• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Richard Burt and Julian Yates

Introduction

The Unread –ability of the Archive as Self-Storage:

Reading the Not Yet Read Out of the Box1

[it would be good to get “media” in the title as well, or “technology” since we also

be moving from or through readability to media recording / archiving devices]

[In the intro, we are effectively introducing the first chapter on WB as reader that then sets up your WBian reading of the missing briefcase.]2

Every book of value plays with

its readers.

--Theodor Adorno,

“Bibliogrpahical Musings,” (25)

What we’re doing is synthesizing Agambben’s state of exception as bare life, camp as nomos with Derrida’s arche-writng and Archive Fever.

1 The useful thing for us is Agaben’s critque of libral decmocarcy, of modern democaracyand its correspondence and difference fomr classical democracy.

Thescandal of Agabbembe’s account of biopolitics is that his descaralization of homo sacer extends homo sacer so far that the it can no longer be identified with victims of crimes (against humanity). The here is no difference between a bare life in a hospital room or a detention center and a bare life in a concentration camp. Chow and Butler want to keep the sacred in place in order to protect the victim, to equate or identify homo sacer with the victim. We think Agamben is right. To preserve the victim by preserving the sacred is to remain within an athroplogy that cannot recognize the more crcial ambiguity of the biopolitical and hence can only labor for ateh extension of human rights discourse that , pragmatically speaking, wil never be achieved, but, more importantly, would only reinforce,as Agamben says about the writ of habeas corpus and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the grip of the State over the biopolitical if it succeeded.

By shifting from the camp to the archive as the paradigm of modernity, we mean to extend and radicalize his insight about biopolitics by exploring what it means that in modernity homo sacer includes not only the victim but the overcomatose or neomort in the same category, the accidental injury with the deliberate injury). Our problem with Agamben’s concept of the camp is that it takes the metaphysical form of an essential structure and a theological hermemeutic that reveals the veiled, secret, hidden space of the camp. The camp in his account is a political space indifferent to its various phenomenalizations, localizations, places. Agamben is a legal historical

2 absolutist and philogist. He is not concerned with the physics, the materiality of the space. Nor is he concerned with whether the place is used to commit crimes or not. He is only concerned with the way a political space opens when the state of exception becomes the norm. By the same token, Agamben does not distinguish between instances of homo sacer and instance of virtual homo sacer:

“We are all virtually homines sacri” (114). By “virtually,” he seems to mean potentially: we are all potentially homo sacri because it is possible we, even citizens, could all be sent to Gitmo or we could all get in a car accident and become “brain dead” like Karen Quinlan.

Agamben’s theological hermeneutic of the concealed camp blinds him to the virtuality of living life “virtually” (111, 114, 171, 174) as homo sacer. What is missing in his account in Agamben’s account of bare life as a potential fate of any “human” life is the mediatization of biopolitics across the globe (not just the

West), the processing of bare life (for citizens and for foreigners) through various biometrics and invasive technologies (data mining and stored for an indeterminate period without a warrant, security cameras, and so on). To understand the virtuality of the virtual homo sacer, we deconstruct his metaphysical account of the camp as an essential hidden structure in order to overcome the political limitations of his metaphysical account of bare life. The default of bare life is not the camp as structure but the camp as a particular place of confinement and internment. Agamben is much more Foucauldian than he knows.3 The concept of a political space only has purchase when the essential, hidden structure of biopolitics / the camp is (to be) recognized as such among its

3 various metamorphoses and transformations.

By turning to the archive, we are asking what it means to live a bare life virtually, what it means for biopolitics to be mediatized. The storage unit in particular as a figure of the archive is our way of thinking through mediatization by turning first to Derrida’s notions of arche-writing and the substrate. Derrida’s distinction bears a superficial similarity to Agamben and one might mistakenly think that Derrida is indifferent to the materiality of the substrate in the same way

Agamben is indifferent to the materialization of the camp’s essence. The important differences between Agamben and Derrida are first that arche-writing is not an essence and second that the substrate of arche-writing is rather is medium specific. We then connect his medium specific account of writing (not empirical sense of materiality, but of formal materiality as in impression, a contact zone that can only be traced and retraced) to the mediatization of the archive in Archive Fever, in turn putting pressure on Derrida’s concept of the archive and media by posing the archive as an uncanny space not only of living and dead, of bios and thanatos, of bios and zoe, but of the human and inhuman, media capable of being figured, disfigured, configured as human, and in turn capable of being humans figured, disfigured, configured as a machines. The self-storage unit includes victims, as the units may be used by people who have become homeless, victims of bad loans made during the administration of

President George W. Bush, for example. But it is also a shelter, even an illegal one, for all kinds of refugees and internal exiles, the camp itself taking a wide variety of forms, as Charlie Hailey has demonstrated.4 By not taking the medium

4 specificity of the camp into account, Agamben’s call for a “new politics” (11) will be limited to a theological mission accomplished, mere pattern recognition of the latest materializations of the camp, and perhaps not even that since Agamben repeatedly says “we must learn to recognize (111, 123),” a task yet to be undertaken much less completed.

By shelf-life, we mean to explore the ways in which bare life is lived virtually as a question of reading and writing to death as a way of life, or what we call

“unread –ability.” The self-storage unit is a site specific installation, as it were, in which we figure the archive as a topos, a topos that requires a metaphorology as a way of reading resistance to reading. Media are not reducible to electronic media any more than bare life is reducible to the concentration camp. We are not narrating an historical narrative of the imposition of technology on modern man, an imposition parallel to the state of exception becoming the norm. Low-tech

“old” media such as paper are just as crucial to us as are high-tech media. Bare life is already lived virtually, through specific media. What it means to live virtually, then, requires that we engage media histories, and particularly the work of a writer also of interest to Agamben, namely, Walter Benjamin.

Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two,

Trans Shierry Weber (New York: Columbia, UP1992), 20-31.

5 Through “streamlining,” the newest books become questionable, as though they had already passed away. (21)

Publishers are irrefutable when they point out to refractory authors, who after all must live too, that their books have less chance of success the less they fit in with that development. (23)

Books that have been lifelong companions resist the order imposed by assigned places and insist on finding their own; the person who grants them disorder is not being unloving to them but rather obeying their whims. He is often punished for it, for these are the books that are most likely to run off. (24)

Certainly the collector demonstrates that books say something without being read, and sometimes is not the least important thing. (25)

These unitary and too carefully prepared blocks of books [collected editions] give the impression of having come into being all at once” (24-25)

At many points Marx’ [sic] texts read as though they had been written hastily on the margins of the texts h was studying and in his theories of surplus value this becomes almost a literary form. Clearly his highly spontaneous mode of production resisted putting ideas where they belong in neat and tidy fashion—an expression of the antisystematic tendency in an author whose system is a critique of the existing one; ultimately, Marx was thereby practicing a

6 conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such even by itself. The fact that for al the canonization of Marx there is no Marx lexicon available is fitting; the author, a number of whose statements are spouted like quotations form the Bible, defends himself against what is done to him by hiding anything that does not fall into that stock of quotations. . . . The relief the lexica afford is invaluable, but often the most important formulations fall through the cracks because they do not fit under any keyword or because the appropriate word occurs so infrequently that lexical logic would not consider it worth including: ‘”Progress” does not appear in the

Hegel lexicon. (26)

In speaking of Marx practicing “a conspiratorial technique unrecognized as such even by itself ,”Adorno sounds surprisingly close to the mystical Walter Benjamin as well as Freud on the uncanny. In adorno’s account, the process of writing and printing involving a secret that is hidden even from the author himself (already described by Adorno earlier as estranged form his text when he reads the page proofs (“the authors look at them with a stranger’s eyes”, 23) “unrecognized as such even by itself.” Yet what is hidden (“hiding anything”) from cognition by the violence of reading for the pullable quotation is not reducible either to a secular

Marxist account (book as commodity, reified means of production) nor to an actual agency (the book continues to be personified) nor to a particular theology but is detected through a series of metaphors, the last of which is “fall through the cracks” based on resemblance, a topic Adorno takes up most explicitly in the very last section of his essay, which begins “What books say from the outside, as a promise, is vague; in that lies their similarity with their contents” (29). Reading

7 the book’s resistance to reading, understanding what says withoutits being read, is a question of mimesis. Although Adorno refers throughout the essay to the book’s external and internal form, his account of the true book as the damaged book does not yield an a analysis based on resemblance: he defines damage both as external and literal (what happens to books when they are shipped around the globe, when they are read and reread over time, when they are produced more cheaply) and also as external and metaphorical (the way external coercion and pressure gets interiorized by the author the damage internal to books (“The book[‘s] . . . own form . . . is attacked within the book itself” 21.) The

(his)story of books, for Adorno, is the story of a dynamic and dialectical estrangement in which metaphors for the resistance to reading books is personified but not personalized. Adorno’s metaphors for reading a book focus on the paratext of the book—the vertical printing on the spine, the removal of the place and date pf publication of the title page, the book’s cover. This focus on the paratext transmutes the book from printed (para)text as the “most eccentric features” to the book as image, “imago” (30), “graphic image” (30) [kind of like

WB’s “prismatic edges” metaphor in Unpacking]. Reading the book’s paratext is for Adorno a matter of attending to the book’s graphic design.

The book has figured among the emblems of melancholy for centuries . . . there is something emblematic in the imago of all books, waiting for the profound gaze into their external aspect that will awaken its language, a language other than the internal, printed one. Only in the eccentric features of what is to be read does that resemblance survive, as in Proust’s stubborn and abyssal passion for writing

8 without paragraphs” [Adorno does not use paragraphs in his essay, just chunks broken up by graphic markers and space] (30):

The eye, following the path of the lines of print, looks for such resemblances everywhere. While no one of them is conclusive, every graphic element, every characteristic of binding, paper, and print—anything, in other words, in which the reader stimulates the mimetic impulses in the book itself—can become the bearer of resemblance. (30)

By reading mimetically, Adorno becomes revelatory, a way into reading the history of the book and of historicizing the book:

At the same time, such resemblances are not mere subjective projections but find their objective legitimation in the irregularities, rips, holes, and footholds that history has made in the smooth walls of the graphic design system, the book’s material components, and its peripheral features. (30)

“What is revealed in this history” (30) is a totality the implosive dialectical tensions of which may be detected in Adorno’s adoption of metaphors or literal book damage to route the book’s materiality through a formal “graphic design system” (30)

Adorno’s essay ends with a series of breakdowns in mimetic reading until reading itself becomes impossible. First, a distinction between inside and

9 outside gets collapsed as a consequence of Adorno’s having made “anything” in a book an occasion for mimetic reading:

The power history wields both over the appearance of the binding and its fate and over what has been written is much greater than any difference between what is inside and what is outside, between spirit and material, that it threatens to outstrip the work’s spirituality. This is the ultimate secret of the sadness off older books, and it follows how one should relate to them and, following their model, to books in general.

Reading a book through its graphic design is to encounter the book’s resistance to reading. Marx’s marginal notes (of Marx) are not analogous to musical notes, which may be heard by a reader:

Someone in whom the mimetic and the musical senses have become deeply enough interpenetrated will . . . be capable of judging a piece of music by the image formed by its notes, even before he completely transposed it into an auditory idea. Books resist this. But the ideal reader, whom the books do not tolerate, would know something of what is inside when he felt the cover in his hand and saw the layout of the title page and the overall quality of the pages, and would sense the book’s value without needing to read it first.” (31)

Adorno finishes his essay off by calling up an “ideal reader” rather than an existing one. In speaking of “the work’s spirituality” and “the ultimate secret,”

10 Adorno ends by (re)tuning into a theological wavelength, a call from beyond the grave of the book’s life, as it were, but there is no religious station identification.

On the one hand, a kind of Jewish mysticism may be heard in the metaphors of hiding the hidden (even the act of hiding) from the hider; on the other hand, a kind of Christian messianism may be heard as a “Passion of the Book” become work of art: “Damaged books, books that have been made to suffer, are the real books.” (24) “The bibliophile expects from books beauty without suffering . . .

Suffering is the true beauty in books; without it, beauty is corrupt, a mere performance” (29). The books’ suffering is redeemed in aesthetic terms, as the books’ true beauty. And yet Adorno’s account of suffering is clearly to messianic nor eschatological in that he is not analyzing or narrating a linear history (of more and more degradation of books due to changes in the book publishing industry) nor is singling out a book in particular. His concern with damaged books is rather with the conditions of book publication and how those conditions make books both more accessible and more resistant. Adorno speaks at the end of

“Bibliographical Musings” both of a singular type of books (older books) and of books in the plural, putting even more pressure on his personification of books by highlighting even more clearly the differences between the non “coterminus” (24) if analogous lives and deaths of books and the lives and deaths of writers and readers. Books preserve and defend their value by becoming inhuman. Reading a book whose value you cannot determine without reading it effectively reduces reading to information processing.

11 the ending fits our notion of the book as being about metaphorology since at the end books become metaphorical, stones for the building in which the collector dwells. The last lines enact a split in Benjamin implicit in his impossible narration

(writing and unpacking at the same time, becoming only more clearly impossible at the en—how could he have been unpacking as he wrote the essay?), WB splits the collector into a third person and a first person. In the last sentence, about the collector disappearing, e WB becomes a displaced person through his collecting.

Although He and yet someone else dwell in the collection WB collects. WB does not himself live in his collection, like the collector. He builds the dwelling for the collector to dwell. The shift from “I to “he” in the last sentence is really quite awkward even as the disappearing act is elegantly performed.

The disappearance of the collector is also posed in the oft-cited line about the collector being comprehended only in his extinction.

I do know that I am running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

The end of collecting is posed in terms of a metaphor of species extinction. But it’s a very dialectally tense sentence, traversed by acid irony that is really

Schleglian rather than Hegelian—comprehension (knowledge of x when x has been completed but also over, lost, hence non-knowledge). This dialectical

12 follows from the assertion that “collecting loses its meaning a it loses its personal owner.” The phrase seem to assert straightforward analogy, a corollary between collecting meaning, and personal ownership), when it really is about the self- negating temporality of collecting, its drive toward loss of meaning and depersonalization even as it becomes increasingly personal. The dialectical tension is made more explicit in the following sentence: “Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.” Private collections have no use and no use value: objects (It’s interesting how WB shifts from books in particular to objects in general] get the way they do because they are totally private, without any exchange value either (though potentially it would seem they could be sold or traded). Ownership turns into a state of being: some things can be more deeply owned than others, and the more deeply they are owned, the less value they have, the more they tend to move toward disappearance.

It’s as if the entire essay were setting up the last lines starting with “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!”

The final turn to books as stones involves a kind of escape hatch for the writer / collector—he displaces himself through metaphor and is thereby able to disappear into his books, or perhaps almost literally into the book in which his essay appears—perhaps we can now read the line differently because the essay is in a book; the essay has taken on a self-referential function being now part of a book series (complete works) on shelves in various libraries. In any case, the collector, WB, can disappear only by building and welling for another collector to

13 disappear in—so WB remains outside the life and the collector lives in books. He lives barely outside the box, the dwelling, in a position of extimacy (to him own collection). In this sense, he survives, perhaps.

