DRAFT Below IS EXPENDABLE

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

1

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.1

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

1 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.”

2

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.”2

3

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.3  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.4

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. Entitled

“The Carousel,” the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the

mother, speeding up and slowing down.5

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

4

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.”6

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

5

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.7  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.8

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

6

home among the clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the

constructive artist” (442).9

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

9 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

2 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).

3 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

7

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.

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

4 may be linked to staging; staging and aging of Prospero in The Tempest?

Stages—

5 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

8

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

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.”

6 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).

7 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

9

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

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

8 may be linked to staging; staging and aging of Prospero in The Tempest?

Stages—

10

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

11

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.

12

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).10

Benjamin develops his discussion of children’s books and children reading not

as an explicit argument about aesthetics but by quietly and indirectly changing

10 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.

13

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.11

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.12 In “Old Forgotten Children’s

Books,” which takes its title from Karl Hobreckers’s book Old Forgotten

11 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)

14

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

15

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.

16

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

17

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.

18

The other thing the title covers up is that the documents are not in fact in WB' s

archive (the title implies a unity of place , person, and property). Some of the

documents are stamped Th. Adornno archive. We could also pit it against

Agamben's last chapter in The Time That Remains and Agamben's use of a

facsimile of a WB manuscript page to turn a text into an image, which he then

doesn't read--he turns into a detective and follows the clues to Paul.

He gets all Saint Paul code on WB. Versus the editor’s references to Wb as

detective and WB’s own comments on detective fiction and collaborating with

Brecht.

Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to

make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of

reading).

we can work Weber in, just before the toys, to use him as support (something

good

rhetorically)

In other words, you have given us not only a breakthrough connection between

infrastructures of memory and infrastrategies of reading by connecting the camp

and the storage unit as you did but some very nice cards to lay down in order

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

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

Uboat, which we can turn into a U-Turn Boat)-.  Sorry about that last one.

Addressing the S/helf

19

Have you encountered Martin Gumpert over there? He is someone whom I knew

during my internment. Since he is going to publish his autobiography, I asked

myself whether I will by any chance appear in it.2

2 In his autobiography, Hoelle im Paradies [Hell in Paradie] (Stockholm.1939), p.

54, Gumpert write the following about Benjamin while describing his friends from

the time of the youth movement” ‘One of us, the most gifted, is an émigré

philosopher in Paris and has become a Marxist.’ (276; 277; 278

Notes and dossier , p. 28

Letter July 10, 1933

One the pictures enclosed you see me–thirty five years later—in front of a palm

tree. And even if it is not a house palm, the photo on which you now see it was

taken for no less external reasons than the masquerade of the childhood picture,

for it is a passport photo that I had taken in Mallorca.

Note 3, “The passport for which the photograph was taken has not survived.

Letter 12, 21-25

“The only project worth mentioning is a detective novel, 8 which I shall only write,

however, if I can be sure that it will turn out well. “23

“8. Sketched in GS, 7 [2], pp. 846-50. It is likely that the document entitled

“Materialien zu einem Kriminalroman’ [Materials for a Detective novel] was

written around that time (see also letter no. 34, note 11),” 25.

Letter 34, 63-65

20

I have been speaking to Bertold about the theory of the detective novel, and

perhaps these reflections will be followed by an experimental project at some

point.11

p. 64

11. Brecht and Benjamin were planning to write a detective novel or a series of

them. The notes and sketches towards a series of detective novels found after

Brecht’s death and published under the title Tatsachenreihe [Series of Facts]

(see Brecht, Werke, vol. 17: Prosa 2: Romanfraggente und Romanentwuerfe

[Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1989], p. 443-45) contain two longer episodes

from a novel, for which a scheme of chapters was found written in Benjamin’s

hand (see GS 7 [2], pp. 847 ff). The scheme and the following list of motifs (see

ibid., pp. 848-50) were probably written in Paris in the autumn of 1933.

p. 65

Mentions taking mescaline p. 106 (Mexican Indians)

WB’s “bare life”:

My wish for you is that you might settle down in the not-too-distant future, without

this constant tormenting worry about your bare existence, without a few pleasant

friends nearby, who could certainly include me, and the true success and

recognition of your work.

p.42

the begins noting that WB forget to give GA his new address.

Lost letter:

21

It would be a shame—though no tragedy—if it {WB’s letter to GA] had been lost.

