who are sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause,
and participate in the demonstrations and protest rallies against the
separation wall; some of these are Palestinians with foreign
nationalities.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about the Gazans?
http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=20638
v reconceptualizing the symptomatic reading as
well as deconstructive /psychoanalytic notions of resistance, a kind
of synthesis of Althuser / Macherey and de Man. [ introduce unread –ability
here—that our delay is not a matter only of our will but of an interpretive problem
involving the archive that the self-storage unit makes visible. Develop the
concept of linearization as a certain of historicism, construction of a timeline, a
connect the dots, understand cause and effect—it’s also a juridical notion and
detective fiction notion of reading (Ginzburg on Holmes, Moretti, and Freud). But
we are pausing over the resistance to linearization the self-storage unit
generates—not a symptomatic reading—just a gap , spaces between the dots
not filed in. But unreading is also a problem of narrative and historicism,
narratives that do not take linear form but are produced through a linearization
that is itself a kind of resistance]
I will just expand on it to introduce "unreada -abilitiy." Thought I
would cite Weber on Benjamin's -abilities as a kind of support, though
we can stress a sort of "inability" in the "unread."
vi
Making Sense of “Force of Law’
Why does Derrida publish what were originally two lectures together as one
article with a new title rather than as two separate articles with their original
titles? Why does he call attention to this fact in the headnote to the essay? Why
doesn’t he integrate the two but instead mark their difference and also mark the
addition of a new prologue to the second essay? Why does he add this part?
Why does he want / need to publish the one lecture with the other, the first on
deconstruction as a method, the second on WB’s “Critique of Violence”, while
offering no explanation as to why he is dong so? What kind of reading of his
essay is Derrida demanding of his reader? Is he implicitly asking that we read
each part both with and against the other? There are some tensions between
the two—only one aporia in part one, but plural "deconstructions" in part two.
Are we supposed to reread the first part in light of the second? Or is the first part
there so he can say what he says in the second part? That is, is the first part is
preparatory and to be burned after reading? Why does he add the post scriptum
but not say anything about it in the headnote? Why is the post scriptum section
entirely italicized?
Is Derrida right or wrong in Agamben’s sense of understand or misunderstand?
Or is the question whether what JD is doing is right or wrong? Is he being just to
WB? He talks about anger being key to WB’s text and hten explodes at WB in
the post-scriptum.
Derrida’s essay on Foucault called “To Do Justice to Freud.”
Is Derrida’s essay a failure? A loss of composure, composition, a failure to
compose his thoughts, himself?
In part one, Derrida says there are two styles of deconstruction, one abstract and
one close reading. The distinction kind of maps on to the essay itself (the first
part is abstract, the second part if a close reading). Bu where then does the P.S.
fit?
In part one, Derrida says deconstruction is oblique, that justice cannot be
addressed directly, but requires detours; in part two, he says he says that WB’s
text is “strange, enigmatic, and obscure.” WB is not a deconstructive thinker, for
Derrida, but someone whose text requires deconstruction.
Does Derrida do violence to WB? He certainly forces his reading, forces WB into
a deconstructive harness (iterability), but reading a 1921 essay without regard to
its chronology in WB’s life (dies 1940) and to The Concept of History (1940) nor
with respect to the chronology of WB’s life and the Final Solution. Moreover, the
Greek (myth) Jew opposition (divine) violence is much more pronounced by
Derrida thatn it is by WB. WB keeps the tensionhidden; Derrida reveals it inorder
to criticize it.
Yet Derrida’s own text is strange, even by his own standards of eccentricity.
Unusual headnote (see above). Moreover, why is the answer to part two in the
post scriptum? And why is it a post scriptum, a singular post-script, as if no other
postscript (P.P.S) could follow, instead of Post Script? Why the Latin to mark the
singular “scriptum” after going on about addressing the audience in English in
part one?
Is Derrida going post-scriptal? Or post-scriptural?
Is the p.s. a collapse a philosophical discourse “ I don't like this text. It’s too this
and its to that.”
Or is Derrida setting up the p.s. as an exception, as a discursive space in which
he can decide that WB’s text is faulty, but make that decision from a paratextual,
relatively but not quite extratextual position that is itself ruptured? The p.s. marks
a failure of the essay to synthesize and integrate the two lectures. The second
requires a prologue, and one wonders if the p.s. was part of the original, and if
so, why it was required to be a p.s.? Is the p.s. singular as a way of deciding not
decide? It’s an end, but not the end, a supplement that is “the” supplement.
Is Derrida excepting his blow up and blow out at WB’s divine violence equals the
Final Solution as a collapse of philosophical discourse by way of excusing his
essay for its failure, its obscuring through seeming clarity the essay’s inability to
do justice to WB, to decide on the merits of his account of (Jewish) divine
violence??
Why doesn’t Derrida sign off, as he does at the end of “Signature, Event,
Context?” Why iterability the key program for Derrida’s deconstruction of WB’s
text?
