Chapter One:



Chapter Two:

Reading Out of the Box with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno: Staging Things, Telling Toy Stories

A private remark of his leads us to the secret of Benjamin’s letters: I am not interested in people, he said: I am interested only in things. The force of negation emanating from that statement is one and the same as the force of his productivity.

--Theodor Adorno, Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in Notes to Literature Vol. 2, (236)

“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

“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.

Articles lost.—What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, a landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.

--Walter Benjamin, “Lost-and-Found Office,” in One Way Street, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 468.

“In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son.”

--Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 47 (cited on p. 73 as an epigraph)

What is Called Reading, and Where Does it Go?

This chapter is about how we read and don’t read things, particularly how we do and don’t read books as things. We take the self-storage unit as a way of framing reading as a question in relation to what happens to bare life when the camp becomes, for Giorgio Agamben the nomos, the political space of modernity. Agamben is certainly right not to equate the camp with the Nazi concentration camp given that camps had already been built during the Weimar Republic, though they were not designed for the purpose of exterminating people. While Agamben says he is not make an historicio-philosophical argument, we are making one, though our historicism is not reducible to linear, sequential temporality, and our 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. We are using the self-storage unit as a figure for the archive, which subsumes the structure of the camp, in order to think thorough the virtuality of bare life. Our historical point of departure is doubled rather than singular. Our point of departure is not only the wake of World War II, but a kind of doubly double origin. In addition to 1945, the other crucial date for us, as for Walter Benjamin is 1933. But like WB, we situate 1933 in relation to another double historical framework, the interwar years of 1918 to 1939. As in the Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiel, the origin is double, not a single moment. We are not tracing the “birth of the archive.”

More narrowly we are framing that question in relation to the present critical moment, the turn away from texts and toward archives things in the “New New Materialism” and material culture studies. 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. Acquisition is reception.

Given these developments, our question might be posed as follows: When we were doing all this archival research to find new things to talk about, where did reading go? But for us, reading is not something that goes away and then may return. The kind of panic narrative that underlies such a narrative and that one finds in various debates about whether cultural studies should be stopped or we should return to formalism forget to take into account that reading always goes missing. As Paul de Man pointed out in The Resistance to Theory, “the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading.” Moreover, this resistance cannot be overcome, de Man maintains, even by the closest of readers.[i] Nevertheless, de Man practiced the allegory of reading, which he defined as the impossibility of reading, in a very specific manner, as a return and rewinding to moments of failure in texts that seemed almost to have succeeded. With his amazing flair for calmly while dropping an irony charged cluster bunker buster bomb, de Man observes, while waiting for the aftershocks:

It would appear that this concentration on reading [in reader response criticism] would lead to the rediscovery of the theoretical difficulties associated with rhetoric. This is indeed the case, to some extent; but not quite. Perhaps the most instructive aspect of contemporary theory is the refinement of techniques by which the threat inherent in rhetorical analysis is being avoided at the very moment when the efficacy of these techniques has progressed so far that the rhetorical obstacles to understanding can no longer be mistranslated in thematic and phenomenal commonplaces. The resistance to theory which, as we saw, is a resistance to reading, appears in its most rigorous and theoretically elaborated form among the theoreticians of reading who dominate the contemporary theoretical scene. (17-18)

Reading fails, then, but its failure can best be detected and appreciated in the best, contemporary theorists of reading by returning to their texts.

De Man includes himself, of course. De Man's “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’” the word “Aufgabe” may be translated both as “task” and as “giving up.” De Man seizes on the second meaning to say that translation always fails for Walter B because the translator has to give up. De Man’s example is a bike race. But his example doesn't quite fit his point because, as de Man says, the translator doesn't drop out of the race but gives up on refinding the original.[ii] So the translator takes a detour that never ends. De Man’s trope for failure fails. It perhaps means that criticism involves a photo finish that never stops developing. In “The Resistance to Theory,” to refers disparagingly to “criticism by hearsay,” and in an example of an anecdote based on hearsay and rumor which attaches itself to a theory of failure as a “is but is not kind of (non)failure:” “Jacques Derrida was doing a seminar with this particular text in Paris, using the French—Derrida’s German is pretty good, but he refers to use the French, and you are a philosopher in France you take Gandillac more or less seriously. So Derrida was basing part of his reading in the “intraduisible,” on the untranslatability, until somebody in his seminar (so I’m told) pointed out to him that the correct word was “translatable.” The first sentence of “The Resistance to Theory” is about what De Man “failed to achieve.” (p. 3)

So we begin by posing as a question in different forms: what does it mean for reading (things as much as texts) to fail? And what does it mean to locate that failure by rewinding a text to the moment where it went wrong? And why does reading persist as resistance? After all, reading and translation happen and events occur between texts, de Man says: “translation is an occurrence . . . that’s an occurrence. That is an event, that is a historical event. As such the occurrence can be textual, is generally textual” (103). De Man refers to this occurence or event not only as translation but as “inscription,” though he defines that term only negatively, and he also speaks of an “infracirculation” of language. We will discuss these two terms later in this book.

In order to begin the project of opening a space of inquiry into these questions and in providing you with exemplars of this reading method, we offer two scenes of reading or “s/h/elf help.” The first stages Walter Benjamin’s “unnoticed” surprise and “embarrassment” as he re-shelves the collection of “Books by the Mentally Ill” that he never even knew he had; the second Theodore Adorno’s musing on damaged books written shortly after his arrival in the US following his flight from Europe.

4. Passport to Biblio-polis

Walter Benjamin begins his essay “Books by the Insane [Geisteskranken]: From My Collection,” with a personal anecdote about how problems he faced re-shelving his books led to his constructing a virtual library inside of books he couldn’t throw away yet didn’t know where to shelve:

A sense of embarrassment often goes unnoticed as the source of a successful enterprise. When I began, ten years ago, to create a more satisfactory order among my books, I soon came across volumes that I could not bring myself to get rid of but that I could no longer bear to leave where they were. Herman von Gilm's poems are among the curiosities of German literature, but I know that at the time I was experiencing Hölderlin as a revelation, I had no wish to include them in the section on Germanic poetry. Emil Szittya's first publication, Ecce Homo Trick, is something I would not want to be without, any more than many another revealing piece of juvenilia by better-known writers. Yet I drove it from shelf to shelf from one section to another, until it finally found a refuge not far from Gilm's poetry. And Bluher's Jesus of Nazareth was a work I did not wish to include in my books on the philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, its contribution to the pathology of anti-Semitic resentment seemed too valuable for me to dispose of it.[iii]

Out of this re-shelving and processing of books that Benjamin could not bury, or put to rest, a library came together that put Benjamin on a new direction of acquisition that leads straight to the psychotic judge Dr. Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903) and Freud’s case study of it:[iv]

“In this way,” he continues,

a motley collection came together over the years, a 'Library of Pathology,' long before I thought to actively build a collection of writings by the mentally ill--indeed, long before I even knew that books by the mentally ill existed. Then, in 1918, in a small antiquarian bookshop in Berne, I came across Schreber's famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published by Oswald Mutze in Leipzig. Had I already heard of this book? Or did I read about it a few weeks later in the essay on it by Freud in Volume 3 of Shorter Writings on the Theory of Neuroses, published in Leipzig in 1913? No matter. I was at once spellbound by it.

This account of re-shelving his books resonates with Benjamin’s much more well-known essay “Unpacking My Library,”[v] but is distinguished by the irruption of what seems like chance, what seems like the gradual dawning awareness or “embarrassment” that Benjamin feels as he describes the revelation that all the time he had slowly but surely been compiling a library within a library. Moreover, in “Books by the Insane,” Benjamin’s books are not in transit, not bound up, their mobility is generated not by the process of packing to unpacking, but by the non-linear process of re-shelving from one order to a more satisfactory one—a satisfaction that waxes and wanes, comes and go, feels right, then wrong, as it settles into something that passes as a routine. Moreover, this re-shelving is not only very personal, but announced as being embarrassingly so. The desire not for a “better” but a “more satisfactory order,” a labor conducted over ten years and which we may assume involved trial orders, experiments by turns assiduous and absent-minded, produces a number of “volumes” that Benjamin cannot “bring [him]self to get rid of,” but which, we assume, rendered the new found order less “satisfactory,” such that he “could no longer bear to leave them where they were.” Benjamin calls foul, overflow, misfit, and then comes to discover that this group of “volumes” constitutes itself a “motley collection,” a “Library of Pathology”—that all the time had been subsisting among his other books, living quietly or sometimes noisily perhaps, some gathering dust, others the object of occasional curiosity perhaps, strangers dwelling with other tribes, who somehow or other past muster as “books.”

Benjamin’s self-embarrassment or performance of self-embarrassment—the essay begins by producing what amounts to a maxim derived from the experience of re-shelving: “A sense of embarrassment often goes unnoticed as the source of a successful enterprise—reveals the way an unexamined sense of “satisfaction” or order is coterminous with both the mechanisms of desire and ideology and the way in which neurotic re-shelving yields a library. On his way to Schreber, Benjamin tells the story of Herman von Gilm’s poems, which we watch migrate through his library as Benjamin shelves and re-shelves the volume, driving it “from one section to another” until it “found a refuge”—though the reason for why the shelving stops there, why the book somehow stops moving even if it does not quite belong, the source of the satisfaction—other than a sense of rightness in the guts—goes unstated.

Benjamin shifts from the active to the passive voice at the moment he resolves his neurotic quandaries or, more rightly, when the resolution was revealed to him, and declares an unanticipated successful compilation: the collection of books “came together” at a point “long before I thought to actively build a collection” and “long before I even knew that books by the mentally ill existed.” Who knew? Well, now we all know: you, us, Benjamin, and all the readers of Die Literarische Welt (July 1928) —but it’s all a bit of a mystery as to how we come to know. Benjamin’s use of the passive voice calls into question the coherence of his “Library of Pathology” in suggesting that the while only some writers (call them pathological) write pathological books, all readers of books are pathological, neurotic, doing things of which they remain unaware, doing things they don’t intend to do—subject, if you like, to the unrecognized ideological construction of the writing machine and the ordering of books in the world and at home.

The opening passage of “Books by the Insane” paradoxically becomes more embarrassing to Benjamin even as it becomes less so. Noticing the previously unnoticed embarrassment does not get rid of the embarrassment—but augments it, making of it, rhetorically at least, the condition of success or the recognition of a “successful enterprise.” The memory of unconscious re-shelving, a time Benjamin nevertheless remembers clearly (“I know that at the time I was experiencing Hölderlin as a revelation”) gives way to a memory of the conscious acquisition of Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness which Benjamin cannot remember clearly.” Cut to Berne, ten years earlier, “a small antiquarian bookshop.” “Had I already heard of this book?” he asks “Or did I read about it a few weeks later in the essay on it by Freud in Volume 3 of Shorter Writings on the Theory of Neuroses, published in Leipzig in 1913?” The embarrassment here is not only personal, a self-exhibition of Benjamin’s own neurotic symptoms, then, but also impersonal, mechanical. Indeed, the more conscious Benjamin becomes of his desire, that is, the more automatic its realization becomes. By the same token, the more automatically his desire is realized, the more mechanical Benjamin’s memory becomes. Its automaticity is made clearest in the moment of Benjamin’s memory lapse: did he buy Schreber’s book before or after reading Freud’s book on Schreber? When was that exactly? “No matter,” he writes, “I was at once spellbound by it,” announcing the closure of memory, the effect of reading the book a spell that rebinds time, space, knowledge, experience, etc so as to remake the man and re-shelve his books.