This kind of exteriorization and interiorization of the collector (WB and not WB, I and he, inside dwelling and outside the dwelling) operates as a kind of spectralization or virtualization of WB

1. Welcome to your Box

Perhaps you have one. Certainly, you’ve seen them as you drive your car from place to place. We refer to self-storage units that now litter on roads, around airports, or in the peripheral transit zones that constitute the spaces between cities. Some of you may have seen them from the bus or the train, but we do not advise visiting them using these modes of transport (assuming that there’s even a stop). Access to a truck or moving van is advised and it will be the pleasure of the staff at the higher end facilities to aid you in renting the vehicle that best suits your storage needs.

These uncanny spaces, faceless, nameless, but awaiting your personal, anonymous, or at least encrypted imprint, offer their users a neurotic compromise in the form of additional room to supplement their full up, no vacancy home and office spaces. You can use them to store things you don’t need or use anymore but that you just can’t sell, throwaway, or arrange to have whisked away by those who specialize in removal. This heavily secured compromise space is located in an indeterminate or yet to be determined zone between home and office, offering

14 a halfway-house or loading zone between a home (residence) and office cubicle

(work station). That said, these uneasy supplements, which seem to offer steady state storage, send you in the direction of home-lessness since they are rentals, and their contents subject to seizure in the event that you fail to meet your monthly obligation and void the contract you have signed to secure your stuff.5

Understandably, these units come in many different styles with sizes to fit the most modest or exorbitant of storage needs—appealing to consumers with any number of slogans drawn from the established scripts. “You deserve Extra

Space,” opine the sympathetic folks at ExtraSpace.com.6 While

PublicStorage.com offers you the certainty of “Another perfect fit”—their website pictures a rolling series of images of cut outs of everyday objects silhouetted against their units, this teletopical figure enabling you already to project your stuff into their otherwise faceless units, mentally freeing up space in your overcrowded home or office. And ecstasy of ecstasies, the instant you roll down that door on the unit, turn the key in the padlock or enter your code on the key pad, that mental cut out that you pictured on their screen will dissolve into the figure of a corrugated metal door and your stuff will be out of here but securely there—a

15 post script to your busy life as the self-abbreviating folks at “PS” (the corporate logo of “PublicStorage.com,”) will simply box it all up.7

Aside from the security self-storage units offer and the democratization of warehousing space (live globally, store locally), the designers of the high end models, seem to have drunk deeply at the font of anthropologist Mary Douglas, mid-twentieth-century phenomenology, and taken as a rule of design that any indication of the presence of another, of dirt, or “matter out of place,” is simply unacceptable, unthinkable.8 This space is for you, their units say, for your stuff and for no one else’s. Indeed, the self storage unit offers itself as an overdeterminedly featureless box, an entirely forgettable container, or series of concentric boundaries (the unit, the corridor, the facility) each so secure, so anonymous, so unavailable to public access—no one will happen by your unit— so fundamentally boring, that you can forget about the permeability of boundaries, sink back in your arm or office chair, and get to work or doze off knowing that your stuff is secure.

Smaller and smaller technical devices that promise to store more and more data. Self-storage offers the same lure in brute low-tech, drive-to, box it up mode. Indeed, it is almost predictable that an online animated advertisement for a computer storage software program should take a hybrid image self-storage units, columbaria, filing boxes, and hotels as its model.

16 Take charge. Get your move on. Be proactive. “Calculate your storage savings.”

You are, like most subjects, a “capital fellow.” 9 Why not then prosecute your advantage and embark on a feel-good Foucauldian regime of self-optimizing rationality that will make possible more use values.10 You will be happy. You will have more funTM. The promise of self-storage is always a phantasmatic sort of extended shelf-life as self-archivalization: there will always be enough space to store your stuff, enough time to tidy everything up, even wrap it up. “Life” will go on—and your life in particular.

It’s easy to read this promise of calculation and optimization as a call to a

Freudian death drive impulse, offering the user little more than an overcoat of protection against an anxiety disorder which is less about keeping your things from being stolen than whether or not there will exist a search engine sufficient to finding and retrieving the nearly useless things and data you cannot delete and that never reach an expiration date. And so, your home comes to be directed by a future outside it, life redefined or made readable as what we call “shelf-life,” as the ongoing process of sorting, categorizing, making cuts, decisions, hollowed out in advance, in anticipation of a future that may or may not come but for which

17 it would be irresponsible not to prepare. So you must ask yourself: ‘Are you prepared?’

Renting a self-storage unit then, is like preparing for your death, the unit a placeholder for a vault, pyramid, crypt, or time capsule. The self-storage unit resembles other kinds of storage spaces, libraries and pawnshops, but differs from them in that, because the mail system no longer works as a relay because there is no address to deliver the mail, the renter selects the contents to be stored and exercises a kind of sovereignty over the contents, deciding what has value (sentimental, cash or both) and hence stored, and what can be thrown away, donated, or sold. The migratory aspects of self-storage add to its singularity in that decisions about its contents are not permanent. Unlike a library, the contents of which are at least imagined to endure forever, if eventually only in digital form, and to be replaced when lost, if possible, the duration of the lives of the things stored has no fixed or predetermined duration, no fixed “shelf- life.” New things may be taken out, new things may be added; a storage unit may be exhausted and closed or additional units may be rented. It all depends on how much stuff it takes to free your “life” from the stuff that threatens arrest.

That’s the theory anyway. But how exactly should we categorize the appearance of these uncanny boxes, which have sprung up like so many de- accessorized motels waiting neither for persons nor their pets but for their stuff?

How should we understand or better yet model the “event” that “self-storage” constitutes within the infrastructure of home, work, and play, or the doling out of somatic and psychic “events” such as birth, aging, dying, death? In a world in

18 which the citizen-people-consumers of the West are induced to accrete more and more stuff, the appearance of self-storage units in the post-World War Two landscape may be judged an inevitable result of the confusion or cross-cutting of boundaries that results from late Capitalist or always Capitalist stop and flow mechanisms.11 Surely then these units merely represent a bit of extra space, a bit of respite for those of us who are doing our level best to get “well” in the world

(input equals output) and so “reduce, re-use, recycle,” but who nevertheless remain on the grid. Surely, self-storage manifests merely as a hub on the way to the landfill, enabling you to place your various “things” in purgatory; some of them will be redeemed, some damned. It all depends on whose prayers get sung longest or loudest in your inner chantry or the chantry that is your family unit.

For us “self-storage” resonates then with any number of critical projects to inventory or analyze the adumbrated spaces and temporalities that make up our built worlds—most obviously with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but also with the cultural geography of David Harvey, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Nicholas

Entriken, and company, as well as the traveling theory of James Clifford, the monographs or singularity writings of Pierre Augé, and the exhaustive project to inventory France’s poetically named lieux de mémoire (places of memory) directed by Pierre Nora.12 That said, even as “self-storage” seems entirely congruent with theories of post-, super- or hyper-modernity, and so immediately readable, immediately available, at a reduced rate, if you like, and with negligible move in costs, for us to store or marshal our cultural studies “stuff,” we seek to maintain a critical uncertainty with regard to what exactly the “self-storage” event

19 might be said to mean, might come to mean, or represent. Rather than taking the appearance of such units as a “matter of fact,” as one more thing to be noted and archived, we treat “self storage” as what Donna Haraway calls a “matter of concern,” a phenomenon that may (or may not) have the power to change the relationships between actors (persons, animals, tools, things) constituted in and by the various networks that constitute our common world.13

We begin, then, by reserving judgment in order to stay with “self-storage” and inhabit the phenomenon. We do so because beyond questions of physical storage and the sociology or demographics of place, these units make available a language of shelving or re-shelving, of storage and retrieval, whose tropic or tropologogical operations—as the folks at “PS” or PublicStorage.com make clear

—play with the linearity and so temporality of things as they are successively used, stored, in motion, left to rest. Our purpose is to historicize work the recent sovereignty of the archive as a dominant figure in the humanities and social sciences in relation to self-storage units which constitute a vernacular or popular self-archiving, premised as they are on the prospect, at least, of future retrieval.

We make no claim about the newness or radicality of “self-storage” but begin instead by remarking the fact that it’s being constitutes the arrival of an as yet unrecognized “material-semiotic” and “rhetorical” actor, which may, by turns, induce yawns, horror, surprise, outrage, humor, and hope. Here, again, we take our cue from Haraway whose interest in the tropic dimensions or linguistic materiality of language systems is a crucial factor in her coining of the “cyborg,”

“companion species,” and “multispecies,” as she bids to rewire the archives of

20 our present to produce modes of description less troubled by the ontological slide between animal, human, and machine than the usual scripts on offer.14

[ introduce unread –ability here—that our delay is not a matter only of our will but of an interpretive problem involving the archive that the self- storage unit makes visible.15 Develop the conept of linearization as a certain of historicism, construction of a timeline, a connect the dots, understand cause and effect—it’s also a juridical notion and detective fiction notion of reading (Ginzburg on Holmes,Moretti, and Freud). But we are pausing over the reistance to linearization the self-storage unit generates—not a symptomatic rading—just a gap , spaces between the dots not filed in. But unreading is alsoa problem of narrative and historicism, narratives that do not take linear form but are produced thorugh a linearization that is itself a kind of resistance]

The affective hit provided by “self-storage” in these kinds of stories derives not simply from their soon-to-be-dated but not yet worn off novelty, their “schein”, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, but from the way they introduce impermeable, unreadable holes into otherwise linear plots, gaps in the code that serve as receptacles for the variously abject or unwanted remains of linearized

“life”—dead bodies, dead stuff—that goes but which does not necessarily stay away. For what concerns us in this book is reading, the fate of reading, and of reading especially as a response to the resistance of texts and things to meaning production. We are eager to discover what kinds of resistance to the established scripts that “self-storage” may offer, for reading or being read, having one’s

21 biometrics auto-read off a chip in your passport (as we saw in our Preface), is increasingly the experience of citizen-subjects in the West.

that the appearance of “self-storage” constitutes an event with the possibility of altering or introducing variables into the programs of what, a while ago now, in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida called “the history of writing

[that] is erected on the base of the history of the grammè” that takes the form of

“an adventure of relationships between the face and the hand.”16 It may be useful, at this point, to re-shelve our Derrida, recalling that his staging of “the history of life—of what,” he writes, “I have called differrance—as the history of the grammè” aims to make visible modes of cognition, historical consciousness, and forms of personhood that do not respect the ratio of the line or the linearization of the world that occurs in a phonetic writing system. The story, as you remember or summon it up from cold storage, begins with the observation lethal to any metaphysics of presence that, “life” begins with the writing event of “‘genetic inscription’ and ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens” (84). The project of metaphysics has been to construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and being written by boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable origin—call it

Nature—forgetting, if you like, or holding at bay the insight that there exists a history of technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously, necessarily a history of human life.

22 Against this installed forgetting, Derrida offers what he calls “graphology” or “cultural graphology” as an alternate historical practice that aims to think the

“pluri-dimensionality” of other “level[s] of historical experience” precisely by thinking the “problems of the articulation of graphic forms and of diverse substances, of the diverse forms of graphic substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or instruments (point, brush, etc, etc)” (87)—to which we add boxes or the project of self-storage. Here it is important to recall that a potentiality exists for Derrida within the figures of storage and retrieval, for, as he writes, “one could speak of a ‘liberation of memory,’ of an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programs of so-called ‘instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges differance and the possibility of putting in reserve” (84).17 Notably, this activity also “at one and in the same movement constitutes and effaces so-called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its theological attributes.” When we describe “self-storage” as an

“event” or “phenomenon,” then, we ask you to hear these terms accordingly, granting that there remains the project makes possible or thinkable an altered set of relations to the writing machine or auto-archiving of phenomena that characterizes our collective present.18

Staged within the larger project of a “cultural graphology,” “self-storage” augurs in more ways than as a bit of extra space—making visible the process of arrangement and ordering, and of a retrieval that “permits,” as Derrida observes,

“a different organization of space” (86) than that which is premised on linearity.

23 What interests us in “self-storage,” then, is the way this archiving that does not yet know that it produces an archive can produce patterns or rhythms within or between the lines of conventional reading and writing, and so make visible to its readers orders of sense other than those authorized by the usual scripts. To the extent that these patterns produce meanings without reference to a human subject or that they are remarked by a person only after the fact, they constitute a set of phenomena we call “shelf life” and on occasion offer their human beneficiaries a form of what we will come to call “s/h/elf-help.”

So, in place of announcing the “new” or the advent of this or that, we content ourselves with describing the contours of the project of self-storage— starting each time from scratch, as each unit teaches us, all over again, how to read it. When, for example, journalistic features, T.V. police procedurals, film documentaries and features have deployed “self storage,” offering its uncanny

(literally Heimlich / Unheimlich) presence as a staging ground for stories of human interest (what to do with grandma’s stuff?), horror shows of serial murder

(Prime Suspect), time-travel mischief (Primer), action movies (Max Payne) or pop phenomenological documentaries (Steel Homes), their assimilation of self storage units to the attic, wardrobe, or dark alley of children’s literature, boy’s own fiction, or film noir, constitutes for us a double gesture.19 On the one hand, these performances of “self-storage” subordinate the units to existing species of space, domesticating them, trading on the newness generated by their shock value in order to recycle stories as old as sin. It is tempting then simply to suggest that such representations of “self-storage” constitute the semiotic fine

24 edge of the way the existing modes of production at a given historical moment scramble or interrupt a technological innovation or “event” by rerouting it to ensure that nothing “new” or unscripted occurs by installing existing social hierarchies, scripts, and labor relations.20 On the other, the cultural texts generated by “self-storage” constitute also a set of meaningful symptomatic responses that disclose the imaginative or phantasmatic lure of the box as an object which is never content with being merely a container, and so which interferes with the linearity of time, meaning, and so also with the linearization of beings that passes as human “life.”

2. From Bare Life to Shelf-Life

As our deployment of various narratives and vocabularies thus far signals, the emergence and proliferation of self-storage units in the later twentieth century and their recent representation in documentary and mainstreams films generate the central concerns and questions of the present book. More precisely, we are concerned with what the event that is “self-storage” may have to teach us about the problem identified by Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, namely, that when “the state of exception” and “state of emergency” that allows for the suspension of law in liberal democracies paradoxically becomes the norm such that all life is thereby politicized.21

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben responds to Schmitt’s challenge, taking the Nazi concentration camps to be an aberrant but hidden figure of modernity. Sovereignty in the modern state is

25 defined not by its care-taking role over the lives of its populace, when politics becomes bio-politics, but by the constant need to define what counts as life worthy of being cared for and what does not, to decide, that is, what is the norm, sacred life, and what is the exception, homo sacer (“bare life”) being life that may not be sacrificed by the sovereign or murdered but may nevertheless be left to die or determined to be dead. Furthermore, bare life does not mark a limit of the sovereign’s power but actually expresses the totality of even sacred life’s subjection to a power over death and life. Agamben arrives at a deeply troubling conclusion, namely, that the transformation of classic politics into bio-politics (or the revelation that politics was always a bio-politics) means that “traditional distinctions (such as between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction” (122). He adds that the modern “democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poorer classes . . . transforms the entire Third World population into bare life” in a way that is “different yet still analogous” to the Nazis’ program of infinitely purifying the German body “through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases” (1980).22 Moreover, as Agamben points out, biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, as death, along with life, are politicized: the sovereign decides not only who lives and who dies but what counts as homo sacer, the bare life that does not deserve to live yet that may not be sacrificed or executed.

