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

lend me an ear...

Perloff's discussion of collage has interesting resonance for my study of bodies and prosthetics. I see this in a number of places. First, Perloff quotes Boccioni from his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture; he asserts that, in a "sculptural environment,"

"the cogs of a machine might as easily appear out of the armpits of a mechanic, or the lines of a table could cut a reader's head in two, or a book with its fanned-out pages could intersect the reader's stomach (FM 62-63)." (52-53)

Perloff argues that Boccioni's manifesto is not realized in his own work. But perhaps Boccioni was just ahead of his time. The work of the artist Stelarc does precisely what Boccioni calls for, integrating the technological with the physical to create a collage that explodes from the space of the canvas, the pedestal, the separated work of art, becoming a human collage.

Stelarc's projects include attaching an additional robotic arm to his right arm, creating an exoskeleton (within which a person sits), and attaching to/growing an ear on his forearm. This art, much like early experiments in collage, is likely contestable by many, breaking quite definitively from more traditional artistic approaches (like landscape painting). It challenges the boundaries not only of art, but of the human body, calling into question the distinction between human and machine, as well as the ethics of body manipulation. A prosthetic for an amputated limb is not "art" but "medicine", recreating the whole person and restoring function after trauma; breast implants and face lifts enhance beauty, perhaps even restoring (or realizing) prior beauty. Neither of these would be considered collage by general standards, and both are completely acceptable by most of society. Stelarc's work is really and merely an integration of these two perspectives, but taken firmly outside of the medical realm, as well as the realm of that which is considered "normal" for bodies. He performs "unnecessary" operations (certainly not covered by any insurance), taking materials from "other" sources (machinery, electronics, virtual space) and splicing them with the human. His work is temporal, performance pieces that constantly invite revision and revisioning. That is, until he can fully enact his EXTRA EAR project.

Thus far, Stelarc, in collaboration with Tissue Culture & Art, has used human cells to grow a 1/4 scale model of his ear; once this ear can be grown with his own bone marrow cells, he plans to insert it beneath the skin of his forearm, creating a third ear. Stelarc communicates the complications and challenges he proposes with this project:

Tissue Culture & Art are dealing with the ethical and perceptual issues stemming from the realization that living tissue can be sustained, grown and is able to function outside of the body. The prosthesis is now a partial life form - partly constructed and partly alive.

Here the collage becomes self and not self, a potentially permanent collage of outside that is inside placed inside to be seen outside. It is a non-missing part, a non-working part (in our understanding of the job of an ear), a signifier that "refers to a presence that is consistently absent" (63), a sign, in Derrida's words, that "'can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable'" (75).

Perloff turns to Benjamin's concerns for the shift from cult value to exhibition value in art in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; he writes "Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character....at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. (Ill 232; GS 493)" (73). * Stelarc has not only broken the boundaries of art, but of composition, of flesh. If Benjamin is concerned about the loss of aura in mechanically reproduced art, what might he say about Stelarc's work? About the "aura" of flesh, of humanity?

Perloff writes:

Indeed, to collage elements from impersonal, external sources - the newspaper, magazines, television, billboards - is to understand, as it were, that, in a technological age, consciousness itself becomes a process of graft or citation, a process by means of which we make the public world our own. (77)

Does Stelarc then make our public world private? Our private public? Or does he entirely reconfigure these boundaries as well? And, as a final thought for this post: what does this have to do with archives?




*Much could be said about this statement, made around 1936, being discussed in a blog, but I'll leave that for another writer.

derridirred

Derrida writes, "[...] Helene Cixous means to leave all or part of her dream memoirs to the BNF" (25). The dream seems a good location from which to spin my reverie on Derrida's reverie on Cixous's reverie, read while I slipped in and out of reverie myself. Well, the first 'reverie' is a stretch of definition, but the spinning of phrasiology is inspired by the master himself. My reading of Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius occured after a weekend of little sleep, leaving me in a state of drifting consciousness. On one hand, this is the precise place from which to read this text, one so slippery in location, twirling around itself, refusing to be pinned down.

The dream as a representation of truth is slippery. It can be an archive of consciousness, translated into an order unbeknownst to us, like Borges' Chinese encyclopedia, with pieces of the day transposed with what was on TV while falling asleep, or the phrases of the text where I dozed, continuing the text in a dream-state (which sounds remarkably like Derrida's voice). I've switched pronouns, gone from collective to singular, self to other.