If then Benjamin is able to find a place for books he dislikes that yields a new order, that order, once recognized, yields a new temporal disorder located at the moment of his accounting for their acquisition: rather than narrating a moment prior to finding a place for the new item in the collection now recognized as such, Benjamin gives us a displacing, spellbinding moment that calls into question a chronological distinction not between before and after, so much as a different kind of time in which bookbinding becomes in psychoanalytic terms spellbinding. Both orders, both collections, “satisfactory” and “motley” were there all along, intertwined or conjoined in ways that are not exactly recoverable but which nevertheless Benjamin finds instructive, helpful.[vi]

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.[vii] 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 remainder of the short essay, he cites examples from his collection in order to establish the viability and value of the phenomenon in aesthetic and psychological terms, concluding 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, even though it is as least the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary terms.”

In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin links 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 publishing history of such works must often be as bizarre as their contents. Nowadays, one would like to think, the situation is different. Interest in the manifestations of madness is as universal as ever, but it has become more fruitful and legitimate. The writings of the insane, so we might suppose, 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, even though it is the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary form, and far superior in intelligibility. 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 passport controls of the biblio-polis.[viii]

Obviously, Benjamin’s semi-serious, semi-jocular reach for the passport (“papers please!”) in order to make apparent the ideological underpinnings of the biblio-polis anticipates, desperately, heart-wrenchingly, the fate of so many Europeans, himself included, who found themselves, stateless, niche-less, slot-less, without papers, literally “fatherless,” or “apatrides,” as they fled the Nazis in 1940. While the passport analogy might play differently now than it did in the today of Benjamin’s essay, it indicates that Benjamin’s neurotic re-shelving become “motley order” recovers is what, in “The Book to Come,” Derrida elaborates as the status of the book or biblion as backing, the material support or guarantee which, in purely physical terms permits portability, linearity, enables a manuscript or a person to travel into the hands of readers, find a slot or niche in the physical and ideological or semiotic world of its today, having passed muster at border control. For biblion we may also read person, the “book” now the backing of a particular way of configuring an identity, a mode of citizenship, belonging, and the privileges it affords.

As Derrida observes, “the Greek word biblion…has not always meant ‘book’ or even ‘work’,” instead biblion

could designate a support for ‘writing’ (so derived from biblios, which in Greek names the internal bark of the papyrus and thus of paper, like the Latin word liber, which first designated the living part of the bark before it meant ‘book’). Biblion, then, would only mean ‘writing paper,’ and not book, nor oeuvre or opus, only the substance of a particular support—bark. But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance or even letters: post (5-6).

The extension of biblion as book, then, represents the development of one particular metonymy, that equates the backing of writing, the underpinning of writing by a physical substance with the figure of the “book,” collating, if you like, writing and book, text and material support and linearizing the biblion as book. For Derrida, the “book to come” signals not something new, so much as something held in abeyance by the repetition and so adoption of one particular metonymy. That repetition made a world. Likewise, as Benjamin’s re-shelving discovers, other infra-worlds, other forms of writing, a whole “library of pathology,” for example, inhere within the order provided by the book.

As Derrida turns to the figure of the library—he is giving this lecture at the Bibliothèque nationale de France—he arrives at the question of the slot or niche, the shelf, as it were, “already in Greek, bibliotheque means the slot for a book, book’s place of deposit, the place where books are put (poser), deposited, laid down (reposer), the entrepôt, where they are stored” (6). And such places of deposit constitute for Derrida a “setting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing—this is also receiving, collecting together, gathering together, consigning (like baggage), binding together, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding” (7). “So the idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit,” he writes, “seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library.” Within this question of gathering, depositing, and so of sorting by gathering, of generating the polis via or in relation to the biblio-polis, he arrives at the “question of the title.” “Can we imagine a book,” asks Derrida, “without a title?” “We can,” he answers, “but only up to the point when we will have to name it and thus also classify it, deposit it in an order, put it into a catalog, or a series, or a taxonomy.” He ends this thinking of the title with the contention that “it is difficult to imagine, or at any rate to deal with, with a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name, an identity, the condition of its legitimacy and of its copyright.” “Sure,” we may say, “yes it is”—for such books, which exist, and which are not properly speaking books at all, or not books quite yet, sit uneasily on their shelves, as Benjamin might tell him, until, of course, the day when those books without titles, such as the manuscript whose title Benjamin withholds from us, reveal their own encrypted infra-titles to us. And in such moments, we may, as did Benjamin, find ourselves, the slightly embarrassed recipients of s/h/elf-help.

5. Minima Bio-bibliographia: Reflections on the Damaged Lives of Books

In “Bibliographical Musings,” Theodore Adorno tells an anecdote in which he correlates a distinction between real and fake books with a distinction between damaged and undamaged books: damaged books are the real books, and fakery extends not to only reproductions of books but even to the presentation of new books as old:

[The] Potemkinian library I found in the house of an old American family on the grounds of a hotel in Maine…displayed every conceivable title to me; when I succumbed to the temptation and reached for one, the whole splendid mass fell apart with a slight clatter—it was all fake. Damaged books, books that have been knocked about and have had to suffer, are the real books. Hopefully vandals will not discover this and treat their brand new stocks the way crafty restaurateurs do, putting an artificial layer of dust on bottles of adulterated red wine from Algeria. Books that have been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by assigned places and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them disorder is not being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often punished for it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off. (24)[ix]

Against the degraded collection he finds in Maine, that nevertheless, because of the verisimilitude or efficacy of the “backing” and the replete order of titles seemingly on offer, “tempts” him, Adorno pitches the authentically damaged book. Not a stunt book that falls apart on contact—there only to advertise the importance of books which are in fact not there—the damaged book acquires a life all its own, a life, or liveliness. The damaged book, then, the used or mangled book is the book that resists its owner’s impulse to order it.[x]

Adorno goes on to describe his own damaged books, their ruination and repair, taking a theological cast that makes Providence sound like a life and death selector or military officer deciding which books will be preserved and which will be disappeared:

Emigration, the damaged life, disfigured my books, which had accompanied me, or, if you like, been dragged, to London, New York, Los Angeles, and back to Germany, beyond measure. Routed out of other peaceful bookcases, shaken up, locked up in crates, put into temporary housing, many of them fell apart. The bindings came loose, often taking chunks of text with them. They had been badly manufactured in the first place; high quality German workmanship has long been as questionable as the world market began to think it was in the era of posterity. The disintegration of German liberalism lurked in it emblematically; one push and it fell to pieces. But I can’t get rid of the ruined books; they keep getting repaired. Many of these tattered volumes are finding their second childhood as paperbacks. Less threatens them: they are not real property in the same sense. Now the fragile ones are documents of the unity of life that clings to them and of its discontinuities as well, with all the fortuitousness of its rescue as well as the marks of an intangible Providence embodied in the fact that one was preserved while another was never seen again. None of the Kafka published during his lifetime returned with me to Germany in good condition (24).

It is as impossible as it would be undesirable to separate the story of these damaged books, books broken in and by transit, from the damage inflicted on their owner in and by his own eviction or emigration. Indeed, it is tempting to say that here Adorno embarks on a rhetorical inflection of the pathetic fallacy, to construct the “bare life” of books which follow in the wake of their human reader. And so it is perhaps that despite their damage, despite the damage they reflect back at him, Adorno cannot bear to throw out these books and they remain, in stark relation to the reduction of books to mass culture delivery mechanisms for “stimuli.”

Beyond the folding of books into a biographical regime as backing or prop for the self, Adorno goes on to write that “the life of a book is not coterminous with the person who imagines it to be at his command. “What gets lost in a book that is loaned out,” he continues,

and what settles into a book that is sheltered are drastic proof of that. But the life of a book also stands in oblique relation to what the possessor imagines he possesses in his knowledge of the book’s dispositio or so-called train of thought. Time and again the life of books mocks him in his errors. Quotations that are not checked in the text are seldom accurate. Hence the proper relationship to books would be one of spontaneity, acquiescing in what the second and apocryphal life of books wants, instead of insisting on that first life, which is usually only an arbitrary construction on the reader’s part (24-25).

Forget immobility. Forget the established or satisfactory order (dispositio) of “first lives.” Give yourself over to the order that books produce by and in their juxtapositions, use, misuse, and damage. The trick is how to do it without doing violence to the relation that develops between biblion and bios—how might we come to accede or allow ourselves to be the beneficiaries of s/h/elf-help without installing that aid as another order or system. Best to keep everything—however damaged. Best not to know why exactly and trust to luck, to what seems like chance, a pure exposure to the aleatory figure that cohabits with fictions of order.

One might as well attempt to herd cats—which is of course the animôt or ani-metaphor to which Adorno turns:

The private life of books can be compared to the life that is a widespread and emotionally charged belief, common among women, ascribed to cats. These undomesticated domesticated animals exhibited a property, visible and at one’s disposal, they like to withdraw. If their master refuses to organize his books into a library—and anyone who has proper contact with books is unlikely to feel comfortable in libraries, even his own—those he most needs will repudiate his sovereignty time and time again, will hide and return only by chance. Some will vanish like spirits, usually at moments when they special meaning. Still worse is the resistance books put up to the moment one looks for something in them: as though they were seeking revenge for the lexical gaze that paws through them looking for individual passages and thereby doing violence to their own autonomous course, which does not wish to adjust to anyone’s wishes. An aloofness toward anyone who wants to quote from them is in fact a defining characteristic of certain authors, especially in Marx, in whom one need only rummage around for a passage that has made a special impression to be reminded of the proverbial needle in the haystack. (25)

Moody, aloof, resistant, apt to punish, the book is a strange animal, an animal dressed in an anthropomorphic “coat,” for to itself it lacks no skin. It joys to punish the “pawing” of the “lexical” gaze of the reading animal that seeks after particular passages rather than accepting what is given freely if capriciously, and subject to loss. It is worth noting further that properly speaking the book is not an animal at all, so much as a form of life that unfolds in the circuit that unfolds between women and cats—the book, this book, like this cat, is always a thoroughly historical, singular being which resists attempts to confine it to this or that species, this or that slot on the shelf. It wanders.

For Adorno, then, life, life worth living, might be said to consist in a bio/biblio project that we might call ‘living together with or through books,’ that is by attending to the second-ness of books, to the apocryphal, tacked on life, that books make possible, to the backing and bucking of writing, to recall Derrida’s modeling of the biblion, that they effect.

6. Un-Folding Our Cards

As our two opening instances of s/h/elf-help indicate, we are interested in how the phenomenon of “self-storage” might signal an orientation to reading, and specifically to reading as necessarily haunted or shot through by other reading positions, readers, and readings. Benjamin and Adorno provide us with a window on to what me might name the world of infra-reading or of reading’s relationship to itself, staging their libraries as topoi, tropic relays in their pursuit of knowledge.

For us, then, Benjamin and Adorno designate a way of reading that is alive to the angles, to the mediation that is s/h/elf-help. Indeed, language is a medium, according to Benjamin, and here we come to the third front, the bureaucratization of the knowledge production in the humanities, the evangelistic invitation to replace thinking with working, texts with data, reading with data processing—dispensing thereby with what passes as matter or medium in an immanence of communication or revelation.[xi]

Part of the reason we will go on to discuss media that includes printed books, illuminated manuscripts, oil paintings, photography, theater, television, YouTube, and films (in analog media such as video and laserdisc and in digital media such as DVD and Blu-ray) is in order to address the question of medium specificity and so refuse the reduction of mediating technologies to the opening of some putatively neutral or dispensable “black box.” By contrast, for us, s/helf-life necessarily draws on and thematizes the properties of different media to gather differently encoded objects that might become or be actualized as differently performed or configured “gatherings” or “things.”[xii] Indeed, it is difficult to know by what logic we could separate the medium from the gathering. So, our collection of heterogeneous materials and media generates a series questions about what many perceive as a crisis or promise of digitalization: How many narratives of media transition, digitalization being the most recent, are there to spin? Forms appear to create a set of impoverished set of narratives about transitions between media. The science-fiction disaster film is one such version, as are prehistoric disaster films, both of which threaten the extinction of homo sapiens. We are asking whether the impoverished narrative of media transitions can be expanded, complicated, multiplied, or otherwise renewed also as a question of genre--noir novels and science fiction. Can one tear / turn / kindle / burn a new page in the genre bound narratives of the book as medium?