In part two, he lets WB sign last and first. He relegates the play of Waltende and
Walter to a footnote. Why? What is the relation between the footnote and the
post-scriptum? Similarly, in WB’s text, how should we read the space between
the text and WB’s name? As a space between the concept and the name,
between the text and Walter as God, giving the name and placing it outside of
the concept, outside philosophical discourse, exterior in the way Derrida’s p.s. is?
Is the P.S. a explosion of the implosion, a kind of underground nuclear bomb
text, as “Did you hear something” Does Derrida want to show that justice cannot
be done or not done to WB? That the justice of his reading is undecidable,
especially at the moment it seems, paradoxically, the most decisive? Is this a
veiling / hiding of the true or central aporia of the essay, an indecisive space
being the only space in which a decision may (not) be taken?
Is Derrida archiving his own failure the way he says WB does? Is he mdoelling
his essay on WB’s?
vii
Veils
Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida ; translated by Geoffrey
Bennington ; with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
Author: Cixous, Hélène 1937Published: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press,
c2001.
Summary: "Something of a historical event, this book
combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the
most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir,"
by Helene Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of
her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe
myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn
of grieving for what is lost...see more
book
LIBRARY WEST General Collection
PQ2663.I9 V6513 2001
viii
Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight
(1971; U Minn, 1983), 246-66.
as well as modern technical processes (study of paper and writing with the aid, I
am told of slides of enlargements of the manuscript) Beissner has produced the
irreproachable critical edition (248)
In the case of Hölderlin, this margin of indeterminacy is especially large, for the
material condition of the manuscripts is frequently such that it is impossible to
choose between two possible lessons in the very places where explication is
most necessary. The editor finds himself obliged to rely upon the principle that
he follows; as a result, scientific philology attempts to find objective and
quantitative criteria, while Heidegger decides in the name of the internal logic of
his own commentary.
248
A rational decision between these two criteria is obviously difficult. The
quantitative method does have in its favor a certain positive probability, but its
final choice remains nevertheless arbitrary for it is most unlikely that Hölderlin
chose his term on the basis of statistical distribution. Philology knows this well
and proceeds in the honest and sensible way; in a note, the editor draws
attention to the problem and leaves he question open. But it cannot be denied
that he exegete capable of providing a coherent and responsible interpretation
has the right, indeed, the obligation, to decide according to the conclusion of his
interpretation; that is, after all, one of the goals of all exegesis. Everything rests,
then, on the intrinsic value of the interpretation. (249)
There’s a kind of infra-reading in de Man—an internal split whereby one kind of
internal philological reading (cruxes are left open, unresolved) is forever at odds
with an other internal reading that has to go far beyond the philological. Yet the
criteria for the value of this ”intrinsic interpretation” is difficult to establish, even if
we posit that Being becomes the editor, and de Man shortly ironizes Heidegger’s
interpetation when de Man says that Heidegger makes Hölderlin say the opposite
of what Holderlin actually says.
Resolving the split rationally is made even more difficult, de Man notes, by
Heidegger’s violent rejection of philology. Heidegger chooses one over the other
in polemical fashion in order to distinguish himself as a thinker from a
philosopher.
p. 249
With Hölderlin, there is never any critical dialogue. There is nothing in his work,
not an erasure, no obscurity, no ambiguity, that is not absolutely and totally willed
by Being itself. Only one who has truly grasped this can become the “editor” of
being and impose commas that spring forth “from the necessity of thought.” We
are far from scientific philology. 254
Heidegger’s need for a witness is understandable, then, but why must it be
Hölderlin? . . . it is the fact that Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what
Hiedegger makes him say. Such an assertion is paradoxical only in appearance.
With Hölderlin, Heidegger cannot take refuge in the ambiguity that constitutes at
once his positive contribution and his defense strategy; he cannot say, as in the
case of the metaphysician, that they proclaim both the true and the false, that
they are greater the more they are in error, that he closer they are to Being, the
more they are possessed by the absconding movement. For the promise of
Heidegger’s ontology to be realized, Hölderlin must be Icarus returned from his
flight: he must state directly and positively the presence Being as well as the
possibility of maintaining it in time. Heidegger has staked this entire “system” on
the possibility of this experience. (254-55)
And I was reading de Man on Heidegger on Hölderlin and saw Ronell's brilliant
essay in a new light, since she totally forgets de Man's essay (the way Weber
forgets the translation essay). De Man's question is more fundamental than
Ronell's. His question is not why does philosophy need poetry (this is her
question) but why Heidegger turns in particular to the poetry of Hölderlin (rather
than Rilke, who seems more Heideggerian). De Man poses the question twice
within two pages. His answer is that Hölderlin is a witness, and this what
Heidegger needs, namely, a witness, someone who has gone out and seen
Being and returned show us what he has collected and to talk about it (de Man
makes the poet sound like a sci-fi astronaut angel). Heidegger couldn’t make the
trip himself because all he knew was that Being is concealed; he didn’t know
where to find it.