For it also contained a description of my first impressions after arriving”

(198)

Constant references to books—requested to be sent, acknowledgements of

books that have arrived, frustration at not being able to get the books he needs,

etc, 22, 61, 63, 66, 77, 84, 99, 107, 134, 164, 170, 213, 215

and to libraries

“the library he is said to have here makes him gain prestige quite considerably”

(24); 57

working in the Biblotechque Nationale (71)

request for a pad of “white MK paper” (he’s run of it and wants to “preserve the

external uniformity of the extensive, meticulous manuscript”” of his Passagen-

Werk / Arcades project so he asks Gretel for a pad, “only the pad, no envelopes.

I will send you a sample page with this delivery.” (71).

“Gretel Karplus’s reply of 15 January, in which she complains that Benjamin

failed to enclose the promised sample of MK paper, proves that the letter

reached her.” (72)

WB’s notes in the margins of GA’s letter:

“Cardboard boxes . . Treatment of the library . . . Cleaning the library” (57)

and to WB’s archive:

“Your archive1 has meanwhile landed in the Prinzenallee . . . .

p. 26

22

1. Benjamin’s collection of his own manuscripts, typescripts and printed

essays. p. 27

“I would long since have answered your letter, but I was hoping daily for the

sample of M-K paper, which was unfortunately not enclosed in your last letter. I

want to get to to you as quickly as possible, as this is after al the only thing I can

do at the moment to support the writing of the arcades study.” (72)

WB describes his own letter as a model

“You can feel what ‘an island’ means, and let this greeting of mine glide into your

hands like a small model of it.”

You can imagine that current events are prompting me to seek naturalization

most vigorously. As ever with such matters, one is suddenly faced with difficulties

one had not reckoned with; at the moment they consist in acquiring a vast

number of papers. All this is consuming a great deal of time. . . . even if ere

simply to contribute a further dossier to the files to the Ministry of Justice.

(212)

GA on secrecy and names:

“I, at least, love a trace of secrecy, and I find it marvelous to hide in the names

reserved almost only for us.”

p. 41

Adorno published an essay under the pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler” and Ernest

Bloch wrote telling him he hated it (without knowing that Adorno wrote it!).

p. 134 GA calls Bloch’s letter “a bare-faced letter” (134)

23

Note 3. Benjamin published an essay “under the name C. Conrad . . . The fact

that Benjamin refers to this pseudonym suggests a veiled request for Greta

Karplus to procure the manuscript of ‘Berliner Kindheit” as well as the proofs of

his own publications . . . the only authentic texts.” (53)

WB and GA regularly refer to people using one initial. “ask B” (112)

This is just after she says “we should always stick to ‘Du’ in our private letters” (p.

40). They addressed their letters to pseudonyms: “Detlef” for WB and “Felizitas”

for GA.

“I am still without a passport” (77) letter by GA

“Wahl reported that according to [Henri] Bergson, the railways are to blame for

everything.” 219

Letter from G about NYC: “let us hope that this hiding-place will remain for awhile

yet” (215)

GA as storage unit, hand holder / signature as I.D.:

And I will not have peace of mind until I know that the rest of the journals with

things of mine, which I might require at any moment during my work, are in your

hands. But this should not make you fear that you will often be pestered with

requests for deliveries. There seems to be a possibility, rather, of having an

acquaintance of mine who is coming here send me the things you listed for me

as well as the journals, which my girl will hopefully soon bring you. His proof of

identity will consist in the other half of my signature, one of which I enclose.6

p.22

24

6. Unknown. The note with one half of the signature has not survived.

p. 25 (written while WB lived in Ibiza).

GA as distributor (by hand):

Is there really no possibility of producing an extended German version of the

reproduction study? I would be very happy to copy it out, so that I could at least

make some contribution to its dissemination if it is only in the form of hand copies

passed from reader to reader” (214)

WB describes a “precious fountain pen” he is using to write his letter as “the relic

of a great romance with a chamberlain of the Pope. (63)

“my Nansen passport” (58)

“Archive” as a keyword, p. 62

“constitute his entire archive. He remains a fool.” (52)

teddy “does not know about our ‘DU.’” (62)

guardian spirit 63

“you would know it is not lost” (63)

I have tried, through a number of official papers, to keep the option of a

withdrawal to my asylum here—which is becoming increasingly difficult for

Germans to enter—open at all costs.” (52)

“I am certainly not one for exaggerated secrecy” (142) in reference to GAs

“sending joint letters” to WB

“I ask you very urgently to destroy this letter immediately, it is intended purely for

you and it would be a disaster if anyone else laid hands on it. P. 142

25

GA also worked in a bookshop and tried to sell WB’s books, but not one sold.