Toy Stories: Close(d) Reading Things

We take up the question of reading as the resistance by readers to reading, or what we called “closed(d) reading,” specifically in relation to things, which we will insist are being read even when critics, adopting an anthropological pose, think they are merely describing and inventorying things, placing them in a sentimental narrative.[xiii] Things have to be staged, and that means that the thing always becomes a topos. In our book, the toy is the central topos for the thing, central because the toy comes with orientations and directions attached for use (and allows for the possibility of misuse, arguably the definition of play). Here we follow Walter Benjamin’s lead in his four essays on toys and child’s play. For Benjamin, the toy always has a double, spaced temporality: it is displayed in a toy store window or a museum exhibition and then it is played with at home. For example, he begins “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Maerkisches Museum,” with a description of the exhibition “Let us start by explaining what is special about this exhibition: it includes not just “toys,” but also a great many objects on the margins. . . . the catalogue . . . is no dead list of objects on display, but a coherent text full of precise references to the individual exhibits as well as detailed information on the age, make, and distribution of particular types of toys.”

Benjamin then traces a series of connected texts and objects, some of them having already disappeared, such as Panoramas, before beginning to discuss why old toys are important and have become objects of attention by adults. “We all know the picture of the family gathered beneath the Christmas tree, the father engrossed in playing with the toy train that he has given his son, the latter standing next to him in tears. When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating . . . the adult, who fids himself threatened by the real world can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war” (100). Toys operate as shock absorbers for adults, for whom child’s play but are also the occasion of new shocks. In the previous paragraph, Benjamin remarks of the then recent find of garishly colored broadsheets made by a deaf-mute teacher to instruct deaf-mute children: the “crude vividness [of the broadsheets] is so oppressive that the normal person, seeing the airless world for the first time, runs the risk of losing his own hearing and voice for a few hours” (100). Adult play does not only involve mimetic mastery through miniaturization but may extend to the player / museum visitor being stung, becoming sensory deprived, if only temporarily.

In “The Cultural History of Toys,” a review of a book on a history of toys, Benjamin expands his remarks in the earlier essay on the importance size has in this history, but then begins talking about architectural scale rather than the size of the times, moving from the exhibition space of objects on display to the domestic space of use and storage: “It was only [when] children acquired a playroom of their own and a cupboard in which they could keep books separately from those of their parents. . . the modern quartos . . are designed to enable children to disregard [their mother’s] absence. The process of emancipating the toy begins. The more industrialization penetrates, the more it decisively eludes the control of the family and becomes increasingly alien to children and also to parents” (114). The change of space requires that the historian of toys move beyond a classification of toys and to “consider the true face of the child at play” and “overcome the basic error” of thinking that “the imaginative content of a child’s toy is what determines his plaything” (115). For Benjamin, the exact opposite is true: “A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so turns into a robber or a policeman. . . . Imitation (we may conclude) is at home in the playing, not in the plaything” (115; 116).

The double space and double time of the toy as object corresponds, in our view, to two moments in critical reading held in tension: first, we have the productive moment of building, construction, reconstruction, description of the object on display; then we have the moment of play, destruction, critique. As Benjamin transforms the toy it into a discursive topos, the toy becomes a trope for reading as habit forming. And as Benjamin moves from display space to domestic space, he also moves into Freudian territory, with the toy becoming uncanny, animated and emancipated, not at home except when being played with as the child becomes something else, human or animal, law-abiding or law-breaking. In a third essay “Toys and Play,” Benjamin explicitly engages Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which, the reader will recall, Freud discusses the repetition compulsion in relation to the infant mastering his anxiety about his mother’s comings and goings by turning a spool into a toy, that is here, then there. “Lastly,” Benjamin writes” as he approaches the end of his essay, “ such a study would have to explore the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of an entire world of play: the law of repetition. We know that for a child repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to ‘Do it again!’ The obscure urge to repeat things is scarcely less powerful in play, scarcely less cunning in its workings, than the sexual impulse in love. It is not an accident that Freud has imagined he could detect an impulse “beyond the pleasure principle” in it. And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for the return and repletion until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang. . . the child is not satisfied with twice, but wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or even a thousand times. This is not only the way to master frightening fundamental experiences—by deadening one’s own response, by arbitrarily conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying one’s victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity” (120).

This double process of habit as deadening, disciplinary, routinization, on the one hand, and intoxication and intensification, on the other, leads Benjamin to restate the difference between adult play and child’s play as a difference between adult narrative and childish reenactment: “An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen: the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a ‘doing as if’ but a ‘doing the same thing over and over again,’ the transformation of a shattering experience into habit—that is the essence of play” (120).

The child’s repetitive use of a toy to master a traumatic experience resembles Freud’s story about the infant playing with a spool on a string a game of “Fort Da” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Benjamin mentions Freud. Indeed Benjamin’s “Toys and Play” invites a Freudian reading of Benjamin’s own arguably compulsive attachment to toys: “Toys and Play” is a do-over, second review of the same book on the history of toys. As in “Old Toys,” Benjamin begins “Toys and Play” by discussing exhibition spaces: “The German Museum in Munich, the Toy Museum in Moscow, the toy department of the Museé des Arts Decoratifs in Paris—all creations of the recent past or present—point to the fact that everywhere, and no doubt for good reason, there is growing interest in honest-to-goodness toys” (117). But to understand what Benjamin means by “habit” when he concludes that “the transformation of a shattering experience into habit . . . is the essence of play,” we need to appreciate the fact Benjamin attends to children who have learned to speak rather than to an infant on the verge of speech, and we need to examine why, before turning to Freud, Benjamin pauses to consider first the importance of acquiring toys, the fact that adults give children their toys, and consequently, children’s needs “do not determine what is to be a toy” (118), and then to consider the technology of toys. He who “wishes to look the hideous features of commodity capital in the face,” Benjamin writes, “need only recollect toyshops as they typically were up to five years ago (and as they still often are in small towns today). The basic atmosphere was one of hellish exuberance. On the lids of the parlor games and the faces of the character dolls, you found grinning masks; they gaped at you alluringly from the black mouth of the cannon, and giggled in the ingenious ‘catastrophe coach’ that fell to pieces, as expected, when the train crashed.” For us, the crucial phrase here is “as expected”: the train, which also makes its appearance in an autobiographical anecdote told in a footnote in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” programs repetition so that it looks to the future, providing the child with a set of strategies to absorb catastrophes that “are to be expected.” A train accident becomes a kind of amusement ride with toys becoming persons, the dolls giggling when the “catastrophe coach” falls to pieces as the train crashes.

Unlike Freud, Benjamin frames repetition compulsion as a question of habit rather than the achievement of mastery and hence closure that may be narrated in anecdotal form. Benjamin ends his essay with a paragraph we will quote in full in which Benjamin shifts from play to habit and elaborates on a distinction between childish play and childlike play:

For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhyme. Habit enters into life as a game, and in habit, even in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable. And without knowing it, even the most arid pedant plays in a childish rather than childlike way; the more childish his play, the more pedantic he is. He does not recollect his own playing; only to him would a book like this [under review] have nothing to say. But when a modern poet says that everyone has a picture for which he would be wiling to give the whole world, how many people would not look for it in an old box of toys? (120)

Benjamin employs the parallel oppositions between childish and childlike, pedant and poet to bring out has a double meaning of habit: on the way hand, play produces habits involve “deadening” discipline and socialization of the child, or what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing process.” On the one hand, play intensifies and intoxicates, bringing out the positive sense of habit, if still stained by a residual connotation of pathology, as habit forming, intoxicating, addictive; habits have “rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves” (120).

Whereas mastery through repetition for Freud amounts to the disappearance and then reappearance of the toy and its ability to function as a substitute object for the missing mother, habit for Benjamin involves the destruction of the toy, the train with the catastrophe car and its reconstruction; the ideal toy is the toy that can be blown up, then reassembled so that it may be blown up again, and so on. By thinking through Freud, Benjamin manages to revise repetition such that playing with a toy allows a negative, critical moment when staging it as a thing to be thought on: disabling and enabling are part of a dynamic, a circuit, or configuration, that compulsively continues, allowing for its storage in an old box that recollects old things with memories attached to them.[xiv]

The toy is our central trope for reading not only because any reading worth the name is by definition compulsive, as Freud has taught us, but because it allows to specify more clearly and exactly why close reading fails, how close reading of things (and texts) becomes close(d) reading.[xv] With the toy comes another object that is always read, like it or not, namely, the toy box, the storage unit. 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 the thing, our interest in things lies elsewhere. We 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 we 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 we have to read are surfaces.[xvi] 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 treating texts as things in storage units 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).[xvii] Reading becomes habit forming in Benjamin’s double sense of discipline and intoxication: If you’re going to take a hit from philosophy, we feel, you might as well do a few lines from the highest grade.

Amplify critique of anti-depressant antiquarianism by describing their

tropes. Everything can be stored, organized, tidily arranged, put in

its place through historicism, which comes with its own containers in

the form of periods (other segments like early and late).

Historicism seeks to turn what for us is a continuum of misdirection

and redirection into a fold, a two sided object on which side is a

blueprint or map (no need to read it, just follow the directions), the

other side a blank (not need to read it either). Historicism is about

one-sided reading, the archive retrieval system (file cards, index,

inventory) collapsing into the historical document (the map) through

the folds that constitute its objects and its spacings of historical

time. The fold hides this trick, so to speak, by which historians

construct things as masks in order to disguise (from themselves) their

reliance on the trope of the fold. Unfolding, for us, is a way of

re-enchanting the inventory, liberating its from its data / base, so

to speak.

Invent/st/ory

Amplify to the critique of historicism and the misapprehension of

reference, the importance of spectrality for us. Pleasures of frustration—what you open, if you could, is empty.

Linguistic materiality is what ideology critique is about, for de Man.

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.

Is it 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? Lire le capital, 15

The Stammer und Drang of Materiality: Staging, Stuttering, and Sticking

Our close(d) reading of things is not closed off, either from history or from politics; rather, closed reading rethinks not as open resistance or of opening up as resistance but as reading readers as resistors. As our central trope for things, toys provide children with no prophylactic against militarism, nationalism, and patriotism, as Benjamin’s contemporary German-Jewish philosopher and satirist Salomo Friedlaender, wistfully imagines. Instead, the toy and toy box are our preferred metaphors for the resistance of things and their readings in that the thing comes together and apart, more or less securely and reliably attached, wrapped, tied, locked or sealed in a box or envelope of some sort. We are interested in the relation between storage and story. As Walter Benjamin, observes while discussing in “Demonic Berlin” the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann,” there s a relation between finding things and telling stories: “For what purpose did Hoffman write histories? Needless to say, he did not have deliberate aims in mind. But we can doubtless read the tales as if he did have some. And these aims can be none other than physiognomic ones: the desire to show that this dull, sober, enlightened, commonsensical Berlin was full of things calculated to

stimulate a storyteller--things that were to be found lurking not only in its medieval corners, remote streets, and dreary houses, but also its active citizens of all classes and districts, if only you knew how to track down such things and look for them in the right ways.”[xviii] In this genetic criticism of Hoffmann’s Tales, there is no direct link between story and thing: indeed, we move from calculation to a strategy of detection (tracking down) that cannot be programmed or taught: you have to know how to look in the right ways, not just know the right places where valuable things can be found.

