This book is about the question of reading,
Introduction:[i]
From Bare Life to Shelf-Life:
Close/d Reading the Archive[ii]
Storage Unit and BLack box ROnell on phone as black box (state of emergency ) versus Stengers, Latour et al Also the black box (scinece data) and the art box (Cornell, Duchamp),
and hte sotrage box (warhol) and hte file cabinet as art (spieker). The book as a work of art, like a boc,x, the briefcase as box, suitcase as box.
Portability of the box.
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book:
The Black Box: After the Crash: The Click: The Survual Guide 350-52.
The Bio, 302-308
The lines to which the insensible ear reconnects us are consternating, broken up, severely cracking the surface of the region we have come to hold as a Book. Even so, the telephone book boldly answers as the other book of books, a site which registers all the names of history, if only to attend the refusal of the proper name. A partial archivization of the names of he living, the telephone binds the living and the dead in an unarticulated thematics of destination. Who writes the telephone book, assumes it peculiar idiom or makes its referential assignments? P. 5
The call as death sentence 6
Terrorism(8)
A state casts a net of connectedness around itself from which h the deadly flower of unity can grown under the sun of constant surveillance. In contrast, we have tried to locate telephones that disconnect, those that teach you to hang up and dial again. (8)
Hediegger failed democracy
It is Heidegger who poses the greatest challenge to those of us who want to shatter the iron collar of fascism’s continued grip on he world. . Heidegger saw the danger, and he called it. And yet, Heidegger experienced the danger too late, which is why we have to route his thinking on the essence of technology –this has everything to do with death machines—through a delay-call forwarding system (8)
But the telephone, as a storage tank of reserve otherness, takes on an increasingly ironic function as it assumes an order of alternative consciousness or secondary personality “with a separate consciousness of its own” (DP,156).
127
Derrida and democracy issue of Diacritcs 2008.
Derrida and Ornell do not put enough pressureon democracy or onhte opposition between deomcarcy and fascism. They playinto Fukyama’s end of history and the last man’s hands.
And Ronell places negativity, does nto fully take irony into account, the parabasis that interrpts the callall along the line (use de Man’s metaphor differently).
Hamletas a play about irony insofar as it is about telephonics—hence is it s already anticipating its parodies,revisions, and even isitselfa parododic repetiion of the Ur-Hamlet. But irony is not comedy, as de Manknows. It is about delay, madness, error andstupidity.
Shelf-Life:
The Biopolitics of the Archive
In the introduction to my book, I maintain that the archive is the paradigmatic space of modernity. I address Giorgio Agamben‘s influential study, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, in which modernity is defined by a paradox: the temporary “state of exception” to the rule of law has become the permanent political norm. Any space can be turned into a detention center in which persons are stripped indefinitely of their rights as citizens and returned to the category of what Agamben calls “bare life,“ life that may not be murdered or sacrificed. The concentration camp is thus “the hidden paradigm of political space of modernity” (123). I widen Agamben’s narrow focus on the law to include a wide range of texts and media related to the archivalization of bare life: manuscripts, books, paintings, and film. I show that the history of biopolitics cannot properly be understood apart from the history of the archive. Whereas Agamben wants to recognize potential reconfigurations of the camp (the hospital room with a comatose patient on life-support, for example), I maintain that the universalization of sacred life [homo sacer] would not be possible without the virtualization, or mediatization of the archive and that allow for need kinds of storage space, from memory sticks to self-storage units. Not just the self-sotrage unit—it has uses owners may not recognize. Other storage devices like memory sticks or external harddrives. Walter Benjamin already living his bare life virtually—postal relay—storing his archive at different places—ordering different kinds of paper, trying to get a passport, reshelving his books. The publication of facsimile book of his archive on a continuum or virtual as pothumographic. My theoretical model of the archive draws on Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology (2007), Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) and Paper Machine (2005), Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008), and Andre Nusselder’s Interface Fantasy (2009).
In first chapter go back to Agamben’s redaing of Foucault in Remnants of Auschwitz and the starting point of Homo Sacer being Foucault not having discussed the camp. Go to Agamben’s Potentialities and his reading of Aristotle and Heidegger on potentilaity (Interface Fantasy mentions Aristotle but does not mention any title by name and says that virtual is Latin, not anicent Greek. Homo Sacer as an underground salvaging of Heidegger—the note on Heidegger; versus Derrida’s chapter on a foonote in Being and Time. Also Agamben’s Man without Content. For Heideggerianism of Agamben, plus sphilologist (Stanzas). He does a philological, structuralist philological reading of homosacer rarther than a Heideggerian reading of Greek (as Derrida does) in Homo Sacer, but he does so in Potentialities.
Begin with storage unit to open up biopolitics as the archive rather htan thecamp, to considervirtual bare life rather than legally declared bare life. A history of filing nad htearchiveresolves, not through positivism, a contradiciotn and bind that Agmben remains in between anhistorical and ahistorical model thatallows for only belated paternrecognition. Archive is not a problem of constructing the past through documents and materials, preserved or ruins, or their hallucinationated impression but of reading to come (Derrida, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthes) and the boundareis of publication. So the virutal archive is about posthumography, not reducible to Vismann’s positivist history or to Derrida’s arche-writing and media trnasformations of the archive. Rather a problem of unreadability of the published / unpublished / archived / stored papers, the haunotlogy of the archive’s materials, supoprts, biblions, subjctiles, supports, impressions. By the same token, no topgraphy that allows for Spieker’s art from bureaucracy. The question of living bare life virtutally forces us to recongize that the camp is an archvie.
In the first chapter, I reconceptualize Agamben’s virutalized bare life, or “biopolitics” as biobibliopolitics: in modernity, persons are defined by their relation to paper. Entry into concentration camps and all other zones of exception always involves identity papers and paperwork; similarly, preserving memory always bears on media of archiving, including film, photography, and print. As Vismann points out, the archived document may have an ambiguous material status: a calligraphic style make become obsolete under different regimes and stored as a work of art. If all life is now virtually “bare life,” as Agamben maintains, it follows that we must attend archival practices including surveilliance, data strorage, retention, retrieval and documents that allow people tp be processed as the cross various kinds of national and international borders. I historicize the increasingly virtualized passport (from written description to photograph to embedded memory chip) and reread Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics as an account of the archive, comparing Foucault’s central works on power to Arlette Farge’s Subversive Words and Jacques Rançiere’s The Names of History. They imagine the archive as a problem of reading, as a scene of annotation, of Philip II as a microhistorian in Braudel’s case. The future is not a disaster that could happen, a then and now, or immediate consequence (hisotircla and ahistorical) but the Hiedeggerian temporality of the late which is actually earlier, of reading the future withoutht a nationalism attached. See Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger. Derrida sidestepping the politics of f the archive—mentioning them in a ntoe that tis a tip of he hat to Foucualt—but he limits the archive to ash, to the limits of the archivabale in relation ot the impression. Once we connect life and death (bare liefe and bare death) of the archive to virtuality-media changes Derrida notes in the archive, hten the archiveis no longer reducibe to a crypt or ash or cinders but must be analyzed in lreation to posthumography (which subsumes autobiography, as in Blanchot)
In the second chapter, I examine the ways in which Alain Resnais’ Statues Also Die (1953), Night and Fog (1955), All the Memories of the World (1956), and Hiroshima, Mon Amour concern people as paper and paper as people and illustrate the ways in which bare life not confined to the space of the camp. In addition to discussing Resnais’ interest in reconstructing the past through various kinds of archives, I examine the forging of papers, paintings, and related criminal activities in the paintings by attending not only to the artist’s signature but to the provenance of paintings established on their reverse sides. I discuss a forgery case related in Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer and the Nazis and in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts as well as a recent German museum exhibition that made both sides of paintings visible entitled Spectres of Provenance. The art work of the archive involves a paradoxical and endless play of concealing and revealing by reading in reverse rather than a belated recognition of the newest “hidden” camp Agamben urges us to find. Or on the backings, behind as in Lost Leonardo—see also the different Lost Leonardo’s and the forensics reading of Nightwatching and related kinds of positivism. debate on the signature engaged by Jacques Derrida in The Truth of Painting; Meyer Shapiro in "The Still Life as Personal Object--A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh"; and Martin Heidegger in "The Origin of the Work of Art."
In the third chapter, I discuss a number of autobiographical essays on the boundaries of posthumous publication by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Derrida “Fichus” and postscript to Archive Fever as well as theory of autothanatobiography in Lacoue-labarhe. to show that the archive paradoxically becomes readable insofar as it is resistant or “closed”: reading is more about various kinds of reshelving, refiling, and storage of persons on paper, the passport being perhaps the best example of the paper person. Walter Benjamin concludes his essay, “Books by the Mentally Ill,” with a cryptic reference to a “manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these enlightened times, “to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house.” In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin equates publication with obtaining a passport:
The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long as we habitually regard writing as—despite everything—part of a higher, safer realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily form elsewhere, is all the more terrifying. How could this happen? How did it manage to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred doors? The writings of the insane would have no trouble obtaining a valid passport today. Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house. (Selected Writing 2: 1, 13)
Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive. Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by the passport controls of the biblio-polis. The archive allows for self-storage (reading yourself in what you and how you store and are stored): reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living bare life virtually.
In the fourth chapter I connect the biopolitical archive to a number of films related to WWII and concentration camps The Train (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1964), Mr. Klein (dir. Joseph Losey, 1976), Lifeboat (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1944), Lucien Lacombe (dir. Louis Malle, 1974), Army of Shadows (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969), and The Counterfeiters (dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007). I show how biopolitics is lived through various kinds of filing and archivalization by putting these films in dialogue with Derrida’s commentary on Maurice Blanchot’s autobiographical short story “The Instant of My Death” (set during WWII) in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony. I elaborate on Derrida’s insight that “no truthful testimony would be possible” were it not for the “fragmentation of truth” and the “spectral virtuality of life.” What odes it mean to recognize that he camp is an archive? The archive resists reading not because it is incomplete, but because it is in some crucial ways yet to be read. Archiving involves philosophical questions about the book, the work of art, and visual media that tend to get bypassed in linear, historicist narratives of a book’s or film’s storage, publication, and republication. Instead of recognizing hidden variations of concentration camps after the fact, as Agamben does, I show that the camps themselves are biopolitical archives: the history of biopolitics constitues a problem not only of reading the past in the archive but of future possible readings yet to come.
Posthumography puts pressure on what is already in play with any editing—the law kicks in sometimes in new ways with regard to executors control over the manuscript or over paratexts when it is published (length of introductions, and so on). Question of the last hand and without interpretation in Heidegger, becoming a dead hand. Family speaking in Heidegger’s name. Heidegger’s fear that what happened to Hegel after his death might happen to Heidegger after his.
See Theodore Kisiel, “An International Scandal,” Radical Philosophy (1995)
Heidegger discusses his own title “The Nature of Language” and rewriting it as “The Nature? Of Language?” and later discussing the title of George’s poem in On the Way to Language. see p. 53, 70, 73.
It’s a kind of Derridean moment, but you can only see it after having read Derrida. Heidegger sometimes stop to summarize what’s he said (he does this all time) but also repeats / restates his introductory sentences to “The Nature of Language.”
In Dialogue on language, MH refers to transcripts of his lectures, his delays in publishing one (after 11 eleven years), the film Rashomon (16), film and photography (17)
Mentions Schilermacher, posthumous publction, philology )10) a photograph of a grave, in On the Way to Language. 49
Recalling it 21
No theater, reading it (18)
Also how he abandoned the hermeneutic circle51, 29. 11.
First drafts of Ebeing and Time
“I believe that I have learned a little more, so that now I can ask questions better than several decades ago.” (8)
“house is a shelter erected earlier somewhere or other, like a portable object, can be stored away.”
“which is why you kept silent for twelve years” (6)
book, gift, inscription (7)
transcripts (5-6)
“lectures came out as a book” (2)
photograph of Kuki’s grave (1)(26)
Lacoue-Labarthe chapter on Niezstche in The Subject of philolosphy aobut how you have to read Nietzsche via Heidegger. See also Otobiogrpahies by Derrida. And that means reading FN against the posthumously published Will to Power (MH’s critique of it).
What Gaston Bachelard calls a “bibliomenon.”
Derrida Intro to Origin of Geometry, p. 91
Cites in note 94, L’activite de la physique contemporaine. 6-7.
Discussion of Husserl on the book, pp. 90-91.
Peter Krapps’ hysterical account of the horrifying misreading of his comments that led to the cancellation of a conference he was organizing to be held at Cornell on the 25th anniversary of Glas—says Derrida does not appreciate the difference between website and email. Krapp says he could not control the listserv. The cancellation was precipitated by a “prank.” Someone said JD had died. Culler and Klein thought he was in on the joke and cancelled the conference indefinitely.
How to read Derrida (reading Derridas) reading x rading y, etc.
See Leavey’s Coda to Intro to Hussler’s Origin of Geometry and three periods or punctuations, one in 1967 with Positions. Second is Joyce Gramophone essay of 1982 and third is Deerida’s thesis, which he cites in reverse order of Eyes of the University as “The Time of a thesis: Punctuations” published in Philosophy in France Today ed. Alan Montefiore Cambridge UP, 1983). And then Leavey says Derrida punctuates relative tot the thesis 1968-74, from 1974-79-89 and 3, 1980.
“Prior to the punctuation of the thesis other punctuations abound. Form 1963 to 1968 . . . (pp. 185-86)
I enjoyed the contrapuntal (contrapunctual?) tension between these two sentences in your Coda to Derrida's intro to Husserl's Origin of Geometry :
As of 1988 the corpus of Derrida is de facto incomplete, which would disrupt any move to unity. (184-85)
As always already there, on the horizon, punctuation, the signature of a corpus incomplete . . . (192)
This is exactly the kind of tension I am trying to analyze in my book _Shelf-Life_.
I also wanted to let you know that I found your dedication to be quite moving.
I am reading your afterword to The Origin of Geometry and finding that
the problem of punctuating Derrida's corpus is exactly what I was
trying to get at when I talked to you about the various ways one could
read Derrida (un)reading Derrida (un/reading (______fill in the blank)
reading ______(fill in the blank). I'm thinking of these different
kinds of punctuation as different reshelvings.
I am especially interested in the notion of a complete corpus
(Derrida's, Shakespeare's, etc) and the kinds of differences between
translations and editions that do not get registered in bibliographies
and translator's notes (or read at all). I have attached the Cordoza
Law Review version of "Force of Law" as well as one page from the Acts
of Religion version so you can see the sorts of differences I was
talking about at the Department party. A kind of comparative
philology could be extended to attend to what I call inaudible and
invisible interferences (of a Ronellian Telephone Book, Derridean Post
Card sort) that only appear through accidental static (when two people
have read two versions and find differences between them as compare
them). At the same time, I think these kinds of interference are not
assimilable to philology, textual criticism (even open texts and
"unediting") but have to be read philosophically under the (be)heading
of what I call "posthumography." That is what I ended up doing with
Derrida's essay on Sarah Kofman, "entitled ". . . ." in The WOrk of
Mourning and "Introduction" in Sarah Kofman: Selected Writings (at the
end of my "Posthumography" essay). The former version is an
incomplete translation (not announced as such) but gives a full note
to the French edition and posthumous publication history; it also
references the forthcoming SK book. The intro to the SK book does not
reference The Work of Mourning, however, and gives the full version of
the essay but replaces "(. . . .)" with "Introduction" without comment
(no note on the original title). My reading of the first translation
focuses on what turned out to be the editors' interpolated "(. . . )"s
which I thought were put there by Derrida. These variations do not
rise to the kind of resistance one associates with the symptomatic
reading, but they can be (not)read "like" the the way Derrida reads
variants in de Man's essay in Memoires for Paul de Man and variants of
Rousseau in Typewriter Ribbon, Ink.
I think of posthumography as constituting the limits of what Derrida
calls "unreadabilty" in Living on: Borderlines, the difference being
that I don't equate unreadability with the crypt (or encryption) as
Derrida does. Posthumography is not a necrology.
See Punctuations Time of a Thesis in Eyes of the University 2, talks about the past twenty gfive years in relation to his thesis (chaning the topic, ecidinghe won’t write it, then writing it). But the weirdest thing is that he keeps talking about books he ublished which he has notincluded in the corpus to be judeged so he can get his thesis. His publication history is crucial. 1967 (three works in one year) in relation to 1963-68 (p. 118) 1967, p 121, 1967 and may 68 , p. 122, only it’s just 1968 “that eventthat one still does not how how to name other than by its date” (122) goes back to 1949, the year he arrived in France to autumn of 1968 (123) Period form 1968 to 1974 (125)
1975 (125)
1974 (126)
death of Hippolyte in 1968 (122) 1972 (124)
“pushing it toward textual configurations that were less and less linear, logical, and topical forms, even typographical forms that were more daring, the intersection of corpora, mixtures of genres or modes, Weschel der Tone [changes of tone], satire, rerouting, grafting on so on” (124)
SO he presents his story not as a personal story but historicizes it as a trajectory or sequence largely through periods and publication dates over twenty five years (114(
1966 colloquium (115)
1957, registered his first dissertation topic
Reads Origin of Geometry teleologically “all of the problems worked on in the Intro to O of F have continued to organize the work I have subsequently attempted” (116)
1958-68 period of de Gaullism.
Title without title, 120
Not a system but a strategic device (18) and 1972.
And here I can only indicate them in an algebraic manner. (119)
Strategy without any goal (128)
After.Life [Blu-ray] Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, (2009). See your own death certificate scene. That is the first piece of proof offered Ricci. Mentioned by the director in an interview with her on the extras.
Thereafter Jaspers began an intensive study of Heidegger with the aim of writing a critique of the philosopher and the man, but again, without reading Being and Time. In 1955 he prepared a chapter on Heidegger for his Philosophische Autobiographie, but it appeared only in the second, posthumous edition (1977). It recounts in some detail the nature of their relationship.
551
here is little enough sustained engagement with Heidegger's thought, however, and one ends up wondering whether Jaspers would have been capable of that at all. Not only did he dismiss Being and Time (pp. 142, 163, etc.), but even his seemingly thorough reading of the Nietzsche volumes makes me doubt, from what I read in these notes, that Jaspers grasped the core of Heidegger's philosophy.