As a resistance to encroachments of biopower, a universal human rights discourse remains of value, but its adequacy as a response to the challenge of

26 bio/thanato/politics is always severely compromised both because the rule of law in parliamentary democracies already depends on a supplement of (hidden and forgotten revolutionary) violence from the start and because a Rights discourse takes for granted the definition of the human.23 Bio/thanatopolitics puts the ontology of the human into question, replacing the citizen with a subject. The same problem occurs when extending a human rights discourse to include animal rights since homo sacer is defined not only in relation to sacred life (bios) but to animal life (zoë).24 The promise of “more life,” even after death in the form of cyrogenics, is similarly limited.25 Homo sacer represents an indeterminate zone in which the borders between life and bare life, the human and the animal, the human and the inhuman have to be continually drawn and redrawn.

We take World War II as our point of departure not only because of the central role the concentration camp plays in Agamben’s work but, more crucially, because what now remains of the camps, razed by the Nazis when they abandoned them in 1945, has since become above all a question of the camps’ archivalization, preservation of documents, reconstruction or ruination of the remnants, and exhibition.26 Is self-storage, we ask, a supplementary technique or prosthetic for the experience of bare life, for the modeling of all spaces, finally, as potential camps, or camps in abeyance? While it may appear jarring, upsetting, or worse still to ask readers to entertain a comparison between two such apparently different objects, the self-storage unit and the concentration camp, we do so, because we wish to understand better the relationship between “bare life” and archivalization and render visible the ways in which questions of “life” and

27 “sovereignty” play out or are determined by the protocols of archiving. As the subtitle to this section signals, we seek to know the relation between “bare life” and “shelf life” through the archive, to understand the relation between the articulation of human persons as citizen-subjects, the auto-archiving of their lives by the state, and the advent of self-storage as a supplement to this articulation, as a writing while being written, or a “putting into reserve,” to borrow Derrida’s phrasing from Of Grammatology.

Here it is crucial to understand that, for Agamben, what characterizes the camp, what constitutes its modus operandi is not any ideology or technics of rationalization, but the production of a zone in which, as Hannah Arendt put it,

“’everything is possible” (HS 170). In an extended discussion of “the paradoxical status of the camp,” Agamben writes:

What is included in the camp according to the etymological sense of the

term “exception” (ex-capere), taken outside, included through its own

exclusion. But what is first of all taken into the juridical order is the state of

exception itself. Insofar as the state of exception is ‘willed,’ it inaugurates a

new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes

indistinguishable from the exception. The camp is thus the structure in

which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds

sovereign power—is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits

himself, as he did in the spirit of the Weimar constitution, to deciding on

the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger

28 to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that

characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a

consequence of his decision on the exception. This is why in the camp the

quaestio iuris is, if we look carefully, no longer strictly distinguishable from

the quaestio facti, and in this sense every question concerning the legality

or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. The camp is

a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become

indistinguishable (HS 170).

This confusion of fact and law is the mechanism that makes possible the demonic fairy tale space that was and is the camp—a space in which quite literally, as Arendt makes clear, “everything had truly become possible” (HS 171).

In this sense, as Agamben notes, the camp “was also the most absolute bio- political space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.” “This is why,” he adds, “the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes bio-politics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen.”

Elsewhere, Agamben has, on occasion, been given to making explicit his own structuralist leanings, by drawing analogies between the systems of thought and legality which make possible the production of such spaces as the camp, and so we think it useful here to make clear that his modeling of the camp as an imminently achievable site takes as a given what Jack Derrida named “arche- writing” or the general or generative text. 27 We do so because we wish to make clear that such events as the “camp” draw their power from the fact that what

29 becomes possible within their confines is a set of translations otherwise and elsewhere deemed impossible or unthinkable. By a series of protocols, the camp subjects those deemed “bare life” or merely living to transformations governed by no rule or law than that of total possibility. In terms we have already used, the camp operates as a zone in which your “present” is actualized by the futural desires and whims of those persons who are constituted as bearers of state violence. If the world is constituted by a series of routinized tropic operations that are housed in a variety of institutions or sites (family, home, school, police, etc,) with rules governing their application, access, and occasion, the camp phenomenalizes the figure of an included exception, making physical the included but entailed away zone of total tropic, which is to say material, physical, semiotic, and rhetorical conversions that the state reserves to itself but does not ordinarily deploy.28

For Agamben, this way of modeling the camp provides an important rubric for future work on the holocaust. As he writes, “The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171).

Yet to Be Read: Exhuming the Camp as the Arche-Archive to Come

30 We must continually remind ourselves

that some part of responsibility

insinuates itself wherever one demands

responsibility without sufficiently

conceptualizing and thematizing what

“responsibility” means.

--Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death 25-

26.

Deader than Dead: Coming After the Archive

In framing the concept of bare life through a cultural graphology of the storage unit and archive, we have indirectly called into question Agamben’s claim that the concentration camp is the figure for the universalization of homo sacralization

—“we are all homo sacrii”—as the central figure for modernity. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacrii. --Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (115) What is stake in our shift from camp to storage unit and archivalization?29 And what would it mean to figure the camp as a box containing buried boxes materials, making sense of it in terms of reading reshelving (as resistance to reading) rather than refilling and reclassifying?

We grant that the archive exerts a referential pull, that the self-storage unit is an empirical thing, that re-shelving involves physical books and other storage

31 media (film reels, DVDs, videocassettes) on physical bookshelves, or packed in boxes. But the archive is also a topos, a space of mediation, a virtual and metaphorical theater in which things have to be staged, taken off a shelf, as it were, in order to be read rather than an origanized space where things are placed ina classificatory order to be retrieved when called up. It is this mobility or the kinematics of the shelf that we wish to valorize, finding in the movement of items in inventories, archives, in and out of files and boxes, briefcases, attachments, a constant exposure to or experience of the extrinsic or the inhuman, that makes it possible to register the pluri-“dimensionality” of being. For us then, the archive serves as topos and theme. Shelving, the production of

“shelf-life,” discloses the presence of poeisis, of reading and performance, as the wild cards or jokers in the deck, some thing that pro-jects (throws forward not quite knowing the destination or result),30 not finally reducible, though it may be black boxed in such terms, to a signature of an artist or the mark of an artisan, but which precisely exceeds human figurations of making. We hope to show that self-storage and s(h)elf-help involve interpretive operation on texts, even if shelf- life cannot be assimilated to existing models of neurosis and psychosis (and repetition compulsion, reanimation, the crypt, the death drive, prosthetic extension, etc) and media (virtual versus material).31 Self-storage units, especially those with temperature settings, are like archives in that the contents may not only include things but also recordings that themselves constitute practices of virtual self-archivalization: videos or digital discs of family celebrations or trips that pile up and yet may rarely if ever be watched

32 afterwards. Take the self-storage unit as the model archive from which to marshal another or occluded history of shelf-life and what stories will we discover?32

A series of broad questions follows: What is the relation between bio-politics and the kinds of archivalization we call shelf-life? How might shelf-life provide us with s(h)elf-help to manage the continued crisis of liberal democracy, help us to think bare life not as the virtual universalization of the victim, of homo sacer into homines sacri, but in broader and more nuanced terms as bare lives that include the refugee, the alien, the resident alien? What does it means to live bare life and what kinds of bare lives are worth living? To what extent can shelf-life help us to think about what forms resistance might take to the homo sacralization of populations, the transformations of citizens into bodies? What are the consequences of archivalization of one’s things and even one’s recordings of them (photographs, home videos) for thinking about reading not only texts and films but things as themselves media and mediated, for thinking about data retrieval, memory, forgetting, and value?

The Resistance to Reading the Archive

To address these questions, we need first to step back and reframe

Agamben’s universalization of the camp (which leads him to make a controversial equation between the victims of the holocaust and people killed in car accidents) as a question of its “unread -ability.” Following Jacques Derrida in

Archive Fever, we regard the archive as both a literal and metaphorical contact

33 zone.33 Agamben views the archive as exterior to testimony, as a conceptual, discursive space housing documents. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive” (158). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s

Archaeology of Knowledge, Agamben regards the archive as a recording device for the unrecordable, defining the archive is "the system of relations between the said and the unsaid" (145) located in opposition to langue as parole is opposed to parole (144): between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, the archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything that is always forgotten in the act of saying" (140). 34

Agamben’s neoFoucauldian conception of the archive misses, however, the way in which the camp is also a future archive / museum to be read but how the musealization and archivalization of the camp also involves an archivology of storage and shelving. Rather than being exterior, the archive produces an exteriority within in which that which is to be read is continually subject to redivisions between life and barelife, between bare and barer life. 35

The problem of the archive’s internal yet unarchivable exteriority is not that certain documents become unreadable because invisible (having beenlost, stolen, defaced, faded, etc) but that they are endlessly divisible, subject to becoming the ash of the archive.

34 The Time That Does Not Remain: Ex-Hum(aniz)ation: The Camp in the

Camp / the Camp Without the Camp as Notes Surfaced from

Underground of the Yet to Be Exhumed

If it is true that for a certain Freud, “our

unconscious cannot conceive of our

mortality” (is unable to represent

mortality to itself), then it would seem to

follow that dying is unrepresentable, not

only because it has no present, but also

because it has no place, not even in

time, the temporality of time. . . Nothing

can be done with death that has always

taken place already: it is the task of

idleness, a nonrelation with a past (or

future) utterly bereft of present. Thus the

disaster would be beyond what we

understand by death or abyss, or in any

case by my death, since there is no

more place for “me”: in the disaster I

disappear without dying (or die without

disappearing).

--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the

Disaster, 118-19.

35 [Contrast Agamben’s notion of time and remains to Blanchot’s / Derrida’s and contrast Agamben’s metaphysical remnants to the scrolls, not as materiality but as substrata (impression, contact zone) in boxes (use Derrida’s “Cartouhes” chapter from The Truth in Painitng. Add in a note the Sven Spieker misses

Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Duchamps’ valise by focusing on the archive as filing system. I think we can get a fuller sense too of what is being linearized, of resistance as linearization of the unread—yet to be read]

Unread –ability as the not yet read. We reconceputalize the camp as an arche-archive to come, as that which is written to be found, read, and archived at an unspecified later time, by attending to the concrete storage boxes and notes left by victims buried in the camps themselves, some of which have been recovered and now known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz.36 Our reconceptualization of the camp as an archive containing an arche-archive in boxes of writings the exhumation and reading of that which is “to come,” will mean extending the concept of the bio/thanatopiolitics of bare life to include a concept bare death.

Blanchot and Derrida on the irreducible impersonality of one’s own death, on the unrepresentabilty of it and the camps in The Writing of the Disaster and

Aporias.37 It will also mean theorizing what we are calling the “unread –ability” of the archive through a deconstruction of linear historicism, of histories and anthropologies of the culture of death and an interrogation of what Derrida calls the “politics of death.” In our view, the archive is not about classifying the world of things but about reshevling and (not) reading what has not yet been classified

36 or will be / may be reclassified and refiled.38 For us the archive as self-storage unit produces an unarchivable archive of the stored (a non-organization, non- classification of shelved materials roughly comparable to Derrida’s anarchic death drive that can’t be heard or seen, hence cannot be archived) that more or less temporarily stores what it archives but is also a relay station linked through an impossible topography inside and outside of institutional organizations such as the library and the museum (and electronically too).39 In theorizing the camp as an arche-archive to come with an impossible topography of the always already internal exteriorized archive, we will also elaborate our concept of

“unread –ability” in relation (un)repeatability and (ir)replaceabilty by first putting an assumed theological and mediatic distinction between scrolls and shrouds into question and then by turning to Derrida’s account of death in Aporias and his readings, in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, of two lost manuscripts mentioned in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, in which he writes the endnote on

Walter Benjamin’s briefcase we discussed in the earlier chapter, and Derrida’s reliance on the metaphor of cinema. In our account of the Scrolls, the camp arche-archivalization literally has no center, as an reconstruction a necessarily uncanny temporality of reassemblage, an after word not only of records produced and destroyed as much as not only of records produced and destroyed as much as was possible by the Nazis, but more crucially, by the victims themselves.

[bring in Derrida’s substrate as contact zone here—and media as graphosphere

(echograhies of Televsion]

37 We juxtapose the Scrolls and Demeures in order explore the meditization of the archive, to understand better what the unread –ability of the arche-archiving of the camps has to do with the importance scholars universally grant to film and filmmaking, the frequent use of film and photography as metaphors, as film and filmmaking have become the central media in debates of archival reconstruction and reuse.

Writing Near Death: The Shrouded Scrolls of Aushwitz

We want to read supplementary notes that have been written by victims

“near” death to a future reader and left for that reader near the remains of the

recently dead and the full written records recorded by the victims. Here four

notes, all cited by Didi-Hubermann:

I have buried, in the terrain of the Birkenau camp near the

crematoria, a camera, the remains of the gas in a metal box, and

notes in Yiddish on the number of people who had arrived in

convoys and were sent to be gassed. I remember the exact

location of these objects and I can them at any moment. (110)

A message to the world must be addressed to the world from here.