(Thread)bare Life

As a result of the thing like a toy being in transit, taken in and out of a box, narrative threads about it may be generated. These stories do not always end up in the form of collected, unified works of fiction, however. The narrative threads may get lost instead tying up the thing or text into bound book lying, as it were on a table of contents. In the case of literary theory and historicist criticism, a biographical or autobiographical anecdote offered in the middle of a philosophical argument deflect that argument, causing it to collapse, diverting us into stupefaction. The narrative “thread” becomes a trope, a thing that also needs to be read since its very metaphoric function of providing closure is that prevents it from functioning as a the means of securing closure. Again, we turn to Paul de Man for a wonderfully instructive example of threading as unraveling. In the transcript of the that ensued after he delivered his essay on Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” at Cornell University, Niel Hertz asks de Man about his discussion of a passage concerning the problem of translation presented through the examples of the German words “Brot” (bread) and “Wein” (wine). De Man writes:

This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction, in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of meaning it. In the words Brot and pain, what is meant is the same, but the way of meaning is not. This difference in the way of meaning permits the word Brot to mean something other to a German than what the word pain means to a Frenchman, so that these words are not interchangeable for them; in fact, they strive to exclude each other.

p. 257

So far, de Man’s exposition and argument are clear enough; the example of Brot makes concrete the argument concerning Benjamin’s distinction between what and how something is meant. But Hertz asks a series of questions about this passage and about de Man’s desire to “hold on” to the word “’inhuman,’ that like the Sublime, a singular noun, cover[s] a series of failed apprehensions” (95). De Man interjects a series of “Yahs” in response, leading Hertz to say “It’s that transition I’m puzzled by, how you get from what's really a contingent impossibility—to reconstruct the connotations of Brot—to a major terms, like the ‘inhuman’” (95). De Man responds by confessing, with good humor, “Well, you’re quite right. I was indulging myself, you know, it was long, and I was very aware of potential boredom, felt the need for an anecdote, for some relief, and Benjamin gives the example of pain and Brot, and perhaps you shouldn’t . . . whenever you give an example you lose, as you know, what you want to say.”[xix] What Hertz calls a problem of “transition” occurs when De Man personalizes the problem of translating Brot at rather great and humorous length. We quote the passage in full:

How are we to understand this discrepancy between “das Gemeinte” and “Art des Meinens,” between dire and vouloir –dire? Benjamin’s example is the German word Brot and the French word pain. To mean “bread,” when I need to name bread, I have the word Brot, so that the way in which I mean is by using the word Brot. The translation will reveal a fundamental discrepancy between the intent to name Brot and the word Brot itself in its materiality, a device of meaning. If you hear Brot in this context of Hoelderlin, who is so often mentioned in this text, I hear Brot und Wein necessarily, which is the great Hoederlin text that is very much present in this—which in French becomes pain et vin. “Pain et vin” is what you get for free in a restaurant, in a cheap restaurant where it is still included, so pain et vin has a different connotation from Brot und Wein. It brings to mind the pain, francais, baguette, ficelle, batard, all those things—[now words have become things] I now hear on Brot, “bastard.” This upsets the stability of the quotidian. I was very happy with the word Brot, which I hear as a native because my native language is Flemish and you say brood, just like in German, but I have to think that Brot [brood] and pain are the same thing, I get very upset. It is all right in English because “bread” is close enough to Brot [brood], despite the idiom “bread” for money, which has its problems. But the stability of my quotidian, of my daily bread, the reassuring quotidian aspects of the word “bread,” daily bread, is upset by the French word “pain.” What I mean is upset by the way in which I mean—the way in which it is pain, the phoneme, the term pain, which has its set of connotations which take you in a completely different direction.[xx]

Though de Man doesn’t say so, his turn to the personal is arguably unavoidable. De Man had already told an anecdote about Derrida teaching a French mistranslation of the essay and gone over some astonishing mistakes made by the French and American translators of Benjamin’s essay.

A philosophical problem always comes when the metaplasmic verbal play gets too hard and generates an anecdote about the play overwhelming the sense. Language becomes the thing / gathering that distracts or which causes the argument to lose itself. Yet this play also redirects: far from stopping you, this play exerts its own gravitational pull and takes “you in a completely different direction.” Translation becomes a material device, a device that materializes language. The word or phrase that couples two words in translation becomes a kind of toy, the Thing as a plaything that distracts you, leads you in a different direction.

Yet any new direction inevitably quickly turns off into further detours in the form of anecdotal attempts at elucidations that fail to advance the argument or confess that failure as a human, all too human, failure to read. For example, de Man rather movingly, with characteristic modesty and self-deflating irony turns the general difficulty of reading Benjamin into his own personal difficulty: “The Frankfurt School interpretation of Benjamin is shot through with messianic elements which certainly are there, as a desire in Benjamin, but which Benjamin managed to control by an extraordinarily refined and deliberate strategy of echoing terms, allowing them to enter his text in such a way that an attentive reading would reveal them. The attentive reading is very difficult to give. He succeeded so well incorporating them in their displacement that you—it really take along practice—it’s always lost again. Whenever I go back to his text, I think I have it more or less, then I read it again, and again I don’t understand it” (102). And when pressed, in the final question, on what he means by historical events and occurrences that the questioner found “slightly obscure” ends the discussion by conceding he can’t answer clearly: “What occurred was that . . . translation. Then there are, in the history of texts, texts that are occurrences. I think Rousseau’s Social Contract is an occurrence, not because it is a political text, but because something that occurs, in that sense. I realize this is difficult—a little obscure and not well formulated. But I feel it, that there is something there. Something being said which is kind of important to me, which I think . . . which isn’t clear” (104).

The Irony Thing

In her book Stupidity, Avial Ronell interrupts her discussion about de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” to tell a personal anecdote about writing her dissertation with de Man. In this case, the anecdote itself, bracketed by marks on the page, turns into a block, that lets us understand the resistant reading proceeds through writing (Wunder)blocks:

But I have strayed from my intention of revealing an autobiographical ordeal, something that would help you understand my own avoidance of de Man, which was never absolute or even remotely successful. I had avoided de Man even before he told me that he thought Goethe was stupid. Actually, the scene of that utterance went a little differently, with more nuance than I have internalized. It took place in Paris. I remarked on him, in the projective manner of upstarts, that he had avoided “my” authors; I remember naming Goethe among them. His response was swift: That’s because Goethe could be so stupid.” My bewilderment. “—Theoretically, I mean, in his theory.” That could stop a girl in her tenure tracks. Not that I had a job at the time. I ended up owing him a great deal, as he had helped me when I was fairly destitute and unhirable, having in fact been fired unceremoniously , no doubt illegally, but nonetheless thankfully by the University of Virginia—I am glad that destiny had spit me out of the university at that time, for what was I, if I may invoke a hapless figure from Hellenic comedy, an alazon in wonderland, doing in the South? After Paris and Berlin, he sent me to California, to a system, he said, whose digestive tract would not be able to eliminate me easily. That is how he put it. In any case, I started in Riverside and ended up at Berkeley, playing to the end a politics of the foreign body that was neither thrown up nor excrete. (What was I, if I may borrow my identity from Lacan, a petite alazon, doing out West?) I don’t know why, but Paul de Man had taken an interest in helping me, and it was only under his prodding that I crossed over from German departments (which had succeeded in throwing me up) to what he called the safer shores of comparative literature. (I had explained to him that being in a German department exposed me to endless reruns of World War II. With all sorts of phantoms surfacing and attacking me. He understood those phantasms immediately, offering safety in the less primitively Germanics precincts of comparative literature.) He was sympathetic, strong, nonsexist; he spontaneously offered me protection upon seeing how I was slammed by one institution of higher learning after another. But now I am getting ahead of myself, telling what happened later in the c.v. Nonetheless, in purely empirical and historical terms, prior to the inevitable hiring and firing squads, before I knew him and before he became a counselor, my compass and friend, I chose not to go to Yale when the opportunity arose but opted instead for distance—for mediation and mediocrity, as it turned out—by choosing a graduate school in New Jersey. I do not hesitate to say in any case, when deciding to pursue graduate studies, I avoided working in close proximity to de Man for fear that he would crush my already nonexistent balls. And yet there was no one else to work with. My relation to de Man would remain, for the most part, teletopical.[xxi]

Ronell’s hyperaware account of her avoidant relation to de Man and the various narrative he spun around her is a non(auto)biographical moment that blocks us out, letting everything and nothing slip. She still stopped in her tenure tracks. Ronell helps us to understand Benjamin’s toy train even more fully. Reading things involves a question of distance.[xxii] Our practice of transforming a thing into a topos always means that we are defining the topos as a teletopos; troping on Ronell, we may add that it is a techno-teletopos, technology being that which both draws closer and keeps apart the human and inhuman, inside the loop and out of it.[xxiii]

Ronell’s ironization of de Man’s irony, her “tell all that tells nothing” delayed, straying autobiography that delivers diversion does not derail of history or politics but gives a track to return to them through a (non)story of resistance and, as in the case of Ronell, mourning for de(ad) Man (walking). Walter Benjamin and evenmore radical case of an out of the way, prefatorial autothantography as pseudo-obituary: “Posthumous Fragments by a Young Physician], which Johann Wilhelm Ritter had published in two volumes at Heidelberg in 1810. This work has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its preface, in which the author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an obituary for a supposedly deceased unknown friend—with whom he is really identical—as the most important example of personal prose in German Romanticism.” p. 491 

We are not taking about (psuedo)autobiography as a personal pathology of a particular author, then, but an effect or, more precisely, a “de/f/fect” in narrative when using the library or other archive as a database to process scattered materials through a filing system and then assemble them into a unified, linear form. In her book Files: Law and Media Technology, Cornelia Visman comments on problems German citizens faced gaining access to their the Stasi files (the East German secret police) when these files were released shortly after the reunification of Germany in 1989. “The right of access to one’s records,” she writes, allows one to use the Stasi files “for purposes of self-enlightenment in much the same way as keeping and reading a diary.” But, she quickly adds, this apparently neat equivalence between a autobiographical diary one writes and a biography written and recorded by the state creates an insurmountable problem of producing the complete story: because a clerk reads one’s file and decides which parts may be read or not by the person who requested the file, effectively tampering with it, the German Government, Viswan writes, fueled “the suspicion that the legible file is nothing but an inferior secondary text lacking the truly important pages. It does not contain the whole life. . . . one’s own story turns out to be illegible, something that can only be found in the complete file.” The file became, in the view of the person reading her of his possibly redacted file, an envelope that “attract[ed] all kinds of phantasms” (156).[xxiv]

Freud discovered a similar problem in Studies in Hysteria the psychoanalyst faced when constructing a case history. Trying to account for the resistance he and his mentor and colleague Josef Breuer both met from their women patients and their failures to help them, Freud runs through a series of similes for the case study’s (dis)organization. In the first adopts the bureaucratic metaphors of file and dossier and then takes a Conradian turn to discuss their sabotage:

It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order. That analysis of my patient Emmy von N. contained similar files of memories though they were not so fully enumerated and described. These files form a quite general feature of every analysis and their contents always emerge in a chronological order which is as infallibly trustworthy as the succession of days of the week or names of the month in a mentally normal person. They make the work of analysis more difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing these memories, they reverse the order in which these originated. The freshest and newest experience appears first in the file first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the series in fact began.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 2, 288

The file and dossier simile allows Freud to remedy a narrative problem simply by reversing the original chronology of narration.[xxv]

Yet discontented with this straightforward simile, Freud continues to adopt other similes until he reaches, as he does at the end of “Note on a Mystic Writing Pad,” a point of breakdown.[xxvi] Freud proceeds to describe resistance as a kind of sabotage not reducible to easily recognizable political secret agency but instead a kind of sleeper cell that works even when sleeping.

But the causal relation between the determining psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon is not of kind implying that the trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence. We must presume rather that the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.[xxvii]

The foreign simile overrides the others, a body that sounds medical (an internal virus) and yet also political (an external agent that it is still at work, even if not an agent provocateur. Freud quickly rejects the foreign body simile, however, for a “pathogenic organization” in favor of an “infiltrate,” a medical term for an inanimate substance left by an unknown and unlocatable foreign body.