“Nor have I sold any of your books yet” (62)

p. 62, 64

My sister, 4 who has been released from the camp, is here-in a rather precarious

state.” (289)

4. Dora Benjamin had been a prisoner in the camp at Gurs.

p. 290

Apparently Lisa Fittkow ever knew this.

GA as trash collector / archivist of TA, living a bare life:

Your books will be sent off soon the next few days; I enclose a copy of the list.1

Please send the Kierkegaard book back soon. . . . We have to find a space for

furniture from two different cities, as well as vast numbers of books, sheet music

and gramophone records in what is ultimately a rather small apartment. And then

worst of all: Teddie’s unsorted papers, 4 boxes of rubbish.” (240)

This passage could go in chapter one, if only as a footnote.

1. It does appear to have survived. (241)

2. The Adornos had moved into the apartment at 290 Riverside Drive on 15

August. (241)

The carbon copy had slipped while Adorno was writing on the back of the paper,

so that the mirror image of the text on the back imprinted itself between some of

the lines on the front.” (234)

3. this letter has not survived.” (230)

4. 14 These have not survived. (226

26

5. “My books” as keyword (216)

. . . in a future that is hopefully not too distant, flow into the bed of our shared

presence” (154) (Strange ménage a trois metaphor)

“the duty of the book as a whole.” (15)

The dialectical image does not replicate the dream . .. . a connection still needs

to be developed, a dialectic conquered: that between the image and

awakening.” (155)

Book publication (96) and the Chamber of Literature (run by the Nazis).

“I do not have my papers yet” (97)

John B. Thompson, Printing in the Digital Age

27

Buzz Spector: Unpacking My Library (1995), MOCA Installation

One of the more interesting show publications in MOCA's history, Unpacking My

Library's catalog is a 12 foot, accordion folded book showing an installation view

of Spector's piece. This installation consists of: All the books in the artist's library,

arranged in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest on a single shelf

in a room large enough to hold them. While short on text, a brief quote from

Walter Benjamin and the artist's biography, it is still long, quite literally, on

content.

Recalled that the book Le Corbusier and the Occult and a chapter on he index

card and generally wanted to look at it because I suspected Spieker caricatures

Le C.  Yes, i was right, but, more useful for us than my being right (happy as I am

to be, or think I am) is that the author of Le Corbusier and the Occult talks about

Le C archiving himself at the end of his career (business dried up).  The

argument is that Le C was into occult symbology that became recognizable to

Masons (as Le C derived it from eighteenth ct stuff) and was then proscribed by

Vichy.  Le C rebranded his work patriotic and then got recognition by the

Gaullists after II and by the Resistance even during the Occupation.

Kind of a weird French version of National Treasure (or vice versa)--in National

Treasure, the U.S. Constitution (the actual document) has the code to the

28

treasure in the film (the code is written on the back and all the Founding Fathers

were Masons).

Jo Steffens, Ed.), Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books (2009)

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the

intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What

does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture?

Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal libraries of twelve

of the world’s leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance

of books to their careers and lives.

Photographs of bookshelves—displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic

organizational schemes, and the individual touches that make a bookshelf one’s

own—provide an evocative glimpse of their owner’s personal life. Each architect

also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to

theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature

and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of

architecture should read.

An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the

arts of reading and collecting.

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books features the libraries of:

29

Stan Allen

Henry Cobb

Liz Diller & Ric Scofidio

Peter Eisenman

Michael Graves

Steven Holl

Toshiko Mori

Michael Sorkin

Bernard Tschumi

Todd Williams & Billie Tsien

The Dis/Appearance of Reading

the Dream of Book-Keeping

Peter Eisenman’s Recommended Titles:

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

30

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

William Faulkner, Light in August

About the Author

Jo Steffens is director of Urban Center Books and editor of Block by Block: Jane

Jacobs and the Future of New York City.

Product Details

Hardcover: 192 pages

Publisher: Yale University Press (November 30, 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Unpacking-My-Library-Architects-Their/dp/0300158939/

ref=pd_sim_b_4

Close(d) Reading

We take up the question of reading as the resistance by readers to reading,

or what we called “closed(d) reading,” specifically in relation to treating questions

of cultural graphology as questions about things, things that have an order and

irreducible materiality, even if that materiality takes the form of dust. We insist

are being read even when critics, adopting an anthropological pose, think they

are merely describing and inventorying things, placing them in a sentimental

narrative that preserves their use(less) value.13 Things have to be staged, and

that means that the thing always becomes a topos with a topography in need of

13 Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” in Blindness and Insight

(1971; U Minn, 1983), 246-66.