Whether it be found soon or in several years, it will always be a

38 terrible accusation. His message will be signed by two hundred men of the Sonderkommando of Crematorium I, fully conscious of their imminent death [ . . ] The message has been carefully prepared. It describes in great detail the horror that have been committed here these last two years. The names of the executioners of the camps appear. We publish the approximate number of people exterminated, describing the manner methods, and the instruments used in their extermination. The message has been written on three large parchment pages. The writer-editor of the Sonderkomommnado—a former artist form Paris—has copied it in a beautiful calligraphy according to the style of the old parchments, in India ink so that the writing does not fade. The fourth page contains the signatures of the two hundred men of the

Sonderkomnado. The parchment pages have been attached with a silk thread, rolled, enclosed in a cylindrical zinc box, specially made by one of our smiths, and finally sealed and welded to be protected from the air and humidity. This box has been left by the carpenters between the springs if the ottoman in the padding. 40

The notebook and other texts remained in the pits soaked with blood as well as the bones and flesh often not fully burned. These we could recognize from the smell. Dear finder, look everywhere in every parcel of earth. Underneath are buried dozens of documents, mine and those of other people, which cast light on

39 what happened here. Numerous teeth have been buried, it was

we, the workers of the Kommando, who deliberately dispersed

them around the terrain as much as we could so that the world

might find tangible evidence of the millions of murdered human

beings. As for us, we have lost all hope of surviving until the

Liberation. (D-H, 108)

We must, as we have until to know . . . make all known to the world

by means of a historical chronicle. From now on, we will hide

everything in the ground. I ask that all these various description and

notes, buried and in their time signed Y.A.R.A., be collected. They

are found in different containers and boxes, in the yard of the

crematorium I: one, entitled Deportation, is founding the bone pits

of crematorium I; the other entitled Aushchwitz, is found under a

pile of bones, southwest of the same yard. After that, I rewrote it

completed it, and reinterred it separately among the ashes of the

crematorium II. I wish them to be put in order and printed together

under the title In the Horror of the Atrocities. We, the 170 men

remaining, are about to leave for the sauna. We are sure that we

are being brought to our deaths. They have chosen thirty men to

remain at crematorium IV. (DH, 109)

Reading these notes backwards as an arche-archive that has gone unread because prematurely unified and even sanctified as a set of single documents, means attending to a strange supplementary logic in the recording of the deaths

40 of the victims that uncannily unsettles a distinction between the living and the dead: writing themselves into death (by murder, not suicide), the authors substitute the note for themselves and the records the notes identify stand in the for lives of the victims, but their relative importance gets entangled rather than neatly boxed up: unlike Walter Benjamin’s distinction between his manuscript and his life, the records are deliberately scattered, left to be exhumed later, collected, reordered, titled and published. Some records are sealed to be preserved, others are soaked in blood. Some are rewritten and reinterred. The records, one might say are to be resurrected but the body parts are presumed to be unidentifiable and not in need of care (paper becomes a contact sheet for human remains). Like Freud’s account of the uncanny as the mixing of the organic and inorganic, the living and the dead, “sowing” the body parts and boxes in the mass graves is connected to the sewing of the parchment. Mixed signals mean missed signals, the repetition compulsion uncannily existing on a continuum with witnessing.

What happens in the camp, then, is not only that people are made to survive beyond death which is not death, as do the Musselmanner in Agamben’s account in Remnants of Auschwitz, but that those neither people who survive nor those who die are not able to determine when the dead are dead, or distinguish less the dead from the living (about to be) dead but singling the dead from the deader than dead. The death of the victim is not reducible to time noted on a coroner’s report. As the Scrolls of Auschwitz already make apparent as a testimony of testimony, as a record of witnessing a record located elsewhere.

41 In elucidating the aporias what he calls the “testimonial condition”

(Demeures, 41), Derrida notes that testimony in a legal sense has to be live: “For to testify . . . the witness must be present at the stand himself, without technical interposition. In the law, the testimonial tends, without being able to succeed in this altogether, to exclude all technical agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in one’s place. One must be present, raise one’s hand, speak in the first person and in the present, and one must do this to testify to a present, to an indivisible moment, that is at a certain point to moment assembled at the tip of an instanteousness which must resist division.” (32-33). Testimony excludes technical agency in order to testify to a temporality of the present to a indivisible instant. Derrida goes on to explain why this legal view of testimonial is unable able “to succeed in this altogether.” Testimony requires the possibility of was possible by the Nazis, but more crucially, by the victims themselves.

[trans will be needed]

hence of grammatology: even if an illiterate witness must nevertheless be

“capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating, remembering, performing the acts of synthesis that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power, at the very least, some possibility of tracing or imprinting in a given element . . . What I say for the first time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one instant; and that being the case the instant is always divide at this very point, at

42 the point of its writing. (40;41). Consequently, testimony admits techne even before the invention of particular recording media:

The root of the testimonial problem of techne is to be found here.

The technical reproducibility is excluded form testimony, which

always calls for a presence of the live voice in the first person. But

from the moment that testimony must be able to be repeated,

techne is admitted; it is introduced where it is excluded. For this,

one not need wait for cameras, videos, typewriters, and computers.

As soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the

instant it is pronounceable and intelligible, thus idealizable, it is

already instrumentalizable and affected by technology. And

virtuality. (42)

The temporality of testimony is thus similar to what Derrida calls, in Archive

Fever, “the moment of archivization strictly speaking” this moment “is not . . . [a] so-called live or spontaneous memory but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate” (25). Yet Derrida’s critique of archeological hallucination of he moment of contact provides with another kind of temporality, that which cannot be repeated. The “matter” of the substrate’s techne is a surface, a contact sheet, like Gradiva’s footprint in the ash of

Vesuvius, the moment of its impression never capable of being retraced, only hallucinated by the archivist turned archeologist.41

We juxtapose the Scrolls and Demeures in order explore the mediation of the archive, to understand better what the unread –ability of the arche-archiving of

43 the camps has to do with the importance scholars universally grant to film and filmmaking, the frequent use of film and photography as metaphors, as film and filmmaking have become the central media in debates of archival reconstruction and reuse.

The Camp within / without the Camp: An Arch-anarchivology to Come

Before we turn to the Scrolls, we need to first explain further what we mean by calling them an arche-archive. Critical attention to concrete specific fragments of the Scrolls, notes written by victims with instructions regarding the contents of these containers, will throw into relief the extent to which reading the camp as an archive means that what is read has been posted in a relay system, deferred.

Immediately conflating these documents with documents of political resistance by the victims, as when was the case of the uprising that destroyed crematorium IV, offers for us an intense moment of reading as the resistance to reading, an evasion of problems posed by the archaeology and archiving of a past that is arche-archival and yet to come. The camp is exemplary of the bioplitics of modernity as an archival self-storage mechanism because it is defined by the unread –ability of documents—papers, films, photographs, things--written stored and as yet to be read, not, as the is defined for Agamben, by the witness who speaks paradoxically only of not being able to speak and is exterior to the archive. Our conception of the “arche-archive to come” is indebted to Jacques

Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression and Aporias, the latter concerned with Nazism turning to the Marrano, a legally dead figure as of 1995,

44 to figure the problem of owning one’s own death in the wake of Nazism.

Whereas Agamben defines the archive in Remnants of Auschwitz as a secured place that opposes memory to forgetting, Derrida ends Archive Fever by redividing the archive without spatializing it as a safeguarded inside and an unsafe outside: what he calls the “ash of the archive” is a remainder within the archive that is not archivable, but what has been burned. What Derrida calls the

“anarchivology” of archive fever is driven in part by the necessity of burning and containing the unarchivable ash. We maintain that archive fever is generated by this constitutive split that enables and disables the archive, adding that the remaining ash remains always waiting to be stored in an urn already under construction. The arche-archive sheds light on the sacrificial economy required for the camp’s archivalization to work: what is destroyed has to be boxed and locked in the box of the archive. Reconstructing the camp as a storage archive in general necessarily means that a camp will have to be created within the camp in order to establish a serviceable library and set of research and exhibition practices differentiated as normal and pathological.

Yet the setting of norms requires endless selection of what needs to be tr/ashed. Agamben attempts to make an end run around the archive by defining remnants not in terms of media or records but negatively: “the remnants of

Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.” (164). Even these negative remnants have to be archived, however, in order to become readable: they have to filed, classified, labeled, organized. Given the

45 endlessness of the production of unarchivable ashes within the archive that are nevertheless exterior to it precisely because they are unarchivable, the very drive to classify and establish norms for archival use paradoxically makes the archival fever of pathologization rise even higher as resistance among the resisters multiplies.

[trans will be needed] The category enables to Didi-Huberman to form a new way of classifying the dead: “Between the healthy victims who did not want to speak and the victims to weak to speak if they wanted, Didi-Huberman says there is “a third position. It is no less extreme, such is its incomparable force. It is the testimony formulated and transmitted in spite of all by the members of the

Sonderkommando” (105). He assigns a different kind of box to testimonies, imagining that the sending, transmission, and reception of these notes and photos is a closed matter, the last word. Didi-Huberman even acceding to their theological title for the notes:

They form what is called—with reference to the megliot of the

Hebrew Bible, the scrolls of the “Lamentations of Jeremiah” in

particular—the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Writing of the disaster, writing

of the epicenter, the Scrolls of Aushwitz constitutes the testimonies

of the drowned who were not yet reduced to silence, who were still

capable of observing and describing. Their authors ‘lived closer to

the epicenter of the catastrophe than any other prisoner. They

were present, day after day, at the destruction of their own people,

46 and were aware, in the global scale, of the process to which the

victims were doomed.’ Their whole effort was to transmit the

knowledge of such a process as far as they possibly could. A

knowledge that would have to be searched for in the blood soaked

earth, in the ashes, and in the heaps of bones in which the

members of the Sonderkommando disseminated their testimonies

in order to give them some chance of surviving” (108).

The closure of the category of testimony, enfolded into the concept of the archive as a box, is all that matters to Didi-Huberman, apparently, since it allows for a narrative sequencing of death and life, a topography of transmission of, even if that means that testimony becomes a homogenous category, regardless of the medium specificity of its contents and their fragmentary nature. Didi-Huberman’s

“third position” amounts to a stabilizer, a tranquilizer, and stands as the non- paradoxical inversion of Agamben’s no man’s border land paradoxes of homo sacer.

[Now we turn from unread –ability to the question of media and the storage unit.] Consider, for example, the continuing controversy of the place of photography and film in archiving the holocaust: images of the dead victims or their exhibition are frequently equated with pornography and Hell. For example, the title of the first section Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from

Auschwitz is “Images Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell.”42 The tendency to pathologize and demonize certain remaining images, unintentionally echoes the topological construction “L’Enfer” (hell) section of the Bibilotheque Nationale in

47 Paris, reserved for pornographic books and images, or even earlier, the restricted library reserved for pornographic images of the library for ancient Roman from the remains of Pompeii in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption.43

Yet this sacrificial economy of processing documents by selecting only some of the for survival, either to be accessed in archives or displayed in museums, hasn’t worked out very well, or, to put it another, has worked only too well.

Fierce internecine polemics among scholars and filmmakers of the holocaust have become more heated, not less, over time, as ethical questions about how to memorialize the holocaust have largely overtaken juridical questions about what happened and who should be held responsible and punished.44 An earlier question of what can be admitted to have happened (the Holocaust) has more recently turned into a question of what can be admitted in a different sense, allowed to enter the archive or even allowed to construct an archive that has any use value at all. In other words, we have now a problem of sovereignty in the archive, with disagreement focused on exceptions to norms as to what is considered a “good” image and a “bad” image, what is considered a legitimate use of photographic and film images and an illegitimate abuse of them, and even whether any images may be used at all.

Let us turn now to a specific case of the controversy over images of the camps, namely, the reception of the French exhibition catalogue Memoires des camps (Memories of the camps) in 2001, four photographs taken in August, 1944 from inside of Auschwitz. After his contribution to the catalogue was fiercely attacked at length, Georges Didi-Huberman reprinting it with an extended

48 response to his attackers in his book, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. And in Did’Hubermann’s self-defense, the problem of the sovereignty of the camp archivist and filmmaker who uses it emerges. While his critics regard the images as the equivalent of pornography (which they pathologize), Didi-Huberman justifies attention to them in terms of heir exceptionalism: “The four photographs taken in August 1944 by the

Sonderkommando of crematorium V are the exception that asks us to rethink the rule, the fact that asks us to rethink history” (61). Defending Godard’s montage editing practice in “Toutes les histories,” Didi-Huberman writes that “in the form is

Godard’s free choice. Here the artist—according to western tradition—gives himself the sovereign freedom of reuse: he chooses two photograms of Dachau and associates them with Hollywood shot” (145). Legitimate images for Didi-

Huberman not only entail a postal system of sovereignty as rethinking and reusing, always coming after a delay, but, more specifically, after the operation of the camps ceases, after the moment of their liberation. The spacing of the archive as a library within a library paradoxically blacks out the moment one would think is most in need of archivalization, namely, the moment the camps were working.

Boxing Up the Disaster and the Question of Sovereignty and Survival in the

Film and Media Archive

49 "The dying of Others is not something

that we experience in an authentic

sense; at most we are always just

'there-alongside.' . . . By its very

essence, death is in every case mine."

--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,

paragraph 47.

By speaking of a death that, in order to

be irreplaceable and because it is

unique, is not even individual—“never

individual,” he says—Blanchot puts

forward a statement that would appear

troublesome even to the Jemeinigkeit,

the “mine every time,” which according

to Heidegger essentially characterizes a

Dasein that a announces itself to itself in

its own being-for-death.”

--Jacques Derrida, Demeures, 51

To understand the importance of photography and film in the camp as archive

/ storage unit, and what we men by its unread -ability, we need to perform a deconstructive reshelving operation, one that risks more than self- embarrassment given the heated controversy around what do with deeply disturbing materials. We may find that we have written ourselves into a book on

50 a library shelf where the internal “library of the pathological” is not a given or decisive discovery but is being contested by participants in the debate, possibly by readers of the present book. Yet there is an even more serious danger, in our view, in going straight to a responsibility patch to calm a panic attack that prematurely (and unethically) closes down thought in the name of the ethical. Let us be clear about our purposes, then.45 A certain allegorical and rhetorical diversion or distraction, a kind of play has to be put into play, to paraphrase

Derrida, if we are understand the dimensions of bare life and unread-ability for the archive and self-storage that precede and follow the camp, that require the camp be read as the reconstruction of a camp within the camp. There is a constitutive problem of historicism. Because determining (over)determinations only temporarily may be read as such, there comes a moment when the determination as such is no longer visible and has to be reconstructed. And the necessity of reconstruction involves puts immense pressure on distinctions between what is narratable and not, what is hallucination and imagination, what is fiction and what is testimony; which media, if any, are indexical and which are not: even narratives that tell the truth cannot tell the whole truth; a living person may be mistaken for a ghost; testimony may be perjury; photos may be staged).

The debate over the four photographs taken in August 1944 is of interest to us because it foregrounds the problem of unread –ability in relation to a problem of uncanny reversibility, a problem that requires the thinking of sovereignty not only in terms of bare life but in terms of bare death, as it were, of determining both the dead are dead, of differentiating annihilation into obliteration and of determining,

51 the importance or irrelevance of visual media and writing to determining death once it is acknowledge that the time of death is not the end of death.

A cultural graphology of the camp as archive for us means reading Derrida’s

Freudian impression of the archive together with his commentary in Demeures:

Fiction and Testimony on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. How

Derrida calls the “anarchivological” drive in the archive, his critique of an archaeological desire to reconstruct the past, the ash of the archive that remains impossible to archive may be productively reread through a problem Derrida identifies of determining once and for all the distinction between fiction and testimony, in order to show that the camp (Agamben) both calls and blocks a call to read as a problem of archivalization, sovereignty, and the burial and exhumation of documents, media, and bodily remains.46 We take this blacking out, this prohibition of imaging what happens in the camp when it was in operation, as the necessity of extending the concept of bare life to bare death, of conceptualizing testimony in terms of a reverse apostrophe, an address to the living from the dead but unburied.