We have said that [pathogenic] material behaves like a foreign body from the living tissue. We are now in a position to see where this comparison leads. A foreign body does not enter into a any relation with the layers of tissue that surround it, although it modifies them and necessitates are reactive inflammation in them. Our pathogenic psychical group, on the other hand, does not admit of being cleanly extirpated from the ego. Its external strata pass over in every direction into portions of the normal ego; and, indeed, they belong to it just as much as they belong to the pathogenic organization. The interior layers of the pathogenic organization are increasingly alien to the ego, but once more without there being any visible boundary at which the pathogenic material begins. In fact the pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body, but far more like an infiltrate. In this simile the resistance must be regarded as what is infiltrating.[xxviii]

Freud’s succession of similes testifies both to a problem of describing the topography of the psyche as “concentric strata” (289) and to a problem of narrating (from the beginning). Acknowledging in a parenthetical paragraph that he is making use of a number of similes that are “incompatible with one another” (291), Freud adds that he will continue to do so in order to throw light on “highly complicated topic which has never yet been represented” (291). Freud inadvertently politicizes resistance to his treatment in the process of describing it through various conspiratorial and medical similes (resistance is a kind of viral politics that deconstructs distinction normal and pathogenic groups, nucleus and foreign body), but politics in Freud’s hands turn out to be a problem of representation and narration, of organized agencies that don’t have bodies and that cannot be visualized.

The bureaucratic similes Freud adopts evince a problem already present in the state’s ability to order the identities the citizen and the foreigner by processing them as papers and files: the stranger traverses categories both categories: the citizen is already estranged from herself and from other migrating citizens as well as form (illegal) immigrants, resident aliens, and, most importantly for Avital Ronell, refugees and the sacred alien (as much as space as a person that cannot be placed). [xxix]

Forgoing Reading

By posing the question of reading things through deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and narratology as much as through science studies, we want to connect the question of shelf-life to the question of bare life less by asking how we attach meaning to things and generate sentimental narratives than in asking how troping things means that attachments to things too become tropes. In exerting a referential pull yet making itself available as a trope, the self-storage unit thing helps us to define the archive both as a place of contact with “real things” that have secure boundaries and protocols for us and as a space of mediation which, in theory, makes virtual contact with toys possible seemingly at any time and from any distance.

Yet even this virtual contact involves a translation that foregrounds attachment as a trope in need of being read: translations involve attachment disorders. As Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator,” “the higher the level of a work, the more it remains translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies only to originals. Translations, in contrast, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty but because the looseness with which meaning attaches to them” (262).

Loose Value: Fragments in Translation as Obstacles to Reprocessing / Repacking

In an oft-cited passage from “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin compares translation as a passing not from one whole text to another but from one fragment to another:

Fragments of a vessel that are glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are [broken] parts of a vessel.[xxx]

“Recogniz-ability” comes from troping the fragments as part of a smashed object.

Although we are relying largely on English translations of the German and French texts we discuss, we take the passage above as an emblem of our close(d) reading practice: translation resists a reprocessing of a writer’s corpus as a totality that allows for a thematic and unifying thread. For an example of this reprocessing, consider Peter Demetz’s metaphor of the musical score in the final paragraph of his introduction to Benjamin’s Reflections. Demetz wonders “whether it would be possible to listen to Benjamin in a musical rather than a literary way, and to concentrate, as if his individual writings were fragments of an inclusive score, on the thematic orchestration of his ideas and arguments. His ultimate secret, I believe, is that he works with a few intimate leitmotifs that fascinate him thoughout his life, regardless of the particular stage of his ideological transformations” (xlii-iii). Using the musical score metaphor, Demetz reprocesses the texts into a totally unified work of art package complete with Wagnerian Leitmotifs.[xxxi]

Our interest with close(d) reading as a reading of fragments rather than systems arises from our concern with the Anglo-American institutionalization of reading literature and the reception of French theory and German philosophy have had through their translation into English.[xxxii] We have from time to time consulted the originals, relying on our friends Peter Krapp, Larry Rickels, Galili Shahar, and Carol Jacobs to help us as needed. We do not mean to dismiss the importance and necessity of translation, and regard translation as a crucial aspect of paralinear reading we undertake in order not to fall back into a naïve monolingualism and unjustifiable provincialism. We wish, rather, to engage translation above all as a question of reading in terms of shelf-life extension, or survival. Benjamin describes what he regards as the bizarre temporality of translation and the determination of “the range of life” in “The Task of the Translator”:

We may call this connection a natural one, or, more specifically, a vital one. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find in their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks the stage of continued life. The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality. . . . The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors such as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And indeed, isn’t the afterlife of works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures? (257)

Benjamin creates obstacles to writing, delays, as well as to reading, resistance on the side of writing and reading, that demands concentration from the reader of Benjamin, that the reader be slowed down. As thee editors of Benjamin’s Archive write, “In order to aid the cogitations in finding their way to an appropriate realization on paper, some resistance is necessary; he places objects in the way of a too rapid reading” (500; 551).

We also that translating someone like Walter Benjamin that would a remain problem even if our German were totally fluent, a problem that de Man, Carol Jacobs, and Samuel Weber have all faced when writing about him in English. Weber’s introduction to his Walter Benjamin’s -abilities (2009) provides probably by the best example of this problem. Weber explains that his book traces Benjamin’s tendency to use the suffix “ability,” preceded by a dash, to form concepts through bizarre sounding nouns rather than create concepts through neologisms. Weber says he was tempted to write the book in German since it is “of course the language in which Benjamin wrote and in which I generally read him” (4), and gives several examples, all of them quoted in the original German and not translated into English.

There is nothing remarkable here, of course. Weber tactfully and rightfully plays the expertise card, thereby laying claim to a certain kind of intimacy and co-citizenship with Benjamin. We would simply point out that the experience of reading Weber's book can never be commensurate with his experience of writing it, even if a reader whose native language were German were to read it. Moreover, “-ability” is in the case of translation, “untranslat-ability.” Weber explains that it can be written that “-barkeit” may be translated as “-ibility” or “-ablity.” What Benjamin calls the necessary failure of translation involves a resistance to movement back and forth, to the metaphor that defines translation as a carrying over. Weber imagines what would happen “if this book is ever translated into German—‘back’ into German I was tempted to write” (p. 4), but he puts the word “back” in scare quotes because he tends, he says, to read Benjamin in German, not because Weber wrote his book in German first and then translated it into English.

Our attention to such small details arises from a desire to attend to the kinds of resistances and repressions that are so common in translation as to go unnoticed. For example, scholarly introductions in the original are typically deleted and replaced by a new scholarly apparatus written in the language of translation.[xxxiii] In the case of Benjamin, the translation resorts and reshuffles the German edition deck, as it were. What were collected together in one volume of unpublished writings for example, are in the English translation, folded into all four volumes of the published writings, the difference between published and unpublished noted only in a footnote at the beginning of any unpublished work. The table of contents implies a unity that the corpus lacks. Similarly, emendations to Harry Zohn’s controversial translation of “The Task of the Translator” are mentioned in an endnote but not noted as they occur on a case-by-case basis. Readers are thus always playing without a full deck when they read, whether what they read is written in a language foreign to them or not.

Reading-to-Hand

For a wonderful illustration of how Benjamin turns the object into a trope in his own writing practice, we may turn to his use of theatrical metaphors to stage an analysis of children’s book in his essay “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books” (SW 1, 435-43). We offer an extended reading of this dense and poetic essay in order to bring out some of the dimensions of closed reading as they relate to the pedagogy, aesthetics, the body, media, technology, and their finitude, both their spatial dimensions and their duration. Benjamin tropes the child picturing / reading children’s picture books and pull out as a metaphorics of hallucinogenic, fantastical, immersive play, theatricalization and carnivalization unbound by sense. Color becomes the atmospheric “medium” (442) par excellence that makes reading and writing into transferential experiences of turning words into images and vice versa. Near the end of the essay Benjamin concludes that “pure color is the medium of pure fantasy, a home among the clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the constructive artist” (442).[xxxiv]

Why is color so central to Benjamin? Because it is a trope of tropes as attachments and detachments, much like clothes:

The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true; he overcomes the illusory barrier of the surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning “attach”: you attach five colors to the objects. In German, the word used is anlagen: you “apply” colors. In such an open, color-bedecked word where everything shifts at every step. The child is allowed to join in the game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up form reading and observing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and joins in, while reading—for the words have all come to the masked ball, are joining in the fun and whirling around together, like tinkling snowflakes. . . At a stroke, words throw on their costumes and in the twinkling of an eye they are caught up in a battle, love scenes, or a brawl. This is how children write their stories, but also how they read them. And there are a rare impassioned ABC-books that play similar sort of game in pictures. . . .

Staging reading through the metaphor allows Benjamin to describe the knowledge and memory as containers that may be turned inside out, with no loss:

Children know such pictures like their own pockets; they have searched through them in the same way and turned them inside out, without forgetting the smallest thread or piece of cloth. And if, in the colored engraving, children’s imagination can fall into a reverie, the black and white woodcut or the plain prosaic illustration draws them out of themselves. Just as they will write about the pictures with words, so, too, they will “write” them in a more literal sense: they will scribble on them. Unlike the colored pictures, the surface of the black and white illustration seems to be incomplete and in need of additions. So children imaginatively complete the illustrations. At the same time, they learn language from them, they also learn writing: hieroglyphics. (SW, 1, 436)

Benjamin interrupts this line of thought about the importance of the lack

of color as the double determination of what kinds of book surfaces invite writing and define writing as scribbling and completion. He takes a detour first to the body, particularly the child reader's hand, and the “disintegrat-ability,” as it were, of one kind of picture book that has detachable parts, before returning to broader considerations about color, media, language, and the body at the end of the essay:

And even in children’s books, children’s hands were catered to just as much as their minds or imaginations. There are the well-known pull-out books (which have degenerated and seem to be the most short-lived as a genre, just as the books themselves never seem to last long). . . . you now find in books those beautiful games in which little cardboard figures can be attached by means of invisible slits in the board and can be rearranged at will. This means that you can change a landscape or a room according to the different situations that arise in the course of the story. For those people who as children—or even as collectors—have had the great good fortune to come into the possession of magic books or puzzle books, all of the foregoing will have paled in comparison. These magic books were ingeniously contrived volumes that displayed different series of pictures according to the way one flicked through the pages. The person I the know can go through such a book ten times, and will see the same picture on page after page, until his hand slips---and now it is as if the entire book were transformed, and completely different pictures make their appearance. (437-38).

In this techno moment of reading by hand, the book becomes magical precisely when the hand slips: the magic effect occurs at the moment of the hand loses control, not the hammer breaking apart, as in Heidegger’s Being and Time, what he calls equipment becomes no longer “ready-to-hand” but “present-to-hand” when it fails. And paradoxically, only the reader who knows how to let his hand skip can perform the magic trick on the book.

The Sunset Clause

We may begin to appreciate better the importance of color as a trope of tropes for Benjamin and how this tropology uses children’s books to connect German classicism, staged as the non-canonical novels of Jean-Paul Richter and the color theory canonical writer and critic of Jean-Paul, namely, Goethe. At stake in account of the pedagogical and aesthetic value of children’s books is whether we are to understand Benjamin as endorsing a classical German pre-critical aesthetic of completion and unity or championing “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, an aesthetic of incompletion and fragmention. Benjamin returns to his initial metaphorical connection with color and children’s reading by yoking the classical Goethe’s theory of colors with the true “spirit of children’s games” through “sensibility,” and the detachment of color from the objects: expanding on his characterization of the child “draped with colors of every hue that he picked up from reading and observing,” (435).[xxxv]

Benjamin develops his discussion of children’s books and children reading not as an explicit argument about aesthetics but by quietly and indirectly changing his metaphors. After quoting Goethe on color, Benjamin makes a series of notable shifts from his earlier discussion of writing and color: snowflakes are replaced by the glow of the sunset, and writing disappears entirely in favor of reading as a magical experience that transforms the child’s body into a lamp.[xxxvi] Instead of colors being attached to the child, color is now separated from the object: “Just think of the many games that are concerned with pure imaginative contemplation: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic lantern, watercoloring, decals. In all of these, color seems to hover suspended above the objects. Their magic lies not in the colored object or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the colored brilliance, the ray of colored light” (443).