31

being read, not used, and reading as close/d, reading as resistance to reading, to

boxing up and boxing in reading in order to dispose of it. As a useless thing, the

toy is an exemplary instance of toposography, crucial because the toy comes

with orientations and directions attached for use (and allows for the possibility of

misuse, arguably the definition of play). Here we follow Walter Benjamin’s lead

in his four essays on toys and child’s play.14

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

32

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

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

33

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”

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

34

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).

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.

35

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

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

36

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.15 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

12 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)

14 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

37

distinction between childish play and childlike play [that bears on close/ reading

—spell this out]:

For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating,

sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the

struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery

rhyme. Habit enters into life as a game, and in habit, even in its

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.

15 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

38

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

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

39

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

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

40

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).

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

41

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.16

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.

16 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

42

The toy is an exemplary instance of toposography as for close/dreading not

only because any reading worth the name is by definition compulsive, as Freud

has taught us, but because it allows to specify more clearly and exactly why

close reading fails, how close reading of things (and texts) becomes close(d)

reading.17

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-

43

Susan Buck-Morss, “Researching Walter Benjamin's Passgen Werk,” in Deep

Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, Ed. Ingrid Schaffner, Ingrid

Shaffner, Matthias Winzen (P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 1989), 222-25. 18

Buck-Morss has two photos of the Bibliotheque Nationale, one of the “work

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?)

17 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.

18 Deep Storage

BOOKS

On the art of archiving

44

room” that is also shot in the end of Renais’ Toute la memoire du monde. Her

essay is a perfect work to use to critique the thinging of the archive, the art thing

of the archive. She takes about a postcard from Hitler’s mother as a thing.

“things mater.” Storage is naively about protecting (the card could be become a

neoNazi fetish!!!” OMG!!!!) like raiders of the lost arc(hive). So we would be

Precedents for this art, as with so many others, lie stowed in a

suitcase. Marcel Duchamp casually dismissed his project of the

Boîtes-en-valise as mere financial enterprise - ‘small business, I

assure you’ 1 - an attempt to drum up a little cash. More recent

valuations acknowledge the Boîtes as the first critique of museum

practice: it ‘parodies the museum as an enclosed space for

displaying art...mocks [its] archival activity...[and] satirically

suggests that the artist is a travelling salesman whose concerns

are as promotional as they are aesthetic.’ 2 But the project seems

to have been more self-consciously motivated than either claim

recognises.

It was 1938; the war was encroaching, and Duchamp’s art had

already proved vulnerable to accident. The Large Glass was

cracked in transit between Brooklyn and Katherine Dreier’s home

in 1926, though this was not revealed until the crate was opened

several years later. What better place to preserve the past than a

museum? And so Duchamp devised one small enough to fit into a

suitcase. He consigned printers and light manufacturers

45

inverting her argument about documents / research as things rather than words,

sowing that the thinginess of texts has to be read. That matter does not matter as

such but only insofar as it is read. He also engages the kinds of paper that WB

used. Here we can stalk about the paper as itself not just a matter of material,

anymore than his microscript is indifferent versus Goethe’s flourishes in his

calligraphy. The paper already is an artistic material. WB , like an artist, is

throughout Paris to make 300 copies of miniature versions of

each of his artworks, customised a briefcase to store and display

them, hastily packed the rest of his bags and came to America. 3

The task of assembling and editioning the Valises stretched

beyond Duchamp’s death in 1964. In the end, the project was not

only autobiographical, a life-long summation, but anticipatory as

well. As an artwork designed to be unpacked, the viewing of a

Valise carries the same sense of expectation and event as the

opening of a crate.

The crate is, of course, a carapace and a coffin. In an increasingly

international art world, works are routinely sealed up into

protective bins and cartons to be jetted off to exhibitions and

salerooms all over the world. Entering the collection or returned to

the studio, they are consigned to storage in this same secreted

state, sometimes never to be opened again. Over time, the crate

supplants its contents as the object under consideration, the thing

which is monitored, moved, and maintained.

46

already making selections, decisions, exercising sovereignty over the subjectile

of his writings, using handwriting and typewriting, experimenting, playing.