Anyway, the witness resonated with me in relation to the Holocaust. Perhaps am
just hallucinating.
But it was a weird moment. Heidegger: "Can I get a
witness?"
Very much not excuses confessions since the witness of Hölderlin would
presumably testify that Heidegger was not a Nazi, that the Nazi thing was just a
bad connection, and misunderstood the call because he didn’t have called I.D.,
he thought he was talking to someone else, etc.
The unreadability of the book is linked linked to the impossibility of mourning.
See de Man “Anthropomorphism and Lyric.”
“The death of Mnemosyne exhausts the possibilities of lyric in that it grounds the
impossibility of reading in the inability of mourning . . . Without memory and the
defensive abilities of understanding (“to re-collect”), there is no possibility eft for a
future hermeneutics.” Aselm Haverkamp “Error in Mourning” YFS No 69 (1985),
246
ix
For Benjamin, the toy always has a double, spaced temporality: it is displayed
in a toy store window or a museum exhibition and then it is played with at home.
For example, he begins “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Maerkisches
Museum,” with a description of the exhibition “Let us start by explaining what is
special about this exhibition: it includes not just “toys,” but also a great many
objects on the margins. . . . the catalogue . . . is no dead list of objects on display,
but a coherent text full of precise references to the individual exhibits as well as
detailed information on the age, make, and distribution of particular types of
toys.”
Benjamin then traces a series of connected texts and objects, some of them
having already disappeared, such as Panoramas, before beginning to discuss
why old toys are important and have become objects of attention by adults. “We
all know the picture of the family gathered beneath the Christmas tree, the father
engrossed in playing with the toy train that he has given his son, the latter
standing next to him in tears. When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is
not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating . . . the
adult, who fids himself threatened by the real world can find no escape, removes
its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an
unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s
games and children’s books since the end of the war” (100). Toys operate as
shock absorbers for adults, for whom child’s play but are also the occasion of
new shocks. In the previous paragraph, Benjamin remarks of the then recent
find of garishly colored broadsheets made by a deaf-mute teacher to instruct
deaf-mute children: the “crude vividness [of the broadsheets] is so oppressive
that the normal person, seeing the airless world for the first time, runs the risk of
losing his own hearing and voice for a few hours” (100). Adult play does not
only involve mimetic mastery through miniaturization but may extend to the
player / museum visitor being stung, becoming sensory deprived, if only
temporarily.
x
In a third essay “Toys and Play,” Benjamin explicitly engages Freud’s Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, in which, the reader will recall, Freud discusses the
repetition compulsion in relation to the infant mastering his anxiety about his
mother’s comings and goings by turning a spool into a toy, that is here, then
there. “Lastly,” Benjamin writes” as he approaches the end of his essay, “ such a
study would have to explore the great law that presides over the rules and
rhythms of an entire world of play: the law of repetition. We know that for a child
repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to ‘Do it
again!’ The obscure urge to repeat things is scarcely less powerful in play,
scarcely less cunning in its workings, than the sexual impulse in love. It is not an
accident that Freud has imagined he could detect an impulse “beyond the
pleasure principle” in it. And in fact, every profound experience longs to be
insatiable, longs for the return and repletion until the end of time, and for the
reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang. . . the child is not
satisfied with twice, but wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or
even a thousand times. This is not only the way to master frightening
fundamental experiences—by deadening one’s own response, by arbitrarily
conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying one’s
victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity” (120).
This double process of habit as deadening, disciplinary, routinization, on the
one hand, and intoxication and intensification, on the other, leads Benjamin to
restate the difference between adult play and child’s play as a difference
between adult narrative and childish reenactment: “An adult relieves his heart
from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates
the entire event anew and starts right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the
deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen: the
element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a ‘doing as if’ but a
‘doing the same thing over and over again,’ the transformation of a shattering
experience into habit—that is the essence of play” (120).
The child’s repetitive use of a toy to master a traumatic experience resembles
Freud’s story about the infant playing with a spool on a string a game of “Fort Da”
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Benjamin mentions Freud. Indeed
Benjamin’s “Toys and Play” invites a Freudian reading of Benjamin’s own
arguably compulsive attachment to toys: “Toys and Play” is a do-over, second
review of the same book on the history of toys. As in “Old Toys,” Benjamin
begins “Toys and Play” by discussing exhibition spaces: “The German Museum
in Munich, the Toy Museum in Moscow, the toy department of the Museé des
Arts Decoratifs in Paris—all creations of the recent past or present—point to the
fact that everywhere, and no doubt for good reason, there is growing interest in
honest-to-goodness toys” (117). But to understand what Benjamin means by
“habit” when he concludes that “the transformation of a shattering experience into
habit . . . is the essence of play,” we need to appreciate the fact Benjamin
attends to children who have learned to speak rather than to an infant on the
verge of speech, and we need to examine why, before turning to Freud,
Benjamin pauses to consider first the importance of acquiring toys, the fact that
adults give children their toys, and consequently, children’s needs “do not
determine what is to be a toy” (118), and then to consider the technology of toys.