Why is colored light separated out as it becomes glowing? Again, only indirectly, Benjamin implies that medial transfer happens through colored light that creates contact that is pre-critical but not quite literal nor complete. Consider Benjamin’s final sentence with its image of “the eyes and cheeks of children poring overbooks are reflected in the glory of the sunset [of a Lyser painting of a landscape]” (442). As we will recall, Benjamin earlier said that colored books not do invite writing, only black and white books do.[xxxvii] In “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” which takes its title from Karl Hobreckers’s book Old Forgotten Children’s Books (1924), Benjamin discusses Biedemeier books, remarking that the pictures in children’s books usually exclude any synthesis of color and drawing” and describes the books in terms of a classical aesthetic: “This resplendent, self-sufficient world of colors is the exclusive preserve of children’s books.” Self-sufficiency seems to imply a classical aesthetic of completion: color tends to exclude drawing. Yet color does includes theater, or, perhaps implicitly, theatrical lighting with color filters, which in turn takes the form of contemplative one might even say closet drama: “The inward nature of this way of seeing is located in the color, and this is where the dreamy life that objects lead in the minds of children is acted out. They learn from the bright coloring. For nowhere is sensuous nostalgia free contemplation as at home as in color.” (410).

Enlightenment for Benjamin involves an aesthetic of sensuous media transfers that work best, “magically,” when there is a contact problem: the hand slips, the book parts get detached and losts. Color as a ray of light throws a Romantic shadow, as it were, on German classicism by turning a transcendental thing separate from all playthings. This transcendence is less reassuring, however, than an unsettling experience of exteriorization necessitating new attachments. Benjamin ends his essay with an ekphrasis of a landscape populated by a poet whose instruments lie scattered whose “melodious hands” do not play them and by a nearly mute Muse who whispers into a “winged-child,” who then draws whatever the Muse said. Yet Benjamin’s ekphrasis appears initially as a narrative, only revealed retroactively to resemble a classical painting in the manner “Lyseronce painted” and thus subject by Benjamin to a certain Romantic tork that focuses on the near finitude of the aesthetic and its artificiality. The painting’s apparently harmonious classical aesthetic, in which scattering is harmonized through a muting of sound, gets troped and reattached as a media specific landscape painting. But the “painting” then becomes the reflection of children outside it who are not looking at it but instead poring over books. The temporality of the classical aesthetic comes with a Sunset clause, the promise of an ending that is deferred to a future soon to come. Like the child’s pocket that turns inside out, children’s books exteriorize their readers; these books operate successfully and harmoniously only by their failure to contain their readers’ experience of reading-to-hand, allowing children a time to reflect light beyond the book’s pages without knowing it.

Detecting / Narrating the Archive: (Not) Reading Books as Things, Storing Persons as Archivists

WB's Archive might be a useful closer. For us, the most interesting thing is the way the editor, at the end of the intro, "saves" the archive by depathologizing it ("care" or "careful"" are the crucial words--nothing OCD here), and "use" and "productive" are terms of use--the archive is not there to be stored and safeguarded but to be used. Was thinking we should read "The Storyteller" too to talk about the relation between media and narrative in relation to the archiving of documents as stored things.

So there’s no reading of WB as archivist (or not much of one) and no reading of the book as a reproduction of the archive, offering its classifications and groupings rather than trying to approximate WB's own. the pun implies a a double reading of "archive" as in the archive of documents we now have that WB had dispersed around the world and also WB's own archive of his own works and correspondence with others (and photos, newspaper clippings, postcards, etc). So there is are shelving operation happening in the table of contents. The editor also notes that WB made photographs or transcripts of various mss thathe then sent to friends to store safely. So he turned people into external hard drives. The postal system allowed for multi-media reproductions of the "auratic" mss, which really doesn't exist. It's like he has already gone digital. But the main thing is that he sends the copies to be stored, not to be read, and he stores his own scraps, papers, proofs, etc in cardboard boxes, in desk drawers, in cupboards, and son. So the spaces of the home, whether designed to store writing or not, all nearly all turned into shelves. The editor doesn't "read" WB's own writing process involves storing his mss as he wrote them, turning friends into archivists who store his mss for him. Writing becomes a strange sort of auto-archiving in which one gets to catalogue one's own works in eccentric, personal ways. I 'm thinking the Saxl essay on Warburg's library would be a nice bookend to this book (opposite material circumstances--Warburg is rich while WB is poor), yet same bizarre end result. Warburg's library is not of immediate use to researchers because he organized it so idiosyncratically. What Agamben says about Holderlin's poetry becoming a-poetic (late Holderlin) could apply toAW aswell, givenhis nervous breakdown and his unreadable Msynome Atlas.--reshevling becomes a collage. Psychological classifications would be as undecidable as other kinds of classifications (we could make this point as we transition into "Books by the Mentally Ill." In that esay, reshelving is a proves of division (some books belong, others don't) and redivision that leads to a new unity, a library within the library. Yet that division itself may be readable only to Benjamin since the shelves do not have labels attached to them. Some of he documents in WB's Archive are also inventories, perhaps readable as constellations of a sort (or as just lists)--to which extent can we read WB in Benjamin terms?. This in addition to the way the editor reads and doesn't read the document, sometimes attempting to produce a print version that looks like the facsimile, and other times not crossing out words or lines, never putting "X" in, never comparing directly front and back sides of a page.

This intro would also expand on the archive fever of the previous discussion in chapter one, madness being a symptom of the breakdown between mechanical auto-archiving and personal auto-archiving as well as other archiving), and the breakdown between being an archivist and being an archive--WB being the archivist who archives himself as his writings. This would make Arendt view of WB as "unclassifiable" more concrete and more sophisticated since the resistance to classification comes out of manifold ways of (self)classifying his collection / archive of writings.

The other thing the title covers up is that the documents are not in fact in WB' s archive (the title implies a unity of place , person, and property). Some of the documents are stamped Th. Adornno archive. We could also pit it against Agamben's last chapter in The Time That Remains and Agamben's use of a facsimile of a WB manuscript page to turn a text into an image, which he then doesn't read--he turns into a detective and follows the clues to Paul.

He gets all Saint Paul code on WB. Vresu the dtiors’s referenesto Wbas detective and WB’sowncomments on detective fiction andcollaborating with Brecht

Interval as Staging Ground: The Teletopical Poetics of Close(d) Reading, or Reading Rings Around things

set up the carousel via a circle from shelf help storage) to toys as staging to children's books as tropes of reading) that are linguistic and medial transfers of things that become readable, “thingable,” as they turn into other storage media with specific tropes of containment (frames, shelves, boxes, and so on) and fragmentation.

So troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals.

[Note: The first two sentences of this section need to be revised]

Before we come to a full stop in our introduction, we want to ride out a bit longer by taking up the interval discussed by linked to the movement of being mechanically rotated, troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals, like the frame in the film required for us to see the film in motion when run at 24 frames in The Ring a second turn our text into a thing, by moving to the trope of the carousel as a way of staging and (being incapable of) reading things set up the carousel via a circle from shelf help storage) to toys as staging to children's books as tropes of reading) that are linguistic and medial transfers of things that become readable, “thingable,” as they turn into other storage media with specific tropes of containment (frames, shelves, boxes, and so on) and fragmentation. addressed by Benjamin in a brief section of Colors: A Berlin Childhood. Entitled “The Carousel,” the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the mother, speeding up and slowing down.[xxxviii]

The revolving deck with its obliging animals skims the surface of the ground. It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying. Music rings out—and with a jolt, the child rolls away from his mother. At first, he is afraid to leave her. But then he notices how he himself is faithful. He is enthroned, as faithful monarch, above a world that belongs to him. Trees and natives line at the borders at intervals. Suddenly, his mother reappears in an Orient. Then, from some primeval forest, comes a treetop—one such as the child has already thousands of years ago, such as he has seen just now, for the first time, on the carousel. His mount is devoted to him: like a mute Arion, he rides his mute fish; a devoted Zeus-bull carries him off as immaculate Europa. The eternal return of all things has long since become childhood wisdom, and life an ancient intoxication of sovereignty, with the booming orchestration as crown jewel at the center. The music is slowly winding down; space begins to stutter [as opposed to mute “animals”], and the trees start coming to their senses. The carousel becomes uncertain ground. And his mother rises up before him—the firmly fixed mooring post around which the landing child wraps the line of his glances.

Berlin Childhood, 122-23

As in Benjamin’s account of habit form playing in his essay on “Old Toys,” his account of the child and mother on the returning carousel bears some similarity to Freud’s “Fort Da” toy story. As in Freud’s “Fort Da,” Benjmain’s account of the carousel involves a story about a child dealing with the loss of his mother. But in Benjmain’s segment, Freud’s infantile, narcissistic, self-centered monarch becomes sovereign as a child through a shocking but pleasurable decentering and repetition (“with a jolt, the child rolls away”), a destabilization of ground and proximity, a kind of time travel in which the present is the first time. And this time the mother moves East as opposed to the father who returns to the Western “fwont” in “Fweud”’s account. The child in the carousel is literally and metaphorically getting high: “It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying.”[xxxix]

The crucial developments in this essay are, first, the varying speed as the ride begins and ends, allowing for the unfixing and refixing of things, a break up and intensification of fixation, and, second, the interval that allows for the mother to appear. It's a later moment of detachment that makes intelligibility necessarily vertiginous as space and things become animated, first mute and then verging on speech by stuttering.[xl]  In Benjamin’s story, the carousel provides a stage to show that there are no stages of ego development, only rereadings that are also always restagings.[xli]

We close down this chapter, turn our text into a thing, by moving to the trope of the carousel as a way of staging and (being incapable of) reading things addressed by Benjamin in a brief section of Colors: A Berlin Childhood.[xlii] Entitled “The Carousel,” the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the mother, speeding up and slowing down.[xliii]

The revolving deck with its obliging animals skims the surface of the ground. It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying. Music rings out—and with a jolt, the child rolls away from his mother. At first, he is afraid to leave her. But then he notices how he himself is faithful. He is enthroned, as faithful monarch, above a world that belongs to him. Trees and natives line at the borders at intervals. Suddenly, his mother reappears in an Orient. Then, from some primeval forest, comes a treetop—one such as the child has already thousands of years ago, such as he has seen just now, for the first time, on the carousel. His mount is devoted to him: like a mute Arion, he rides his mute fish; a devoted Zeus-bull carries him off as immaculate Europa. The eternal return of all things has long since become childhood wisdom, and life an ancient intoxication of sovereignty, with the booming orchestration as crown jewel at the center. The music is slowly winding down; space begins to stutter [as opposed to mute “animals”], and the trees start coming to their senses. The carousel becomes uncertain ground. And his mother rises up before him—the firmly fixed mooring post around which the landing child wraps the line of his glances.

Berlin Childhood, 122-23

As in Benjamin’s account of habit form playing in his essay on “Old Toys,” his account of the child and mother on the returning carousel bears some similarity to Freud’s “Fort Da” toy story. As in Freud’s “Fort Da,” Benjmain’s account of the carousel involves a story about a child dealing with the loss of his mother. But in Benjmain’s segment, Freud’s infantile, narcissistic, self-centered monarch becomes sovereign as a child through a shocking but pleasurable decentering and repetition (“with a jolt, the child rolls away”), a destabilization of ground and proximity, a kind of time travel in which the present is the first time. And this time the mother moves East as opposed to the father who returns to the Western “fwont” in “Fweud”’s account. The child in the carousel is literally and metaphorically getting high: “It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying.”[xliv]

The crucial developments in this essay are, first, the varying speed as the ride begins and ends, allowing for the unfixing and refixing of things, a break up and intensification of fixation, and, second, the interval that allows for the mother to appear. It's a later moment of detachment that makes intelligibility necessarily vertiginous as space and things become animated, first mute and then verging on speech by stuttering.[xlv]  In Benjamin’s story, the carousel provides a stage to show that there are no stages of ego development, only rereadings that are also always restagings.[xlvi]

Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of reading).

we can work Weber

in, just before the toys, to use him as support (something good

rhetorically)

In other words, you have given us

not only a breakthrough connection between infrastructures of memory

and infrastrategies of reading by connecting the camp and the storage

unit as you did but some very nice cards to lay down in order clarify

the importance of the toy--and also to elucidate WB perhaps even

better than does Weber as well as a totally brilliant de Man card to

play (the Uboat, which we can turn into a U-Turn Boat)-.  Sorry about

that last one.