Contrast her account of the archive to the book Walter B’s Archive, it’s WBian

disorganization, it’s use of facsimiles that render the text readable without turning

Accelerating this eventuality are Richard Artschwager’s recent

crate sculptures: empty wooden boxes that deviate only slightly

from true art shipping form. An unlikely corner, sly angle, or jog in

the silhouette embody the gestalt of Artschwager’s furniture-like

sculptures and, resting in their chamfered frames, his sculptural

paintings. Collectively, these funereal objects transform the

gallery into a crypt, subjecting the history of Artschwager’s

achievements to the crudest form of encapsulation. They

adjudicate the assessment of art as so much cultural furniture.

Haunting the storage spaces of galleries, museums, and auction

houses, Louise Lawler photographs the object-inmates as they

move from racks and rooms, wheel past conservation studios,

pause in corridors, wearily stand on view, step up to auction

blocks and shuffle back into the storeroom. A dormant pall hangs

over these transactions, turning the bustle of the marketplace and

the dynamism of history into equally mythic properties. To watch

the digital counters affixed to Ashley Bickerton’s sculptures, set

during the ago-go 80s, and ticking away the seconds of a

47

it into an image, as does Agamben in TheTime that Remains but turn it into a

work of art. Compare his postcards in the WB’s Archive to Hitler postcard

mentioned by Buck-Morss.

Robert Walser, The Microscripts Susan Bernofsky (Translator), Walter Benjamin (Contributor)

presumably ever-increasing worth, today seems only wistful.

The sense of loss which is intrinsic to these critiques depends on

a consensus on what’s at stake. (You cannot mourn what you

don’t care for.) To this extent, the crate becomes a figurative

presence. Magritte made light of this potential in his pastiches of

David’s Madame de Recamier and Manet’s Le Balcon, in which

the subjects of the original paintings are encrypted into craftily

customised coffins. Artschwager’s self-reflexive crates confront

the viewer with the immediate presence of totems. With their plain

pine facades, they recall something Magritte once wrote about

trees:

‘Pushed from the earth toward the sun, a tree is an image of

certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be immobile

like a tree. When we are moving, it is the tree that becomes the

spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables

and doors to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life.

48

“Benjamin gehoert zu den Papiersarbeitern. Die Arbeit am Manuskript war ihm

koeperlich elabbares Denken.

--Ermut Wizila “’Verzetttle Schreiberi’: Walter Benjamins Archiv,” in Topographie

der Erinnerug,

The German article on WB’s archive is all about how different collections were

The tree having become a coffin, disappears into the earth.

And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air.’ 4

Marcel Broodthaers brings this imagery of identification to its most

intimate disclosure, writing of a ‘deep storage’-style installation he

created for his own Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des

Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle, located in his Brussels apartment:

‘My crates are empty. We are on the brink of the abyss. Proof:

when I’m not here, there’s nobody.’ 5

Other artists seem more resigned to the ephemeral nature of

representation. Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, makes works as

temporary as camp sites. Like Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, who

systematically moved stones from pocket to pocket, Tiravanija

moved the contents of 303 gallery’s storeroom out into its

exhibition space. In the back room, he set up a small stove to

cook and serve meals to itinerant gallery-goers. During his

absence, dishes and pans indicated the artist’s imminent return.

In the meantime, the space afforded by Untitled (Free) (1992)

49

gathered together gradually from 1940 to 1985 into one collection in the

Academy of Art.19

Staging Things, Telling Toy Stories

generously envisioned a world without storage problems.

In many cases, the storage of fine art has become practically an

art in its own right: crates and conservation measures sometimes

seem more elaborate than the very works they are designed to

protect. Captivated by its symbols, labels, and materials, as well

as the mysterious forms it engenders, Martin Kippenberger has

cultivated the beauty of fine arts handling. It’s a far-ranging

aesthetic. Bins of the artist’s own canvases, shown as if jettisoned

from the warehouse, are as romantic as ruined temples. The

crates Kippenberger exhibits alongside his sculptures are so

intricately absurd that, in the manner of the best gothic art, they

defy common sense. Striped cardboard boxes, exhibited like

Donald Judd wall-sculptures, are smooth icons of minimalism.

And a series of mummified works, wrapped in Kippenberger’s own

customised packing tape, becomes archaeological treasure,

mysterious fetishes of some marginal sect.