551
Finally one must ask what motivated all this scribbling. Perhaps Jaspers reveals the sadness of it all in a note written the day after Christmas, 1953 (p. 97): "In my dreams Heidegger never appears, yet tonight I dreamt of him. I was together with some people who attacked Heidegger in a way which made me angry. Heidegger came by. We spoke to each other in the familiar form, and I went away with him."?
552
T. J. S. Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Mar., 1979), pp. 550-552.
Humanist philology, in short, eminently deserves the attention that it has received from modern classicists and historians. Its proponents not only filled in the gaps and cleaned off the stains of the classical corpus, but rethought the nature of reading itself. At the same time, a second group of scholars-mostly literary- have shed new light on the methods by which some humanists made their texts yield a meaning directly useful to modern readers. The great surveys by Seznec and Allen vividly portray generations of Renaissance scholars building around their texts a vast wedding cake of interpretation, with ancient, medieval and modern ingredients richly mingled in the hope of disguising the awkward pagan features and apparent errors of the texts.
P. 627
Most scholars seem to find the current of thought that Garin emphasizes easier to accept as novel and important. He and other critics and historians offer a vision far more gripping than the mock- Raphael I described before: a group of heroic humanists energetically wipe the fog from a vast window, behind which appears the ancient world as it really was-or at least as Mantegna portrayed it, with me- ticulous attention to archeological detail and perspective. Yet dif- ficulties arise when we test this vision against the sources. In the first place, few of the humanists actually reveal on close
p. 629
Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries Author(s): Anthony Grafton Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), pp. 615-649
Swift Tale of a Tub / battle of the Books fake posthumography (Oxford edition, 1984)
the author, I believe, is dead, and it is probable that it was writ in the Year 1697, when it is said to have been written . . . (191)
Plato was by chance on the next shelf (110)
windows / shelves (113)
The following Discoure came into my hands perfect and entire [it is called A Fragment]. . .Concerning the auuhtor I am wholly ignorant, neither can I conjecture whether it be the same withthat of thetwo foregoing pieces, the original having sent me at a different time, and in a different hand. (all italics, 126)
but whether the author designed to have gone through such a work himself, or intended these papers only for hints to somebody else that desire them, is not known. After which the rest was to follow, written in his own hand, as before (all italics, 176)
Appendix A
“Chapter 28 Of the Philological Learning of the Moderns” (167)
in the magazine they call libraries (107)
In these books is wonderfully instilled and preserved the spirit of each warrior, while he is alive; and after his death his soul transmigrates there to inform them. This at least is the common opinion; but I believe it is with libraries as with cemeteries, where some philosophers affirm that a certain spirit . . . hovers over the monument till the dead body is corrupted and turns to dust or to worms, but then vanishes or dissolves. (107)
Huanted books in the St James library of Books of Controversy. (108)
Books not persons or others “I must warn the reader to beware of applying to persons what his here meant only of books, in the most literal sense. So, when Virgil is mentioned, we are not to understand the person of a famous person called by that name, but only certain sheets of paper, bound up in leather, containing in print the works of the said poet” (All italics, p. 104) Battle of the Books
More posthumography:
El tercer Reich (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition) [Paperback]
Roberto Bolano (Author)
Found in Bolano’s papers after his death.
Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard UP, 1992. Revised and augmented 2009.
Ernest Renan’s time travel fantasy—he really did travel His granddaughter said: “As for individuals, Renan deliberately assumed that they were identical to those who lived in the past. When he saw one woman on her way to the fountain and another in her doorway, eighteen centuries evaporated, and he beheld Martha and Mary and Mary Magdalene, barefoot and veiled. “ (Olender, 72)
Pictet’s readers were not wrong to see his Origins as a kind of Aryan ethnology, As he journeys through the land of the first Indo-Europeans, Pictet communicates his enthusiasm by abolishing all distance between himself and his remote ancestors, , , , Renan . . . was powerfully moved, to the point where they believed that they had a better idea of this resurrected prehistoric society “than of many contemporary societies.” Pictet’s admirers felt comfortingly close to the pre-diaspora Aryas. . . (Olender, 99)
Moses would have found there no “archives of Paradise.” Herder therefore advised his contemporaries not to hold out for an archaeology of the impossible, not to play “saviors of the history of Eden.” . . . For Herder, then, the Hebrew Bible was poetry of an exemplary kind. Renan (1823-1892) preferred to see the Bible as the archives of humanity: “The primitive archives of this [Semitic race, which by a remarkable twist of fate became the archives of the human race, have come down to us in Hebrew.” (4)
The inaccessible archives of Paradise evolved into the scince of linguistics, which dmeditated upon language as a faithful witness to history that transceneds the generations of humanity. In a 1759 dissertation enetitled “On the Influence of Opinions on Language and Language on Opinions” J. D> Micahelis (11717-1791) wrote: “Language is therefore a kind of archive in which human discoveries are protected against the most harmful accidents, archives htat flames cannot destroy and that cannot perish unless an entire nation is ruined.”(5)
Thanks to the new history of language, a study in which philology and lingusitcs made common cause, scholars now believed that they were ina position to make accurate portrayal of prehistoric society. By comparative analysis of Indo-European linguisticroots, some scholars even hoped to uncover the words and deeds of mankind’s earliest ancestors. Linguistic paleontology was the science of hteir dreams.
(7-8)
In his origins of the Aryans . . ., Reinarch analyzed the works of scholars who, along with Pictet, produced “endless vraitions” on the theme of the Aryan’s’ primitive state. “It seemed that a new Eden had been discovered beneath the fossil layers of language.(8)
Familiarity with the Bible had made it possible to conceive of human existence as an uninterrupted expanse of time stretching from the Garden of Eden onward; now, as nineteenth-century philologists filled in the Indo-European archives, other texts with an air of eternity about them came to supplant the Bible. (9)
Quoting Georges Dumezil:
The goal of comparativists in linguistics asin other disciplines is thus a modest one, for they kknow it is impsossible to reconstruct the living drama of a common ancestral language or civilization because nothing can replace documents, and there are no documents. (13)
“”Archives of Paradise,” 1-20/
“The Bible continued to haunt the new indo-European archives throughout the nineteenth century.” 126
Hand from beyond the drive dictating what is (not) to be done to the bodies of his legatees, heirs (second and third generation), and so on—several semantic registers legacy and estate (property) get condensed and conflated), but it all goes back to a pragmatic notion of editing and readability—a precritical philology. It ignores an author’s reshelving of his own works.
Heidegger case—planning hisown posthumous edition; didn’t want any; didn’t want to be like Hegel aferdeath. But he resigned ot it in two last years of hils slife.
Family business ran it likea paramilitary effort and produced bad critical editions without interpretaion, without an editorial apparatus and with mistakes uncorrected.
The book does double double
time work Grafton's book: it takes a double form and a double
narrative, one story being the narrative and the other story, in the
notes, of the book's production and "materials." Page layout and
graphic design variations are accidental. What matters is that the
two narratives are coherent. (his word).
The book is redoubled yet again a compilation of information, a "sort"
or "virtual" archive that cannot be used.
When [Otto] Ranke used account books, ambassadorial dispatches, and papal diaries to characterize the austere willful, and determined Pope Sixtus V, and rebuilt the city of Rome into a magnificent stage for Catholic festivals and triumphal processions, he made his book into a sort of archive” (57)
Angelo Frabroni . . . insisted that distinction of his work [Laurentii Medicis Magnifici vita (Paris, 1784] lay not in its solutions to disputed problems of historical interpretation but in its massive presentation of archival documents, which made the book itself a sort of virtual archive. (82)
Frabroni told his reader that
“you will think you are actually seeing” the Florentine Archive, actually known as that of the Medici, where many of the “incorrupt records” are “preserved” and “presented” in “many “volumes” of the book. He admitted that he could not publish all the relevant sources, or all those he had used. “Nobody would want to publish whole archives” (51)
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote, A Curious History
Scholar: Philosophers have always tread I place.
Guide: All of them even in the selfsame place.
Scientist: and I am grateful to you for admitting this.
Guide: But, without myself being a philosopher, I have just admitted much more to you. Philosophers not only don’t go forwards, they don’t just read in place either; rather, they go backwards. For there is what you referred to as the “selfsame place.”
Scientist: But where is “backwards,” and what is in back?
Guide: The backwardness of the essence and what it is—in other words, the essentiality of the essence—appears to greatly unsettle you. That is good.
Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations. Trans. Bret W. Davis, 2010, 14.
Whereas Grafton wants to go back in an unbroken manner from one cittion to another, a simple blushing history of dates of publication,
It also skips over the moment of emptying the storage unit(s) in which the papers have been found. Kierkegaard’s desk gets emptied and the papers get archived. But the desk remains. It is a/voided.
Next museological art installation. K’s desk with a lap top on it giving you access to each desk and its contents as left by K with simulacra of each page. The desk remains closed, its contents restored virtually. They could also be linked to their actual place in the archives-though that would mean noting that the shelves are always shifting.
Problem with the Berlin Bibliotek book burning installation is that it assumes that libraries are full-it has a simple binary of full and empty. But shelves maybe overfilled, unfilled, reshelved. Books do not have permanent addresses, domiciles, places of residence even if they permanent call numbers. They may sometimes be retrieved and re-placed in different places. The library is not necessarily full. Real libraries have to adjust the call numbers on shelf rows as they acquire more books, often lagging behind the books such that the shelf numbers are no longer current. No clear if there is a systematic procedure librarians use to update their shelf row numbers. Or if it is just ad hoc. A kind of lazy eye that notices belatedly the need for an update. Bibliotek book burning installation also odes not take into account the way people do dump their books over time—or they get sold at an estate auction. Moving shelves allow for more space but more difficult access. They only work if you are the only person using the library.
Next musuological art
Prehistoricism—New and Old Historicisms
“Living On / Borderlines”
My desire to take charge of the Translator’s Note myself. Let them also read this band as a telegram or a film developing (a film “to be processed,” in English?): a procession underneath the other one, and going past it in silence, as if it did not see it, as it it had nothing to do with it, a double band, and a blindly jealous double. . . a “double blind.” . . . . This would be a good place for a translator’s note, for example, about everything that has been said elsewhere on the subject of the double bind, the double bind, the double procession, and so forth (a quotation in extenso, among others of Glas, which itself . . . and so forth: this, as a measure of the impossible. How can one text, assuming its unity, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything about it, practically without referring to it?
pp. 64; 65, lower band
I shall perhaps endeavor to create an effect of superimposing, of superimprinting one text on the other. Now, each of the two “triumphs” wrotes (on [sur]) textual superimprinting. What about this ”on,” this “sur,” and its surface? An effect of superimposing: one procession on the other, accompanying it without accompanying it (Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompaginait pas). This operation would never be considered legitimate on the part of a teacher, who must give his references and tell what he’s talking about, giving it its recognizable title. You can’t give a course on Shelley without ever mentioning him, pretending to deal with Blanchot, and more than a few others. And your transitions have to be readable, that is in, in accordance with criteria of readability very firmly established and long since.
pp. 68-69, lower band
At the beginning of L’arret du mort, the superimposing of the two “images,” the image of Christ and, “behind the figure of Christ,” Veronica, “the features of a woman’s face—extremely beautiful, even magnificent”—this superimposing is readable “on the wall of [a doctor’s] office” and on a “photograph.” Inscription and reimprinting, reimpression of light in both texts. La folie du jour.
pp. 69-70, lower band
See also pp. 119, 137
The violent truth of “reading.”
p. 124, upper band
The absolute crypt, unreadability itself
p. 123, lower band
How are yu going to trnslate that?
p. 118, lower band
pp. 118-19, lower band
Reread in extenso
What must not be said today, if we are to follow the dominant system of norms of this domain? I do not say it; I say what must not be said: for example, that a text can stand in a relationship of transference (primarily in the psychoanalytic sense) to another text! And, Freud reminds us that the relationship of transference is a “love” relationship, stress the point: one text loves another (for example The Triumph of Life loves, transferentially, La folie du jour, which in turn . . . ) It is enough to make a philologist laugh (or scream) and Freud himself, did speak of transference as a “new edition”(in the metaphorical sense, of course, of Ubertragung!). On what conditions is this transferential magnetization possible between what are called textual bodies? This strange question has perhaps, long engaged (r long committed) me. Engaged me in what must not be. . . . [Dans ce qu’il ne faut pas.] How are you going to translate that? What must not be dome, in the realms of translation, transference, or the aforementioned comparative literature. . . This is what would not be serious sober, even if effects of homonymic transference are at play already and of necessity within Shelley’s poem. Which is, moreover, full of colors and embroidered flowers.
p. 116-19 lower band
Note to the translators: How are you going to translate that, réci, for example? Not as nouvelle, “novella,” nor as “short story.” Perhaps it will be better to leave the “French” word récit. It is already hard enough to understand, in Blanchot’s text, in French.
p. 70, lower band
it forces the translator to transform the language into which he is translating or the “receiver medium,” t deform the initial contract, itself in constant deformation, in the language of the other. I anticipated this difficulty of translation, if only up to a certain point, but I did not calculate it or deliberately increase it. I just did nothing to avoid it. On the contrary, I shall try here in this short steno-graphic band, for the greatest translatability possible. Such will be the proposed contract.
p. 2, lower band
The maximum translatability of this band: impoverishment by univocality. Economy and formalization, but in the opposite sense to that of what takes place in the upper band: there too are economy and formalization, but by semantic accumulation and overloading, until the point when the logic of the undecidable arret du mort brings and opens polysemia (and its economy) in the direction of dissemination,
pp. 73-74, lower band
The page layout of Derrida’s essay present a practical problem of reading (even though the norms for book design of the book’s margins remain in place, as they do in The Telephone Book). How do you read the upper and lower part? The text’s “readability” is immediately put in question.
The text is not unified, nor clearly split. One band is narrower than the other, but you have to read both. No instructions on how to do so. First the top, then the bottom, then turn the page? Etc. The page mimes the discussion of the internal divisions in Blanchot. A synchronous reading—is Derrida the author of both.
So the division presents a certain inference with “normal” reading, with what is usually allow to publish and with what page layout and font sizes usually signify tacitly.
The aporias eventually get thematized, made explicit in the text, but are also repeated; passages are quoted twice; comments in the notes / diary band are picked up in the text.
The text is about self-quotation.
The note is a supplement.
Certain metaphors kick in quickly. Telephone, telegraphics. Teleo-graphy.
Metaphor of transference, superimposition, photograph—used in the lower band, then in the upper much later.
Freud on mourning—transference (telephone exchange) as madness of one text reading another--One text reads another—first Shelley and Madness of the Death; then the two parts of Death Sentence. Both Blanchot texts have two versions; but each is internally divided.
All this has taken place in non-reading, with no work on what was thus being demonstrated, with no realization that it was never our wish to extend the reassuring notion of a text to a whole extra-textual realm and to transform the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries, all framework, all sharp edges (arets: this is the word I am speaking of tonight), but we sought rather to work out the theoretical and practical system of those margins, these borders, once more, form the ground up. I shall not go into detail. Documentation of all this is radily available to anyone committed to breaking down the various structures of resistance, his own resistance as such as primarily the ramparts that bolster a system (be it theoretical, cultural, institutional, political, or whatever). What are the borderlines of a text? How do they come about?
70, upper band
Notable that Derrida turns his writings metaphorically into documents of his assertion—he does not go into detail, does not do the bibliographic work of documentation but asserts that what he has said can be document if you read the documents even while talking about unreadability.
“(I note parenthetically The Triumph of Life, which it is not my intention to discuss here, belongs in many ways ot the category of the recit)” 70
Is the word “medium” as used by Husserl when Derrida quotes him in Margins of Phil using the word to mean “middle” in its Latin sense? Derridas seems to think it is medium (paper) ina telecommunications sense.
Superimposed like a photographic image. P. 137, upper band
Yet the two bands cannot be superimposed over each other—one is not a translation of the other.
The translator’s note is a set of instructions to the translator and also a series of questions and a series of diary entries.
Derrida often omits key bibliographic information when he cites a text by himself or in one case by Blanchot, making so that the question of self-reference and self-quotation is not reducible to recognizable and (fully) operational citations / references. (p. 132—Derird mentions Cartouche but does not name it
p. 134, lower band, Derrida mentions Lapart du fue but does not give Blanchot’s name as author. He also says “elsewhere” at points, sometimes giving no bibliographic information at all.
Narrator says elsewhere” (133, upper band)
Derrida says he will read Triumph of Life with Madness of the Day but then just talks about Madness of the Day.
Gives examples of transferential reading in the lower band—“rose” in Death Sentence” and variations of rose and arose in Shelley; as well as “rose” in Bataille’s Laure.
Insists this is not word play.
He often repeats (recites / refer to/ quotes / references) himself in the text without calling attention to doing so
Derrida does not read a long passage (123) but then he does (124)
Dates in lower band p. 62, 114, 122, 130 (just October 12); he also talks about dates in Blanchot 1936, 1938.
“proof” in lower band p. 133 and upper band p. 139)
Asynchronous reading demanded.
Practice of reading unreadability is typographic. “teleo-graphy”
Also figured as atopic and hypertopia. A place-less place.
Figure of “unreadability” is the crypt-“form the bottom; from the ground up.
Derrida does not read the Triumpfh of Life
Question about the violence of quoting the text one reads.
The Coming of the Book—title is so messianic without being messianic.
Very French orientation. By the end, it gets very focused on how to do it (on method). He ends up taking about how its huge in scope but is narrower reorientation is toward French printing.
Graphic unconscious—equivalent of W Benjamin’s optical unconscious, an altered relation to writing.
But Tom Conley doesn’t do Benjaminian, or are his readings psychoanalytic (just decoding rebuses).
Has anything been written on the executors constraints on editing and translating Heidegger? I hadn't realized that some of the seminar volumes resembled Lacan's (transcriptions plus notes, in H's case).
One way I find editing very interesting is that it defaults to vulgar time, to biographical realism, and organic life (living and postuhumous [often hitherto unpublished] publications).