-----------------------

[i] “Technically correct readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable, ad unpleasant, but they are irrefutable. They are also totalizing . . . but are an unreliable process of knowledge production that prevents all entities, including linguistic entitles, from coming into discourse as such, they are indeed universal, consiaentently defective models of language’s impossibility to be a model language. They are, in theory, the most elastic theoretical and dialectical model to end all models and they can rightly claim to contain within their own defective selves all the other defective models of reading-avoidance referential, semiological, grammatical, performative, local, or whatever. They are theory and not theory at the same time, the universal theory of the impossibility of theory. To the extent that they are theory . . rhetorical readings like the other kinds, still avoid and resist the reading they advocate. Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself the resistance. The loftier anaims and the better the methods of literary theory, the less possible it becomes. (19)

[ii] One of the reason why he takes the translator rather than the poet is that the translator, per definition, fails. The translator can never do what the original text did. Any translation is always second in relation to the original, and the translator as such is lost form the very beginning. He is per definition underpaid, he is per definition overworked, he is per definition the one history will not really reain as an equal, unless he happens to be a poet, but that is not always the case. If the text s called “Die Aufgabe des ubersetzers,” we have to read this title more or less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If you enter Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe—“er hat aufgegeben,” he doesn’t continue in the race anymore. The translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original.

p.80

[iii] Benjamin, vol 2, 123.

[iv] And see Georges Perec, “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 148-55.

[v] Acquiring books and arranging one’s books have become topoi in modern fiction. See, for example, Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979, pp. 4-6: See also George Perec’s chapter “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 148-55.

[vi] Benjamin’s own archiving practices and the problems editors have faced publishing his works constitutes in themselves a subfield we call F(h)ileology, the philology of files.

[vii] 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.

[viii] This loss of the mss in order to make it possible to find it later in published form would, in any case, only be a temporary solution since Benjamin sees the collector as an endangered species: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio.  But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.  Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.” In “Unpacking my Library.”

[ix] Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings” in Notes to Literature Vol 2 Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 20-31

[x]



[xi] See Peter Stallybrass, “Against Working.”

[xii] Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1937) enacts this process, slows it down as we move from the movie theater that can’t show the film because the electricity has gone, to the source of the power failure, sand, and to a wonderful exchange between policemen disguised as grocers about oranges, cabbage, banana skin outside the movie theater, as a kind of short-hand for the medium of film.

[xiii] Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight (1971; U Minn, 1983), 246-66.

as well as modern technical processes (study of paper and writing with the aid, I am told of slides of enlargements of the manuscript) Beissner has produced the irreproachable critical edition (248)

In the case of Hölderlin, this margin of indeterminacy is especially large, for the material condition of the manuscripts is frequently such that it is impossible to choose between two possible lessons in the very places where explication is most necessary. The editor finds himself obliged to rely upon the principle that he follows; as a result, scientific philology attempts to find objective and quantitative criteria, while Heidegger decides in the name of the internal logic of his own commentary.

248

A rational decision between these two criteria is obviously difficult. The quantitative method does have in its favor a certain positive probability, but its final choice remains nevertheless arbitrary for it is most unlikely that Hölderlin chose his term on the basis of statistical distribution. Philology knows this well and proceeds in the honest and sensible way; in a note, the editor draws attention to the problem and leaves he question open. But it cannot be denied that he exegete capable of providing a coherent and responsible interpretation has the right, indeed, the obligation, to decide according to the conclusion of his interpretation; that is, after all, one of the goals of all exegesis. Everything rests, then, on the intrinsic value of the interpretation. (249)

There’s a kind of infra-reading in de Man—an internal split whereby one kind of internal philological reading (cruxes are left open, unresolved) is forever at odds with an other internal reading that has to go far beyond the philological. Yet the criteria for the value of this ”intrinsic interpretation” is difficult to establish, even if we posit that Being becomes the editor, and de Man shortly ironizes Heidegger’s interpetation when de Man says that Heidegger makes Hölderlin say the opposite of what Holderlin actually says.

Resolving the split rationally is made even more difficult, de Man notes, by Heidegger’s violent rejection of philology. Heidegger chooses one over the other in polemical fashion in order to distinguish himself as a thinker from a philosopher.

p. 249

With Hölderlin, there is never any critical dialogue. There is nothing in his work, not an erasure, no obscurity, no ambiguity, that is not absolutely and totally willed by Being itself. Only one who has truly grasped this can become the “editor” of being and impose commas that spring forth “from the necessity of thought.” We are far from scientific philology. 254

Heidegger’s need for a witness is understandable, then, but why must it be Hölderlin? . . . it is the fact that Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Hiedegger makes him say. Such an assertion is paradoxical only in appearance. With Hölderlin, Heidegger cannot take refuge in the ambiguity that constitutes at once his positive contribution and his defense strategy; he cannot say, as in the case of the metaphysician, that they proclaim both the true and the false, that they are greater the more they are in error, that he closer they are to Being, the more they are possessed by the absconding movement. For the promise of Heidegger’s ontology to be realized, Hölderlin must be Icarus returned from his flight: he must state directly and positively the presence Being as well as the possibility of maintaining it in time. Heidegger has staked this entire “system” on the possibility of this experience. (254-55)

And I was reading de Man on Heidegger on Hölderlin and saw Ronell's brilliant essay in a new light, since she totally forgets de Man's essay (the way Weber forgets the translation essay). De Man's question is more fundamental than Ronell's. His question is not why does philosophy need poetry (this is her question) but why Heidegger turns in particular to the poetry of Hölderlin (rather than Rilke, who seems more Heideggerian). De Man poses the question twice within two pages. His answer is that Hölderlin is a witness, and this what Heidegger needs, namely, a witness, someone who has gone out and seen Being and returned show us what he has collected and to talk about it (de Man makes the poet sound like a sci-fi astronaut angel). Heidegger couldn’t make the trip himself because all he knew was that Being is concealed; he didn’t know where to find it.

Anyway, the witness resonated with me in relation to the Holocaust. Perhaps am just hallucinating. But it was a weird moment. Heidegger: "Can I get a witness?"

Very much not excuses confessions since the witness of Hölderlin would presumably testify that Heidegger was not a Nazi, that the Nazi thing was just a bad connection, and misunderstood the call because he didn’t have called I.D., he thought he was talking to someone else, etc.

The unreadability of the book is linked linked to the impossibility of mourning.

See de Man “Anthropomorphism and Lyric.”

“The death of Mnemosyne exhausts the possibilities of lyric in that it grounds the impossibility of reading in the inability of mourning . . . Without memory and the defensive abilities of understanding (“to re-collect”), there is no possibility eft for a future hermeneutics.” Aselm Haverkamp “Error in Mourning” YFS No 69 (1985), 246

[xiv] What Sam Weber calls “Benjamin’s –abilities” includes, for us, Benjamin’s “-disabilities.” Benjamin quotes the author of an essay on New Playthings” saying his children, in an essay on “New Playthings,” could not live without their toy guillotine and gallows. In “Neues Kinderzeug,” there’s a fascinating passage about a miniature Zeppelin, “zum biespiel Hindenbergs” displayed with music playing either “Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles” or “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (1986).

Patriotischer kann man die deustschen Kindlein gar nicht praeparieren. –Das Massengrab darf in keinem Soldatenkaestchen fehlen, so wenig wie ein gutes Musterungslokal, ein Lazarett mit gut imitierten Verwundeten, an denen die kleinen Aertze Operationen, Amputation u. dergl. Vornehmenkoennen. . .. (1986)

Fuesilierung ist ein sehr huebisches Spiel; desgleichen sollte auch eine Menge Zivilbevoekerung in militerischem Spielzeug enhalten sein, mit luetten Barrikaden, ansonst man nicht “Revolution” spielen koennte. . . . Kinderspielzeug kann gar nicht realistisch genug ersonnen werden. . . . “’Soll ich die Kleinen aufklaren?’” (187)

Toy trains that cannot be wrecked only allow kids to have a half as good a time as trains that do:

Eisenbahn-Spielzeug, ohne die Moeglichkeit, Eisenbahn-Katastrophen darzustellen, macht nur das halbe Vergnuegen. (189)

Walter Benjamin, “Neues Kinderzeug”, 185-89

The essay’s thrust is that because children are so innocent and laugh so easily at everything toys involve, toys can never be used effectively to militarize them and indoctrinate them into patriotic citizens. Even guillotines and gallows will appear funny to kids and WB’s children would not want to be without them: “Geschwuer-Puppen furchtbar komisch. Guillotine und Galgen moechten wenigstens meine Kleinen nicht mehr missen. (188) Toys provide children with a means of making their own miniature museums and learn the value of images, things (Plastisches) and prepare for to avoid / respond to future disasters: Es kann gar nicht genug vorahnen!!!” Es soll nicht unwissend gehalten werden, erlebe Alles.

(There can never be enough premonitions. Should not ignorance be brought to a halt so that everything may be experienced?)

[xv] We hope to provide in our book a corrective to the substitution of sentimental stories for intellectual analysis in material culture studies and a related series of binary oppositions that seek to replace one term, regarded negatively such as thinking, with another regarded positively, such as working. Preservation, restoration, recuperation, efficiency are assumed uncritically to be good; similarly, loss, failure, error, waste, and breakdown are all assumed to be negative.

[xvi] We 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.

[xvii] 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),

[xviii] "Demonic Berlin," in Selected Writings 2:1, 326

[xix] Discussion after Task of the Translator, p. 90

[xx] Task of the Translator, 87

[xxi] Avital Ronell, “The Rhetoric of Testing,” in Stupidity, 95-164; to pp. 119-21

[xxii] See Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychological Problem,” sections VI and VII on “Nearness and Distance.” SW, 1, 393-401; to 397-401

[xxiii] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. . . Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” P. 4 (technology understand as instrumental and anthropological, p. 5)

Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning . . . the closer we come to danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.”

The Question Concerning Technology, p. 35

Where do we find ourselves brought to, if now we think one step further regarding Enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve.”

[xxiv] Max Payne is indeed a terrible action / vigilante movie. Max Payne is a cop and widower whose wife and baby were murdered in his own home by, it turns out, a despicable pharmaceutical corporation tied to the military industrial complex. I cannot recommend it to you without warning you that finding the few interesting parts means having to endure the incredibly awful parts that constitute nearly the entire film. However, there is a quite interesting scene in it when Max visits a self-storage unit. To save time, let me show you some image captures of the scene.

Now in terms of the plot, there is something silly here in the assumption that the corporate security / thieves would leave the file folders but steal their contents. Indeed, why would they use first names only much less keep these files at all. But it does make sense in psychoanalytic terms. The file is missing. The film fills in that story—the wife turns out to have been murdered by the corporation’s security agents with the knowledge of the CEO. Like any number of detectives in films, Max Payne’s is able to fill in what is missing. But in this case, there’s a pun on self-storage. You do it yourself, but you store yourself—or you are stored, to use the passive voice. You store more than you know, more than can be stored. And we also have an example of Freud’s uncanny: the home / office. The home and office spaces are connected by a slash, differentiated yet linked. In Max Payne, a similar fantasmatic logic about the file and its tampering is at work. Though the missing contents of the file become evidence in a chain that leads to Payne’s finding and killing his wife’s murderers, the last scene of the film is shown after the end credit sequence is over, when most viewers will have left the theater. This scene is titled on the DVD edition “unfinished business.”