For possible use in the intro when we discuss the topos, our metaphorlogy.47

we may grasp more clearly the way the temporalities of testimony and archivalization, of the impression, link up media to an uncanny and contradictory temporality and placelessness (Unheimlichkeit). Derrida introduces a cinematic metaphor—the screenplay—when commenting on a passage in Maurice

52 Blanchot's The Instant of My Death in which a young French man is “prevented from dying by death itself”: as the Nazi officer in charge organizes a firing squad, the man’s family silently and slowly goes back inside the chateau, “as if everything had already been done.” This last phrase leads Derrida to comment:

He is the only man and thus the last man, this man already less

young. The Last Man is not only the title of another of Blanchot's

books. The eschatology of the last man is marked in the phrase

that states in the mode of fiction ("as if") that the end has already

taken place before the end: "as if everything had already been

done." Death has already taken place, however unexperienced [sic]

its experience may remain in the absolute acceleration of a time

infinitely contracted into the point of an instant. The screenplay is

so clear, and it describes the action so explicitly in two lines, that

the program is exhausted in advance. We know everything with an

absolute knowledge. Everything, all of it, has already happened

because we know what is going to happen. We know the

screenplay; we know what is going to happen. It is over; it is

already over from instant of the credits. It begins with the end: as in

The Madness of the Day, it begins with the end. We know it

happened. "As if everything were already done," it already

happened. The end of time. What will happen now will sink into

what was done, as it were backward, into what has already arrived,

that is to day, death. (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and

53 Testimony, 62)

The temporality of the narrative is uncanny not because the repressed returns but because it places testimony and the archive backward in a non-place where death precedes death, becoming metaphorical visible as a movie screenplay, specifically, a last man scenario.

We are now in a position to turn to the Scrolls left by members of

Sonderkommando to be exhumed later. We find yet again in these Scrolls a black box trope left in the exhumed notes themselves, the fantasy that the accusations will always stand, will always be transparent, will be found by the right reader (any reader who finds them is presumed to be right). The Scrolls stand as testimony beyond a legal sense. They are not offered as legal evidence. Indeed, the notes titled collectively as Scrolls become operative as a theological model of reading as re-cognition, in other words, a total recall and retrieval guidance system that transmits the recording of the present to the future intact. Yet listening at the receiving end of the transmitted notes becomes a problem of reading because taking it necessarily involves, long after evidence has to used in trials, a philological and archaeological reconstruction of records of an event that are not reducible to an absolute moment or single place: they retrace an impression of what cannot be retraced.

For this reason, gas chambers (when in operation) have become a hot black box, regarded both as the epicenter of the catastrophe, the heart of darkness, the dark room, the “eye of the cyclone, the eye of history,” (106) but also the most inaccessible space, the reader / viewer locked out by self-appointed guardians of

54 the archives. Imagining the place and time of the gas chambers in operation is paradoxically viewed as pornographic (not evidence but the source of sadistic, perverse pleasure, so that Spielberg’s averted gas chamber turned shower scene in Schindler’s List is regarded by all parties to the debate as porn) yet also the most authentic, the best evidence and refutation of revisionists. In the 1980s, filmmakers have split over the question of the use value of the archive. Whereas

Alain Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of

Auschwitz in the present and black and white archival footage of the camps and

Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with documents from the archive about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting archival footage, Claude Lanzman decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using any archival footage, just filming in color interviews with survivors. By contrast,

Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage in his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), though the film is not a documentary about the holocaust as is Shoah. Despite this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and archivist Jean-Luc Godard share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both imagining the existence of film footage of the camp in operation. Lanzmann says that if he had found a

Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:

Spielberg chose to reconstruct. To reconstruct, in a sense, means

to manufacture archives. And if I had found an existing film—a

secret film that showed how three thousand Jews, men, women,

children, died together in a gas chamber at a crematorium II at

55 Auschwitz, if I had found that, not would I have shown it, I would

have destroyed it. I am unable to say why. It is obvious. (95)

Godard says something similar about the actual existence of Nazi film footage of the camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footage should be shown (destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives a long time afterward. [. . .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I think that if I worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the images of the gas chambers after about twenty years. We would see the prisoners entering, and we would see in what state they come out” (cited byDidi-

Huberman, p. 216, n. 73). We perhaps somewhat precipitously hazard from these two quotations the following generalization: both the archivist and anti- archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two camps being early mirror opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents of which are to be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines this crematorium within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creating another space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable. As

Didi-Huberman puts it, “Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of annihilation . . . it is neither full presence or absolute silence. It is neither resurrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains.

It is a world proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which placed together in a montage, will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge” (167).

We have singled out Didi-Huberman’s Images of Auschwitz and the heated debate it has provoked for attention because of its indirect impact of the question

56 of the archive when its use value has to do with the ethics of remembering rather than refutation. Did-Hubermans interest is saving a legitimate use value for visual media sheds helps explain the paradoxical ways opponents occupy the same ground for the same purpose by enabling us to the uncanny effect of the mediatization of the holocaust in its arche-archivalization. Didi-Huberman observes acutely the difficulty of reading images, including their reverse sides:

“All this cries out the need for ‘a genuine archaeology of photographic documents,’ as Clement Cheroux suggests. It could only be done by ‘examining the conditions of their creation, by studying the documentary content, and by questioning their use.’ It is a tough program. It would require, for example, access to the reverse side of images—which recent digitalization projects often forget about—in order to glean the slightest sign, the slightest inscription that might better situate the image and identity, as far as possible, of the person who took the photograph: the question of viewpoint (undoubtedly, Nazi, for the most part) is capital in this domain” (67). Contrary to our account of Walter

Benjamin’s briefcase, Didi-Huberman’s model of the archive is one of reassembly: We know that in 1940, just before committing suicide, Walter

Benjamin was able to reformulate, to retrace and reassemble all of his sources, from the Kabala to Kafka, from Karl Marx to Rosenzweig, in a notion of Erlosung

[redemption] understood from the point of view of the catastrophe and in the absence of any “salvation” either historical (definitive victory over the forces of totalitarianism) or religious (resurrection, definitive victory over the forces of death)” (169). Didi-Huberman cites no evidence about Benjamin here, and he

57 has to miss the briefcase in order to conceptualize Benjamin’s self-archivalization as a total retracing and reassemblage, as a redemption that redeems the dialectic of enlightenment (“’redemption’ is . . . that which enlightens us regarding the dialectical manner in which both of these states exist on the foundation or possibility of the other” (170).48

Retracing and reassemblage is less a matter of readability, however, as it is a map of the archive made geographically specific. The central point of the debate over the four Sonderkommando photographs taken in Auschwitz turns out not to be the veracity of the photos (everyone agres they are not fakes) but the place from where they were taken. Didi-Huberman says they were taken from within a gas chamber, looking out from a door. His critics wonder if that is the case; one critic says the photographer looks through a window, not a door. This positivist debate is of less interest to us, however, than the fact that the photos are doubles. Did-Huberman astutely notes that “we are not dealing with one image.

In each case of his locations, the clandestine photographer of Birkenau pressed the shutter release twice, the minimal condition for his testimony to account, from two angles at least, for the time that he took to observe. (123).” Rather than critically examine this uncanny doubling, Didi-Huberman reproduces and manufactures it in the way it reproduces the four photos on two pages, in opposite and reverse orders: “To maintain the chronology of the testimony [of

David Szmulewski] would suppose the contact prints from the Auschwitz museum were produced from an inverted negative, a lack of technical attention all the more banal since the films in this format carry no single permanent

58 inscription allowing us to distinguish the between the obverse and the inverse of the negative. If such were the case, it would be necessary—while keeping the chronology—to reverse the shots that we are shown in the prints conserved at

Auschwitz. The question then remains open” (110). Yet right after acknowledging that we are left with an open question, Didi-Huberman labels the four photos as he thinks they were taken (117), not the ways they may be. The captions the four photos on page immediately following showing says they are

“reversed” (118). Retracing, reassemblage, rethinking and turn out to be slightly different instances, then, of the sheer repetition.

One Step Not Beyond . . . the Grave

The problems for both sides of the debate over the four Sonderkommando photographs may be summarized as follows. Didi-Huberman can use the photographs effectively against the prohibition on imaging the unimaginable in that its doubleness is, as it were, more real than a single photo: “the phantasm of one image is supported by a phantasm of the absolute instant: in the history of photography, which is true for the very notion of the snapshot; it is even truer in the memory of the Shoah, where a “secret film”—Claude Lanzmann’s hypothesis

—about the “absolute moment,” the death of three thousand Jews by asphyxiation in a gas chamber—can be dreamed of ().” However, by clinging to positivism rather than the uncanniness of the photos, defaulting to the photo as indexical position, Didi-Huberman ends up having to devalue them: “While they are singular, the images are not unique for all that, and are even less absolute.”

59 He goes further in conceding that “it is clear that of the exhausting mass of visible things [here oddly conflated with images of things] that surround us, not all deserve the time that it would take us to decipher their dynamics.” Didi-

Huberman discovers not the sequential move from monad (photographic still) to montage but the uncanny film loop. Just as the Nazi snuff film functions, as Didi-

Huberman insightfully, as a phantasm for Lanzmann, so the door functions as a phantasm for Didi-Huberman, a means of connecting a series of double images he then mistakes for a montage. Didi-Huberman thus does not acknowledge his own role in playing the sovereign, he who decides the exception. Having said that there most images (in general) do not deserve the time it would take to decipher them, he is unable to establish any criteria for deciding which images

(of the Holocaust in particular) are deserving of our time. Moreover, Didi-

Huberman substitutes choice for decision, describing a “formal mechanism” for viewing that guarantees the "opening sight itself to a start up of knowledge and to an orientation of ethical choice" (`(179).49 Decision in the visual archive is arguably ethical, however, only because cannot know in advance or provide a proper distance and orientation.

The intellectual differences between Didi-Huberman and his antagonists turns out to be surprisingly slight: both sides agree that “it is impossible, indeed, to bear witness from the inside of death” (105); while his critics want to put an end to all images, Didi-Huberman merely wants to preserve—that is, read-- a select few, and these few, moreover, do not require any rethinking of what he calls the dual system of reading images as veils that cover and torn veils that

60 reveal Didi-Huberman uses to read all images deserving of our attention. In place of optical unconscious, we get a “torn consciousness; in place of the four photographs, we get a generalized account of the way images appeal to “the incessant desire to show what cannot be seen” (133).

Didi-Huberman’s category of the legitimate because inadequate “in spite of all” image / testimony has as much conceptual integrity in his eyes as the exaggerated and distorting “all” image have for his critics.

The singularity of what Didi-Huberman singles out as a “not all” image (and the endlessly revisable narrative it generates) is really not singular at all, just a repetition, like his many insistent repetitions of the phrase “in spite of all,” like his repetitive characterization of the not image as a rethinking of history. Like his critics, Didi-Huberman does not interrogate want it means to construct the camp within the camp, to represent death from the “outside” of death, and so remain stuck in a stop and go loop—a live wire with a dead end, so to speak.

Cultural Graphology

In the later chapters on film, issues of fakery, counterfeiting, misdirection, the work of art, and Judaism get relayed through transport in cinema, differently, all interested in an epistemic reversibility that links the work of art to the body of the victim, that poses a problem of salvaging and arching, of what goes missing, and of ending itself figured as a posting to the future to come. Why turn to films about

61 World II that engage the holocaust indirectly through the work of art, counterfeiting, misdirection, and transportation? Why not turn directly to documentary films about the holocaust such as Night and Fog (Alain Renais,

1951), Marcel Ophul’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), and Claude Lanzmann’s

Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (1985), or to Jean-Luc Godard’s use of archival footage in Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), as Jacques Rançiere and

Georges Didi-Huberman, among others, have done?50 How does the medium of film relate to the briefcase and self-storage unit as boxes?

Setting aside the rhetoric of use and prescriptive adjectives at work in Agamben’s lines, which seem to wish to inoculate the text against misreading, we wish to note that the items Agamben outlines as topics for further study are in essence those relays in the writing machine by which the modern state processes its citizens, according papers and rights to some and not to others. This is all to say that the project of a cultural graphology, of grammatology as a positive science, is complimentary to Agamben’s deconstruction of the state of exception or emergency. We take this methodological congruence as a sign also of the fact that the processing of persons as bare life is enacted through and by their archiving, by their processing with regard to what we have begun to call “shelf- life.”

In this sense, the camp figures as the systematic undoing of the nation state’s most important rental to its citizen subjects, the passport, reducing the guarantee of self-sameness and the privileges and costs that come with this

62 guarantee to an indexical marking of the body: a horrific and degraded form of the tattoo.51 Where the passport functions as the enabling device for the double articulation of sovereignty and citizen’s or perhaps even “human” rights discourse, demanding that other nation states recognize its sovereignty by according the same rights and privileges it gives to its citizens when “abroad,” the tattoo, in this case, merely records the facticity of a body’s presence and its sorting. Given the flimsiness of the bearer’s ownership or right to a passport, as our previous discussion of the making of a US passport (see Preface) established, it seems reasonable to suggest that human rights discourse exists merely as an epi-phenomenon or disposable, if enduring, other to the mechanisms of the passport—a recognition of what is at stake in having oneself appropriately archived, shelved, accounted for. We take it as implied by

Agamben that one corollary of his modeling of the camp would be an inquiry into which instantiations of the writing machine, which modes of archiving, foster rights discourse and which prove lethal to it. “Which are the good and the bad

[forms]” we ask, the “good and the bad [media / archives]” we may ask, replaying

Foucault’s late, optative discussions of drugs and governmentality.52

Is the project of “self-storage” merely a neurotic reaction formation or does it augur the possibility of reclaiming reading and writing, marking a form of resistance. We are working hard, obviously, to persuade you to the notion that, the question of the camp and of “bare life” will tend to play out in our historical moment as a series of questions about pieces of paper, or the encoding of information and the ability of citizen subjects to participate in their auto-archiving.

63 For us, the “self storage” event represents an uncertain signal in this economy of archiving. What order of tropological intervention might it be said to house or make possible? Is it merely a supplement or degraded mimetic doubling of the activity of the state or does it offer a meaningful counter? While “self storage,” like any phenomenon, will be subject to modes of ideological capture allied to the mode of production (police procedurals etc), its uptake could, given the correct juxtapositions, yield a dialectical image of other possible relations—indeed of

“bare life” not as a single unit of being but as a zone of possible configurations of beings, of multiple forms of living, life, and liveliness. We turn to the figure of the self-storage unit, then, in order to pose the archive as a question of reading things and / as texts.

Beginning, Ending, Over Again.

But whoever does not try to think and

read the part of the fiction and thus of

literature that is ushered in by sucha

phrase in even the most authentic

testiomony will not have begun to read

or hear Blanchot. This holds for the

majority of his political prosecutors,

among others. (47)

--Jacques Derrida, Demeures

64 Before we can address the relation between un(repeatability) and

(un)readability in order to return once again to the Scrolls of Auschwitz, we first address a question demanded by Derrida’s own text: how readable or unreadable is it? By addressing this question through a close reading of the macro-structure of Demeure, we will link (un)readability in relation to

(un)repeatability) and to (ir)replacebability. We begin by consider Derrida’s an implicit demand to read the text as a remainder outside a remainder generated by parallels between the ending of the text and the beginning of the postscript. A problem of knowing when and how to end arises in the last pages of Derrida’s text and, conversely, a dictum to read beyond the beginning emerges in Derrida’s post-script, specifically, as a citation, entitled “Reading ‘beyond the beginning’; or, On the Venom in Letters, Postscript and ‘Literary Supplement’” (104). Derrida ends his essay rather self-consciously by dealing his own ending with series of directions toward the future made in the present in the form of citations on endings by Corneille, La Fontaine, and Plutrach.