It would appear that MH's works gets organized around a twin telos (if that is possible).
First, we have Becoming Heidegger (1910-27), on the trail
then we have
Being Heidegger (1927) Being and Time. This is the first telos, taking the path (the right right way).
then
Still Being Heidegger (1927-35) Off the beaten track
(Heidegger's reshelving of Sein und Zeit in relation to the Intro to Metaphysics (1929 and 1935)
then
After Being Heidegger
Beitrage (Vom Ereignis) (1936-1938). This is the second telos. Off the unbeaten track
And then we get something like
Still Being Heidegger After Being Heidegger until his death. More and more detours, regatherings, and recirclings. On and Off the unbeaten track
This briogrhical, chronological, bibliographical schema gets simplified into the commonly drawn distinction between Heidegger and Late Heidegger with the attendant debates over the meaning of their relation.
But these kinds of reductions of Heidegger's Gesamtasugabe (which I notice has been divided into three divisions) into the vulgar time of biography and bibliography are complicated by the paratexts of the editions (in German and in English translation) as well as by Heidegger's own reeditions of his work, his marginalia, his citations of his own works, in short, by his discontinuous relation to his own works. I love H's preface to Kant and Metaphysics a reading of Kant's two editions. Here H presents the second edition of his own book as unedited, unrevised. But H and his executors, in seeking to publish the most complete edition, actually fail to present a transparent, definitive edition. Kisiel notes all kinds of static and interference that makes any claim to an "edition without interpretation" deeply ironic. Yes, without interpretation in some cases, but those cases have no interpretation because they resist interpretation as editions: they have either lots of missing connections (the text is a ruin, leaving only fragments) or improperly made connections (repair jobs that hide the stitching together of notes and transcripts).
In any case, I think the publishing history of MH and its conflicting temporalities (vulgar time and the uncanny time / occurrence of self-reshelving) deserves critical attention if it has not already received it.
Of course. No normal category of readability, then, could give credence to the mad hypothesis according to which the double invagination that attracts us in this reçit could make it possible to read [donner a lire] the unreadable hymen between the two women: one with(out) the other. . . And yet something like X-ray analysis or “blood” [sang] analysis can make readable [donner a lire] that which is unreadable in this narrative body. . . the readability of unreadability is as improbable as an arrêt du mort. No law of (normal) reading can guarantee its legitimacy. By normal reading I mean every reading that insures knowledge transmittable in its own language, in a language, in a school or academy, knowledge constructed and insured in institutional constructions, in accordance with which the arrêt du mort troubles so many conceptual oppositions, boundaries, borders. The arrêt de mort brings about the arrrêt of the law.
(“Living On / Borderlines,” Third edition, 2004), 138, upper hand
The truth beyond truth of living on: in the “middle” of the recit, its element, its ridge, its backbone [aret]. There is only one blank space in the typography of the book, between the two recits. Before, in the first version, there were two. By erasing, by doing away with the second blank space, in the second version—the blank space that separated the two recits from the sort of epilogue that was in danger of being meta-narrative and pretending to gather together the two recits—by making this change, Blanchot has given the middle space an even more remarkable singularity. This is not the only effect of this change, but it counts.
p. 117, upper band
This unreadability will have taken place, as unreadable, will have become unreadable [se sera donné a lire] right here, as unreadable, from the very bottom of the crypt in which it remains. It will have taken place where it remains: that’s the proof. From here on in it’s up to you to think what will have taken place, to work out both the conditions for its possibility and its consequences. As for me, I must break off here, interrupt all this, close the parenthesis, and let the movement continue without me, take off again, or stop, arrest itself, after I simply note this: in everything that happens, it’s as if. . .
Living On 139, upper band
The translators will quote Glas, including this passage that begins on page 220—“After developing the X-ray, negative of testamentary chrisms and graveclothes. . “
Living On, p. 99, lower band
By the same way, linked to what is untranslatable in a language, this decision becomes unreadable. I maintain that this title is unreadable. If reading makes accessible a meaning that can be transmitted as such, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity, then the title is unreadable. But this unreadability does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface; rather, it starts reading and writing and translation moving again. The unreadable is no the readable but rather the ridge [arête] that also gives it momentum, sets it in motion “The impossibility of reading should not be taken too lightly” (Paul de Man). If we say that the unreadable gives, presents, permits, yields something to be read [l’illisible donné a lire], this is not a compromise formula. Unreadability is no less radical and irreducible for all that—absolute, yes, you read me.
Living On, pp. 95-6, upper band
Everything that, in the text above, goes back to the dissemination of sand . . p. 97, lower band
I slice things up somewhat barbarously and illegitimately, as we always do, counting on an implicit contract, the impossible contract: that you read “everything” and that at all moments you know the “whole” “corpus” by heart, with a living heart that beats unceasingly [sans aarret], without even a pulsation. . . .
p. 96, upper band
Maurice Blanchot, “Translated from . . .” in The Work of Fire
It is perhaps unsuitable to recognize in translated works, from the fact of their translation, merits that might be lacking in similar works written in an original language. But first, we do not see why the act of the translator should not be appreciated as the quintessential literary act, one which proposes that the reader remain ignorant of the text it reveals to him, and from which his ignorance will not distance him. Instead, it will bring him closer by becoming active, by representing to him the great interval that separates him from it. It is true that these merits are perhaps only apparent; they have the value of a mirage; they vanish if we are too attentive to them. Even more, one can evaluate such dangerous qualities. Too good a bargain, a translated text mimics the effort of creation that, starting from everyday language in which we live and are immersed, seeks to make another language be born, same in appearance and yet, with regard to this language, like its absence, its difference perpetually acquired and constantly hidden. If foreign works encourage and stimulate imitation more than our own works, it is because imitation, in this case, seems to reserve for us a greater personal role, especially because the imitator, fascinated, in the translated text, by the strangeness that the passage from one language to another provokes, thinks that it can take the place of the originality he seeks. Unfortunately, even if he borrows from his model only what he has the right to borrow, he will forget to be in his turn a translator and he will renounce making his language undergo the transmutation that from one single language must draw out two, one that is read and understood without deviation, while the other remains ignored, silent, and accessible. Its absence (the shadow of which Tolstoy speaks) is all that we grasp of it.
(pp. 189-90)
Rebound
I had not reread Valéry for a long time. And even long ago, I was far from having read all of Valéry. This is still true today. But in going back to the texts that I thought I knew, and in discovering others, especially in the Notebooks, naturally I asked myself in what ways a certain relationship had changed. Where had the displacement, which in a way prevented me from taking my bearings, been effected? Where does this signify here, now? A banal question, arising once more in the form of the return to the sources which always afflicts the rhetoric of the anniversaries of a birth: Valéry one hundred years later, Valrey for us, Valéry now, Valéry today, Valéry alive, Valéry dead—always the same code. What laws do these rebirths, rediscoveries, and occultations too, obey, the distancing or reevaluation of a text that one naively would like to believe, having put one’s faith in a signature or an institution, always remains the same, constantly identical to itself? In sum a “corpus,” and one whose self-identity would be even less threatened than one’s own body [corps proper]? What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinctions?
--Jacques Derrida, ”Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources” in The Margins of Philosophy, 278
No normal category of readability; then, could give credence to the mad hypothesis according to which
Derrida talks about genes and DNA as forms of writing in Of Gramatology. What he;s doing in Paper Machine in some ways he was already doing as early as that book.
Essay on a footnote from Band T in Margins of Philosophy. No other early Heidegger until later Derrida Of Spirit, then Aporias.
Derrida's Living On / Borderlines essay is a non-reading of
Shelley's "Triumph of Life" with a reading of Blanchot's Madness of
the Day and Death Sentence. He puns on
bandaged and banded. He also puns on "de-lire[to read]-ium." It's
all the folding edges of the never possible to finish text,
unreadability, translation (untranslatability), recit and re-citation,
and the technics of transmission. The text is divided horizontally
into two "bands, the lower and narrower one in a smaller font, like a
long footnote that runs the entire length of the text above it. But
it's a translator's note, or a note to Derrida's translators, not a
footnote.
By the way, "Living On" is in Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold
Bloom et al.
"Living On" is similar to "Before the Law" in some respects and to _Of
Spirit_ in others (especially attention to typography, a single
letter, a change in punctuation, a change of title, invisible
quotation marks, and so on). Everything in the text is rendered
readable, but "everything" can never be read. Derrida puts
"everything" in quotation marks below. He not only deconstructs an
opposition between versions but the unity of any singular version as
well (so Macbeth would be a perfect example--you don't need to go to
Hamlet or Lear).
The temptation here, of an exhaustive reading, both of The Triumph and of everything else, beginning with all of Shelley’s glas [death knells] . . . The same temptation with Blanchot: beginng in with L’arrêt de mort, a starting point chosen by chance and of necessity, to recognize a “logic” that would enable us to read everything, in L’arrêt de mort and elsewhere, down to the smallest element, the grain of sand, the letter, the space . . . (96, lower band)
"Telegraphics and telephonics, that's my theme." (63, lower band)
But in the same way, linked to what is untranslatable, this decision
becomes unreadable. I maintain that this title is unreadable. If
such, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity, then this title
is unreadable. But this unreadability does not arrest reading, does
not leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface: rather, it
starts reading and writing and translation moving again. The
unreadable is not the opposite of the readable but rather the ridge
[arete] that also gives it momentum, movement, sets it in motion. "The
impossibility of reading should not be "taken too lightly" [sic] (Paul
de Man). If we have to say that the unreadable gives, presets,
permits, yields something to be read [l'illisible donne a lire], this
is not a compromise formula. Unreadability is no less radical and
irreducible for all that--absolute, yes, you read me. (95-96, upper band)
I slice things up somewhat barbarously and illegitimately as we always
do, counting on an implicit contract, the impossible contract: that
you will read "everything" and that at every moment you know the
"whole" "corpus" by heart, with a living heart that beats unceasingly
[sans arret], without even a pulsation. . . . (96, upper band)
Coming of the book
Note words like “a reasonably accurate impression” and “impressed’ on the first page. An entirely instrumentalist, rationalist account of the market and needs based, basic requirement of new markets following form new organizations.
Michel Zink. “Nerval in the Library, or The Archives of the Soul.” Representations, No. 56, Special Issue: The New Erudition (Autumn, 1996), pp. 96-105.
Now all that remains is for Nerval to make a gift to the Bibliotheque imperiale of the book that was so expensive and is now, he discovers, of no use to him.8 It is crucial-as we all know-not to find what one is looking for in the library in order to prolong a studious and dreamy quest, so that time lost has time to become transmuted into lost time, and so that one might suddenly find oneself in Chalis long ago. In Sylvie, it is "an evening at the theater" and the sudden superimposition of the face of the forgotten girl onto that of the beloved actress that sets the journey in motion toward Valois and toward the past. In Angelique it is wandering through the libraries, the conversation with the curators, the opening of archival files, the reading of catalogs that has the same effect. Perhaps this effect will soon be all that libraries are good for--I mean real libraries in the literal sense of the word: places where books are stored. The book is less and less the bearer of the text. Access to all documents will soon be convenient, instantaneous, and certain. Soon there will be no more need to visit a library, to give a card to someone working in the stacks and wait with bated breath for someone not to bring you the book you requested. Just when libraries as they have existed for so many centuries and as we have visited them through the long years of our short lives are on the verge of disappearing, let us hope that at least a few will remain, preserved for the services they do not render. Imagine, if Nerval had had no difficulty finding the Histoire de l’abbe de Bucquoy, there would be no Angelique. Let us fear the day when we shall be confident of finding the obscure and coveted book to read on that hopelessly familiar screen. (103)
Boris Groys, “What Carries the Archive—and for How Long?” in Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data. Ed. Joke Brower and Arjen Mulder. A V2_/NAI, 2003, 178-83.
The “materials” of reading, the “material” supports are not material, they are “material.” They are nto things, transparent, but “things” that have to be read.” Especially the biblion as backing. So any writing is double—it ahs a support.
So my version of Textual Culture includes but displaces cultural studies. Word culture not a default.
How this support (paper machine) bears on the archive (bibliopolis) and posthumographic publication is the issue.
Textual transgressions : essays toward the construction of a biobibliography
David C. Greetham
Biobiblio about the impasses of philology and philosophy / and literature.
About the spectrality of materiality. A questioning of conventional historicism.
I've begun to see more clearly the logic / structure of
Shelf-Life--from the archive as container resistant to reading to
posthumous publication to the relic / work of art, linking up bibbliogrpahy to biobibliopolis.
the metaphors of "close/d read ing"--side to side, upside down, inside
out--will kick in accordingly as variations on “reading around.” The self-storage unit is a figure of the archive that resists various hermeneutic defaults—the file or desk drawer, the inside of a book, a secret hiding place where a mss is found that went missing, a fort /da hermeneutic, from abesnece to presence. Paralinear reading is not only side to side, but turning over the other side of the underneath-not topographically three dimensional—posthumography—no addressee at all—so error not just in destination; and not chronological or sequential but also pre / post temporality of writing, publication and retrieval; writing is not reducible to orinary, empirical writing. So I link up the archive, paratextuality, and posthumography n rlation to rading and the future / destiny—hediegger and Derrida.
Writ/e of Habeas Corpus
de Man's brilliant essay on Heidegger on Hoelderlin (second edition
of Blindness and Insight) recently because I remember thinking it odd
that de Man does not cite a particular Hiedegger text. I wanted to
doublecheck to see if he did, so I did and found that he doesn't. But
he does mention an essay in a 1959 issue of a journal (which I then
got of UF's storage published in 1959 as part of a special issue on
Hoelderlin. I thought de Man was refering to an essay he had written
(I checked the posthumous Critical Writings collection and didn't see
it there). Anyway, it turns out to be a translation of Heidegger's
"Essence of Poetry" by de Man, along with six endnotes by de Man (and
a translation of Hoelderdlin's "Bread and WIne," a poem de Man
discusses in his Task of the Translator essay. No big deal, to be
sure. Still, for someone so interested in philology and translation,
it seems strange that de Man ghosts his own translation of Heidegger
(on Hoelderlin).
DENIS HOLLIER, Notes (on the Index Card) October 112 (2005)
There is also the fact that, as a genre, autobiography is structurally condemned
to incompleteness and that, conversely, incompleteness tends to induce an autobiographical
effect. (39)
Leiris’s interest in Duchamp’s box comes at a time when, having just completed
the manuscript of L’Age d’homme, having also irreversibly decathected from the
mirages of automatic writing, he was searching, in the aftermath of the revelation
of Roussel’s ars poetica, for a protocol that would ensure that the autobiographical
self would never lose what Sartre called its transcendence, that the I would keep
its linguistic status as an empty sign. The 1931–33 Dakar-Djibouti anthropological
expedition had been for him an intensive training ground for the systematic technique
of note-card filing. While in the process of becoming a professional
ethnographer and of setting the stage for the dual exploration of autobiography
and ethnography that will inform his further work for more than fifty years, this
almost-manual (artisanal) aspect of his professional training will soon lead him to
open a sort of autobiographical account, a kind of safe into which he will deposit
entries cut out (i.e., copied out) from his diary, before drawing from this frequently
reshuffled and augmented portfolio of memories, anecdotes, ideas, and feelings,
small and big, to feed his continuous self-portrait.13 The result is a secondary, indirect
autobiography, originating not from the subject’s innermost self, but from the
stack of index cards (the autobiographical shards) in the little box on the author’s
desk. A self built on stilts, on “pilotis,” relying not on direct, live memories (as in
Proust’s involuntary memory), but on archival documentation, on paper work, a
self that relates to himself indirectly, by means of quotation, of self-compilation. (39)
5. The Roussel-Mallarmé-Duchamp triangle, already in place in 1935 (see
Roussel & Co.), was spectacularly revived (at the same time, if one may say so, as Leiris
himself was) in 1957. In the hospital, Leiris had at his bedside, like some sort of bible,
Mallarmé’s notes for the Le Livre (which had just been edited for the first time by
Jacques Scherer). An important chapter of Scherer’s introduction is devoted to
Notes (on the Index Card) 39
12. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernists Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196–209.
13. See Richard Sieburth, “Leiris/Nerval: A Few File Cards,” this issue, pp. 51–62.
the theme of the container in Mallarmé’s poetics and his symbolist universe,
specifically to the affinities and differences between the book, the casket, the safe,
the chest or chest of drawers, and the coffin.14 But there were for Leiris earlier
associations of Mallarmé’s work with more literal containers. In his preface to his
1925 first edition of Igitur, a text to which Leiris refers on a variety of occasions,
Dr. Bonniot, the son-in-law of the poet, had written: “Mallarmé, as we know, used
to jot down his first ideas, the first outlines of his work on eighths of half-sheets of
school notebook size—notes he would keep in big wooden boxes of China tea.”15
Here the box, a coffin for the literary unborn, is thus associated with the definitively
unfinished: it is the resting place for notes that didn’t make it, didn’t reach
the stage of the book.
The index card file, however, is not doomed to be tied to this funeral model.
It is also the best support for the opera aperta, whose desire was pervasive in the
1950s and 1960s. Not unlike Duchamp’s door that is both open and closed at the
same time, the card file resists the syntagmatic closure of the sentence by sustaining
the openness of the paradigm. It doesn’t allow the phrase to gel, to take
shape. A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of time
or space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequential
irreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interior
mobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclusion
of a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pages
are numbered, like days on a calendar). (39-40)
As it is also known, some twenty years
later, Barthes was to return to this book series, as both author and subject, both
author and title: Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. This time, the index cards were
already there. One of the pages of illustrations of the volume reproduces three of
them in facsimile. The text doesn’t comment on them, doesn’t even allude to
them. There is just a caption: “Reversal: of scholarly origin, the index card ends
up following the twists and turns of the drive.” (40)
Very early on, he fought for an aesthetics
and an ethics of the discontinuous (which the structuralist activity of cutting
and editing, the gestures of montage, the practice of analysis will epitomize) as a
defense against the endoxal stickiness of continuity. He defended it in short texts;
but that was not the point. The small dimension of his own output was never foregrounded,
never thematized. There was no hint of a possible self-referential
connotation, of the possibly pro domo dimension of such an adamant and eloquent
discourse in favor of the discontinuous. Discontinuity, then, was on the side of the
object, its concentration on the referent and the signified leaving no space for a
feedback on the textual performance itself. At least not before the preface of
Critical Essays, where Barthes identifies it as the formal feature of critical writing:
“the very discontinuity which marks all critical discourse.” (42)
Hollier edition of Michel Leiris' La Règle du jeu : Biffures - Fourbis - Fibrilles - Frêle bruit. The words Biffures and Fibrilles are not in any French / English dictionaries online.
the posthumous publication of
two sets of index c cards by Barthes. I noticed that his last seminar
"Preparation for the Novel" is coming out in an English translation
this November.