He who “wishes to look the hideous features of commodity capital in the face,”
Benjamin writes, “need only recollect toyshops as they typically were up to five
years ago (and as they still often are in small towns today). The basic
atmosphere was one of hellish exuberance. On the lids of the parlor games and
the faces of the character dolls, you found grinning masks; they gaped at you
alluringly from the black mouth of the cannon, and giggled in the ingenious
‘catastrophe coach’ that fell to pieces, as expected, when the train crashed.” For
us, the crucial phrase here is “as expected”: the train, which also makes its
appearance in an autobiographical anecdote told in a footnote in Freud’s essay
“The Uncanny,” programs repetition so that it looks to the future, providing the
child with a set of strategies to absorb catastrophes that “are to be expected.” A
train accident becomes a kind of amusement ride with toys becoming persons,
the dolls giggling when the “catastrophe coach” falls to pieces as the train
crashes.
xi
What Sam Weber calls “Benjamin’s –abilities” includes, for us, Benjamin’s “-
disabilities.” Benjamin quotes the author of an essay on New Playthings” saying
his children, in an essay on “New Playthings,” could not live without their toy
guillotine and gallows. In “Neues Kinderzeug,” there’s a fascinating passage
about a miniature Zeppelin, “zum biespiel Hindenbergs” displayed with music
playing either “Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles” or “Heil dir im
Siegerkranz” (1986).
Patriotischer kann man die deustschen Kindlein gar nicht praeparieren. –Das
Massengrab darf in keinem Soldatenkaestchen fehlen, so wenig wie ein gutes
Musterungslokal, ein Lazarett mit gut imitierten Verwundeten, an denen die
kleinen Aertze Operationen, Amputation u. dergl. Vornehmenkoennen. . ..
(1986)
Fuesilierung ist ein sehr huebisches Spiel; desgleichen sollte auch eine Menge
Zivilbevoekerung in militerischem Spielzeug enhalten sein, mit luetten
Barrikaden, ansonst man nicht “Revolution” spielen koennte. . . . Kinderspielzeug
kann gar nicht realistisch genug ersonnen werden. . . . “’Soll ich die Kleinen
aufklaren?’” (187)
Toy trains that cannot be wrecked only allow kids to have a half as good a time
as trains that do:
Eisenbahn-Spielzeug, ohne die Moeglichkeit, Eisenbahn-Katastrophen
darzustellen, macht nur das halbe Vergnuegen. (189)
Walter Benjamin, “Neues Kinderzeug”, 185-89
The essay’s thrust is that because children are so innocent and laugh so easily at
everything toys involve, toys can never be used effectively to militarize them and
indoctrinate them into patriotic citizens. Even guillotines and gallows will appear
funny to kids and WB’s children would not want to be without them: “GeschwuerPuppen furchtbar komisch. Guillotine und Galgen moechten wenigstens meine
Kleinen nicht mehr missen. (188) Toys provide children with a means of making
their own miniature museums and learn the value of images, things (Plastisches)
and prepare for to avoid / respond to future disasters: Es kann gar nicht genug
vorahnen!!!” Es soll nicht unwissend gehalten werden, erlebe Alles.
(There can never be enough premonitions. Should not ignorance be brought to a
halt so that everything may be experienced?)
xii
We hope to provide in our book a corrective to the substitution of sentimental
stories for intellectual analysis in material culture studies and a related series of
binary oppositions that seek to replace one term, regarded negatively such as
thinking, with another regarded positively, such as working. Preservation,
restoration, recuperation, efficiency are assumed uncritically to be good;
similarly, loss, failure, error, waste, and breakdown are all assumed to be
negative.
xiii
Deep Storage
BOOKS
On the art of archiving
Precedents for this art, as with so many others, lie stowed in a
suitcase. Marcel Duchamp casually dismissed his project of the
Boîtes-en-valise as mere financial enterprise - ‘small business, I
assure you’ 1 - an attempt to drum up a little cash. More recent
valuations acknowledge the Boîtes as the first critique of museum
practice: it ‘parodies the museum as an enclosed space for
displaying art...mocks [its] archival activity...[and] satirically
suggests that the artist is a travelling salesman whose concerns
are as promotional as they are aesthetic.’ 2 But the project seems
to have been more self-consciously motivated than either claim
recognises.