In order to as your pardon for having made things go on so long, in order

to end without ending in great haste . . here are several desmormais’s with

which both the French language and French literature have distinguished

themselves. These desmormais [henceforths] all say--it is certainly not

insignificant--something about the compassion and the "complaining" to

which, as with remainders, as with a talk, one must know how to put an

end."(102)

Derrida finally ends his overlong text at slow speed with a quotation from a

65 French translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: "He knew to write this: henceforth, enough has been said on this point" (105).

Yet Derrida does not the work end there. He adds a seemingly unrelated and irrelevant postscript about attacks on him made in the Times Literary

Supplement (TLS) that followed his being awarded a Ph.D. by Cambridge

University over a period of years. And Derrida links them formally by ending both with a citation. By asking what the relation between the text and post-script is, we may more fully understand its unread –ability and how it bears on reading the

Scrolls as storage units that structure the reconstruction of the camp. Derrida’s text and postscript may be linked by Derrida comments on Blanchot’s readability in the text and his comments on reading beyond the beginning in the post script, his characterization of the last page of The Instant of My Death as a (sort of) postscript (even though neither the word “post-script” nor “p.s.” on the last page of Blanchot’s text), and his mention of E. R. Curtius’s European Literature in the

Latin Middle Ages in the text of Demeure (23) and the postscript (105).53 The postscript begins in its very title with two citations, the first one from a TLS review critical of Derrida for Beginners, namely “beyond the beginning,” and the second one from two words of the newspaper weekly’s title, “Literary Supplement.”

Derrida’s postscript is a “sort of” postscript, a specifically “literary supplement” to his text, rather like those “sort of” postscripts he finds in Blanchot’s The Instant of

My Death. In the text of the postscript, Derrida paraphrases the quotation from

TLS before giving it italicized, in full: “’beginners’ . . . are not be tempted to venture beyond the beginning of their reading . . . : ‘The worst fate in store for

66 beginners here be that they might be tempted to venture beyond the beginning’”

(105). The phrase “Venture beyond the beginning” recurs three times in the last two pages of Derrida’s postscript: "I really think--if they want to understand--that they must "venture beyond the beginning" (107); "But for this, yes, the reader will indeed have to "venture beyond the beginning" (107); "In order to escape obscurantism, one must, on the contrary, I repeat my advice, always, always

"venture beyond the beginning" (108). That last sentence with the citation italicized is the last sentence of the book Derrida is taking his critic’s phrase, also occurring in the last sentence of the negative TLS review, to turning it against him, ending by making the repeated riposte typographically emphatic.54

In the excessive repetition of this citation, in the recourse to a citation, Derrida and by calling it a “literary supplement,” Derrida opens up a way of reading his text analogous to the way he describes how Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death is to be read:

This last narrative [The Instant of My Death] also marks the

repetition of what will always already have been said in Blanchot’s

earlier texts, giving them to us to be read again, confirming and

thereby relaunching the singular achrony of time of which we of

which we are speaking, and of which the text speaks in the first

place . . . . Every sentence of [The Instant of My Death] gives us,

let us not say a key, but at least a prescription for reading

Blanchot’s entire work” (50; 70)

The divided macrostructure of Derrida’s text redoubles the doubleness he sees in

67 Blanchot (Blanchot doubles himself in The Instant of My Death—he is the narrator and the young man), in Blanchot’s two lost manuscripts, both of which are misrecognized, and in Blanchot’s letter to Derrida, both of which Derrida reads together, yoking non-fictional testimony with fiction in the mode of testimony. In Demeures, Derrida does similar to what Derrida says Blanchot is doing, yoking a commentary on fiction (and non-fiction) within which he addresses autobiography with a seemingly conventional autobiographical post- script that is also literary. The postscript reads as an invitation to read Derrida’s book that makes us consider whether reading it is not reading it, as if to say, the end of the book is only a beginning, you not only have read past the beginning but in doing so will have to read past the end because you will never have really gotten past the beginning. The divide between the text and postscript of

Demeure marks the death and survival of the text, inscribing / performing / calling on the reader to perform an uncanny temporality of reading beyond reading and not-reading, beginning and ending reading. Out of this “passion” suffered by the reader of a complaint made by a reader of philosophical fiction (and vice versa) can there be a compassion for the singular generality of complaining writers to come.

Later, (de) Man

Blanchot, or. . . the narrator is

complaining about, bringing an

accusation . . against his having been

68 saved . . . for an impure, unavowable,

socially suspect reason that calls all the

more for an urgent confession. . . But

through the . . . confession another

accusation , , , can be heard . . . : that

everything was saved except the

manuscript.

--Jacques Derrida, Demeure, 85

Another name for this complaint as compassion might be mourning. Derrida pointedly mentions Paul de Man in the second paragraph of the first page, just after he returns in his talk to “the context of the relations between fiction and autobiographical truth. Which is also to say, between literature and death.

Speaking, then, shortly after his death, of my friend Paul de Man, whose memory

I salute since we are here in his country” (15). Along similar lines Derrida, describes Blanchot’s letter to Derrida as having been written the late in life, fore he died. Moreover, Derrida implicitly links de Man, or calls up his memory, when defending Blanchot at length against prosecutors wish to indict his politics (which

Derrida does not specify, though he does concede an element of calculation in the publication of The Instant of My Death. Derrida refuses a narrowly autobiographical reading of Blanchot which allegorizes Blanchot’s writing as an evasion of a more direct testimonial of his past experience in the Resistance.

Derrida invites a similar misreading, a failure to read, the postscript to Demeure in similarly autobiographical terms since he writes in the first person about actual

69 documents and experiences. A suspicious reader might then read Derrida as exonerating de Man by exonerating Blanchot and then by literal ex-onerating himself in post-script; that is, Derrida would be comparing himself to both other writers as the victim of unjust persecutions. The divide of the text into text and paratext might then be taken as Derrida's irresponsible evasion of distinguishing critics of writers Nazi sympathies during Wolrd War II with critics of his philosophy in the 1990s. Derrida entitles his postscript a “literary supplement” to divert such readings, however, to put the thought police on a false trial. Instead

Derrida routes mourning through complaint and compassion in order to make mourning unrecognizable as such, to operate by being inoperable. Derrida’s division of Demeure marks the achronic time it takes (not) to read, so that

Derrida ends his postscript with a goodbye advising the reader to read past the beginning, always. it's a reading that cannot stop, The post-script has a specifically literary autobiographical element, then, by means of which Derrida can address a phrase in the first line of Blanchot's text: perhaps an error of injustice." Derrida notes the oddity of the phrase--injustice ordinarily is by definition error. Errors cannot be corrected by a just mot, or only by lots “mo” mots, by reading, by reading while knowing that the testament or testimonial one reads is "haunted" by the phantasm and spectre of fiction.55

We may further elucidate an understanding of (un)readability,

(un)repeatability, and (ir)placeability if we turn back to the references of postscripts and readability in the text of Demeure. Derrida first mentions postscript to The Instant of My Death in relation to Blanchot’s work is being both

70 readable and unreadable:

We can only judge [Blanchot’s attestation] to be readable, if it is,

insofar as a reader can understand it. . . . We can speak, we can

read this because this experience . . . remains universal and

exemplary. Conversely, this thing here, this sequence of events—

having almost been shot to death, having escaped it, etc., --it is not

enough for this to have happened, to be able to read this text, and

to understand it in the absolute secret of its singularity. (93)

Derrida proceeds to stress the conjunction of universalization with readability, not unreadability:

One understands, everyone understands this narrative in his own

way, there are as many readings as there are readers, and yet

there remains a certain manner of being in agreement with the text,

if one speaks in its language, provided certain conditions are met.

This is testimonial exemplarity. Because this singularity is

universalizable, it is able to give rise—for example, in Blanchot—to

a work that depends without depending on this very event, a

readable and translatable work a work that is more and more widely

translated into all the languages of the world, or less well, etc.,

more or less well read in France . . . (94)

The rather muted paradoxical characterization of a work that depends without depending” does not give rise, however, to an account of Blanchot’s unreadability but a characterization of a line from Blanchot’s text-- “What there remains there

71 for him of existence” that is “described,” according to Derrida, “as a sort of tomorrow, a sort of postscript—fifty years—this remainder that remains, the demourance of this remainder will have been but a short sequel of sorts a fall out, a consequence. Nothing has truly begun. . . What remains for him of existence, more than this race to death, is this race of death in view of death not to see death coming. In order not to see it coming (94; 95). When Derrida asserts that “There is a post script. A sort of parergonal hors-d’oeuvre” (97), he has already framed the postscript as “sort of” remainder in a remainder, a metaphor or supplemented by a metaphor, with different amounts and kinds of time—fifty years, tomorrow, not yet begun and “Later . . . the first word to the epilogue” (97). Unread –ability apparently cannot be theorized as such in part because textual places are themselves double (a paratext is a parergon; an

“afterword” is called an “hors-d’oeuvre” the word writes Derrida as the single word on the first page Dissemination; the postscript is an epilogue). The yet to be read is a remainder within a remainder that, like death, that one which cannot see coming. The never to arrive unreadable and never written remainder, or remainder “written” as the paratextual spacing between text and post-script, guarantees a kind of readability because reading means not being able ever to read what’s coming, what is yet to be (un)read.

It should come as no surprise that Derrida introduces his fourth and final film reference the moment he begins discuss the second lost manuscript, placed by

Derrida in an epilogue to Blanchot’s text, and comments on the first word of the first sentence of the last page (where): “The epilogue already refers to an anterior

72 later, a later immediately following the war: ‘Later, having returned to Paris . . .’

(Was he thus not in Paris during the war?) Behind this first epilogical sentence an entire film passes by: the end of the war, liberation, the purges, etc. Gallimard,

NRF, Paulhan, Drieu La Rochelle, etc. The whole entanglement of a very questionable history . . . ." (8).56

Derrida reads the second lost manuscript (mentioned on the very last page of

The Instant of My Death) as a question the readability of the story as testimony.

(The first manuscript Derrida reads as having been confiscated by the Nazi lieutenant who mistook them for war plans.) It has to readable to everyone in order to be universalizable (replaceable--the reader can place himself in

Blanchot's / the young man's place). Yet it is also, he says, has a singular generality (it is irreplaceable). Here is the line from the story: “Later, having returned to Paris, he met Malraux, who told him that he had been taken prisoner

(without being recognized) and that he had succeeded in escaping, losing a manuscript in the process. It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute, whereas a manuscript would not be" (Derrida cited p. 99). Derrida comments:

Subtle and interesting distinction--as if reflections on art were not a

manuscript. Could never be confused with the writing of a

manuscript. . . What is a manuscript if it cannot be reconstituted? it

is a mortal text, a text insofar as it is exposed to a death without

survivance. One can re-write Malraux's books, they are but

reflections on art whose content is not bound to the unique event

and trace of writing. It is not very serious; one can say even that

73 these things are immortal, like a certain kind of truth. But a

manuscript--and this would be its definition, a definition via the

end--is something whose end cannot be repeated and to which one

can only testify where the testimony only testifies to the absence of

attestation, namely, where nothing can testify any longer, with

supporting evidence, to what has been. Pure testimony as

impossible testimony. (99; 100)

The second manuscript is singular in having been lost without remainder: “Unlike the witness–narrator, the manuscript has disappeared without remainder. . . .

Nothing of it remains [demeure]” (100). Yet, Derrida adds: “Unless one could say: without remainder other than The Instant of My Death, the narrative entitled The

Instant of My Death, its last witness, a supplementary substitute which, by recalling its disappearance, replaces it without replacing it. The absolute loss, perdition without salvation and without repetition, would have been that of a piece of writing. To which one can but testify, beyond all present attestation, however”

(100-01).

Reading Demeure is not reading in the ordinary sense of the word in that we are retracing as we reread an experience that did happened but, as Derrida points out, that may not be relived. We are on the surface, reading the impression of Derrida’s text as were, literalized by the non-space between text and paratext (no blank page separates them), figured as a cinematic screen on which a film is projected.

74 ROUGH INCOMPLETE DRAFT OF ENDING:

My impulse is to characterize the Scrolls of Auschwitz as having been made unreadable by its preservers (in the same kind of way Derrida says Blanchot's would be prosecutors have not read The Instant, or Blanchot's other writings, many of which, he says, are repeated in The Instant--see p. 50) by being singularized (even though the title repeats Jeremiah and thereby characterizes the notes in advance as jeremiads, prophetic indictments and calls for justice).

But the notes are really fragments of a collection of lost and found manuscripts that are meant to be universally readable, translatable. There's a doubleness in them kind of like the doubleness in Blanchot's story (the story witness of the last manuscript as its unrepeatable repetition) and the doubleness of the already self- repeating notes and records (multiplied in the hope their chances of being found would increase). They are dead and buried survivors. Their philological recovery and sanctification does not read their readability and unreadability, tries to put an end to repetition by seeing them collectively as the repetition of a single

Jewish prophet's lamentations that do not involve the prophet's relation to death.

No Ending of Death

Agamben wants to render the machine inoperable, put it in neutral as a way of stopping it. Issue of him is the degradation of death, of the Musselmann as those who cannot die because a industrialized and bureaucratic machine of extermination has striped the victims of the possibility of dying an authentic

75 death. Although Agamben points, it makes little sense to distinguish between proper and improper deaths, her deserves the Musselmann as the figure of a ridge that divides: the figure serves as a structuralist conception of life and death. For us, homo sacralization has its own uncanny temporality, enabling

“false” endings, as it were that override medical, juridical, and coroner determinations of birth and death. Use the uncanny media loop to link unreadability to reversibility, a resistance reading to a problem of taking sides in

Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Then the briefcase as the boxcars with boxes of paintings that resemble coffins; then the double in Mr. Klein and the reverse side of paintings; then counterfeiting passports, and art in The Counterfeiters.

TO BE CUT OR Incorporated:

The scrolls are juridical and theological—they are last wills and testaments (legal in that sense, directing the disposition of property and its housing and access, like one might leave a work of art to a museum.

I want to read the so-called scrolls in relation to a Catholic notion of the Shroud

(as in Turin) as offering a different conception of a contact zone, surface, and revelation in order to better articulate debates over the theology of Godard's

Histoire(s) du Cinema (image as resurrection or secular? Is the film Catholic? or not?) as well as Agamben's secularization of the history of the camp, of history in general, and his turning its poteentiallyJewish theology into a Catholic one: "We must cease to look toward . . . historical processes as if they had an apocalyptic

76 or profane telos in which the living being and the speaking being, the human and the inhuman--or any terms of a historical process--are joined in an established, completed humanity and reconciled in a realized identity. This does not mean that, in lacking an end, they are condemned to meaningless or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting. They have not an end, but a remnant . . . The messianic Kingdom is neither the future (the millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead a remaining time"

Remnants, 159.