• ↑ Éric Aeschimann, « Désaccords autour des notes posthumes de Roland Barthes, François Wahl, son ex-éditeur et ami, conteste la parution de certains de ses écrits intimes », Libération, 21 janvier 2009 [lire en ligne [archive] ]
• ↑ Chantal Guy, « Les inédits de Roland Barthes : la littérature en héritage », Cyberpresse, 5 avril 2009 [lire en ligne [archive]]
The Greetham essay I was thinking of is collected in his Textual Transgressions-entitled "Textual Imperialism." He's probably commented on the MLA elsewhere. I saw a rather acerbic review of the electronic editing collection from MLA in Textual Cultures (2007).
David Greetham. "Uncoupled: OR, How I Lost My Author(s)." Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 3, no. 1 (2008): 44-55.
Peter Sloterdijk, in Terror from the Air, (MIT 2009) invokes the storage model:
We are condemned to being-in, even if the containers and atmospheres in which we are forced to surround ourselves can no longer be taken for granted as being in good in nature. (108)
He moves above from “being-in-the-air “to “being-in”
His metaphors become enclosures: greenhouse, arcades, bell jar, gas palace, following by counter dwelling of reconstructed “home.” “natural air-envelope” (60).
“storage and transport” 35)
The “greenhouse effect” as a metaphor for global overheating implies that the earth itself is in a container. Sloterdijk links the greenhouse to the arcades—and Walter Benjamin (95-96).
Critique of Heidegger—being unto death—versus “breathing-unto-death”(42); airing versus clearing (borrowed form Irigaray The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (The Constructs Series) - Paperback (1999) by Luce Irigaray and Mary Beth Mader
If, in his post-1945 writings, Martin Heidegger makes use of the them Heimatlosigkeit, or absence of homeland to signify the human being’s existential orientation in the era of Ge-Stell, then we would be wrong to imagine that he is merely talking about the bygone naivety of dwelling in rural houses and the moving of existence into urban habitation machines. More profoundly, The term “homeless” also suggests a denaturalization in the snese of the human being’s natural air-envelope and re-settlement in climate-controlled spaces; more radically still, the discourse of homelessness can be read as symbolizing the change of epoch implied by the exodus out of all the remaining proetective niches and into latency. (60)
My disagreements with Heidegger . . . the conditions for Gegend and natal-earth type situations cannot be construed as donations of Being . . ; for they are actually dependent on sustained efforts of formal design, technical production, legal trusteeship, and political design. (62-63)
Declaring war against an enemy this gets replaced with the issuing of an arrest warrant (66)
“media of existence” (50)
The idea according to which life insists less in its being-there, by its participation in the whole, but instead by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal of participation. (110)
From these sources of various kinds of perceptible, microclimatic alterations, we moved—from the 18th and 20th centuries—to the very design-precipitated “discovery of the obvious” by which people , in the age of explication, were motivated—a second time around—to take hold of what lay at hand. These were the fields in which the concrete atmo-technologies were developed, . . . the artificial adjustment of temperature and humidity in living spaces and storage spaces; the installing of refrigerators in apartments and the construction of fixed or mobile cooling rooms for storing and transporting food stuffs” (92)
Also becomes a question of formal “air design” (94)
“psychoactive designer air (95)
“the principle of interior architecture is extended to an otherwise imperceptible milieu of everyday life; that of a breather’s gaseous and aromatic environment. (95)
Comments that people versus population is “ a trifling matter” (p. 69). Discusses
“persons’ instead (85). Also people versus residents
Air/Conditions of modernity as biowar and bioterrorism, assault on the conditions that make life of the enemy possible, especially the air he breathes. The victim participates in his own destruction by breathing in the poisoned gas (cynanide).
“Life is a side effect of having been climatically spoiled.” (91)
Heidegger’s homelessness
Key dates April 22, 1915 gas warfare at Ypres Germans on British
1918 German Pest Control using same gas
1921-27 first aero-chemical air war (Spain).
1924 gas chamber in Nevada
1941 Final Solution
1945 Dresden firebombing
1945 nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
1960s U.s. Naplam in VietNam
Sarin gas attack in Tokyo 1995
“tele-destruction” (51)
Terrorism can only be understood when grasped as a form of exloration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility. It exploits the fact that ordinary inhabitants have a user relationship to their environment, that they instinctively and exclusively consume it was a silent condition of their existence. . . it is crucial to insist on identifying terrorism as a child of modernity, insofar as its exact definition was forged only after the principle of attacking an organism’s, or a life-form’s, environment and immune defenses was shown in its perfect technical explication [explication means making explicit, exposing] pp. 28; 29
“media for life’ (25)
In this movement of exlication the principle of design is implicated from the start (23)
Terroris, from an enviromnetal perspective, voids the distinction between violence against people and violence against things: it comprises a formof violence agasint he very human-ambient “things” without which people cannot remain eople. (26)
The enemybecame an object in the environment whose removeal was vital to the system’s survival. (27)
“atmoterrorism” means atmosphere terrorism—atem as in breathe.
Warfare becomes “rational exterminism” (41)
In the last years of World War I, the international community for poison gas and atmosphere deign experts was porous enough, on both sides of the Atlantic, to be able to react to technical innovations and fluctuations in the climate of applied morality. (38)
Peacetime research efforts continued wartime research efforts.
And P Sloterdik comes back to a Heideggerian mood default of anxiety
The American way of war includes in advance its enemy’s punishment. . . Warfare thus indissociable from an extra-judicial trial. The victor’s anticipated justice comes to pass in the form of weapons research against the enemies of tomorrow and of the day after. (66)
What then proves particularly dangerous are the climatic toxins emitted from people themselves, since, desperately agitated, they stand sealed together under a communication bell jar: in the pathogenic air conditions of agitated and subjugated politics, inhabitants are constantly re-inhaling their own exhalate. (101)
Life in the media state resembles a stay in a gas palace of high-spirited adventures. (102)
Duchamps’ glass readymade of air of paris (actually from a pharmacy in Le havre); broken and replaced with same Le havre air (106)
With the press’ Gleishalthung [Nazi word for total extermination of Hitler’s enemies] during the World War, civilian communication was attacked from the ground up: signs themselves became sullied and compromised by their involvement in warmongering deliria and psychosemantic arms races; the critiques of religion, ofideology, and of language have declared vast parts of our semantic environments to be intellectually unbreathable zones—from hereon in, the only responsible thing to do seems to be to dwell in places that analysis has evacuated , re-constructed, and re-approved for habitation. (109)
Air-design is the technological response to the phenomenological insight that human being-in-the-world is always and without exception present as a modification of “being-in-the-air.” (93)
Who are turned into inner aborigines, regionalists, and the voluntary curators of their own untimeliness—try, on their reservations to maintain the benefits of having a fact-free concept of a world that is symbolically immune to the age of latency. 70)
Knowing Machines
Technical Change
Making Parents has the naïve “change” narrative. Democracy reduced to a social support system htat levels inequities in terms of access but otherwise levaes the means of production in place. Marx not even named inrelation to the means of production.
Latour Comsopolitics has to be thought through the biobibliopolis.
Blackbox necessitates paralinear reading.
Science research wiritng—scribbles, scribs, but notebooks, note cards (unbound) to codex. To computer file document.
In culturlmaterialsim / textual amterialism, or in Vismann on ifling, reading goes missing as it isreplaced by retrival and recall. The archive is assumed to be a more or less quickly acesed storage unit. It is a delivery system. The contaier is a blackbox, a sort of tool kit of established fact, that can be opened, (closed bok, unfiled0 or unblackboxed.
Book and the bookshelving—as opposed to Bok and bookshelf.
Reshelving and refilling as repetitions that make resitance to rading asreading more visible and refine it furthr. Draws our aattention t the ashests of the archive, to the peripheries, to the interference that runs in the text as well as in the paratext.
When the dead go paperless; death certificates, passports for the dead (Lost episodes); posthumous publication
Papers as different kinds of support—the passport as papers but also as a book with a book cover.
Archives in formation: privileged spaces, popular archives and paper trails
Michael Lynch
History of the Human Sciences, May 1999; vol. 12: pp. 65 - 87.
Can counter Rabinow’s postmetaphysical account of Foucault and biopower.
the root scrib/scrip, which means write in Latin. ROOT-WORDS are SCRIB & SCRIP which come from the Latin scribere & scriptus which mean to WRITE. Here again there are two spellings, because the Latin ...
Latour “Drawing things together” essay. The need for the illustration, as in Agamben’s facsimile of Agamben.
← Scrips and Scribbles
← Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 622-636
I am also taking on materiality in general—science studies—and its notion of technology
And scribs and scrips—science working with paper in experiments—and also notebooks (like in Splice , also in Lost (season two—record everything and then roll up the notebook in the airtube (used at drive through banks and CVS) that sucks it up.
From biopolitics to biotechnics
bioethics—scientific experimentation—through the posthumographeme—the living posthumous rather than postvital living or autobiography and autothanatography.’’ As well as heternoramtiivty—repetition as habitus, practice—without freud—just techniques or technologies of normalizaiton (Charis Thompson). The ashsets of the archive—the value of the ash of the archive that cannot be calculated since it is not archivable but is not simply priceless either since it is not exactly buried treasure but nevertheless remains as abjected asset--hence "ashset"-- to be read. This is even better as it's an intralingual pun "achetes de l'archive" "ashets of the archive"--technically a translingual pun? Darnton is his progressive model of book publishing does not allow for typos, errors, etc. leaving them as Goethe did.
Expanding on Genette in increasing the filed of partextual anomalies. Only dysfunction he allows for is self-consciousness, cleverness of the author—too literary. But there are all kinds of textual and paratextual interference that are other kinds of dysfunctions, from typos to bibliographies, to ghost entries (books cited that were never written). This interference is not simply a matter of errors to be overlooked. The abjected areas of the text have to be read.
Means I will taking on science studies (blackbox)and media materialism (hard drive) and textual materialism (Bill Brown) and history of the Book (Le Febvre).
"Facts become unblack-boxed when they are contested and when people question the conditions and assumptions under which the data were obtained."
Charis Thompson. Making Parents: the Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. (MIT, 2005) p. 279, n. 34
Science studies caught in an older debates in social of knowledge over empiricism and anti-foundationalism. They assume the black box can be opened and read back ethnographically. I am assuming that that here is an irreducible blackboxing that defines reading as resistance.
Thompson on biomedical citizen. No holocaust movie about Megenel’s experiments in the camp, just afterwards (Boys from Brazil).
Films about Quarantine, disease control—film Quarantine and also the one abut the train that gets stopped in Europe. Also State of Siege. Military and science disease / crowd control. Perhaps the one about the lsoss of eyesight. Outbreak.
Naïve politics of democracy of Latour’s parliament of things, or Making Thing Public collection or Charis Thomspson Making Parents. She mentions Nazi science in passing but does not look at ways in which U.S. scientists worked similarly.
Let it be versus let it bleed—is there necessarily a acrificial economy?
It is therefore a special reading which exculpates itself as a reading by posing every guilty reading the very question that unmasks its innocence, the mere question of its innocence: what is it to read?
--Louis Althusser, Lire le
capital, (15)[iii]]
The “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary or permanent visa, a rubber stamp. The literal reference to the word papers, in the sense of legal justification certainly depends on the language and uses of particular national cultures (in France and Germany, for instance). But when the United States, for example, the word undocumented is used to designate analogous cases, or undesireables, with similar problems involved, it is the same axioms that carry authority; the law is guranteed by the holding of a “paper” or document, an identity card (ID), by the bearing or carrying [port] of a driving permit or a passport that you keep on your person, that can be shown and that guarantees the self, the juridical personality of “here I am.” We shouldn’t be dealing with these problems . . . without asking what is happening today under international law, with the subject of “human rights and the citizen’s rights,” with the future or decline of nation-states. 60-61.
--Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, you Know. . .” Paper Machine,
“For me, the interwar years fall naturally into two periods, before and after 1933.” "Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr. Walter Benjamin" Selected Writings, Vol 4, 381-85, to 382.
“In the final analysis, it is a matter, for both of us (tell me if I am mistaken), of thinking the 1930s . . .at the heart of which is an attempt to think Nazism as a politics . . . .”
--Alan Badiou, Letter to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, cited in the “Postscript” to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 81
Does September 11 mark a symbolic rupture in our history? . . . . September 11 did not mark any rupture in the symbolic order. . . . If a symbolic rupture occurred, it had already been accomplished. To want to date it on September 11 is ultimately a way of eliminating all political reflection on the practices of Western states and reinforcing the scenario of civilization’s infinite war against terrorism, of Good against Evil.
Jacques Rançiere, “September 11 and Afterwards: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order?” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics 2010, 97; 104
To show how Agamben’s critique of Foucault (not getting to the camp ) is weak, turn to the “Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks in which Kittler maintains that Foucault’s historical research did not get much past 1850 because he equated with the archive with the library and thus was bound by a certain discourse network.
But Kittler misses how the archive is also biopolitical for Foucault, but also what Foucault would have called technologies of reading.
The term discourse network . . . can designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation, which in the Europe of Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism. In order to describe such systems, that is, to describe them from the outside and not merely from a position of interpretive immanence, Foucault developed discourse analysis as a reconstruction of the rules by which the actual discourses of an epoch would have to have been organized in order not to be excluded as was, for example, insanity. His concept of the archive—synonymous with the library in Foucault’s research methods, if not in his theory—designates a historical a priori of written sentences. Hence discourse-analytic studies had trouble only with periods whose data-processing methods destroyed the alphabetic storage and transmission monopoly, that old-European basis of power. Foucault’s historical research did not progress much beyond 1850. All libraries are discourse networks, but all discourse networks are not books. . . . Archaeologies of the present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media.
“Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks 369-72; to p. 369
There is no end to the writing of books, wrote the preacher. Even books written to bring about the end of books and of their ordering submit to this pronouncement.
“Afterword to the Second Printing” of Discourse Networks 372
(Also cite Nicolas Luhman on dcostruction and information theory).
Put stills from Max Payne storage unit and of Foucault boxes from Return to Normandy in the intro-take out my photos of the self-storage unit.
The problem with Kittler is that his analysis of technological media is post-hermeneutic. Reading is displaced by data-processing and literary criticism is subordinated to information theory.
I won’t be looking at the art of the insane in relation to WB’s essay ,even though WB reproduces pages form the books as images. Seeing Insane Sander Gilman; Beyond rason: Art and Pyshcosis heory itself has to be and has been thought through Naziism (Ronell, Rickels, Kittler), Vismann). Therefore won’t be doing I, Pierre Riviere or Bresson’s L’Argent (counerfeitng, crime)
Also transfer in de Man’’s Anthropmoprhism and lyric is a telechnlogy of reading 9the lyric) that shows that failure itself the reshelving a failure of reading as a linear succession. So reshelving can take the form of boxing things up, misrecognition. Ronell has an interesting passage in The Test Drive
"The relation of testing to the question of place is essential. The test site, as protoreal, marks out a primary atopos, producing a "place" where the real awaits confirmation. Until now the test site has not been constructed as a home . . . Linked to a kind of ghostless futurity, the site offers no present shelter. . . Nietzsche wants to know if he can build a new home without the foundations that Heidegger and others will lay. Will it be possible to establish residence without the grave ideologies of ground and dwelling weighing him down?" p. 171
I was also thinking that we could counterpose the Steel Homes film (a
misnomer, really, since they are not homes; I do know a woman who dated
a guy who lived in one--illegally, I would guess--another kind of
"pass(tele)port"ing?), who claims to be historical, with the sci-fi
film, if we can track it down, in which the self-storage unit is
ahistorical as twin readings of the bizarre space and temporality of
the (divisible) unit (here the passport-al).[iv]
Add at the end that the book has a Germanic / WWII thread in part because the story of WWII is not over—the currency of Bush as Hitler or Obamaa as Hilter, Saddam Hussein as Hitler, appeasement (Munich) and films like Nglorious Basterds, Downfall, and s oon show that tstory is still alive for Americans (in a way the war in the Pacific is not—failure at box office of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters form Iwo Jima). And also that I am talking about theory as an institutionalization of German philosophy and French philosophy in English, French, a Greman, and Comp Lit Departments.
Also the German WWII frame [provides a container of sorts—thread of archive and art could be expanded—Ray Johnson and Maria Abromivic. But won’t go ther,e or counterfeit stories—Baudelaire and Bresson’s L’Argent. Or even Nazi art. Same with museum installations, The Big Archive. I will engage more with how the archive comes up in these areas—the library too. Not a history but an analysis of the conditions of reading the archive.
Der Zeitungsausschnitt: Ein
Papierobjekt der Moderne - Anke te Heesen
Sort of like Visman and Spieker, but focused on practice of collecting by cutting and pasting exceprpts from newspapers and magazines.
Die Papier-Persona, 285-87
Sich lessen uaf Papier , 287-291
Sich sammeln, 291—94
Becomesa question of selfportrait for artists , Raoul Hausmann,’s Gurk (198-19
The Frst World War is her focus.
She also discuusses bacnksas archives. Connct counterfeit money in chpter 4.
Das durcheinander der Seite 274-77
Schwitters collage another example.
Archiverung in Ersten Welt Krieg245-47
BuShe is looking at paper objects: Die Materialitat von Exzerpt und Zitat: Bescriebenes, geschnittenes and geklebtes Papier, 25-45
But it is not just a matter of cutting and pasting and paper as materials; paper ahs to be recognized, recycled
Also failure of the installation in which the archive is exteriorized (last chapter of Speiker); the failure of the installation is its unrecognized success.