The notion of genius is equally slippery. If you know you're a genius, you can't possibly be a genius, unless you are trying to be an evil genius. I've heard a similar argument for coolness...

lost in translation

First, I have to admit that I have not read all of Derrida's Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius. Even to say that I have read most of it would be a stretch. But I have read some of it. My thoughts, however, are about the first comment noted with an asterix in the text:

"The original text of this book was the transcript of the opening talk of the symposium, 'Helene Cixous: Geneses Genealogies Genres', organised by Mireille Calle-Gruber and held in the Bibliotheque National de France (French National Library), 22-4 May 2003."

This text is a speech. My question in the presentation I am "giving" Friday in Boston is: how is orality changed when it is transcribed in a different media form. Immediately upon reading this text, I realized that Derrida is playing with words and sounds throughout this text (in French nonetheless). How does this change our reading of it?

Not only does this change from orality to text but also from French to English - which has terrible repercussions for Derrida's plays/turns on the words he chooses.

The pastness of the past, and its presence.

In Archive Fever, Derrida writes that

. . . the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (36)

Interesting, then, that it is not until page 527 that Saleem seems to bring his narrative to the present moment, making promises about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

But this passage leads me back to the last paragraphs of Midnight's Children, where Saleem asserts, "I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty . . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday[. . .]" (532).

Is Saleem's treatment of the future, whether as "prophecy" or as emblematized by the empty jar, what Derrida had in mind when he said that the question of the archive is "a question of the future"?

Silent (silencing?) Genius

I'm not exactly sure what to do with or make of this work. Derrida is both more engaging and more disengaging in this than in the previous work of his we read for the class (Archive Fever)--meaning that in this text I find myself "discovering" nuggets of information that seem like tiny lumps of gold all the while swimming in a market where coal is the predominant currency.

The text, as it unfolds itself to itself (as well as to others) seems to provide many of the answers and insights to the issues that I want to provide, that I want to "find," that I want to share...as such, its genius silences most attempts (at genius insights?) because you realize that you can never be the first to discover and share what the author has set up for you (to be the first?) to discover and share.

As such, my(unspeakable/ unutterable?) thoughts linger essentially on the following passage:
Genius that is a gift of nature is not genius. Genius that gives out of natural generosity gives nothing. A gift that knows what it is giving to someone who knows what it is he [sic] is receiving is not a gift. It repossesses itself and cancels itself out in awareness and in gratitude, in the symbolic, the contract, economic circulation, in the symbolic. Silent genius surpasses both the symbolic and the imaginary, it grapples with the impossible. (75, my emphasis).

Derrida, Jacques. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Brought to you by the letters G, L, and B.

Derrida's Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive references Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and plays a bit with its fascinating architecture. You can take a photographic tour of the library here.

I <3 Salman Rushdie

First, let me just note the joy I experienced in returning to my roots and reading some literature - a whole book, nonetheless! - for this week. Midnight's Children is a gorgeous twisting path, ever turning back on itself while pushing forward. As an example of 'writing the archive', it's also quite brilliant. One interesting aspect of this is the consideration of what counts as knowledge, history, memory - essentially, "archive." When Saleem develops the ability to hear others' thoughts, he reflects:

Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen...which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. "I can find out any damn thing!" I triumphed, "There isn't a thing I cannot know!" (199).

This is intriguing on a number of levels. Saleem becomes an archivist in this moment. He has access to, perhaps, the dream archive - one which will reveal everything one could every possibly need to know. Out of this archive, he also creates the archive (very Derridian), as he has control over what happens with this information, setting the boundaries for what follows inteh collection. As he claims the thoughts as "mine," he also reflects the potential imperiality of the archive as a collection/space which can gather others' artifacts, shape/write history, and simply own others' (mental) landscapes. He is Methwold, he is the British rewriting the land and lives of the Indians (especially relevant as this is a book in part about colonialism and independence).

Additionally, this moment is doubly self-reflexive. Saleem "entered into the illusion of the artist," becoming a composer or writer of others' lives. But he is already that, as the narrator of this story of himself - he is always already entering others' thoughts and remaking them for his purposes, or "making them happen." Mirroring that is Rushdie as author - the ultimate artist who creates all of the text, characters, thoughts, ideas. This questions the relationship between author and narrator; Rushdie comments on this in his introduction to the 25th anniversary addition of the novel. He explicitly thanks "the original people from whom my fictional characters sprang," demonstrating the connection between "real life" and fiction (xi). However, his father, the source for Ahmed Sinai, was "so angry" about the fictional portrayal he inspired that, Rushdie says, "he refused to speak to me for many months" (xii).

This conflation of artist and archivist implicitly questions, challenges, informs conceptions of the archive itself. Plus, it's just damn sexy.