Somewhere between Benjamin and Burroughs

“New forms ‘cited’ the old ones out of context” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 110

The destructive nature inherent in the birth of time; each second consumes the previous: all time is a march toward death.

“The exponents of realistic historicism […] agreed that the task of the historian was less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future” – Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse 49

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“Collecting is a form of practical memory” – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project 205

In the process of collecting--baseball cards, bottle caps, or memories--one finds an order to them that only makes sense among themselves. The links between them do not obey any particular logic—though they can—but rather is about associative links. We could think of this as conductive logic, to borrow from Ulmer, but it is something more (and less) than this.

The collection allows us to revisit the collected, to go back to reconnect with a previous logic, but also to go back to see what else needs to be included in the collection. In a water proof box, in my closet, is a collection of representative tokens. While my history may be what binds them, they also bind my history. And without them, without their place in the construction of my now, I’m not sure my tomorrow would in fact be my tomorrow, or even tomorrow at all.

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“Technology, not yet ‘emancipated,’ is held back by conventional imagination that sees the new only as a continuation of the old which has just now become obsolete” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 115-116

“‘Every epoch dreams the one that follows it’—as the dream form of the future, not its reality” – Susan Buck-Morss, Dialects of Seeing 116

“We must grant these dreams another fate and different histories depending on whether they have been published or not” Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius 27

“For a significant number of philosophers seem to have decided that history is either a third-order form of science, related to the social sciences as natural history was once related to the physical sciences, or that it is a second-order form of art, the epistemological value of which is questionable, the aesthetic worth of which is uncertain” – Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse 30

“It was fatal for the workers’ rebellions of old that no theory of revolution had directed their course, it was this absence of theory that, from another perspective, made possible their spontaneous energy and the enthusiasm with which they set about establishing a new society” – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project 25