Thrtr’d no room for irony in the concept—it’s a purely different kind of functionality that they want—subversion is a redistribution, not a negation. Same with Abromvic Moma collection—supposed to be on good behavior when interacting wit the exhibit. Interactivity is already the disciplined, docile body.
First,
biopolitics is the archive; second, the archive is not there but has
to be read; once we understand that the materiality of the archive is
not reducible to a fixed architecture, to already stored records
(intact or in the process of degrading over time, going missing etc
and hence in need of recovery), we see that biopolitics is not
reducible to bare life and the camp (state of exception equals the norm,
homor sacer is therefore universal) but is a question of spare life; if everyone
is now homo sacer, then the consequence is not that the camp has to
be recognized (always as the same space, but always in different forms) but
that life is lived as reading one's (auto)archivalization, reading
necessarily being a practice of close/d reading because reading is
about opening a box that one wants to assume has been sealed, its
contents there, organized, etc and waiting to be turned into a linear
narrative) but is in fact surrounded, as it were, by the unarchivable
ash of the archive and hence necessarily involves a kind of
delinearization as the condition of unreading. We might even want to
replace Agamben's paradoxes with our own: closed reading is possible
only because the archive is not there, only because the archive has to
be reshelved, delinearized, disorganized, even, in order to rendered
readable. Spare life makes reading necessary. But reading we speak of is unreading because it is not revealing the hidden contents of the archive (which aren’t there, or are very frequently fantasized as being missing).
And can we connect this question about Homo Sacer (the victim) to the conclusion, the fossil and the arche-trace, from the sacred man to the last (sacred) man? I think we need to return to Agamben in the conclusion since we will have started with him. I was also thinking about the boundaries of publication being an issue for us (something I have been building a file on) as well as the defense of deconstruction—or the self-defense, that ranges from Derrida’s more hyperbolic, frazzled accusations (about his critics not having read him) to his much more careful, patiently thought out formulations about reading. Deconstruction has no auto-immunity—perhaps that’s what we could think of in relation to sacrifice—inoculation (like the book getting a shot in Toute la Memoire) and an anthropomorphism of things—deconstruction does not prevent abjection, especially not its abjection by others but instead “sacrifices” itself(while sticking around like a sore thumb) in order to make exposure (as good and as bad thing the necessary risk of reading.
the difference between spare life and bare life
is that the archive is the nomos and domos of the biopolitical and hence has to
be read (it has no architecture, no geological history; it cannot be
referred back to blueprints and forward to remnants) in historically in relation to
WWII (we have any more grounds for making 1933 important) and in relation to deconstruction (Agamben’s structuralism and fusion limit what he can do with the camp; his account requires that deconstruction be sidelined; to see that the camp is the archive is to see that we are talking cultural graphology). Hence, we have to foreground storage, boxes, but do so as a topos, figure, as a metaphorlogy that is neither just an empirical thing (physical materials) nor media (understood as technical devices, again empirically) with its own archive fevers. In chapter two, we reconceive / redescribe the history of the book, in which materiality is taken for granted and storage ignored, as a question of reshelving, refiling, and the auobiographeme, the dream of sleeptalking; (chapter three, we show that the default of reading subsumes the crime scene (the detective genre, to which we return in the conclusion when we get to Perec) but that the missing body / corpus has to be rethought (via WB; and we could also footnote Vismann on the Stai—fantasy that there are parts of the file that are missing and also footnote The Lives of Others)) as a living out your death as a kind of declassification (or however I put it an earlier time); Chapter four, Lifeboat et al, we show that the archive becomes something to be read after the fact, on the surface again WWII, post war, archive and camp haunting each other in Night and Fog and Toute la memoire); in chapter five, we show that what is archived is not one thing but many things that may not only resist classification but that may be recognized as different things (a file may or may not look like a book; a document may be recognized as a work of art; the archive may resemble a de/portable museum; the work of art is the return of the theological), the pay of off this chapter being that we show that the camp as an archive, returning to the passport and counterfeiting, and also the question of homo sacer and the (Jewish) victim?
Zettelwirtschaft: Die Geburt der
Kartei aus dem Geiste der Bibliothek
Is the problem in part, that if we follow Agamben then the structural function of Homer Sacer re the collective moves from polis to the figure of the person citizen, for him, post WW2. So that all those persons named “human” are literally split or (d)riven by a rupture between “the people” and “the citizen” that means that shares of “bare life” are parceled out—those persons who are refugees, asylum seekers or who share the same status as those persons so subjected in WW2, but now without the sense of occasion that a world war provided, are intensified versions of the normalized citizens of the West or East who act as if they did not lead bare lives…in other words, post ww2 there’s a qualitative shift in the processing of persons that takes bare life as a starting point and then borrow back (redeems???) other forms of life as temporary “benefits” (as opposed to natural rights)…does this make any kind of sense? If you like, this would be the explanation for why self-storage units exist in the first place—they are a materialization of the relation of the “as if” that bare life in the West lives….
I began this intro with the storage unit, in what seem like a detour, rather htan announcing the argument of the book as I am now doing, in order not only to concede the materiality of the archive but to render the archive as a question of reading(n theory). Just as the archive ais taken as given, as read, something to be reassembled, so theory has come to be understood as given, as having been read. To return to the archive, then, is a return to the thing theory, not thing theory. It is to engage biopolitics by return to deconstruction, particularly Derrida but also de Man. Trope of the archive gets into easiest and fastest gear when the archive is said to contain something missing or that was lost and may have eebn stored. Also add from Agamben’s zone, with always fixed borders is a contact zone (DidHuberman). a black box trope
Vismann makes it clear (inadvertently) why storage is so important as a master figure of the archive as well as the way a dynamic of divisibility determines our metaphorology (and metonymology) of reading as unread –ability.
That is not a calculable experience. It is beyond calculation. It is not exactly blocked mourning either since you are given time (or assume you have time) to return to it. Unreading is about rereading, repetition but not redundancy (closer to the uncanny). Or as Perec does, you can (re)write yourself to death (but again as a kind of implicit apostrophizing). Ray Johnson How to Draw a Bunny is another example.
Inscription / recording is not reducible to visible / invisible, writing and erasure (see Chartier’s book). The metaphor is a contact zone, itself a metaphor for a space that may have an architecture but which is discursively available only through a nomotopological similes (see Freud on the psyche as dossier in vol 2 standard edition, Studies in Hysteria or the end of the mystic pad essay were the similes all break down, he says; our version of psychoanalysis is about a problem of modeling the psyche, a dynamic that has no coherent topology), that calls forth a dream of interpretation that gets immediately resisted since it proceeds as a metaphorlogy.
Move from Night and Fog to Ben on passport and books—bibliopolis—and Susan Buck Morss on the postcard as thing, as material. But to read is also to read writing in hteridnary sense, as Derrida puts it, rather than as aa trace—resistance to reading takes different concrete, henomelal forms. Font, graphic design, paratext. Missing title in Work of Mourning and in chapter two (Derrida ont eht tiel) and could go to Demure and the lapse as not recognized—but instead an eccentric move—so why the post-script—we canmake snese of it as a the Defense of Deconstruction, as a response to a kind of persecution , prosecution. So I can go perhaps from Work of Mourning to Demeures to de Man on irony—again the lapse as not recognized—passed off as a joke—that displaces and does nto read, reads by not reading. Cemetery hten like a library—the graverobbing fantasy like the missing manuscript fantasy.
Coould break this up into two chapters—the fourth chapter being about the posthumous and title and the unrecognized lapse.
Examples of the archive as the to be read or the to be visited—as problems Mr Death regarded as anti-Semtiic, so he had to add interviews with Jewish group representatives to make it clear he was not a Holocaust denier; and Lanza=mann askig hIlberg about the document. But these are not exceptional cases; they are allegories or discussions of the resstance of the archive as the condition of access to it.
End of chapter three then would be about variations of homo sacer—the musselman versus the survivor—the zombie Muslim orhter of thwho survives versus the surivivor who lives past the instant of his own death (Blacnhot) and hten Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz versus the Marrano of Derrida Aprorias and Ghostlier Demarcations, xenos (stranger, foreinger) versu shomo sacer as figures of the threshold, of persons. Foreigner versus barbarian.
Port Bou in Aporias.
Also, add to archive as a trope the fact that it is ften imagined as a container missing its contents—or thedepository of something that has gone missing. WB’s manuscript briefcase—the film archive with a Nazi snuff filmimagined both by Lanzmann and Godard. The archive arrives as a figure of loss (not just mssishelved documents, stolen items, or degraded materials), or dust gathering.
The question of the archive—what is it—it is the to be read—it is in question. Historicism boxes it up. So reading is exposure. Thinking biopolitics in terms of paper machines means not taking the materiality of the book or of files as givens, nor to see the archive as a haunted space. It is a problem of reading, as we can see Derrida perform in Archive fever. It is a retracing. So this means that reading is exposure; not simply a return to deconstruction but a rereading of its resistance to reading as reading, including the lapse, even the staged lapse. Not idealization or defensive commemoration, “For Derrida” but “Force Derrida”
Intro—from storage to where did reading go to the need to read—the passport, as a way into reading the archive.
Chapter one—
Not going to do the rereading of Foucault one could do but advance through Agamben (who has positioned himself as the heir to Foucault). Agamben has to read in relation to the sidelining of Derrida.
Derrida too does not read biopolitics of the archive but has a kind of Foucauldian take, placed in a footnote. The issue is not one reducible to control. Biopoltiics of the archive is about reading, the archive including the camp (footnote Mr. Death and Shoah Raul Hilberg scene. Footnote Hilberg on Arendt
At the the end of the intro I go from the nomos of the modernity poiltiical space of the camp, epitomized by Agamben by Nazi concetration camps, and the linear history of Agamben to the atopological and achronic Nomos and Domos of the biopolitical archive eventalized exceeds the law but becomes a question of medaitized persons, of paperless persons. This takes us in chapter three to the question of the victim which Agamben sidelines by descarlizing homo scarer. Point is not get out of a sacrificial econmy but to see that Agambenhas a theological hermenutic, that he dismisses deconstruciton as a thwarted Messianism even as he tries to superimpose Roman law on to Greek and Jewish law in The Time that Remains. It’s not about the different spaces of the archive—not parallel problem to agamben’s different spaces of the camp—instead of maintaining that the concentration camps are only an extreme case, and in including care as well as extermination as operations that happen in camps (camps did have hospitals), it’s about how the archive makes certain kinds of reading operable., including readings of persons as already papered.
Spell out the double reading of the archive and biopolitics. Agamben Homo Sacer and Derrida, but mostly, the key is virtualization—of the archive for Derrida and of homo sacer for Agamben. The archive as storage unit is not just about political space, but the duration of storage, returns of rereading, the theorizing of historicism’s abjection of reading in favor of using. Virtualization means ethics of close/d reading. Chapter One spells out virtualization. By turning to the self-storage as the exemplar of the archive, we are asking what it means to live a bare life virtually, what it means for biopolitics to be mediatized.[v] For Derrida, the default is paper: “(at the center of this book, we will hear echoing, for instance, in more than one register, literal and figurative, of the question of the person with no papers, crushed by so many machines, ‘when we are all, already, undocumented, ‘paperless’”) (2). For agamben it is the virtuality and universality of “we are all homines sacrii.”
To understand the virtuality of the virtual homo sacer is to understand, in our view, both the endless mediation of politics and the irreducibility to life as a biology of organic matter, death signally the body’s transformation into inorganic matter.[vi] I take the self-storage unit as a way of framing reading as a question in relation to what happens to bare life when the archive becomes the nomos and domos, the political space of modernity. My concern is not to trace the history of the self-storage unit as it would be conceived in the conventional terms of what is understand as material culture studies.[vii] I am using the self-storage unit as a figure for the archive, which subsumes the structure of the camp, in order to think biopolitics through the virtuality of bare life.[viii]
1. Welcome to your Box
Perhaps you have one.[ix] Certainly, you’ve seen them as you drive your car from place to place. I refer to self-storage units that now litter our roads, around airports, or in the peripheral transit zones that constitute the spaces between cities. Some of you may have seen them from the bus or the train, but I do not advise visiting them using these modes of transport (assuming that there’s even a stop). Access to a truck or moving van is advised and it will be the pleasure of the staff at the higher end facilities to aid you in renting the vehicle that best suits your storage needs.
These uncanny spaces, faceless, nameless, but awaiting your personal, anonymous, or at least encrypted imprint, offer their users a neurotic compromise in the form of additional room to supplement their full up, no vacancy home and office spaces. You can use them to store things you don’t need or use anymore but that you just can’t sell, throwaway, or arrange to have whisked away by those who specialize in removal. This heavily secured compromise space is located in an indeterminate or yet to be determined zone between home and office, offering a halfway-house or loading zone between a home (residence) and office cubicle (work station). That said, these uneasy supplements, which seem to offer steady state storage, send you in the direction of home-lessness since they are rentals, and their contents subject to seizure in the event that you fail to meet your monthly obligation and void the contract you have signed to secure my stuff.[x]
[pic] [pic]
Understandably, these units come in many different styles with sizes to fit the most modest or exorbitant of storage needs—appealing to consumers with any number of slogans drawn from the established scripts. “You deserve Extra Space,” opine the sympathetic folks at .[xi] While offers you the certainty of “Another perfect fit”—their Ibsite pictures a rolling series of images of cut outs of everyday objects silhouetted against their units, this teletopical figure enabling you already to project your stuff into their otherwise faceless units, mentally freeing up space in your overcrowded home or office. And ecstasy of ecstasies, the instant you roll down that door on the unit, turn the key in the padlock or enter your code on the key pad, that mental cut out that you pictured on their screen will dissolve into the figure of a corrugated metal door and your stuff will be out of here but securely there—a post script to your busy life as the self-abbreviating folks at “PS” (the corporate logo of “,”) will simply box it all up.[xii]
Aside from the security self-storage units offer and the democratization of warehousing space (live globally, store locally), the designers of the high end models, seem to have drunk deeply at the font of anthropologist Mary Douglas, mid-tIntieth-century phenomenology, and taken as a rule of design that any indication of the presence of another, of dirt, or “matter out of place,” is simply unacceptable, unthinkable.[xiii] This space is for you, their units say, for your stuff and for no one else’s. Indeed, the self storage unit offers itself as an overdeterminedly featureless box, an entirely forgettable container, or series of concentric boundaries (the unit, the corridor, the facility) each so secure, so anonymome, so unavailable to public access—no one will happen by your unit—so fundamentally boring, that you can forget about the permeability of boundaries, sink back in your arm or office chair, and get to work or doze off knowing that your stuff is secure.
Smaller and smaller technical devices that promise to store more and more data. Self-storage offers the same lure in brute low-tech, drive-to, box it up mode. Indeed, it is almost predictable that an online animated advertisement for a computer storage software program should take a hybrid image self-storage units, columbaria, filing boxes, and hotels as its model.
[pic][pic]
Take charge. Get your move on. Be proactive. “Calculate your storage savings.” You are, like most subjects, a “capital fellow.” [xiv] Why not then prosecute your advantage and embark on a feel-good Foucauldian regime of self-optimizing rationality that will make possible more use values.[xv] You will be happy. You will have more funTM. The promise of self-storage is always a phantasmatic sort of extended shelf-life as self-archivalization: there will always be enough space to store your stuff, enough time to tidy everything up, even wrap it up. “Life” will go on—and your life in particular.
It’s easy to read this promise of calculation and optimization as a call to a Freudian death drive impulse, offering the user little more than an overcoat of protection against an anxiety disorder which is less about keeping your things from being stolen than whether or not there will exist a search engine sufficient to finding and retrieving the nearly useless things and data you cannot delete and that never reach an expiration date.[xvi] And so, your home comes to be directed by a future outside it, life redefined or made readable as what I call “shelf-life,” as the ongoing process of sorting, categorizing, making cuts, decisions, holloId out in advance, in anticipation of a future that may or may not come but for which it would be irresponsible not to prepare. So you must ask yourself: ‘Are you prepared?’
Renting a self-storage unit then, is like preparing for your death, the unit a placeholder for a vault, pyramid, crypt, or time capsule. The self-storage unit resembles other kinds of storage spaces, libraries and pawnshops, but differs from them in that, because the mail system no longer works as a relay because there is no address to deliver the mail, the renter selects the contents to be stored and exercises a kind of sovereignty over the contents, deciding what has value (sentimental, cash or both) and hence stored, and what can be thrown away, donated, or sold. The migratory aspects of self-storage add to its singularity in that decisions about its contents are not permanent. Unlike a library, the contents of which are at least imagined to endure forever, if eventually only in digital form, and to be replaced when lost, if possible, the duration of the lives of the things stored has no fixed or predetermined duration, no fixed “shelf-life.” New things may be taken out, new things may be added; a storage unit may be exhameted and closed or additional units may be rented. It all depends on how much stuff it takes to free your “life” from the stuff that threatens arrest.
That’s the theory anyway. But how exactly should I categorize the appearance of these uncanny boxes, which have sprung up like so many de-accessorized motels waiting neither for persons nor their pets but for their stuff? How should I understand or better yet model the “event” that “self-storage” constitutes within the infrastructure of home, work, and play, or the doling out of somatic and psychic “events” such as birth, aging, dying, death? In a world in which the citizen-people-consumers of the Ist are induced to accrete more and more stuff, the appearance of self-storage units in the post-World War Two landscape may be judged an inevitable result of the confusion or cross-cutting of boundaries that results from late Capitalist or always Capitalist stop and flow mechanisms.[xvii] Surely then these units merely represent a bit of extra space, a bit of respite for those of me who are doing my level best to get “Ill” in the world (input equals output) and so “reduce, re-use, recycle,” but who nevertheless remain on the grid. Surely, self-storage manifests merely as a hub on the way to the landfill, enabling you to place your various “things” in purgatory; some of them will be redeemed, some damned. It all depends on whose prayers get sung longest or loudest in your inner chantry or the chantry that is your family unit.