See the conflation of WB with Saint Paul in the last chapter of Agamben’s The

Time That Remains.

It’s all about reading the text as an image, overcoming the Jewish Bildverbot.

The secret is that WB was really a Catholic.

This way I can link the briefcase to film by making reading a question of relating text and image, word and image—the film image falls under the larger category of the image and all the theological baggage that comes with it.

Maybe we should think abut baggage and bagging, as in bagging it, in order to texture the temporality of boxing and the aesthetic value (or lack thereof) of its “to be found” contents, perhaps.

Duchamp’s suitcase (though that can’t fit). Joseph Cornell.

A disturbance in he measure of time and a paradoxy of these instants, which are so many heterogeneous times. Neither synchrony nor diachrony, an anchrony of

77 all instants. .. because of the cause of death there can be no chronology or chronometry. (81)

All testimony essentially appeals to a certain system of belief, to faith without proof, to the act of faith summoned by a kind of transcendental oath, well, faith in a temporal order, in a certain commonsense ordering of time, is what guarantees the everyday concept. Especially the juridical concept and the dominant concept of attestation in European culture (49)

For Derrida, experiencing an encounter of death with death opens up the possibility of passion as compassion and friendship (non-Christian).

It is precisely "complaining" that Derrida addresses at the end of Demeures:

One cannot testify for the witness who testifies to his own death, but, inversely, only to te imminence of my death, to its instance as deferred imminence. i can testify to the imminence of my death. And . . . instance . . [can] signify more than thing: not only, in the place of administrative or juridical authority, the palace of a verdict, such as a magistrates' court or the proceedings of a court of justice, but also imminence and deferral, he added delay preceding the "thing" that is pending . . . because it cannot be long in coming, to the point of being on the point of arriving. (46)

Death happened to him-them-, it arrived to divide the subject of this story in some sense; it arrive as this division, but it did not arrive except insofar as it arrived

(managed) to divide the subject." (54)

Such an instant does not follow in the temporal sequence of instants:

78 this instant is another eternity, the stance or station of another present." (73)

Not a Platonic or Christian immortality in the moment of death or the passion . . . in the instant of death, when death arrives, where one is not yet dead in order to be already dead, at the same instant. At the same instant, but the tip of the instant is divided here: I am not dead and I am dead." (67-68)

Perhaps it is the encounter of death, which is only ever an imminence, only ever a suspension, an anticipation, the encounter of death as anticipation with death itself, with a death that has already arrived according to the inescapable: an encounter between what is going to arrive and what has already arrived.

Between what is going to come (va venir) and what just finished coming [vient de venir], been what goes and comes. But as the same. Both virtual and real, real as virtual. . . Death has just come from the instant it is going to come (64; 65)

The hospitality of death itself. . .an autobiography, a hostobiography which, under circumstances (the surviving in suicide) advances in the maner of a work of art. 44

Is the witness not always a surviror? (45)

The really amazing move (on p. 52) is to read a letter Derrida got from Blanchot

79 about almost being shot by Nazis and the story itself (non-fictional testimony with testimony in a fictional mode). So he advances a new kind of autobiographical reading largely in order to defend Blanchot from professorial political prosecution

(on grounds that Blanchot has already written in such prosecutors as police and doctors in his work as incompetent in their competence because naive when it comes to understanding testimony). Blanchot seems to be operating as a stand in for de

Man (Derrida doesn't say what the charges against Blanchot are, only that when he wrote the Instant of My Death various charges about his politics were in play).

The essay begins with Derrida talking about the conference title and mentioning de Man because the conference is in Belgium. The title of the conference is The Passions of

Literature." He comes back to passion on p. 56 in relation to Blanchot and then on p. 63, distinguishes a Christological / Hegelian account of resurrection from

Blanchot's "auto-bi-ography" of surviving

(survivance) as "life without life."

Derrida's remark that "He can no longer relive what he lived" (p. 66) offers an indirectly deeper account of archaeological hallucination (Archive Fever) in that the person who actually was there cannot repeat what happened because of the divided subject and divided temporality death introduces in Blanchot's split non- fictional fictional autobiography (the young man about to be executed by Nazis and the narrator of The Instant of My Death are both "Blanchot”.)

80 I was thinking we might bring it into the conclusion in terms of the de Man and

Blanchot relation since it bears on a notion of irreplaceability The one who says and undersigns "I" today, now, cannot replace the other; he can no longer, therefore, replace himself, that is, the young man he has been. He can no longer replace him, substitute himself for him, a condition that nonetheless stipulated for any normal and non-fictional testimony. He can no longer relive what he lived.

(66). There is a curiously elliptical defense of de Man at work here that occurs not by substituting the clearer case of resistance in

Blanchot for de Man but by linking in order to put distance between the two figures (who cannot be substituted for one another). Or we could not bring it in. In any case, I think is worth reading. There's a lot of insistence in the first twenty pages or so on speaking in French ("I am speaking in French" becomes an example) and the assumed translatability of testimony, and later Derrida reads very closely the references to language in

Blanchot's story (which is really amazingly good). The space between de Man and Blanchot seems to offer Derrida a way of abiding (demeure) with de Man and of not abiding certain kinds of extra-legal, academic prosecutions (he includes a postscript about answering charges leveled against him, so he more openly reveals that he is also a third target, along with Blanchot and de Man, of such prosecutions. (Derrida also mentions Kafka's the Castle.)

I find it also helps clarify the specificity of the notes written by

Sonnderkommando. They write from the same place Blanchot's narrator writes,

81 namely, knowing that are about to die. They differ in this respect crucially from the victims they were forced to execute, who did not know they were about to die.

NOTES

The book begins prior to World War Two, in Chapter One, “Articles Lost:

Toys, Topoi, and the Tele-Topical Poetics of Close/d Reading,” which builds on

Benjamin’s and Adorno’s handling of their books, examining what it means to transform some “thing” into a topos or staging ground. We follow Walter

Benjamin’s discussions of toys, photography, and film as necessarily always stagings or thing-“events,” in order to discern the avatars of “self-storage” in his burgeoning analysis of modernity and the mechanisms by which consumer

82 capitalism rewires space, time, and perception. Focusing on the techniques by which Benjamin stages different things and media events, we frame an account of what we call “close/d reading”—a reading that is unafraid of its determination by what escapes it.

Chapter Two completes this arc by focusing on what we call “The Brief

Case of Benjamin Walter,” taking up the infamous story of the missing briefcase that Walter Benjamin is said to have carried over the Pyrenées in his flight from the Nazis and the missing manuscript he claimed that it contained—both of which are said to have disappeared following his death in Port Bou in 1940. We treat

Benjamin’s articulation of the manuscript and the briefcase in relation to his “life” as a response to his forcible archiving and rendering “paperless” by nation states

(axis and allied), and go on to explore how the briefcase is deployed by his readers in order to redeem a usable Benjamin from the ruins that are his archive.

We concentrate on understanding Benjamin’s own articulation of the importance he attached to the thing in the context of the transport systems and worlds of paper he inhabited in his flight from the Nazis. Crucial for us is the way the briefcase stands in relation to Benjamin’s own compulsive, almost automatic self- archiving in repositories all over Europe—in libraries, and via mail to all manner of friends and acquaintances. We offer what various commentators have called the “ruin” of Walter Benjamin’s works, his missing briefcase, as an Ur-form of

“self-storage.”57

Our reading of Benjamin’s briefcase leads us to argue that incomprehension, incapacity, and other kinds of space shortages are what

83 enable reading in the first place (all readings are failed readings). Here the legacies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man are useful to us, paradoxically, as a way of rethinking use in relation to failure as using, of treating Derrida as a pharmakon and de Man as an even more “dangerous supplement” or prescription for even harder philosophical drugs. The essence of our method, then, is to (re)turn to reading as a rewinding of audiotape or videotape, a reading back to the moment where things went wrong in the earlier text or film, so that close reading means you’re rereading becomes a kind of broadcast rerun.58

As Chapter Three, “After the War: Reading States of Exception in Alfred

Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944)” demonstrates, the conceptual logic under-girding the chapters that follow takes up the tele-poetics of close reading that shelf-life necessitates. Moving from the toy as staged thing or tropically transformed topos in chapter one and the briefcase as generative mechanism by virtue of its missing contents in chapter two, chapter three develops what we call the politics of infra-reading or side-to-side reading, of failed reading, in Alfred Hitchcock’’s

Lifeboat. In Hitchcock’s film, reading takes the form of various openings as violent surfacings that put into question both political readings from one side or the other and also the future conceived as a “post,” phrased as a question in the film of what will happen after the war. Forward movement becomes impossible since all movement returns to a past that refuses to fold, that refuses to sit quietly in a box, and take the form of a text with two opposite sides. The resulting mobility of the past, of competing sides of the past in the present, renders a story that is simply not narratable in linear terms with one side of readers counted just

84 in correcting the injustices of the other side. In effect, reading becomes a state of exception, a suspension of the norms of reading and of justice.

The transport and storage mechanisms of train and boxcar that form the back drop of Benjamin’s flight in Chapter Two are the focus of Chapter Four,

“Disorderly Restitutions: The Work of Art and the Missing Jewish Corpus in The

Train, Mr. Klein, and The Counterfeiters,” as we track the narrative disturbances generated by the missing Jewish body, stolen or sold paintings, forged documents and signs during World War II as recalled in films which address the meaning of French Resistance, The Train, Mr. Klein; and Jewish resistance, The

Counterfeiters. Here, the present’s ability to recall certain pasts and not others is mediated by key objects gone missing while in transit and haunted by the missing Jewish corpus of the Holocaust.

In Chapter Five “Tele-visiting Raymond Williams: Television as Rerun of

The Country and the City” we extend our tele-poetical reading practice to the realm of the televisual as mediated by the “box” in the living room that made distant messages present by virtue of the technics and trope of broadcasting.

Significant also, for us, is the fact that this chapter focuses on the work of

Raymond Williams, writing with no knowledge of Walter Benjamin, and so offering a decidedly different if allied model of technology’s role in the formation of his present. Williams dies rewriting Television (1974), which was already an unacknowledged, paranoid, hysterical rewriting of his much more famous The

Country and the City (1973). Television is Williams’ meditation on the transformation of the transit systems that underwrote The Country and the City

85 (which he refers to in a long personal anecdote at the beginning of that text). We argue that with Television, Williams reveals a singularly different and challenging model of what a cultural studies oriented toward the tele-topical might become— a crucial tool for re-broadcasting text events placed in archival cold storage.

We conclude in Chapter Six, “After Extinction: Last Man Scenarios,” with a polemic against “boxing” reading, disavowing, in other words, the deconstructive event. We do this by turning to science-fiction disaster films and novels concerning the “last man” or “first man” scenario that replay the issue of bare life and s/h/elf life in apocalyptic vein in order to engage two competing models of s/h/elf-life extension offered by writer and archivist Georges Perec, on the one hand, and the “speculative metaphysics” of philosopher Quentin Meillasoux, on the other, each of whom offer two different ways of imagining human extinction:

Meillasoux's After Finitude and Perec's “defective” novel, 53 Days. We will show that for all his mesmerizing getting beyond or before Derrida, Meillasoux actually re-inscribes a more fundamentalist eschatological version of philosophy turned philotheology (all hail the great God HyperChaos!), while Perec, whose novel recalls the figural liveliness of Benjamin’s briefcase, writes into his death, creating an ars moriendi or legendi of "must read before finishing after my death" editing and reading.

Our hope, then, is that our forays into the worlds and ur-histories of self- storage may, in some small way, be read as hand(y)book or manual—offering news but never quite amounting to a guide to the potential benefits of s/h/elf help, of living, that is, with and planning one’s death in anticipation always of the shelf.

86 So, please, let this book loose among your s/h/elves.

87 NOTES

88 1 Echographies of Television could clearly tie in to your Williams chapter.

Chapter Six is entitled "The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence" (82-99)

Chapter Three is entitled "Acts of Memory: Topopolitics and Teletechnology" (56-67)

Claudia Wegner, "Necessary Fabrications" in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay,

217-33. Essay discusses the disintegrating of archive of art historian Alois Riegel--Vienna, c. 1890.See also the first chapter of Echographies of Television for --"Right of Inspection"-- for the preface of our book. p. 38 ("the moment of inscription") bears somewhat on your point Wednesday about the penetration of archiving / recording devices.

John Hunter, "Minds, Archives, and the Domestication of Knowledge, " in Lost in the

Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay, 199-216

"Renaissance storage arsenals and their assumptions"

I love "storage arsenal" ("arsenal" is a really interesting a metaphor here)

Ben Nicholson, "Secret Geometries: Beneath the floorboards of Michelangelo's

Laurentian Library," in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay, 41-62

Claudia Wegner, "Necessary Fabrications" in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca omay,

217-33. Essay discusses the disintegrating of archive of art historian Alois Riegel--Vienna, c. 1890.

We need to make a clear to our readers number of shifts in the book itself: from Agamben to Meillassoux, from the yet to be read to reading after extinction, from bare archive, from bare life to no life, from cultural graphology in general to Derrida after Derrida after de Man in particular. Declaring from the book to be a book about the archive at the start would, I think, make our turn or return to cultural graphology would make more sense and recognizable for what it is and is not (it’s not cultural studies, nor is it dated deconstruction); and we won’t feel the need to engage in detail and in a boring way a host of work in other fields. Our argument, and the way we thread strands of it through the book, will do the work.

Bigger version of describing of the book is that it’s about biopolitics quotient of media. Our book is a metaphorology, a topos question: what does it mean to stage the archive from the point of view of the storage unit rather than the library. That immediately puts in a more vernacular, less hallowed place.

Toys are not a thing narrative but a topos narrative—Fort / Da—a toys are a repletion. Something interesting about the staging of things. Benjamin as reader before we do the briefcase—his last words. Do a Benjaminian reading of the briefcase. We move incrementally from the innocuous to the disaster.

So we can avoid a salvific narrative.

The problem is not that being were not being reverent enough the problem is that your not being revenant enough.

Minimerror.

Up with tics is a minum.

R or an N –the difference is a minum of paleography.

I think we have skipped that step (I think we have skipped as well as the steps need to make explicit our move from Agamben to Meillassoux from the yet to be read to reading after extinction, from bare life to no life, from cultural graphology in general to Derrida after

Derrida after de Man in particular). In addition to engaging Agamben on the camp as a paradigm by refiguring the camp as an archive, we might also want to engage even more directly in the intro what happens to thing theory / thing studies when they things are thought as being archived, stored, specially to notions of life as in the social life of things, to the everyday life of things, working through the relation between bare life and more life

(which seems to evade the question of sovereignty and bare life when it comes to things: can we speak of things in terms res sacrii, the universalization of res sacrii? Of the life and death of things instead of just the life of things? Maybe we can work through this question in the preface through our pun on “Spare Life” in the title—a spare as an extra (like a spare tire), a back up moving in the direction of life, but as reduced, moving in the direction of bare life (though not Spartan) and not yet death (by trashing, selling gifting / regifting, disposing of in numerous ways). (Benjamin has a great line in “Unpacking My Library” where he shifts from “day” to “night” on the next to last page).