It was 1938; the war was encroaching, and Duchamp’s art had
already proved vulnerable to accident. The Large Glass was
cracked in transit between Brooklyn and Katherine Dreier’s home
in 1926, though this was not revealed until the crate was opened
several years later. What better place to preserve the past than a
museum? And so Duchamp devised one small enough to fit into a
suitcase. He consigned printers and light manufacturers
throughout Paris to make 300 copies of miniature versions of
each of his artworks, customised a briefcase to store and display
them, hastily packed the rest of his bags and came to America. 3
The task of assembling and editioning the Valises stretched
beyond Duchamp’s death in 1964. In the end, the project was not
only autobiographical, a life-long summation, but anticipatory as
well. As an artwork designed to be unpacked, the viewing of a
Valise carries the same sense of expectation and event as the
opening of a crate.
The crate is, of course, a carapace and a coffin. In an increasingly
international art world, works are routinely sealed up into
protective bins and cartons to be jetted off to exhibitions and
salerooms all over the world. Entering the collection or returned to
the studio, they are consigned to storage in this same secreted
state, sometimes never to be opened again. Over time, the crate
supplants its contents as the object under consideration, the thing
which is monitored, moved, and maintained.
Accelerating this eventuality are Richard Artschwager’s recent
crate sculptures: empty wooden boxes that deviate only slightly
from true art shipping form. An unlikely corner, sly angle, or jog in
the silhouette embody the gestalt of Artschwager’s furniture-like
sculptures and, resting in their chamfered frames, his sculptural
paintings. Collectively, these funereal objects transform the
gallery into a crypt, subjecting the history of Artschwager’s
achievements to the crudest form of encapsulation. They
adjudicate the assessment of art as so much cultural furniture.
Haunting the storage spaces of galleries, museums, and auction
houses, Louise Lawler photographs the object-inmates as they
move from racks and rooms, wheel past conservation studios,
pause in corridors, wearily stand on view, step up to auction
blocks and shuffle back into the storeroom. A dormant pall hangs
over these transactions, turning the bustle of the marketplace and
the dynamism of history into equally mythic properties. To watch
the digital counters affixed to Ashley Bickerton’s sculptures, set
during the ago-go 80s, and ticking away the seconds of a
presumably ever-increasing worth, today seems only wistful.
The sense of loss which is intrinsic to these critiques depends on
a consensus on what’s at stake. (You cannot mourn what you
don’t care for.) To this extent, the crate becomes a figurative
presence. Magritte made light of this potential in his pastiches of
David’s Madame de Recamier and Manet’s Le Balcon, in which
the subjects of the original paintings are encrypted into craftily
customised coffins. Artschwager’s self-reflexive crates confront
the viewer with the immediate presence of totems. With their plain
pine facades, they recall something Magritte once wrote about
trees:
‘Pushed from the earth toward the sun, a tree is an image of
certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be immobile
like a tree. When we are moving, it is the tree that becomes the
spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables
and doors to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life.
The tree having become a coffin, disappears into the earth.
And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air.’ 4
Marcel Broodthaers brings this imagery of identification to its most
intimate disclosure, writing of a ‘deep storage’-style installation he
created for his own Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des
Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle, located in his Brussels apartment:
‘My crates are empty. We are on the brink of the abyss. Proof:
when I’m not here, there’s nobody.’ 5
Other artists seem more resigned to the ephemeral nature of
representation. Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, makes works as
temporary as camp sites. Like Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, who
systematically moved stones from pocket to pocket, Tiravanija
moved the contents of 303 gallery’s storeroom out into its
exhibition space. In the back room, he set up a small stove to
cook and serve meals to itinerant gallery-goers. During his
absence, dishes and pans indicated the artist’s imminent return.
In the meantime, the space afforded by Untitled (Free) (1992)
generously envisioned a world without storage problems.
In many cases, the storage of fine art has become practically an
art in its own right: crates and conservation measures sometimes
seem more elaborate than the very works they are designed to
protect. Captivated by its symbols, labels, and materials, as well
as the mysterious forms it engenders, Martin Kippenberger has
cultivated the beauty of fine arts handling. It’s a far-ranging
aesthetic. Bins of the artist’s own canvases, shown as if jettisoned
from the warehouse, are as romantic as ruined temples. The
crates Kippenberger exhibits alongside his sculptures are so
intricately absurd that, in the manner of the best gothic art, they
defy common sense. Striped cardboard boxes, exhibited like
Donald Judd wall-sculptures, are smooth icons of minimalism.
And a series of mummified works, wrapped in Kippenberger’s own
customised packing tape, becomes archaeological treasure,
mysterious fetishes of some marginal sect.
Taking this Egyptian preoccupation one step further, Jason
Rhoades fashioned an entire installation of his artworks and
possessions as if entombed in a suburban family garage. While
Kippenberger elevates wrappers to the status of artworks,
Rhoades intimates that it’s all - art and sepulchre alike - so much
trash. With Suitcase with Past Financial Endeavours (1993), a
shabby version of Duchamp’s Valise, Rhoades conjures up a
comic image in which the suitcase takes advantage of the firstclass luxury of the contemporary art circuit. Packed meticulously
by professional handlers, fawned over by devoted registrars,
expensively insured and gingerly installed, this slacker suitcase
filled with rolls of cellophane tape, magic markers, balled-up
aluminium foil, and vials of ‘wee-wee’ will travel from gallery, to
museum, to collection, taking an occasional time-out to relax in
climate-controlled storerooms - a Beverley Hillbilly come to high
culture.