Renting a self-storage unit then, is like preparing for your death, the unit being a placeholder for a vault, pyramid, crypt, or time capsule.[xviii] The self-storage unit resembles other kinds of storage spaces libraries and pawnshops, but differs from them in that, because the mail system no longer works as a relay because there is no address to deliver the mail, the renter selects the contents to be stored and exercises a kind of sovereignty over the contents, deciding what has value (sentimental, cash or both) and hence stored, and what can be thrown away, donated, or sold. The migratory aspects of self-storage add to its singularity in that decisions about its contents are not permanent. Unlike a library, the contents of which are at least imagined to endure forever, if eventually only in digital form, and to be replaced when lost, if possible, the duration of the lives of the things stored has no fixed or predetermined duration, no fixed shelf-life. New things may be taken out, new things may be added; a storage unit may be exhausted and closed or additional units may be rented. It all depends on how much stuff it takes to free your “life” and locate your death-arrest. The pawnshop shares with self-storage units a kind of homelessness, an uncanny space and time when the thing as revenant returns, or fails to return, or returns in altered but apparently unaltered form, but only things with cash value to others determined by the broker may be pawned.
As our deployment of various narratives and vocabularies thus far signals, the emergence and proliferation of self-storage units in the later twentieth century and their recent representation in documentary and mainstreams films generate the central concerns and questions of the present book with regard to the philosophy of political thought and what, a while ago.[xix] More precisely, we are concerned with what the event that is “self-storage” may have to teach us about the problem identified by Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, namely, when “the state of exception” and “state of emergency” that allows for the suspension of law in liberal democracies paradoxically becomes the norm such that all life is thereby politicized.[xx] As the subtitle to this section signals, we seek to know the relation between “bare life” and “shelf life,” to understand the relation between the articulation of human persons as citizen-subjects, the auto-archiving of their lives by the state, and the advent of self-storage as supplement to this articulation, as a writing while being written, or a “putting into reserve,” to borrow Derrida’s phrasing from Of Grammatology.
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben responds to Schmitt’s challenge, and taking the Nazi concentration camps to be an aberrant but hidden figure of modernity. Sovereignty in the modern state is defined not by its care-taking role over the lives of its populace, when politics becomes politics, but by the constant need to define what counts as life worthy of being cared for and what does not, to decide, that is, what is the norm, sacred life, and what is the exception, homo sacer (“bare life”) being life that may not be sacrificed by the sovereign or murdered but may nevertheless be left to die or determined to be dead. Furthermore, bare life does not mark a limit of the sovereign’s power but actually expresses the totality of even sacred life’s subjection to a power over death and life. Agamben arrives at a deeply troubling conclusion, namely, that the transformation of classic politics into biopolitics (or the revelation that politics was always a biopolitics) means that “traditional distinctions (such as between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction” (122). He adds that the modern “democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poorer classes . . . transforms the entire Third World population into bare life” in a way that is “different yet still analogous” to the Nazis’ program of infinitely purifying the German body “through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases” (1980).[xxi] Moreover, as Agamben points out, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, as death, along with life, are politicized: the sovereign decides not only who lives and who dies but what counts as homo sacer, the bare life that does not deserve to live yet that may not be sacrificed or executed.
As a resistance to encroachments of biopower, a universal human rights discourse remains of value, to be sure, but its adequacy as a response to the challenge of bio/thanato/politics is always severely compromised both because the rule of law in parliamentary democracies already depends on a supplement of (hidden and forgotten revolutionary) violence from the start and because a Rights discourse takes for granted the definition of the human.[xxii] [we need more Agamben here—quotation wise?] Bio/thanatopolitics puts the ontology of the human into question, replacing the citizen with a subject. The same problem occurs when extending a human rights discourse to an animal rights discourse since homo sacer is defined not only in relation to sacred life (bios) but to animal life (zoë).[xxiii] The promise of “more life,” even after death in the form of cyrogenics, is similarly limited.[xxiv] Homo sacer represents an indeterminate zone in which the borders between life and bare life, the human and the animal, the human and the inhuman have to be continually drawn and redrawn. [When time permits I think I do want to come back to this paragraph and reread the Agamben looking for nuggets to unbox].
We take World War II as our point of departure not only because of the central role the concentration camp plays in Agamben’s work but, more crucially, because what now remains of the camps, razed by the Nazis when they abandoned them in 1945, has since become above all a question of the camps’ archivalization, preservation of documents, reconstruction or ruination of the remnants, and exhibition.[xxv] Is self-storage, we ask a supplementary technique or prosthetic for the experience of bare life, for the modeling of all spaces, finally, as potential camps, or camps in abeyance? While it may appear jarring, upsetting, or worse still to ask readers to entertain a comparison between two such apparently different objects, the self-storage unit and the concentration camp, we do so, because we wish to understand better the relationship between “bare life” and archivalization and render visible the ways in which questions of “life” and “sovereignty” play out or are determined by the protocols of archiving. Here it is crucial to understand that, for Agamben, what characterizes the camp, what constitutes its modus operandi is not any ideology or technics of rationalization, but the production of a zone in which, as Hannah Arendt put it, “’everything is possible” (HS 170). In an extended discussion of “the paradoxical status of the camp,” Agamben writes:
What is included in the camp according to the etymological sense of the term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of exception itself. Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed,’ it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception. The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power—is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception. This is why in the camp the quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable (HS 170).
This confusion of fact and law is the mechanism that makes possible the demonic fairy tale space that was and is the camp—a space in which quite literally, as Arendt makes clear, “everything had truly become possible” (HS 171). In this sense, as Agamben notes, the camp “was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.” “This is why,” he adds, “the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.”
Elsewhere, Agamben has, on occasion, been given to making explicit his own structuralist leanings, by drawing analogies between the systems of thought and legality which make possible the production of such spaces as the camp, and so we think it useful here to make clear that his modeling of the camp as an imminently achievable site underwriting the adumbrated networks constituted by global exchange, work, home, and play, take as a given what Jack Derrida, a while ago, now, named “arche-writing” or the general or generative text. [xxvi] We do so because we wish to make clear that such events as the “camp” draw their power from the fact that what becomes possible is a set of translations otherwise and elsewhere deemed impossible or unthinkable. By a series of protocols, the camp subjects those deemed “bare life” or merely living to transformations governed by no rule or law than that of total possibility. In terms we have already used, the camp operates as a zone in which your “present” is actualized by the futural desires and whims of those persons who are constituted as bearers of divine violence. If the world is constituted by a series of routinized tropic operations that are housed in a variety of institutions or sites (family, home, school, police, etc,) with rules governing their application, access, and occasion, the camp as phenomenalizes the figure of an included exception, making physical the included but entailed away zone of total tropic, which is to say material, physical, semiotic and rhetorical, conversions that the state reserves to itself but does not ordinarily deploy.[xxvii]
For Agamben, this way of modeling the camp provides an important rubric for future work on the holocaust. As he writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171). Setting aside the rhetoric of use and prescriptive adjectives at work in these lines, which seem to wish to inoculate the text against misreading, we wish to note that the items Agamben outlines as the topics for further study represent those relays in the writing machine by which the modern state processes its citizens, according papers and rights to some and not to others. This is all to say that the project of a cultural graphology, of grammatology as a positive science, is complimentary to Agamben’s deconstruction of the state of exception or emergency. We take this methodological congruence as a sign also of the fact that the processing of persons as bare life is enacted through and by their archiving, by their processing with regard to what we have begun to call “shelf-life.”
In this sense, the camp figures as the systematic undoing of the nation state’s most important rental to its citizen subjects, the passport, reducing the guarantee of self-sameness and the privileges and costs that come with this guarantee to an indexical marking of the body: a horrific and degraded form of the tattoo.[xxviii] Where the passport functions as the enabling device for the double articulation of sovereignty and citizen’s or perhaps even “human” rights discourse, demanding that other nation states recognize its sovereignty by according the same rights and privileges it gives to its citizens when “abroad,” the tattoo, in this case, merely records the facticity of a body’s presence and its sorting. Given the flimsiness of the bearer’s ownership or right to a passport, as our opening discussion of the status of that coveted object, the US passport (one of us has one; one of us does not), established, it seems reasonable to suggest that human rights discourse exists merely as an epi-phenomenon or disposable, if enduring, other to the mechanisms of the passport—a recognition of what is at stake in having oneself appropriately archived, shelved, accounted for. We take it as implied by Agamben that one corollary of his modeling of the camp would be an inquiry into which instantiations of the writing machine, which modes of archiving, foster rights discourse and which prove lethal to it. “What are the good and the bad [forms]” we ask, the “good and the bad [media / archives]” replaying Foucault’s late optative discussions of drugs and governmentality.[xxix]
That said, it seems important also to note that in its current iteration, the passport of today, more than ever, subordinates the viability of a rights discourse to the production of a self-declared, mobile biometric archive, which remains unavailable to the bearer, who may not access the technology necessary to “read” it. The population of archived-person-paper-subjects that, if all is in order, participate in the international stop and go routines we name the travel system constitute quite literally an archive on the move, in flux, an archive that may be rendered immobile or theoretically rendered immobile and so available to the surveilling sovereignty of a state which creates one more fiction of an Archimedian point. Indeed, it may be ventured, that modern passport technologies deploy the passport-icon as a technical installation of a possible camp, a camp that may be phenomenalized any time, anywhere, but now on the scale of the individual citizen-person, the fracture between bios and zoë now delivered at the level of the individual subject.
We are working hard, obviously, to persuade you to the notion that, the question of the camp and of “bare life” will tend to play out in our historical moment as a series of questions about pieces of paper, or the encoding of information and the ability of citizen subjects to participate in their auto-archiving. For us, the “self storage” event represents an uncertain signal in this economy of archiving. What order of tropological intervention might it be said to house or make possible? Is it merely a supplement or degraded mimetic doubling of the activity of the state or does it offer a meaningful counter? While “self storage,” like any phenomenon, will be subject to modes of ideological capture allied to the mode of production (police procedurals etc), its uptake could, given the correct juxtapositions, yield a dialectical image of other possible relations—indeed of “bare life” not as a single unit of being but as a zone of possible configurations of beings, of multiple forms of living, life, and liveliness. We turn to the figure of the self-storage unit, then, in order to pose the archive as a question of reading things and / as texts.
2. Self-Life as Closed Reading
What is it about the prosaic phenomenon of the storage unit that demands attention? It allows me to reconceptualize the archive, on the one hand, as that which is to be bread rather than given as readable, on the other hand, and to show that biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucualt and expanded by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, is a question of the archive, while thinking biopolitics in relation to Derrida’s archvihology. Near the opening, expand on Agamben a bit to make clear what bare life is and what the problem of biopolitics is—the camp.
The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of emergency, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order. (168-69)
The camp was also the most absolute space biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. This is why the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen. (171)
The self-storage unit is not just an empirical thing, a collection of things to be inventoried and catalogued, but an archive. The archive is an irreducible condition of biopolitics, biopolitics entailing an ethics of reading, a condition that demands I conceptualize reading not only as the resistance to reading “the text” that will tend to reach certain impasses, (the answering message keeps playing after the person who recorded it has died, just keeps repeating) but as a question of filing, boxing, storing, (re)calling error, and (mis)recognition (again none of this is reducible to the mechanics of retrieval and information processing). By turning from bare life to shelf-life, I mean to redefine bare life as life that is lived virtually, as paradoxical practices of reading and writing to death as a way of (bare) life, of reorganizing and reshelving as practices of resistant to reading and archiving, or what I call “closed reading.”[xxx] For what concerns me in this book about the biopolitical archive is reading, the fate of reading, and of reading especially as a response to the resistance of texts and things to meaning production. I am eager to discover what kinds of resistance to the established scripts that “self-storage” may offer, for reading or being read, having one’s biometrics auto-read off a chip in your passport, is increasingly the experience of citizen-subjects as well as immigrants, legal and illegal, foreigners in the west and in relation to the state's always operational auto-archiving of persons inside and at the borders of the state).
In positing the biopoltiical archive as the to be read rather than immediately readable, Shelf-Life departs from is about how I read and don’t read material things like the storage unit, books, files, and so on. The self-storage unit is a site specific installation, as it were, which I figure as a topos, a topos that requires a metaphorology to be read, and which I figure primarily as a box. In foregrounding reading rather than things in the archive, I depart from material culture studies and thing theory. Consider the case of the book as thing. As the New Historicism took an archival turn in 1990s that made books things to be looked at and treated as personal items whose owners had left traces in their margins, the act of reading was displaced by the matter of reading. Genre has come to the fore in a kind of sociology of texts and cultural that traces circulation and distribution of books rather than their interpretation or reception: how books are used matters now, not how they are read or were read. An acquisition of a book is made equivalent to its reception. Given these critical developments, my question about reading might be posed as follows: When we were doing all this archival research in the 1990s and since to find new “things” to talk about, where did reading go? The kind of panic narratives that one finds in various debates about whether cultural studies should be stopped or I should return to formalism forget to take into account that reading always goes missing, not something that goes away and then may return. Whereas materialist culture critics tend to skip over the box, the storage unit, in order to get immediately to the physical, empirical thing that is for them the thing, my interest in things lies elsewhere. I read things tropologically by first staging them topologically in a relation dynamic between inside and outside, a desire to open what is closed, and that generates what I call paralinear reading, a practice of flipping the box over, looking at it from side to side, accepting that the box can never be opened, that all I have to read are surfaces.[xxxi] Reading as the resistance to reading does not close off or close down reading but pushes reading off in new direction, failure thereby becoming a productive practice of parareading, or reading around, moving from quotations serving as links between texts and that necessitate not only treating texts as things in storage units but storage units as archive without a recognizable form and as under (de)construction rather than finished, complete, architectural structures.
Closed reading is re-turning to texts you already read and now reread, but not necessarily with a deeper understanding (as if reading could be narrated in linear, progressive form) but as a returning of the screw of interpretation, to paraphrase Shoshana Feldman, a returning yet again that may seem to be as much a renewal and reopening of the text as it does a belated return to what you missed in your earlier (re)reading(s).[xxxii] I am interested in how the phenomenon of “self-storage” might signal an orientation to reading the archive, and specifically to reading as necessarily haunted or shot through by other reading positions, readers, and readings. Closed reading designates a way of reading that is alive to the angles, to the mediation that is s/h/elf-help.[xxxiii]
Spare Life
I hope it is clear by now that I am doing a cultural graphology of the archive as self-storage, not a cultural studies of the bare life of things in storage units or a conventional history of the storage-unit in linear, chronological time.[xxxiv] I am concerned rather with a home(lessness) fever, a sense of belongings that are out of place, in which the space of the home itself is at its maximal uncanniness. Beyond questions of physical storage and the sociology or demographics of place, these units make available a language of shelving or re-shelving, of storage and retrieval, whose tropic or tropologogical operations—as the folks at “PS” or make clear—play with the linearity and so temporality of things as they are successively used, stored, in motion, left to rest.
The appearance of “self-storage” constitutes an event with the possibility of altering or introducing variables into the programs. I make no claim about the newness or radicality of “self-storage” but begin instead by remarking the fact that it’s being constitutes the arrival of an as yet unrecognized “material-semiotic” and “rhetorical” actor, which may, by turns, induce yawns, horror, surprise, outrage, humor, and hope. What interests me about “self-storage” is the way this archiving that does not yet know that it produces an archive can produce patterns or rhythms within or between the lines of conventional reading and writing, and so make visible to its readers orders of sense other than those authorized by the usual scripts. To the extent that these patterns produce meanings without reference to a human subject or that they are remarked by a person only after the fact, they constitute a set of phenomena I call “shelf life” and on occasion offer their human beneficiaries a form of what I will come to call “s/h/elf-help.”
4. The Cultural Graphology of Shelf-Life
Even before Jacques Derrida announced “archvilology” in Archive Fever and then elaborated on the questions of new media raised there in Of Hospitality and Paper Machine , Derrida undertook a cultural graphology of life. In Of Grammatology, Derrida’s notion of arche-writing is itself a notion of life: called “the history of writing [that] is erected on the base of the history of the grammè” that takes the form of “an adventure of relationships between the face and the hand.”[xxxv] “the history of life—of what,” he writes in “I have called differance—[is] the history of the grammè” aims to make visible modes of cognition, historical consciousness, and forms of personhood that do not respect the ratio of the line or the linearization of the world that occurs in a phonetic writing system. For Derrida, “life” begins with the writing event of “‘genetic inscription’ and ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens” (Of Grammatology, 84). The project of metaphysics has been to construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and being written by boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable origin—call it Nature—forgetting, if you like, or holding at bay the insight that there exists a history of technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously, necessarily a history of human life.
Against this installed forgetting, Derrida offers what he calls “cultural graphology” as an alternate historical practice that aims to think the “pluri-dimensionality” of other “level[s] of historical experience” precisely by thinking the “problems of the articulation of graphic forms and of diverse substances, of the diverse forms of graphic substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or instruments (point, brush, etc, etc)” (87)—to which I add archive figured as boxes. Staged within the larger project of a “cultural graphology,” “self-storage” augurs in more ways than as a bit of extra space—making visible the process of arrangement and ordering, and of a retrieval that “permits,” as Derrida observes, “a different organization of space” (86) than that which is premised on linearity. On the one hand, these performances of “self-storage” subordinate the units to existing species of space, domesticating them, trading on the newness generated by their shock value in order to recycle stories as old as sin. It is tempting then simply to suggest that such representations of “self-storage” constitute the semiotic fine edge of the way the existing modes of production at a given historical moment scramble or interrupt a technological innovation or “event” by rerouting it to ensure that nothing “new” or unscripted occurs by installing existing social hierarchies, scripts, and labor relations.[xxxvi] On the other, the cultural texts generated by “self-storage” constitute also a set of meaningful symptomatic responses that disclose the imaginative or phantasmatic lure of the box as an object which is never content with being merely a container and that often functions as a container most concretely when its contents have gone or are thought to have disappeared. As a practice of archivalization, self-storage interferes with the linearity of time, meaning, and so also with the linearization of beings that passes as human “life.”