Taking this Egyptian preoccupation one step further, Jason

50

“In the twenties he was apt to

offer philosophical reflections as

Rhoades fashioned an entire installation of his artworks and

possessions as if entombed in a suburban family garage. While

Kippenberger elevates wrappers to the status of artworks,

Rhoades intimates that it’s all - art and sepulchre alike - so much

trash. With Suitcase with Past Financial Endeavours (1993), a

shabby version of Duchamp’s Valise, Rhoades conjures up a

comic image in which the suitcase takes advantage of the first-

class luxury of the contemporary art circuit. Packed meticulously

by professional handlers, fawned over by devoted registrars,

expensively insured and gingerly installed, this slacker suitcase

filled with rolls of cellophane tape, magic markers, balled-up

aluminium foil, and vials of ‘wee-wee’ will travel from gallery, to

museum, to collection, taking an occasional time-out to relax in

climate-controlled storerooms - a Beverley Hillbilly come to high

culture.

Occasionally an artist is invited to infiltrate the sanctum

sanctorum. Museum exhibitions that feature artists as curators

seem to have made their debut in 1970 with Andy Warhol’s ‘Raid

51

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)

the Icebox’ at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

6 David Bourdon describes Warhol’s tour of the vaults:

‘Warhol wanted the entire shoe collection. Did he mean the

cabinet as well? “Oh yes, just like that.” But what about the doors?

Would he allow people to open and close them? “Spectator

participation,” Warhol murmured… One of the biggest surprises

for Warhol was finding one of his own works...sharing a rack with

two Charles Hawthorns and one Zoltan Sepeschy. “Doesn’t it

make you sad to see all these forgotten artists?” Robbins asked

Warhol. “...uh...”’ 7

A work’s fate once it leaves the studio domain can prove the

source of some anxiety. Contemplating the unknown, Franz

Erhard Walther took precautions against the possible mishandling

of his First Work Series (1963-69). This multi-faceted sculpture

consists of a suite of ‘before’ drawings, the realised fabric

sculptures, ‘after’ photographs documenting these in performative

use, and a shelving-unit for storing the entire ensemble.

52

We are not taking about (pseudo)autobiography as a personal pathology of a

particular author, then, but an effect or, more precisely, a “de/f/fect” in narrative

when using the library or other archive as a database to process scattered

materials through a filing system and then assemble them into a unified, linear

form. In her book Files: Law and Media Technology, Cornelia Visman comments

on problems German citizens faced gaining access to their the Stasi files (the

Altogether the piece serves as both museum and archive: a

pragmatic minimalist structure that attempts to control its own

physical and interpretative destinies. On a similarly hermetic note

are On Kawara’s date paintings, which come housed in their own

cardboard boxes. Inside the lid of each box is affixed a newspaper

page for the date situating the day’s work into a world of external

events.

Reifying a stored work’s existence through a paper trail of

photographs, sales records, loan forms, and letters is the archive.

The archive was Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished project: an

attempt to organise the tidal waves of an ensuing modernity into a

cohesive architecture of information and imagery. The inherent

futility of this attempt, as each fragile structure slips beneath the

crushing weight of the next oncoming wave, makes for an

appropriately unstable paradigm in an age of reproduction that is

itself giving way to the juggernaut of the information

superhighway.

53

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

For artists working from mediated imagery, as opposed to first-

hand experience, archives are invaluable studio references.

Eugene Atget, whose work was once primarily purchased by other

artists and engravers as reference tools, referred to himself not as

a photographer, but as an archivist. (Duchamp decided to give up

painting to become a freelance librarian at the Bibliothèque

Sainte-Genevieve in Paris.) Among Joseph Cornell’s papers are

neatly titled dossiers - whose subjects include ‘Claire Bloom’,

‘Clouds’, ‘Patty Duke’, and ‘Peter Engels’ - from which he culled

for his collages. Likewise, Karen Kilimnik maintains files on

everything from ‘Andy Warhol’ to ‘Waterbabies’ as possible fodder

for her scatter-style drawings and installations. 8 For both artists,

personal obsessions sustain collecting impulses that give way to

assemblage by way of the archive. For the collaborative team of

Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, whose perfume Êtes-vous servis?

(1992) reproduces the scent of the National Archives in Paris, the

repository is its own obsession.

Working an undefined interstice between archivist and artist,

54

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

collector and curator, Douglas Blau maintains a vast accumulation

of film stills, postcards, photographs and magazine clippings for

use in his picture shows: installations of cycles of uniformly

framed images lined up in neat rows on the wall. This format

results in a deceptively simple narrative. It’s easy enough to follow

the logic of this idiosyncratic flow of imagery when taken one

picture at a time, but almost impossible to reconstruct in terms of

a whole. Thrown back on the curatorial project in general, Blau’s

selections point out a fictive fallacy whereby every exhibition is an

essay reflecting arbitrary predilections and biases, what’s at hand,

and what someone remembered to dig out of storage.