Occasionally an artist is invited to infiltrate the sanctum
sanctorum. Museum exhibitions that feature artists as curators
seem to have made their debut in 1970 with Andy Warhol’s ‘Raid
the Icebox’ at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
6 David Bourdon describes Warhol’s tour of the vaults:
‘Warhol wanted the entire shoe collection. Did he mean the
cabinet as well? “Oh yes, just like that.” But what about the doors?
Would he allow people to open and close them? “Spectator
participation,” Warhol murmured… One of the biggest surprises
for Warhol was finding one of his own works...sharing a rack with
two Charles Hawthorns and one Zoltan Sepeschy. “Doesn’t it
make you sad to see all these forgotten artists?” Robbins asked
Warhol. “...uh...”’ 7
A work’s fate once it leaves the studio domain can prove the
source of some anxiety. Contemplating the unknown, Franz
Erhard Walther took precautions against the possible mishandling
of his First Work Series (1963-69). This multi-faceted sculpture
consists of a suite of ‘before’ drawings, the realised fabric
sculptures, ‘after’ photographs documenting these in performative
use, and a shelving-unit for storing the entire ensemble.
Altogether the piece serves as both museum and archive: a
pragmatic minimalist structure that attempts to control its own
physical and interpretative destinies. On a similarly hermetic note
are On Kawara’s date paintings, which come housed in their own
cardboard boxes. Inside the lid of each box is affixed a newspaper
page for the date situating the day’s work into a world of external
events.
Reifying a stored work’s existence through a paper trail of
photographs, sales records, loan forms, and letters is the archive.
The archive was Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished project: an
attempt to organise the tidal waves of an ensuing modernity into a
cohesive architecture of information and imagery. The inherent
futility of this attempt, as each fragile structure slips beneath the
crushing weight of the next oncoming wave, makes for an
appropriately unstable paradigm in an age of reproduction that is
itself giving way to the juggernaut of the information
superhighway.
For artists working from mediated imagery, as opposed to firsthand experience, archives are invaluable studio references.
Eugene Atget, whose work was once primarily purchased by other
artists and engravers as reference tools, referred to himself not as
a photographer, but as an archivist. (Duchamp decided to give up
painting to become a freelance librarian at the Bibliothèque
Sainte-Genevieve in Paris.) Among Joseph Cornell’s papers are
neatly titled dossiers - whose subjects include ‘Claire Bloom’,
‘Clouds’, ‘Patty Duke’, and ‘Peter Engels’ - from which he culled
for his collages. Likewise, Karen Kilimnik maintains files on
everything from ‘Andy Warhol’ to ‘Waterbabies’ as possible fodder
for her scatter-style drawings and installations. 8 For both artists,
personal obsessions sustain collecting impulses that give way to
assemblage by way of the archive. For the collaborative team of
Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, whose perfume Êtes-vous servis?
(1992) reproduces the scent of the National Archives in Paris, the
repository is its own obsession.
Working an undefined interstice between archivist and artist,
collector and curator, Douglas Blau maintains a vast accumulation
of film stills, postcards, photographs and magazine clippings for
use in his picture shows: installations of cycles of uniformly
framed images lined up in neat rows on the wall. This format
results in a deceptively simple narrative. It’s easy enough to follow
the logic of this idiosyncratic flow of imagery when taken one
picture at a time, but almost impossible to reconstruct in terms of
a whole. Thrown back on the curatorial project in general, Blau’s
selections point out a fictive fallacy whereby every exhibition is an
essay reflecting arbitrary predilections and biases, what’s at hand,
and what someone remembered to dig out of storage.
Sometimes the collecting impulse overwhelms the archival
process. Instead of throwing things away, Warhol crammed his
unopened mail and other casually-acquired ephemera into
cardboard boxes, which he shipped off to storage in New Jersey.
Currently being opened and catalogued at The Andy Warhol
Museum, the Time Capsules’ contents would seem a historian’s
dream - a post-marked paper backdrop to the famous artist’s daily
life. Except that the staggering volume of the capsules reveals
Warhol’s revenge, drowning the speculator in details of little or no
importance.
The artist’s life is a grand archive, in which every discarded
receipt, marginal note, or studio scrap might someday be deemed
tremendously significant. Besides Warhol, consider the Robert
Mapplethorpe and Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundations,
dedicated to compounding interest in their subjects through the
availability and upkeep of archives. These archives spawn those
other great testaments of worth, catalogue raisonnés, such as the
giant tome just published in conjunction with the Bruce Nauman
exhibition. Jockeying for control of the raw material are institutions
like the Getty Museum, which offer to pay living artists large sums
of money for their dead papers. While these activities maintain
and minister to a flourishing art market, the resultant
accumulations of documents are also telling memory banks,
demonstrating the ways in which historic figures are valued.