I grant that the archive exerts a referential pull, that the self-storage unit is an empirical thing, that re-shelving involves physical books and other storage media (film reels, DVDs, videocassettes) on physical bookshelves, or packed in boxes; refilling also amount to the same thing. But the archive is also a topos, a space of mediation, a virtual and metaphorical theater in which things have to be staged, taken off a shelf, as it Ire, in order to be read rather than an organized space where things are placed in a classificatory order to be retrieved when called up. The archive is a trope, as in using the archives,” which are either named but not specified, just assumed to exist—t”the archives” is rhetorical shorthand. It is this mobility or the kinematics of the shelf that I wish to valorize, finding in the movement of items in inventories, archives, in and out of files and boxes, briefcases, attachments, a constant exposure to or experience of the extrinsic or the inhuman, that makes it possible to register the pluri-“dimensionality” of being. For me then, the archive serves as topos and theme. Shelving, the production of “shelf-life,” discloses the presence of poeisis, of reading and performance, as the wild cards or jokers in the deck, some thing that pro-jects (throws forward not quite knowing the destination or result),[xxxvii] not finally reducible, though it may be black boxed in such terms, to a signature of an artist or the mark of an artisan, but which precisely exceeds human figurations of making. I plan to show that self-storage and s(h)elf-help involve interpretive operation on texts, even if shelf-life cannot be assimilated to existing models of neurosis and psychosis (and repetition compulsion, reanimation, the crypt, the death drive, prosthetic extension, etc) and media (virtual versus material).[xxxviii] Self-storage units, especially those with temperature settings, are like archives in that the contents may not only include things but also recordings that themselves constitute practices of virtual self-archivalization: videos or digital discs of family celebrations or trips that pile up and yet may rarely if ever be watched afterwards. Take the self-storage unit as the model archive from which to marshal another or occluded history of shelf-life and what stories will we discover?
As my deployment of various narratives and vocabularies thus far signals, the emergence and proliferation of self-storage units in the later twentieth century and their recent representation in documentary and mainstreams films generate the central concerns and questions about the biopolitics of the archive at the heart of the present book. A series of broad questions follows: What is the relation between bio-politics and the kinds of archivalization I call shelf-life? How might shelf-life provide me with s(h)elf-help to manage the continued crisis of liberal democracy, help me to think Agamben’s homo sacer, or “bare life” not as the virtual universalization of the victim, of homo sacer into homines sacri, but in broader and more nuanced terms as bare lives that include the refugee, the alien, the resident alien? What does it means to live bare life and what kinds of bare lives are worth living? To what extent can shelf-life help us to think about what forms resistance might take to the homo sacralization of populations, the transformations of citizens into Foucault’s docile bodies? What are the consequences of archivalization of one’s things and even one’s recordings of them (photographs, home videos) for thinking about reading not only texts and films but things as themselves media and mediated, for thinking about data retrieval, memory, forgetting, and value? Is self-storage, I ask, a supplementary technique or prosthetic for the experience of bare life, for the modeling of all spaces, finally, as potential camps, or camps in abeyance? What is stake in my shift from camp to storage unit and archivalization?[xxxix] And what would it mean to figure the camp as a box containing buried boxes materials, making sense of it in terms of reading reshelving (as resistance to reading) rather than refilling and reclassifying? And how might Derrida’s notion of the archive as oriented to the future, as an imperative to remember not to forget the victims of injustice overtaken by the erasure of the anarchivic death drive of the archive, as a future yet to be read, might be thought not as a repetition compulsion but as a reading that repeats a past lapse?
Let me close with the following tentative conclusion: the ethics of close/d reading follows from the self-exposure of reading, about paper and persons, and a biblio-oplis. I am concretizing my model of the not yet read is the autobiographical anecdote about a lapse that perform or stage lapses in reading, speaking. A not yet read text is one you return to after having failed to understand it, not knowing if you will understand it less or more when you do return to it. As a recursive learning curve, s/h/elf-help thus always exceeds self-help and the assumptions about developmental ego psychology and cognitive behavior that go with it.[xl] Beyond the figure of the human / reader / collector, s/h/elf-help admits to the possibility of unanticipated futures, indeed to the existence of a “pluri-dimensionality” of worlds or orders of worlds that exist already, and which seek refuge when remarked but not admitted to the biblio-polis in the form of publication[xli]
At the end of the chapter,
World War II because 1933-45 he point at which biopolitics and the archive overlap and make possible, even require a double reading.
Could get at failure and the archive in chapter one. Then the autobiographeme and writing machine in chapter two—the self—is already a bio-machine. Automaticity of reading, filing.
Chapter Three extends life and death politics beyond organic and inorganic and gets at technology, the body, and the work of art. In relation to the detective genre—publication form the archive. Microscript—readability.
Threshold of publication and national border—passports and papers now about Marrano and Heidegger—Lacoue La Barthe and Heidegger.
Chapter Four pursues decamping to the archive via transport in film. Framed by Derrida the Truth in Painting and Heidegger and Shapiro on thework of art as attached.
Chapter Five—paralinear reading and close/d reading. The archivoclasm of the opening sequence.
Conclusion
By linking the camp to the archive, my central concern necessarily
becomes rereading. Once we realize the Homo Sacer is always already
virtual / or has been virtualized in modernity (1930s), then we
necessarily have to see bios and biopolitics as a question of unread
-ability, of reading as what remains. We think of reading primarily
as the resistance to reading, reading as the not yet read, reading as
comfort through destruction (WB on book burning of the storyteller);
on the read as a medium (not reducible to physical materials). But
all of these ways of thinking about reading have to routing for
us through the archive--reading as refiling, and even more crucially
as reshelving. Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of
living biopolitics virtually, a biobiblioprocessing and thanatobiblioprocessing. The archive, storage unit, as a temporary space for damaged life, not only of preservation and safe-guarding--like a museum--or destruction--like a crematorium), but of bare life lived virtually. When and where you begin and where and when you stop reading become instances where the reader becomes sovereign--moments of decision, moments of danger (especially to the reader, who may have completely miss something). In this sense, sovereignty and homo sacer collapse into each other in new ways (in ways other than the Schmitt or WB had thought, since homo sacer becomes sovereign only over his own homo sacerness by decamping to the archive). I am talking about reading as question of biobiblio(thanatos) processing not reducible to chronological time and possible
irreducible to any chronometry (as in Demeure) but as achronic, not as
a autobiography but as a question of autobiographicity (the conditions
of writing an autobiographicity).
Bioprocessing: U-My-Tropias
Bioprocessing is the process, as it were, both of the dissolution of democracy and the possibility of its reconstruction “hidden from the eyes of justice” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, ) in the isolated yet there to be found archipelagos of “u-my-topias” of self-storage units. Bio-processing involves reading and itself resistance (bio-processing by the state) in which storage units are figured as "u-my-topias," places of file-sharing that are non-places, always in transit sic mundi (bad Latin pun) where the temp work of metaphorical reshelving operations may occur in a paralegal zone both beyond the state's view and also beyond what Agamben calls "the eyes of justice." Processing is both anti-democratic and the possibility of democracy (defined as a reshelving operation of the already / yet to be read.
As we move form "physical" storage unit to box to close/d reading I am in effect turning the storage unit as thing into a topos and trope. In other words we could perform the argument we are making about cultural graphology and topos-ography and trop-ography. A "thing" like the storage unit becomes operational or inoperative in terms of their unread -ability, in relation to paper machines that construct bare life as shelf life and that render biobibliopolitics resistant to reading because they are not things but things rendered readable by becoming topoi that then have be troped, con-figured. This resistance to reading rendering the archive readable is the condition of access to the archive, the condition historians have to forget or repress.[xlii]
The importance of the notion of resistance as I use it—Derridean—is the resistance and reading as a way of managing resistance offers no guarantees. It will not free you from the continuous necessity of reading—there’s no exit, you can’t get no clean—it’s a condition of living, that is life, and you will have paid your money. It’s not about capitalization, or a calculus of the subject—see Given Time and Gift of Death—the subject as a capital seller—its a pure expenditure—that’s what living is—you don’t get their life back, you don’t get a refund.
Materialists want to feel done, but they want to have the hallucinogenic experience of the real that it is actually phenomenalized in the facsimile.
You cannot be done with reading—when you think you’re done, you’re a consumer, or in ideology—you just bought something without knowing what you’ve ought or done. Unconscious likes to rest, it doesn’t want to be put into play. People are fractured—read negatively as the fragmentation of the subject into pieces, it’s part of a discourse about reading people. Potentialities for living come out of this reading / resistantly.
NOTES
-----------------------
[i] How to read Derrida.
Proper name defaults to an author-function, especially when the author is dead, bteven before.
So we have X and late X
We already have late Derrida
But we have Derrida, then more difficult Derrida of Glas and Cinders (one review in Criticism) and Robert Ray listing a series of more typographically challenging books he says begins with Signes Ponge in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts.
So Derrida’s style (book design / page layout) would be another way of organizing his works chronologically, using the author-function default.
These are pragmatic but also conceptual ways of “reading” Derrida.
But they are not Derridean ways of reading “derrida”; they are philological rather than philosophical readings.
Or one could try to do a Derrida/re/de/ec/centric reading of “Derrida” derived form Derrida’s accounts of writing
Three areas ralted to Derrida on (arche)writing:
1. grammatology: Derrida on writing as arche-writing, the trace, writing before the letter
2. Writing machines: Margins of Philosophy, Paper Machine—the machine is a metaphor and a device (Freud’s mystic writing pad; manual printing press in Tympan; stick on ground in Levi-Strauss chapter in Grammatology; typewriter ribbon in Typewriter Ribbon, Inc; the computer in Cicumfession, Paper Machine, Archive Fever)
3. writing as support, backing, subjectile. Material is always “material.”
In all of these cases, writing is not reducible to a given writing system (alphabetic, ideogrammatic, hieroglyphic are all equivalent) nor to a given mode of publication (paper; letter; book; computer). There is a history (vulgar time) of these media and materials, but that arche-writing is not historical (is never present, not subject to vulgar time).
Reading Derrida reading to understand reading “Derrida” ina Derridean manner: he close reads, he deconstructs, by assuming or defaulting to a philologist. His close reading s of Death Sentence in Living On, of two versions of a de Man essay in Memoires for Paul de Man, of two editions of Rousseau in “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc” of de Man’s ciations of Rousseau the same essay, Heidegger’s use of quotation marks and italics in Of Spirit; a footnote by Heidegger in “Ousia and Gramme” in Margins; prefaces by Hegel in dissemination, of page layout and printing in Mallarme’s “Un Coup de des” and “Livre” in The Double Session,” all depend on a very traditional notion of the printed book—its design, page layout, spacing breaks, quotation marks, italics, and footnotes, and editing / editions.
Here is the question: can Derrida do philosophical readings without also being a philologist? Do his readings depend on the repression of philology? And of the paratext? Of did Derrida just by accident happen never to think this question through ? (like it never occurred to him?
In any case, it would appear that any Derridean reading of “Derrida” would be irreducibly hetergenous, a mix of a philology and a philosophy of writing that are totally irreconciable. “derridean” would thus not mean one thing, a method , or a program, but a working by not working through notion of reading.
The other option is to read Derrida foresencically. One can read his practices of self-citation as “clues” to the to his work, or as resistnaces—labyrinthine trials leading to dead ends—to reading his work by coross referencing it, making a Derrida lexicon and even a hypertext apparatus inadequate.
[ii] 'Topography Of Terror': A New View Onto The Third Reich 'Center Of Evil'
VERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN | 05/ 3/10 06:35 AM |
BERLIN — A knee-high wall, a rusty gate, the brick foundations of razed buildings – such are crumbling remnants of the Nazi empire in the heart of Berlin known by historians as the "center of evil."
Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, a new exhibition center is opening this week on the site where the feared Gestapo, SS and other Nazi agencies ran Adolf Hitler's police state from 1933 to 1945.
The center adds a museum and a library to the previously Spartan exhibit known as the "Topography of Terror," which has attracted as many as 500,000 annual visitors for the last two decades to the former Prinz Albrecht Strasse. New exhibits document how Hitler's Reich operated and how Germans dealt with the dark chapter of history in the aftermath of World War II.
The area – adjacent to the Martin-Gropius-Bau arts museum – once housed not only Hitler's secret police Gestapo and its prison, but also the leadership of the SS, the Nazi party's paramilitary unit, and the Reich Security Main Office, which combined and coordinated all different police agencies.
Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann all had offices on the street.
The authenticity of the site is what draws people's interest, from the casual visitor to the detailed academic, said the center's director Andrea Nachama.
"People coming to Berlin still want to know 'Where were the agencies of terror? Where was the capital of the Third Reich?'" Nachama told The Associated Press.
In addition to the new buildings, the new exhibit opens up the entire site, he said.
"Now, they can see the whole area for the first time, all 4.5 hectares (about 11 acres) not just one-eighth of it. They can see the layers of history on the site and they can come in and learn where the terror against millions was initiated and planned," he said.
Story continues below
The Nazis could have located all the agencies in more convenient locations at the edge of town, but chose to put them into the heart of their capital for a reason, Nachama said.
"Repression was used for political purposes," the historian said. "Fuehrer, Gestapo, and concentration camp were the key words of the Third Reich."
All citizens were to see clearly what would happen if they resisted – they would end up at Wilhelmstrasse or Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the street addresses of the complex that housed the offices.
The buildings were damaged during the war and leveled afterward, and the whole area, right next to the Communist-era Berlin Wall, was more or less forgotten.
Over the decades, it housed construction companies and a so-called autodrome where West Berliners could practice their driving skills before seeking a license, and much of the site remained covered by rubble, grass and trees.
"It was the attempt to let grass grow over history in the true sense of the word," said Nachama, a former leader of Berlin's Jewish community.
It was not before the 1980s that interest in the Nazi-era significance of the site budded again and historians made part of the area accessible to the public.
While the city of Berlin and Germany's federal government came up with plans for a museum-like documentation center in the late 1980s, planning errors and cost overruns held up the project for more than 20 years before it was finally completed.
Nachama said it cost euro12 million to raze part of a building that was started in the 1990s but proved unusable. The new documentation center – a simple, but elegant single-story pavilion – cost some euro25 million and stayed within budget, he said.
"We are, of course, relieved to finally see it open," Nachama said.
He said Germans had little interest in dealing with the memory of the Third Reich and its crimes in the 1950s and 1960s, but have since then carefully addressed the issue.
"It would be unfair to say German historians have failed," he said.
The site is a few minutes' walk from the capital's Holocaust memorial, which opened in 2005, and the Jewish Museum. Many tourists take a walk from one site to the next also passing by the former East German border Checkpoint Charlie, Nachama said.
The new center opens May 7.
___
On the Net:
[iii] Althusser’s deconstructive impulse in the ISA essay in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, the “continuous reading process” as the repressed part of the essay no one ever acknowledges.
[iv]
The archive
* *
edited by Charles Merewether.
*Published:* London : Whitechapel ; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2006.
*Description:* 207 p. ; 21 cm.
*Series note:* Documents of contemporary art
*Series:* Documents of contemporary art series.
*Notes:* Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-201) and index.
*Contents:* A note upon the mystic writing-pad, 1925 / Sigmund Freud --
Research and presentation of all that remains of my childhood 1944-1950,
1969 / Christian Boltanski -- The historical a priori and the archive,
1969 / Michel Foucault -- The philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and
back again), 1975 / Andy Warhol -- The man who never threw anything
away, c. 1977 / Ilya Kabakov -- The archive and testimony, 1989 /
Giorgio Agamben -- Working through objects, 1994 / Susan Hiller --
Survival : ruminations on archival lacunae, 2002 / Renée Green -- A
short history of photography, 1931 / Walter Benjamin -- Archives,
documents, traces, 1978 / Paul Ricoeur -- The body and the archive, 1986
/ Allan Sekula -- Archive fever, 1995 / Jacques Derrida -- Interview
with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, 1972 / Marcel Broodthaers --
Gerhard Richter's Atlas : the anomic archive, 1993 / Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh -- Against the camera, for the photographic archive, 1994 /
Margarita Tupitsyn -- The model of the sciences, 1997 / Anne
Moeglin-Delcroix -- Politics of cultural heritage, 1999 / subREAL (Cãlin
Dan and Josif Kiraly) -- Interview with Okwui Enwezor, 2000 / Thomas
Hirschhorn -- A language to come : Japanese photography after the event,
2002 / Charles Merewether -- "The camera made me do it" : Nicole
Jolicoeur, female identity and troubling archives, 2004 / Patricia Levin
and Jeanne Perrault -- An archival impulse, 2004 / Hal Foster -- From
enthusiasm to the creative commons : interview with Anthony Spira, 2005
/ Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska -- A triptych (abc), 1976-80 /
Eugenio Dittborn -- Archives of the fallen, 1997 / Charles Merewether --
The Rani of Sirmur : an essay in reading the archives, 1985, 1999 /
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -- First information report, 2003 / Raqs
Media Collective -- Archigraphia : on the future of testimony and the
archive to come, 2002 / Dragan Kujundzic -- The secrets file, 2002 / the
Atlas Group Archive --
The operator # 17 file, 2000 / the Atlas Group Archive -- Let's be
honest, the rain helped, 2004 / the Atlas Group -- Photographic
documents : excavation as art, 2006 / Akram Zaatari -- Sans
titre/untitled : the video installation as an active archive, 2006 /
Jayce Salloum.
*ISBN:* 0262633388 (pbk. : alk. paper)
0854881484 (pbk.)
9780262633383 (pbk. : alk. paper)
9780854881482 (pbk.)
*Subjects, general:* Archival resources
Archives
Archives artistiques
Art archives
Fonds d'archives
Museums -- Collection management
Musées -- Gestion des collections
*Other author(s),etc:* Merewether, Charles
*Format:* Book
I really liked your characterization of Haraway on the cyborgs.
I look forward to reading The Animal that Therefore I am.
He has an interesting discussion of "follows"--de Man also talks about
following in R of R in terms of before and after--for to Derrida to
follow is about coming after.
Agamben The Open notes
Source of allusions to Marvell’s "The Garden" in Weber:
“green scents” have less compelling connotations than “green thoughts” or “green shades.” (R of R, 248).