Sometimes the collecting impulse overwhelms the archival

process. Instead of throwing things away, Warhol crammed his

unopened mail and other casually-acquired ephemera into

cardboard boxes, which he shipped off to storage in New Jersey.

Currently being opened and catalogued at The Andy Warhol

Museum, the Time Capsules’ contents would seem a historian’s

dream - a post-marked paper backdrop to the famous artist’s daily

55

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).20

life. Except that the staggering volume of the capsules reveals

Warhol’s revenge, drowning the speculator in details of little or no

importance.

The artist’s life is a grand archive, in which every discarded

receipt, marginal note, or studio scrap might someday be deemed

tremendously significant. Besides Warhol, consider the Robert

Mapplethorpe and Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundations,

dedicated to compounding interest in their subjects through the

availability and upkeep of archives. These archives spawn those

other great testaments of worth, catalogue raisonnés, such as the

giant tome just published in conjunction with the Bruce Nauman

exhibition. Jockeying for control of the raw material are institutions

like the Getty Museum, which offer to pay living artists large sums

of money for their dead papers. While these activities maintain

and minister to a flourishing art market, the resultant

accumulations of documents are also telling memory banks,

demonstrating the ways in which historic figures are valued.

56

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

The issue looms measurably in Meg Cranston’s Who’s Who by

Size, University of California Sample (1993). These blank stelae

portray the relative importance of a panoply of cultural figures,

from Emily Dickinson to Mohammed Ali, according to the number

of inches of shelf space they occupy within the stacks of the

library at the University of California. With individual merit

counting for little - Nikola Tesla is dwarfed by Thomas Edison,

despite his substantial contribution to engineering - it’s the adage

of the art review come true: when it comes to securing a place in

history, perhaps it’s not so much what gets written as the number

of inches racked up in print.

When Sarah Seager approached the Smithsonian Institute’s

Archives of American Art with Excuse My Dust (1992-93), she

implicitly challenged the archival system of inclusion. Her donation

of found correspondence written or received by the former

archivist of the Huntington Library, was subtitled, Why do we

circulate all these papers when everyone says it will make no

difference? It tells of ‘...the archivist’s coming to terms with his

57

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,

wife’s nearly fatal bout with pneumonia’ and in itself, serves no

more or less a purpose than documenting a fragment of a facet of

an otherwise untold story. However, housed in the Archives of

American Art under ‘The Sarah Seager Papers’, it speaks of a

historical process that only selectively chooses its evidence from

a vast arena of information, while the rest falls away into an ocean

of insignificance. 9

Anxiety and dust provoke the archiving impulse. In the museum -

the mausoleum most artists still aim to enter through their work -

the recesses of the storeroom simultaneously beckon and bar

access to history. Art that assumes the storeroom’s cladding and

demeanour of the stores displays a desire to repose within the

museum’s collection. At the same time, these works also elude

the museum’s authority by inventing alternative systems of self-

containment outside of its ordination. These systems might be

seen as individual struggles against time, or as simply

autobiographical.

58

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

The process of storing is always one of mirroring and self-

evaluation. Whether that self be a cultural body, squirrelish

individual, or Citizen Kane, ‘you are what you keep.’ When these

dual modes of internal and external assessment intersect in an art

of impenetrable closure or inexhaustible accumulation, they attain

an ongoing afterlife within deep storage.

1. Marcel Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Bride and the

Bachelors’ , New York: The Viking Press, 1965, p.60

2. Jackie McAllister and Benjamin Weil, exhibition catalogue

essay ‘The Museum under Analysis’ in The Desire of the

Museum, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989,

p.10

3. The task of assembling and editioning the Boîtes-en-valise

multiples progressed at a rate of about 30% per year and involved

a whole history of hired hands, including at one point, Joseph

Cornell.

59

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.”21 In this genetic criticism of Hoffmann’s Tales,

4. Magritte quoted in Harry Torozyner, Magritte: Ideas and

Images, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,1977, p.109

5. Marcel Broodthaers’ open letter (dated 29 September 1968)

quoted in Birgit Pelzer, ‘Recourse to the letter’, Broodthaers:

Writings, Interviews, Photographs, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed.

(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988), p. 170. The installation of an

arrangement of crates and postcards of 19th century paintings,

placed under the sign of the eagle, remained in place for exactly a

year. Broodthaers’ open letters document the opening and

activities of the museum on ‘official’ letterhead, comprising its

‘Section Littérature.’