[xxv] In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres, 2008), 35-50, Sven Spieker includes a chapter entitled “Freud’s Files” but he not does not cite or mention this passage in which Freud uses the file simile.

[xxvi] See Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

[xxvii] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, 6, 289.

[xxviii] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 2, 290.

[xxix] Avital Ronell. "On the Misery of Theory Without Poetry: Heidegger's Reading of Hölderlin 's 'Andenken.'" PMLA 120.1 (2005):16-32.

Once in a while, reading a text is tantamount to submitting it to a blunting level of interference, and so one rarely wants to read, in the space of published thinking, what one truly loves, which is which is to say, what one truly relinquishes. (18)

Arendt’s thought on Kant and cosmopolitanism pivots on the hesitant allure of the stranger—on the possibility , that is, for welcoming the stranger, and yet the stranger, the alien, calls for love and incomparable ethical responsiveness. (20)

I have cited the sacred alien to level the word of Hölderlin against the accelerating velocities of hostility directed against foreign bodies I the United States. I may seem odd to state that Hölderlin gas already responded to mainstream desecrations of the alien, but it is so. (20)

In the twentieth century, a subtle shift occurred in the terms in which we locate the ethics and value of responsibility. . . to the movement away from the concept of citizen and toward the refugee as the figure that carries the demand for clear ethical responsiveness. . . . it is no longer the citizen, the one assumed to occupy the secure interior zones of a polity, who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights; rather, the refugee—the foreign and shifting body with no home base—has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics. (20)

The inhabitual, what we do not inhabit habitually—where we do not live and work—does not mean here an aberration, the sensational state of exception of the ever before seen. The contrary, the inhabitual is always there as the simplest and ownmost of beings . . Normalcy harbors the unexpected: solely in the habitual, says Heidegger, can the inhabitual appear within its clearest contours. To celebrate (feiern) is to become free of the habitual: when celebrating, one honors the becoming of he habitual. (26-27)

Bound to the impossible task of commerative retrieval, “Andenken” persistently reorients the discussion concerning a decisive locality and the placing of the political, blowing apart the premises on which one could build a substantial work or project of asserted nonalientation and secured returns—a political work or project mirroring the narcissistic totality of the state. . . . Greeted and greeting, the poet stands on responsive alert, clear about the limits of poetic dwelling on earth. . . States of security, windswept, reveal the nature of illusion. There will be no gathering home, even if the poet has projected a homeward turning. (30)

[xxx] See Carol Jacobs, “Monstrosity of Translation” for the restoration of the adjective “broken” (Zohn drops it) and for an illuminating and very generous discussion of Zohn’s many amazing errors in his translation.

[xxxi] Tom Cohen does something similar with Hitchcock in the two

Hitchcock books were several figures that look to me to be unrelated

(they can't all be substituted for each other as variants of the same

thing / theme). He ends up inverting the problem he locates in Zizek,

relocating the signature of AH in images of inscription that

nevertheless unify the AH canon the way Rothman's auteurial signature

idea does.

[xxxii] Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort (2008).

[xxxiii] The preface to Hans Blumenberg's Shipwrecked provides another good example of the ways in which translations are always new editions; in this

case, some notes in the original declared to be without interest to

non-German readers are deleted, and others are added.

[xxxiv] The yoking of children’s books here both to German Romanticism (Jean Paul) and to German classicism (Goethe) bears reading against Benjamin’s comparison of children’s books with Baroque emblem books in “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” SW 1, 409

[xxxv] Benjamin links children’s picture books to Jean Paul’s novels and the classical German Goethe’s theory of color in relation to the body’s sensory receptivity, language, and media: “( . . . Language itself synthesizes this group (of sense perceptions) into a unity of words like “looking,” “smelling,” “tasting,” which apply intransitively to objects and transitively to human beings.) See Benjamin’s discussion of Lieb and Korper, two kinds of embodiment opposed to sprit, that involve differentiation in his essay.

[xxxvi] See the contrasting use of snowflakes and snow in “Child reading” in One Way Street: To him, the hero’s adventures can still be read in the swirling letters like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes” and Benjamin ends with an image of unending snow rather than the image of a finite sunset: when he gets up, he is covered over and over by the snow of his reading.” (463)

[xxxvii] See the very similar discussion of color versus black and white woodcuts in Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” p. 411. The surface of black and white woodcuts , unlike that of colored pictures, “seems incomplete and can readily be filled in.” (411)

[xxxviii] See note 52 on p. 176 for the odd publication history of the article, not listed in the TOC of the 1938 edition of Berlin Childhood. It’s in One Way Street Selected Writings, v I, as “Child on the Carousel,” 464-65. The translation is very different (not as good, in my view; in that version the last sentence reads “And his mother appears, the much-hammered stake which the landing child winds the rope of his gaze.” I’ll have to check out the German, especially since “the much-hammered stake” implies a violent relation the child has to his mother (Mom as punching bag) in a way that “the firmly fixed mooring post” does not; ditto for “gaze” versus “glances.”

[xxxix] The child at play in WB can be linked to Truffaut’s The Wild Child and I, Pierre Riviere as savage peasant (who is nevertheless literate).

[xl] Mre BerlinCHildhood:

Mentions Robison Crusoe p. 145

Book as magic carpet, p. 147

Snowflake metaphor letters in “A Child Reading” Selected Writings, 1, 463

The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. When shall we actually write books like catalogues?

Vol 1, 457

The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.”

Vol. 1, 457

The card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation.

“Attested Auitor Books” in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, Vol 1, 456

“Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning “attach”: you attach five colors to the object.”

“A Glimpse into the Forgotten World of Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, vol 1, 435

[xli] may be linked to staging; staging and aging of Prospero in The Tempest? Stages—

[xlii]

As a kind of teaser introduces our second chapter, we begin with a mini-allegory of the carousel as cinematic writing machine in Hitchcock's The Ring.[xliii] The title of the film runs rings around the film by multiplying the meanings of “ring.” The title initially seems to refer to the boxing ring, since the film title appears in a single long take superimposed over a freeze frame longshot of a boxing ring. But the frozen shot of the boxers each touching hands and seen in profile already prefigures a pattern of triangulation that follows in which the boxers form an antagonistic and inseparable pair, a static object of art, with a third man, the referee watching them as if he were a stand in for the spectator. There is also a wedding ring from a husband and a bangle from his rival, who are also sparing partners in the boxing ring. A gypsy fortune teller also displays a deck of cards in a circle which ends with two kings, the King of Diamonds and the King of Hearts, which describe up the man described by the fortune teller, as “a tall, rich, young man” she will marry.

[pic]

Tickets sold to the boxing match also appear in a roll, all marked 6D. And the best man drops the wedding ring and mixes it up to great comic effect with a button that has popped off his vest while he is on knees looking for the ring.

[pic]

But the circle of the circle, as it were is the carousel. The woman courted by both men is a ticket seller. When she sells tickets, several shots with the carousel appear. In the early shots of the film, the carousel appears blurred in the background behind the face of one of the eventual rivals, as if it were a mechanism producing his fantasy of the woman, briefly shown just after he first spots her becoming a ghost like enlarged face. Later, similar effects are used as she imagines her fiancée in a boxing match.

Let us take a brief detour: The carousel is a kind of stroboscope or cinematic prototype; there is an early shot of it from a ride that is a machine like p.o.v.; similarly, the tickets, also serial, are comparable to a spool of celluloid film, each ticket a frame; when the tickets become open, the woman makes a silent pitch to the guy she later falls in love with but does not marry, as if the tickets were soliciting and activating the romance plot; and of course, one buys a ticket to the cinema, and the boxing match is indoors; and later we see two sequences in which the tickets are show close up and in time lapse photography as the show sells outs. Similarly, a poster, partly obscured, links rounds to money; anyone who goes more than one round gets X pounds. So the “cinema” generates revenue for the challenger; we see the text of the poster and “A” pound looks like a weight used for weight lifting, a kind of ideogram rather than a number or letter.

We are now back on track. We also see the carousel’s bottom part at the top of the frame shot in deep focus, sometimes slowing to a stop as mothers and children get on and off. (The first rides we see are all for couples, each couple paired up in two seater rides.) Then we get some shots of the carousel that shows us words written on the top circle. The boxing star is named “One Round Joe” so boxing rounds are opposed to the endless rounds of the carousel, and also in a brief racist bit, to the rounds of a policeman who is not watching the crowd but instead has been diverted by the act and watches it as the crowd does. Only in the last shot of the carousel, a transitional shot from day to night, do we read the words on it in sequence, “Rapid Riding Machine of the Times.”

|[pic] |[pic] |

|[pic] |[pic] |

It’s kind of like the flashing neon “Blonde Girls Tonight” looped message outside the theater near the beginning of The Lodger which parallels the ticket tape neon news lights on a building telling us the latest news on the serial murderer dubbed “The Avenger” and the newspaper headlines sold first thing in the morning on the street announcing the latest murder.

We see the carousel again in The Ring when the Western Union messenger turns up with the message from the fiancée giving her unwished news of his success. The carousel is a riding machine as writing machine as cinema machine, the film as an amusement ride, but not so amusing in its programming of romance as a freak show. As if to underline the point, Hitchcock has a pair of Siamese twins shows up at the wedding. (Although ostensibly a romantic melodrama, The Ring is a lot like Browning’s Freaks, which contains its own revenge melodrama, and anticipates the much later noir, Nightmare Alley.)

The Ring ends with a shot of a camera filming the fight that ends the film in a kind of live action version of the initial freeze frame photo of the fight, calling up

the film canister containing a bomb in Sabotage and the weird way the title of the film canister (Bartholomew’s Murders?).about a serial killer) that Stevie carries on the bus ends up entering / not entering the diegesis as key by leading the detective back to Verloc’s theater and hence to the criminal but that the policeman hero pockets in order to cover up evidence that Verloc’s wife murdered him, as the policeman hero pocketed a woman’s glove at the scene of the crime in Hitchcock’s earlier film Blackmail to protect his unfaithful girlfriend turned murderess, a glove she had dropped earlier at a restaurant before dumping him for a date with another at a nearby table; both women are engaged in dialogue that does not transmit (did she say befor or after? The detetive asks at the end of Sabotage; the bobby whispers a joke into the ear of the heroine, who leaves the policeman with the painting of the joker.  In other words, Sabotage auditions the potential of reading the canister / contents only to have them inadvertently and unknowingly sabotaged.

[xliv] See note 52 on p. 176 for the odd publication history of the article, not listed in the TOC of the 1938 edition of Berlin Childhood. It’s in One Way Street Selected Writings, v I, as “Child on the Carousel,” 464-65. The translation is very different (not as good, in my view; in that version the last sentence reads “And his mother appears, the much-hammered stake which the landing child winds the rope of his gaze.” I’ll have to check out the German, especially since “the much-hammered stake” implies a violent relation the child has to his mother (Mom as punching bag) in a way that “the firmly fixed mooring post” does not; ditto for “gaze” versus “glances.”

[xlv] The child at play in WB can be linked to Truffaut’s The Wild Child and I, Pierre Riviere as savage peasant (who is nevertheless literate).

[xlvi] Mre BerlinCHildhood:

Mentions Robison Crusoe p. 145

Book as magic carpet, p. 147

Snowflake metaphor letters in “A Child Reading” Selected Writings, 1, 463

The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. When shall we actually write books like catalogues?

Vol 1, 457

The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.”

Vol. 1, 457

The card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation.

“Attested Auitor Books” in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, Vol 1, 456

“Hoa, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua, meaning “attach”: you attach five colors to the object.”

“A Glimpse into the Forgotten World of Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, vol 1, 435

[xlvii] may be linked to staging; staging and aging of Prospero in The Tempest? Stages—

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