Talk about a selective forgetter.
Weber wants to turn de Man into fertilizer / fossilizer for Derrida so he can "shade" de Man's ghost in the greening of deconstructive thought?
[v] Agamben does use the word “medium” (64) once when discussing Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Agamben does not engage Benjamin’s work on media or consider how it might bear on his account of divine violence and his dissatisfaction with liberal democracy.
[vi] Agamben discusses thanatopolitics only in relation to transplants and life support technologies of the 1960s, in the chapter “Politicizing Death,” 160-65. Agamben forgets that the determination of death was never clear (his example is a breath not fogging up a mirror held close to a person’s mouth being evidence that that person is dead), as the panic over premature burial in the nineteenth century testifies.
[vii] For an example, see the Big Archive by Sven Spieker. He wants to make an historical argumentabout the archive and art but leaves oppoisitn between origanic and inorganic matter unquestioned: art becomes that which the archive cannot regulate—control, discipline. Derrid’a anarchihological death drive is not engaged as such. All the more reason to engage Derrida’s account fo the archive and its impossible toplogical (as opposed the house (domos) or office (domicle) or installation space in a museum.
[viii] The archive has to be theorized.
Even more important is the meditization of the archive, the archive fever.
we mean to extend and radicalize Agamben’s Foucauldian insight about biopolitics and the virtualization of bare life and the camp.
[ix]
March 16, 2010
Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit
By PATRICIA COHEN
Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently
exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and
electronically produced drafts of his novels.
Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display
at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten
journals and for Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The
18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers
and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized
and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set
of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering,
“born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form
— are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments,
sIated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors,
are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on
floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster
than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do
survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older
equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s
simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to
fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling
through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make
that material accessible.
“It’s certainly one of those issues that keeps a lot of people awake
at night,” said Anne Van Camp, the director of the Smithsonian
Institution Archives and a member of a task force on the economics of
digital preservation formed by the National Science Foundation, among
others.
Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades,
archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their
way into collections. Last Iek, for instance, the Harry Ransom Center
at the University of Texas, Ametin, announced that it had bought the
archive of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Emory
opened an exhibition of its Rushdie collection in February, and last
year, not long before his death, John Updike sent 50 5 ¼-inch floppy
disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard.
Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “I don’t
really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital
material. “I just store the disks in my climate-controlled stacks,
and I’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she
added.
Among the challenges facing libraries: hiring computer-savvy
archivists to catalog material; acquiring the equipment and expertise
to decipher, transfer and gain access to data stored on obsolete
technologies like floppy disks; guarding against accidental
alterations or deletions of digital files; and figuring out how to
organize access in a way that’s useful.
At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a
choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the
look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s
particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative
process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of
Manmecript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, said that the archivists
decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the
original computer environment.
Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. “My writing has got
tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the
mechanical act of re-typing endlessly,” he explained during an
interview while in hiding. “And all the time that was taken up by that
mechanical act is freed to think.”
He added: “I had this kind of fetish about presenting clean copy. I
don’t like presenting my publisher with pages with lots of
crossings-out and scribbling. So I would be manic at the end of typing
a page where actually I didn’t want to change anything, not at all.”
Some of the early files chronicle Mr. Rushdie’s self-consciome
analysis of how computers affected his work. In an imaginary dialogue
with himself that he composed in 1992 when he was writing “The Moor’s
Last Sigh,” he wrote about choosing formatting, fonts and spacing: “I
am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed
at this size and spacing.
“Oh, my God, suppose it looks terrible?”
“Oh, my God, yeah. And doesn’t this look wrong?”
“Where’s the paragraph indent thing?”
“I don’t know. I will look.”
“How about this? Is this good for you?”
“A lot better. How about fixing the part above?”
At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the
screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and
find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies Ire a favorite.)
They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The
Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial
comment.
“I know of no other place in the world that is providing access
through emulation to a born-digital archive,” said Erika Farr, the
director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library
at Emory. (The original draft is preserved.)
To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is
equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen
and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors
to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak
House.”
“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the
context as Ill as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr
said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact
of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would
require seeing the original computer images.
It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences
by matching which Ib sites a writer visited on a particular day with
the manmecript he or she was working on at the time.
Michael Olson, the digital collections project manager at Stanford
University, said that the only people who really had experience with
excavating digital information Ire in law enforcement. “There aren’t
a lot of archives out there capturing born-digital material,” he said,
referring to the process of extracting all data accurately from a
device.
Located in Silicon Valley, Stanford has received a lot of born-digital
collections, which has pmehed it to become a pioneer in the field.
This past summer the library opened a digital forensics laboratory —
the first in the nation.
The heart of the lab is the Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device,
nicknamed FRED, which enables archivists to dig out data, bit by bit,
from current and antiquated floppies, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, computer
tapes and flash memories, while protecting the files from corruption.
(Emory is giving the Woodruff library $500,000 to create a computer
forensics lab like the one at Stanford, Ms. Farr said.)
With the new archive from David Foster Wallace, the Ransom Center now
has 40 collections with born-digital material, including Norman
Mailer’s. Gabriela Redwine, an archivist at Ransom, is impressed by
Emory’s digital emulation, but said the center was not pursuing that
kind of reproduction at the moment.
“My focme is preservation and storage now,” she said. “Over the last
couple of years, I’ve been learning about computer forensics.”
The center is trying to raise endowment money to hire a digital
collections coordinator while Ms. Redwine works on preservation and
processing. In the meantime, most of the digital material is off
limits to researchers.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 24, 2010
An article on March 16 about digital archives from Salman Rushdie on
display at Emory University misstated part of the name of the Emory
library that has the archives. It is the Manmecript, Archives, and
Rare Book Library — not the Manmecript, Archives and Rare Book
Collection.
[x] David Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage” May 11, 2008 New York Times
[xi]
[xii]
[xiii] See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 1966), and also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).
[xiv] For this formulation see Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 101.
[xv] History of Sexulaity, Technologies of Self + ANT on feel good Foucault…
[xvi] Endnote to self—tie this point to The Counterfieters and Given Time—the subject as accumulation, as capitalized, versme divested, ash. The importance of the notion of resistance as I use it—Derridean—is the resistance and reading as a way of managing resistance offers no guarantees. It will not free you from the continuome necessity of reading—there’s no exit, you can’t get no clean—it’s a condition of living, that is life, and you will have paid your money. It’s not about capitalization, or a calculme of the subject—see Given Time and Gift of Death—the subject as a capital seller—its a pure expenditure—that’s what living is—you don’t get their life back, you don’t get a refund.
Materialists want to feel done, but they want to have the hallucinogenic experience of the real that it is actually phenomenalized in the facsimile.
You cannot be done with reading—when you think you’re done, you’re a consumer, or in ideology—you just bought something without knowing what you’ve ought or done.
Unconsciome likes to rest, it doesn’t want to be put into play.
[xvii] Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Augé
[xviii] Sentimentalization of the self-storage unit is the evacuation of its
potentiality (as a new technology (as WB says) by existing mechanisms
of capture. Think about critique of sentimentality of Stallybrass et al versus the pastoral and Schiller’s naive and sentimental—the pastoral as always a postcard, an idyll.
[xix] The self-storage unit now becomes the dossier that doesn't know it is a work of art or is becoming a work of art, but after the artist's death; the guest and
host that don't know each other, the broken hospitality, and we could
expand on this as the problem of the foreign (language) and foreigner,
of biocitizenship in the U.S. (if you're born here, you are a
citizen). So it's about the relation between citizenship, mobility,
migration, and transport (as in concentration camp). Here is where we could make shelf-help a response to bare life and biopower and use Derrida's Paper Machine--people turned into paper (of a political sort). And we could come to processing as in due process, the law, Kafka's Das Process (The Trial), and Derrida's reading of Before the Law. So there’s also a political theology in play here (sovereign violence as unrecognizable divine violence) we will want to develop to explain our title, last things.
[xx] Political theology and the Concept of the Political, See the Challenge of Carl Schmitt.
[xxi] The central part of the book is a concrete, if brief, discussion of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjmain as thinkiker of the same stripe. See pp. 63-67. For a contrasting reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence, see Derrida Force of Law. The similarities between Benjamin and Schmitt have been discussed by Victoria Kahn Representations and Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception”.
[xxii] On Human Rights, see Agamben, “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” in Homo Sacer, 119-25 and on animal rights, see Derrida The Animal that Therefore I Am, 87-89
[xxiii] On animals, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am (Fordham UP, 2008) and The Beast and Sovereignty (2009); see also Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, 2004).
[xxiv] On cyrogenics, see Wetwares We already tip our hand here, in letting the reader see that we think Agamben’s work, his reading of Schmitt, has to be read with Derrida and with(out) de Man. We lay down our cards in the conclusion.
[xxv] See especially Agamben’s discussion of the archive and the camp in Remnants of Auschwitz and of the camps in “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. On the controversy over the camps and the problem of archiving what happened, see James Young, The Texture of Memory and Geoffrey Hartman, Archive. See also the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death (200?).
[xxvi] In the State of Exception, for example, at the end of his reading of the “Force of Law,” Agamben notes that “once again. The analogy with language is illuminating” going on to to describe the instantiation of the system of law via the langue / parole model of Ferdinand de Saussure as mediated by Emile Benveniste [Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39-40. See also Potentialities…
[xxvii] enlist Althusser’s ISAs here
[xxviii] For a reading of the tattoo as a mode of writing not yet identified with the Holocaust, see Fleming, Graffiti, 79-112.
[xxix] Foucault on drugs
[xxx] Following out the logic of Agamben’s deconstruction of citizen and stateless person that follows from the virtualization of homo sacer, I maintain the political space is not the camp but the storage unit; I maintain further that the one who lives a more or less bare life cannot properly be reduced to the refugee, the exile, the detainee, the prisoner, the soldier, and so on. I will contrast Agamben’s figure of bare life—the Muselmann, in Remnants of Amechwitz and Homo Sacer—to Derrida’s figure of death—the Maranno, in Aporias. I will also consider academics I the humanities as ronin or picaro figures.
[xxxi] I could also use the Wunderblock turned toy building block or Bildung block as a reversal of the box metaphor. It’s unpackable box that can be nevertheless boxed, put in a toy box. But the block offers resistance in a way that box seems not to do. I just opened Ronell’s Stupidity and see she refers to Schlegel’s fragments as “writing blocs” [sic], p.149.
[xxxii] See, for example, the reproduction of part of the preface from The Rhetoric of Romanticism as the epigraph to the Bibliography in The Resistance to Theory (121),
[xxxiii] Paul de Man’s return is itself a bit nostalgic when read against E.r. Curtime’s lament about the decadence of philogy: “Perhaps this decadence cannot be halted. Since the sixteenth century philology has stood on firm ground. It exhibits many stars of the first magnitude; and even the lesser stars have their function in a constellation. In this discipline the emendation, restoration, and interpretation of texts are rigorome skills. Without sound grammatical training and extensive reading nothing can be accomplished. Germanic studies, Romantic studies, English studies are without a tradition. Hence they are easy prey for the fashions and aberrations of the “Zeitgeist.” They could improve their situation only if they would resolve to go to school to the older philology. But to do that, one must learn Greek and Latin—a demand which no sensible man would even dare to express. . . . The controversies over methods in the last decade and the windmill battle against so-called “Positivism” . . . merely show that there was a wish to evade philology—on grounds which will not discmes.”
E.R. Curtime, “Retrospective” (chapter 18 of European Literature and the Late Middle Ages), 382; 383 [link this passage to Paul de Man’s return to philology—already, in the heyday of “old” philology,” a philologist says philology is being evaded, that is a decadent phase. Curtime even mentions “great teachers” including his own 382, kind of the way de Man focuses on Harvard pedagogy]
[xxxiv] Things have to be described in order to be presented but I wonder that the default genre for description remains biography. Anthropomorphism haunts cultural history of the “lives” of things much as it does work on animals. See Lorraine Dawson, ed. Things that Talk and ed. The Social Life of Things.The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.Christopher Pinney, “Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that Object Come?” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 257.Re Thing theory and the fetish and desire for more and different—cite Pietz re the end of Border Fetishisms. Brown re wanting to escape the consumerist narrative Cite Charis Thompson on “ontological choreography” re the shifting ontological statme of beings / things as they are performed. And as I have observed, the auto-archiving protocols of the state bear close relation to those of cultural studies. Part of the explanation I think, at least within cultural studies and the movement loosely known as “thing theory” derives from the dissemination of the word “biography” as a virtual synonym for what Arjun Appadurai calls the “social life of things,” which proceeds according to a strategic or methodological fetishism. Appadurai, it must be said, is a little uneasy about the agentive division of labor between person and thing that results. Seek after the meanings of culture, and writes Appadurai “for that I have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.” But quite soon, almost immediately, he’s worried about accmeations of real fetishism and so continues to say that, “thus even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view, it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”[xxxv] By this doubling or decoupling of theory and method, Appadurai adopts a particular mode of description or staging for things but avoids any rethinking of the relations between the physical, material, semiotic, or rhetorical dimensions of the relations between things and persons. People render matter lively. Matter renders historians lively. The constitutive “as if” of Appadurai’s method renders biography the zone of emergence for the agency of things, for their part that is in the process of making and manufacture, of the “history of the grammè.”
The effect of such a mode of description cannot fail to linearize the phenomenon and as anthropologist of visual culture Christopher Pinney puts it, the key point might instead be that “any engagement with materiality must surely supercede the question of culture.”[xxxvi] If, in other words, you inquire into the nature of “things” and how they come to exist, how they are made and work or fail to work, there ought to be something so profoundly disturbing or distracting about the account you provide that my meual categories of understanding are thrown into disarray. The lines by which I demarcate who or what has agency should become unfixed. Indeed, for Pinney, the condition of “materiality [the irreducible this-ness of say this book, this briefcase, this note pad] might be conceptualized as a figural excess that can never be encompassed” by all the various historically bound codes I typically use to make sense of “things”—that is to make them speak to and of myselves. Things resist. Reading is the story of this resistance.
In Pinney’s terms, I might say that Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism” essentially voids the instability that a conversation about matter entails and instead transforms “things” into an emblem of the poIr of human culture to recode matter endlessly. This is all to say that, for Appadurai, there is nothing inhuman about “things”—nothing terrifying, strange, lethal or slimy. The figural excess that is materiality appears only to disappear, locked down more tightly than ever, but now corralled into funding the spectacular readings that the collection includes, as I move by way of “things.” It is vital to note, hoIver, that “The Cultural Biography of Things,” the lead essay to the collection, as advocated by Igor Kopytoff, takes as its founding unit of analysis the enslaved human person who is processed as a commodity. Koptyoff then abstracts this reading protocol to serve for all objects, all forms of existence, treating them, as it Ire, as so much “bare life.” I find this significant because Koptyoff’s strategy of description responds directly to the non-archiving or writing of enslaved human persons by offering description as the first step in a mode of commutative justice. How could I not agree? For what Koptyoff’s careful analysis demonstrates is that the turn to things in cultural studies occurs precisely as a move to supplement the experiences and the consequences of the processing of human persons as “bare life.”[xxxvii]
Against this generic impulse to biography, I propose to read things instead as “bio/biblio/graphies,” or things in situ, as books-cum-archives, subject to the conditions and manipulations, the flexible and shifting ontological performances, of “shelf life.”[xxxviii]
[xxxix] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84.
[xl] Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Eagleton’s book on Benjamin
[xli] Aramis
[xlii] In the cmyse of the present book, I turn to many of the later works by Jacques Derrida and Paul De Man, Freud’s early writings, the work of Bruno Latmy on things, some lesser known essays by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on books, and Georges Bataille on prehistoric art and speculative realist philosophers Quentin Meillasoux and Ray Brisseur on the arche-fossil, Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave, 2007) and Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency Trans. Ray Brassier (London:Continuum, 2008).
[xliii] “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. a universal Marrano as the figure for the "aporia" of aporias that is death for Dasein (74) and "the finished forms of Marrano culture." (74) The Marrano returns on p. 77 and p. 81 (the last page of the book).
“Marrano (of the crypto-Judaic, and of the crypto-X in general).” p. 77
it’s interesting here in which Judaism gets universalized or generalized insofar as it same a secret, encrypted. Derrida mentions that law passed in Spain in 1955 “finished” off the Marranos. So they are a dead minority.
By contrast, Agamben refers to the camps as the “hidden matrix” about “sacred veils.” Agamben is kind of a Catholic and secular critic, who thinks it’s his job to reveal the hidden and bring it into visibility. For Derrida there is no simple movement from veiled (scared) truth to unveiled (secular truth as Catholic revealed truth). There is a secret that cannot be secreted.
[xliv] What many scholars of the history of the book take to be its materiality is here inseparable from what those same scholars dismiss as psychic immateriality.
[xlv] (expand on Benjamins remarks about manuscripts better than the one on Schreber that go unpublished. Then return n chapter three to WB via the unpublished—he is the figure of the unpublished and posthumously published) In performing the troping of the storage thing turned topos we could also demonstrate explicitly that the more materialist one tries to be, the more one tries to give a positivist history of filing and storage, the more historical one tries to be (Vismann is the perfect case; Spieker's not so well done "art history" is another), the more metaphorical the "material" becomes. It is precisely by metaphorizing the archive a certain way that renders it readable, or readable with protocols for reading attached, in various ways: historians can read the files as historical documents but also construct that history so that older documents are viewed as works of art; artist historians can read the entire archive as a work of art in "deep storage" in order to write a history of "art" that opposes artistic filing systems to bureaucratic ones and wants to reverse their functionality (art would really be subversive it is worked; bureaucracy would lose power if it didn't function) and the possibility of access to legal files may preserve liberal democracy. [xlvi] [even Visman cannot sustain her initial opposition between file and book. Unlike historians of the book who want to deal with this kind of problem by talking about the "concept" of the book, we could go with Derrida and talk about the "book" or File" or "archive" as notions rather than concepts to resist their being treated as part of a system through which one can not read the "materials" of the book or other paper machine.]
[xlvii] a Visman and a Spieker
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