The issue looms measurably in Meg Cranston’s Who’s Who by
Size, University of California Sample (1993). These blank stelae
portray the relative importance of a panoply of cultural figures,
from Emily Dickinson to Mohammed Ali, according to the number
of inches of shelf space they occupy within the stacks of the
library at the University of California. With individual merit
counting for little - Nikola Tesla is dwarfed by Thomas Edison,
despite his substantial contribution to engineering - it’s the adage
of the art review come true: when it comes to securing a place in
history, perhaps it’s not so much what gets written as the number
of inches racked up in print.
When Sarah Seager approached the Smithsonian Institute’s
Archives of American Art with Excuse My Dust (1992-93), she
implicitly challenged the archival system of inclusion. Her donation
of found correspondence written or received by the former
archivist of the Huntington Library, was subtitled, Why do we
circulate all these papers when everyone says it will make no
difference? It tells of ‘...the archivist’s coming to terms with his
wife’s nearly fatal bout with pneumonia’ and in itself, serves no
more or less a purpose than documenting a fragment of a facet of
an otherwise untold story. However, housed in the Archives of
American Art under ‘The Sarah Seager Papers’, it speaks of a
historical process that only selectively chooses its evidence from
a vast arena of information, while the rest falls away into an ocean
of insignificance. 9
Anxiety and dust provoke the archiving impulse. In the museum the mausoleum most artists still aim to enter through their work the recesses of the storeroom simultaneously beckon and bar
access to history. Art that assumes the storeroom’s cladding and
demeanour of the stores displays a desire to repose within the
museum’s collection. At the same time, these works also elude
the museum’s authority by inventing alternative systems of selfcontainment outside of its ordination. These systems might be
seen as individual struggles against time, or as simply
autobiographical.
The process of storing is always one of mirroring and selfevaluation. Whether that self be a cultural body, squirrelish
individual, or Citizen Kane, ‘you are what you keep.’ When these
dual modes of internal and external assessment intersect in an art
of impenetrable closure or inexhaustible accumulation, they attain
an ongoing afterlife within deep storage.
1. Marcel Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Bride and the
Bachelors’ , New York: The Viking Press, 1965, p.60
2. Jackie McAllister and Benjamin Weil, exhibition catalogue
essay ‘The Museum under Analysis’ in The Desire of the
Museum, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989,
p.10
3. The task of assembling and editioning the Boîtes-en-valise
multiples progressed at a rate of about 30% per year and involved
a whole history of hired hands, including at one point, Joseph
Cornell.
4. Magritte quoted in Harry Torozyner, Magritte: Ideas and
Images, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,1977, p.109
5. Marcel Broodthaers’ open letter (dated 29 September 1968)
quoted in Birgit Pelzer, ‘Recourse to the letter’, Broodthaers:
Writings, Interviews, Photographs, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed.
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988), p. 170. The installation of an
arrangement of crates and postcards of 19th century paintings,
placed under the sign of the eagle, remained in place for exactly a
year. Broodthaers’ open letters document the opening and
activities of the museum on ‘official’ letterhead, comprising its
‘Section Littérature.’
6. The show was part of a series conceived by John and
Dominique de Menil, ‘who wanted to bring out into the open some
of the unfamiliar and often unsuspected treasures mouldering in
museum basements, inaccessible to the general public.’ c.f.
exhibition catalogue essay by David Bourdon, ‘Andy’s Dish’, Raid
the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, Providence: Museum of Modern
Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970, p.17
7. ibid. pp.17 & 24. Bourdon continues, ‘Back in his office,
Robbins informed the curator of the costume collection that
Warhol wanted to borrow the entire shoe collection. ‘Well, you
don’t want it all,’ she told Warhol in a rather disciplinarian tone,
‘because there’s some duplication.’ Warhol raised his eyebrows
and blinked.’, p.20
8. Other topics include anorexics, ballet/bows, god’s little
creatures, murders, overbites, and pajama parties. c.f. Melissa E.
Feldman, ‘Karen Kilimnik: A Material Girl,’ Karen Kilimnik: Escape
in Time, Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992, p.1.
9. In a letter dated September 14, 1992, the artist describes:
‘These letters were recently sent to my mother by a woman who
found them in the basement of a Santa Cruz home. How the
letters turned up in Santa Cruz remans a mystery, but it is in this
unusual manner that I have become the custodian of the
correspondence.’ c.f., Sarah Seager, Excuse My Dust, ed.
Cornelia Lauf, Gent: Imschoot, Uitgevers, 1994
Ingrid Schaffner
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at
editors@frieze.com. Freize, Issue 23, June-August 1995.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/deep_storage/
Dalton, Jennifer. Dream trash/trash dream: the artist as collector, historian, and
archivist PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 62 (Volume 21, Number 2), May
1999, pp. 63-70/
xiv
Can also bring in r footnote Kirkegaard book of fascmilies of his notes.