6. The show was part of a series conceived by John and

Dominique de Menil, ‘who wanted to bring out into the open some

of the unfamiliar and often unsuspected treasures mouldering in

museum basements, inaccessible to the general public.’ c.f.

exhibition catalogue essay by David Bourdon, ‘Andy’s Dish’, Raid

the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, Providence: Museum of Modern

Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970, p.17

60

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

7. ibid. pp.17 & 24. Bourdon continues, ‘Back in his office,

Robbins informed the curator of the costume collection that

Warhol wanted to borrow the entire shoe collection. ‘Well, you

don’t want it all,’ she told Warhol in a rather disciplinarian tone,

‘because there’s some duplication.’ Warhol raised his eyebrows

and blinked.’, p.20

8. Other topics include anorexics, ballet/bows, god’s little

creatures, murders, overbites, and pajama parties. c.f. Melissa E.

Feldman, ‘Karen Kilimnik: A Material Girl,’ Karen Kilimnik: Escape

in Time, Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992, p.1.

9. In a letter dated September 14, 1992, the artist describes:

‘These letters were recently sent to my mother by a woman who

found them in the basement of a Santa Cruz home. How the

letters turned up in Santa Cruz remans a mystery, but it is in this

unusual manner that I have become the custodian of the

correspondence.’ c.f., Sarah Seager, Excuse My Dust, ed.

Cornelia Lauf, Gent: Imschoot, Uitgevers, 1994

Ingrid Schaffner

61

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:

frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at

editors@frieze.com. Freize, Issue 23, June-August 1995.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/deep_storage/

Dalton, Jennifer. Dream trash/trash dream: the artist as collector, historian, and

archivist PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 62 (Volume 21, Number 2), May

1999, pp. 63-70/

62

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.”22 What Hertz

63

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

19 Can also bring in r footnote Kirkegaard book of fascmilies of his notes. Possilby link back to Foucault on Nietzsche in Archaeology of Knowledge—not only what goes into the archive (what is regarded as significant enough to read) but also how it goes into the archive, how the archive gets reproduced in book forms. Facsimile raises word and image issue in new ways when the writing of a text is its illumination / illuminated manuscript, as it were, like historiated letters.20 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.

64

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,

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.”

21 "Demonic Berlin," in Selected Writings 2:1, 326

22 Discussion after Task of the Translator, p. 90

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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.23

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

23 Task of the Translator, 87

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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—

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a little obscure and not well formulated. But I feel it, that there is something

there. Something being said which is kind of important to me, which I think . . .

which isn’t clear” (104).

The Irony Thing

[I’m thinking one thing to sort out for us and also to motivate this turn to

unreading and even to irony is to think through how negative our critique

is, how insisting on the aporias of the archive [close to final section of the

essay] produces a stronger historicism for being a resistant strain of

historicism. The Habeas Corpus section and perhaps even a bit on the

passport would close out our intro by showing what our negative dialectics

can deliver (by not delivering)

In her book Stupidity, Avial Ronell interrupts her discussion about de Man’s

“The Concept of Irony” to tell a personal anecdote about writing her dissertation

with de Man. In this case, the anecdote itself, bracketed by marks on the page,

turns into a block, that lets us understand the resistant reading proceeds through

writing (Wunder)blocks:

But I have strayed from my intention of revealing an

autobiographical ordeal, something that would help you understand

my own avoidance of de Man, which was never absolute or even

remotely successful. I had avoided de Man even before he told me

that he thought Goethe was stupid. Actually, the scene of that

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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

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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.24

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

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things involves a question of distance.25 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.26

Ronell’s ironization of de Man’s irony, her “tell all that tells nothing” delayed,

straying autobiography that delivers diversion does not derail of history or politics

but gives a track to return to them through a (non)story of resistance and, as in

the case of Ronell, mourning for de(ad) Man (walking). Walter Benjamin and

even more radical case of an out of the way, prefatorial autothantography as

pseudo-obituary: “Posthumous Fragments by a Young Physician], which Johann

Wilhelm Ritter had published in two volumes at Heidelberg in 1810. This work

has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its preface, in which the

author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an obituary for a supposedly

deceased unknown friend—with whom he is really identical—as the most

important example of personal prose in German Romanticism.” p. 491 

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

71

25 See Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychological Problem,” sections VI and

VII on “Nearness and Distance.” SW, 1, 393-401; to 397-401

26 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

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NOTES

order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing

reserve.”

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