Possilby link back to Foucault on Nietzsche in Archaeology of Knowledge—not
only what goes into the archive (what is regarded as significant enough to read)
but also how it goes into the archive, how the archive gets reproduced in book
forms. Facsimile raises word and image issue in new ways when the writing of a
text is its illumination / illuminated manuscript, as it were, like historiated letters.
xv Max Payne is indeed a terrible action / vigilante movie. Max Payne is a cop
and widower whose wife and baby were murdered in his own home by, it turns
out, a despicable pharmaceutical corporation tied to the military industrial
complex. I cannot recommend it to you without warning you that finding the few
interesting parts means having to endure the incredibly awful parts that constitute
nearly the entire film. However, there is a quite interesting scene in it when Max
visits a self-storage unit. To save time, let me show you some image captures of
the scene.
Now in terms of the plot, there is something silly here in the assumption that the
corporate security / thieves would leave the file folders but steal their contents.
Indeed, why would they use first names only much less keep these files at all.
But it does make sense in psychoanalytic terms. The file is missing. The film fills
in that story—the wife turns out to have been murdered by the corporation’s
security agents with the knowledge of the CEO. Like any number of detectives in
films, Max Payne’s is able to fill in what is missing. But in this case, there’s a pun
on self-storage. You do it yourself, but you store yourself—or you are stored, to
use the passive voice. You store more than you know, more than can be stored.
And we also have an example of Freud’s uncanny: the home / office. The home
and office spaces are connected by a slash, differentiated yet linked. In Max
Payne, a similar fantasmatic logic about the file and its tampering is at work.
Though the missing contents of the file become evidence in a chain that leads to
Payne’s finding and killing his wife’s murderers, the last scene of the film is
shown after the end credit sequence is over, when most viewers will have left the
theater. This scene is titled on the DVD edition “unfinished business.”
xvi
"Demonic Berlin," in Selected Writings 2:1, 326
xvii
Discussion after Task of the Translator, p. 90
xviii
Task of the Translator, 87
xix
Avital Ronell, “The Rhetoric of Testing,” in Stupidity, 95-164; to pp. 119-21
xx
See Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychological Problem,” sections VI and
VII on “Nearness and Distance.” SW, 1, 393-401; to 397-401
xxi
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. . . Likewise, the
essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” P. 4 (technology
understand as instrumental and anthropological, p. 5)
Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection
upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that
is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other,
fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection
on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which
we are questioning . . . the closer we come to danger, the more brightly do the
ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.
For questioning is the piety of thought.”
The Question Concerning Technology, p. 35
Where do we find ourselves brought to, if now we think one step further
regarding Enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the
order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing
reserve.”
The Charterhouse of Parma is really interesting and could be our literary default
literary text (as opposed to Bartleby and the parable “before the law” from
Kafka’s The Trial for Visman) as well as theorizing literature and law (something
Visman does not do).
. There are romantic conversations between the prisoner hero and a woman he
loves who is the jailer's daughter and a woman who loves him (a Duchess) by
alphabet, one using an old alphabet as a code. In the former case, the lovers
communicate by using letters one by one by day and exchange full-length
"regular" postal letters at night. In the other case, the loved and lover
communicate by using lights, resorting to abbreviations. The Chancellery also
sends a letter stating the sentence of the prisoner without the sovereign's
knowledge. Another character has the sovereign store all kinds of records (that
he has signed) in a separate castle for security but really so the character can
blackmail the sovereign if need be (for the good purpose of saving the hero's
life). Another character never burns letters and yet has letters forged to damage
her rival, the woman who loves the hero but whom the hero does not love.
Another character, a chancellor of sorts, excuses himself at one point by saying
he couldn't get away form court because the sovereign had effectly imprisoned
him to his writing desk, making him copy out a bunch of documents in an old
calligraphic style that is laborious and therefore time consuming. Letters are
copied out and dictated (and copied after being dictated); handwriting is viewed
as potentially incriminating. It seems very proto-modern in calling attention to
its own medium, letters. The foreword also sets the novel up as a found
manuscript the author says he has merely recorded and transcribed. But the
narrator now and then intrudes, addresses the reader, and also says he has
omitted parts of the record. It's as if Stendahl allegorized the way the a novelist
renders the archive (un)readable as "historical" fiction. The nineteenth-century
novel's discourse network is premised on the fantasy not only of a lost
manuscript but of a lost archive in which the manuscript is presumed to have
been stored, fully intact.
The other noticeably bizarre aspect of The Charterhouse of Parma is that the
narrator pronounces negative judgments on his characters very severely and
then narrates the story on which he has passed judgment. Something going on
about first and lasting impressions, about the weakness of reason. Perhaps read
the prison as a self-storage unit that requires new ways of communicating, new
alphabets, new scripts, even microscripts, new kinds of lighting signals.