2 Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. --Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, (5)

The strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible.--Maurice Blanchot,

"The Last Word,” in Friendship, (252)

3 Even though Agamben begins Homo Sacer by saying that the camp is not a space of

“internment” (6), as in Foucault’s history of the prison, when he describes the “complex topology” of the camp (19), or when later describes the topology camp as a dislocating location). It is not a coincidence that Agamben makes almost the exact same critique of

Foucault on p. 4 and p. 119, nor is it a coincidence that Agamben ends his book by claiming to out have Foucauled Foucault (187) not situating biopolitics in relation to eh camp rather than sexuality. As early as the sixth page of Homo Sacer, Agamben maps his account of the camp as the “concealed nucleus of sovereign power” onto the “vanishing point” of Fouauclt’s work, namely, the camp. Agamben presents his book as a kind of large footnote to Foucault’s genealogical work on power.

4 David Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage” May 11, 2008 New

York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/business/11storage.html . See Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space (MIT, 2009)

5 David Streitfeld, “Losing a Home, Then Losing All Out of Storage” May 11, 2008 New

York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/business/11storage.html

6 http://www.ExtraSpace.com

7 http://www.PublicStorage.com

8 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 1966), and also Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,

1958).

9 For this formulation see Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy

Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 101.

10 History of Sexulaity, Technologies of Self + ANT on feel good Foucault…

11 Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Augé

12 Harvey, Dvis, Clifford, Nora et al.

13 Haraway + Latour in CI

14 Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto” + The Companion Species Manifesto + When Species

Meet… 15 reconceptualizing the symptomatic reading as well as deconstructive /psychoanalytic notions of resistance, a kind of synthesis of Althuser / Macherey and de Man.

I will just expand on it to introduce "unreada -abilitiy." Thought I would cite Weber on Benjamin's -abilities as a kind of support, though we can stress a sort of "inability" in the "unread."

16 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84.

17 Crucial forbears to our project are Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology,

Schizophrenia, and Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), Fourth

Printing; Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Juliet Fleming’s Graffiti and the Writing Arts of

Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Richard

Burt’s Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2008). Like all subsequent students of graphology, we are indebted to Goldberg’s unfolding of the project described by Derrida in Of Grammatology, see Goldberg, Writing

Matter, 16-27 especially.

18 Derrida “Of Grammatology”

19 It is possible to get advice on “how to choose a self storage unit” at How To Do

Things.com (http://www.howtodothings.com/home-garden/how-to-choose-a-self-storage- unit). Season three of Prime Suspect features a serial killer who uses a self-storage unit as the scene for his crimes. In Primer (2003), a self-storage unit is the location used for the time-travel device that anchors the sci-fi moral that messing with linearity has consequences (For Primer see the following article in The Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-10-05/film/a-primer-primer/). Steel Homes stages self- storage units as “windows into human histories,” “silent cells with their myriad objects and dust-covered furniture” which “are inscribed with past dreams, secret hopes, etc.” In documentary mode, self-storage is revealed always to be a cameo, always a screen or window for the user or reader on to the sad little adventure in linearity that is the anthropos. (For Steel Homes see http://www.docscene.org/Steel-Homes1.html).

20 Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Eagleton’s book on Benjamin

21 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology and Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, See the

Challenge of Carl Schmitt.

22 The central part of the book is a concrete, if brief, discussion of Carl Schmitt and Walter

Benjamin as thinker of the same stripe. See pp. 63-67. For a contrasting reading of

Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence, see Derrida “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion (19 ), edited and translated Gil Ajindar. The similarities between Benjamin and Schmitt have been discussed by Victoria Kahn Representations and Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception”.

23 On Human Rights, see Agamben, “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,” in Homo Sacer,

119-25 and on animal rights, see Derrida The Animal that Therefore I Am, 87-89

24 On animals, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am (Fordham UP, 2008) and The Beast and Sovereignty (2009); see also Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal

(Stanford, 2004). 25 On cyrogenics, see Wetwares We already tip our hand here, in letting the reader see that we think Agamben’s work, his reading of Schmitt, has to be read with Derrida and with(out) de Man. We lay down our cards in the conclusion.

26 See especially Agamben’s discussion of the archive and the camp in Remnants of

Auschwitz and of the camps in “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-

80. On the controversy over the camps and the problem of archiving what happened, see

James Young, The Texture of Memory and Geoffrey Hartman, Archive. See also the Errol

Morris documentary Mr. Death (200?).

27 In the State of Exception, for example, at the end of his reading of the “Force of Law,”

Agamben notes that “once again. The analogy with language is illuminating” going on to to describe the instantiation of the system of law via the langue / parole model of Ferdinand de Saussure as mediated by Emile Benveniste [Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39-40. See also

Potentialities…

28 enlist Althusser’s ISAs here

29 “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. a universal Marrano as the figure for the "aporia" of aporias that is death for Dasein (74) and "the finished forms of

Marrano culture." (74) The Marrano returns on p. 77 and p. 81 (the last page of the book).

“Marrano (of the crypto-Judaic, and of the crypto-X in general).” p. 77

it’s interesting here in which Judaism gets universalized or generalized insofar as it same a secret, encrypted. Derrida mentions that law passed in Spain in 1955 “finished” off the Marranos. So they are a dead minority.

By contrast, Agamben refers to the camps as the “hidden matrix” about “sacred veils.”

Agamben is kind of a Catholic and secular critic, who thinks it’s his job to reveal the hidden and bring it into visibility. For Derrida there is no simple movement from veiled (scared) truth to unveiled (secular truth as Catholic revealed truth). There is a secret that cannot be secreted.

30 Aramis

31 In the course of the present book, we turn to many of the later works by Jacques Derrida and Paul De Man, Freud’s early writings, the work of Bruno Latour on things, some lesser known essays by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on books, and Georges Bataille on prehistoric art and speculative realist philosophers Quentin Meillasoux and Ray

Brisseur on the arche-fossil, Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

(Palgrave, 2007) and Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of

Contingency Trans. Ray Brassier (London:Continuum, 2008).

32

Things have to be described in order to be presented but we wonder that the default genre for description remains biography. Anthropomorphism haunts cultural history of the

“lives” of things much as it does work on animals.

See Lorraine Dawson, ed. Things that Talk and ed. The Social Life of Things.

The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. Christopher Pinney, “Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that Object Come?” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 257.

Re Thing theory and the fetish and desire for more and different—cite Pietz re the end of

Border Fetishisms. Brown re wanting to escape the consumerist narrative

Cite Charis Thompson on “ontological choreography” re the shifting ontological status of beings / things as they are performed.And as we have observed, the auto- archiving protocols of the state bear close relation to those of cultural studies. Part of the explanation we think, at least within cultural studies and the movement loosely known as

“thing theory” derives from the dissemination of the word “biography” as a virtual synonym for what Arjun Appadurai calls the “social life of things,” which proceeds according to a strategic or methodological fetishism. Appadurai, it must be said, is a little uneasy about the agentive division of labor between person and thing that results. Seek after the meanings of culture, and writes Appadurai “for that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.”

But quite soon, almost immediately, he’s worried about accusations of real fetishism and so continues to say that, “thus even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view, it is the things-in- motion that illuminate their human and social context.” By this doubling or decoupling of theory and method, Appadurai adopts a particular mode of description or staging for things but avoids any rethinking of the relations between the physical, material, semiotic, or rhetorical dimensions of the relations between things and persons. People render matter lively. Matter renders historians lively. The constitutive “as if” of Appadurai’s method renders biography the zone of emergence for the agency of things, for their part that is in the process of making and manufacture, of the “history of the grammè.” The effect of such a mode of description cannot fail to linearize the phenomenon and as anthropologist of visual culture Christopher Pinney puts it, the key point might instead be that “any engagement with materiality must surely supercede the question of culture.” If, in other words, you inquire into the nature of “things” and how they come to exist, how they are made and work or fail to work, there ought to be something so profoundly disturbing or distracting about the account you provide that our usual categories of understanding are thrown into disarray. The lines by which we demarcate who or what has agency should become unfixed. Indeed, for Pinney, the condition of

“materiality [the irreducible this-ness of say this book, this briefcase, this note pad] might be conceptualized as a figural excess that can never be encompassed” by all the various historically bound codes we typically use to make sense of “things”—that is to make them speak to and of ourselves. Things resist. Reading is the story of this resistance.

In Pinney’s terms, we might say that Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism” essentially voids the instability that a conversation about matter entails and instead transforms “things” into an emblem of the power of human culture to recode matter endlessly. This is all to say that, for Appadurai, there is nothing inhuman about “things”— nothing terrifying, strange, lethal or slimy. The figural excess that is materiality appears only to disappear, locked down more tightly than ever, but now corralled into funding the spectacular readings that the collection includes, as we move by way of “things.” It is vital to note, however, that “The Cultural Biography of Things,” the lead essay to the collection, as advocated by Igor Kopytoff, takes as its founding unit of analysis the enslaved human person who is processed as a commodity. Koptyoff then abstracts this reading protocol to serve for all objects, all forms of existence, treating them, as it were, as so much “bare life.” We find this significant because Koptyoff’s strategy of description responds directly to the non-archiving or writing of enslaved human persons by offering description as the first step in a mode of commutative justice. How could we not agree? For what Koptyoff’s careful analysis demonstrates is that the turn to things in cultural studies occurs precisely as a move to supplement the experiences and the consequences of the processing of human persons as “bare life.”

Against this generic impulse to biography, we propose to read things instead as

“bio/biblio/graphies,” or things in situ, as books-cum-archives, subject to the conditions and manipulations, the flexible and shifting ontological performances, of “shelf life.”

33 The archive is both in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. See also Dragan “Arkiv Fever”.

For somewhat literal-minded response to Derrida, see Carol Steadman, Dust.

34 Agamben wants to relocate Foucault's distinction in Archeology of

Knowledge between langue and acts of speech "in the difference between language (langue) and archive: that is, not between discourse and its taking place, between what is said and the enunciation that exerts itself in it, but rather between langue and its taking place, between a pure possibility of speaking and its existence as such. (144)

The Archaeology of Knowledge is Agamben on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous Men:

What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the disjunction between the living being and the being that marks its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all biography." 143 “On the Lives of infamous Men,”

35 Agamben wants to stop division within the camp in order to arrive at a core of bare life, the barest of bare life, as it were: Agamben divides the victims of the camp into increasingly fine distinctions until he reaches the limit case, the Musselman or the witness who cannot witness, being the weakest of the weak, hence representing the central paradox of homo sacer. According to Agamben, “the empty space at the center of the camp that, in separating all life from itself, marks the point at which the citizen passes into the Staatsangegehoringe of non-Aryan descent, the on-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Musselman, that is, into a “bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life” (156-57), the barest of bare life, as it were. The remnants of Auschwitz are a matter of testimonials to what cannot be testified to: “The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in her or her being a subject. In our perspective, bare life is defined in part by the endless divisibility of life and bare life.

36 The notion that full presence cannot be manifested in the present gets reroutes as a fullpresence to some future--Lacoue Labarthe on the folk--writing in that present will only be understood in the future. The Scrolls of Auschwitz are a kind of parody of Heidegger's notion of futurity. Critique of Hedegger by Derrida at the end of Force law in line with

Lacoue-Labarthes' critique of Hiedegger in second book.

37 the culture of death” in Aporias and reads anthropology thorough Heidegger.

The second and third corollaries in Aporias (on pp. 59-62), where Derrida discusses death as the essence of the political, are particularly germane to our book in part because

Derrida mentions mass extermination and the Nazis (p. 59) while indirectly deNazifiying

Being and Time (since he argues that is no particular politics of death inscribed in

Heidegger's account of dying (as demise rather than as perishing) "There is no politics of death--of death properly speaking. The existential analysis does not claim any competence (and, indeed, it has none) for dealing with political problems of burial, of the cult of the dead, and, above all, of war and of medicine. True, historical anthropologies do not have much to say on the subject, particularly on the most original forms that it can take today. Think for example of the hostage war . . . one of the irreducible givens of modernity and of its treatment of speed modes of transportation [aviation] and of communication

[telephone, mass media, television, etc.]). Insofar as it depends upon this technical modernity, the hostage war also presupposes a massive economico-cultural heterogeneity among several experiences of the relation to death, to the individual's mortality, and to his place in society. A given society cannot treat its individual subjects in the same way as another society can. One can do no more than recall, without exaggerated pathos, the space of a politics of death or of mass extermination, the developments of a modern hostage war that probably began with kidnapping (the cannot be ay kind of kidnapping, in the strict sense, without automobiles, without a certain condition of posts, telephones, and telecommunications, for example), then developed in Europe under Nazism and has recently expanded to worldwide dimensions. The difference in the treatment of the individual or mass death has consequences for modern war: it is not in the same way, even if it is called surgical, that one bombards Iraq or Sarajevo in the name of international law; and the disproportion in the evaluation of the enemies' deaths continues to change constantly, just as 'dying for one's country' has changed. The same mutation has transformed medicine and modern bio-genetics." (59-60)

One must indeed die and die well. If fact, if not by right, and like the anthropo- thanatologies mentioned above, the existential analysis of death has nothing to say on this matter that is not its subject. At least this is what the existential analysis says, for it is not certain that Heidegger does not ultimately gives us a discourse on the best, indeed the most proper and the most authentic, relation to dying, de bene moriendi." p. 59; 60

Even if Heidegger does indirectly give such a discourse on dying well, it has nothing to do the National Socialism and mass extermination (apparently).

38 On files and the archive see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. And

Vismann, Files: Law and Technology.

39 The archive especially as it concerns death, may have the structure of as the aporia in

Derrida’s account of Being and Time in Aporias and the impossible topography of the aporia. What Derrida calls an “aporography” may be extended to include the impasses of the archive as an aporarchivography, especially given that death can only be figured, read through metaphor. “topological conditions when the speed of the panopticization of the earth—seen, inspected, surveyed, and transported by satellite images—even affects time, nearly annuls it, and indeed affects the space of passage between certain borders . . . .”

Derrida, Aporias "strange topography of edges" Derrida, Aporias (80) Derrida takes up

“Insofar as they are ontical research, biology and anthropology have already and always decided. They have decided without even asking the

question, . . this precipitation . . . leads to an apparently

empirical or technojuridical confusions about what the sate of death

is, confusions that are increasingly serious today. These questions

of legitimacy . . . are no longer only questions concerning hte philosophical order of de jure and de facto. They impinge upon legal

medicine, the politics of gerontology, the norms concerning the

surgical prolongation of life and euthanasia, and upon several

questions that will be addressed later." Aporias, pp. 28-29

"In short, across all these differences, the dominant feeling for everyone is that death, you see, is no longer what it used to be. And who will deny it? And who would not recognize here the crossing of borders? For if death figures this theme or this fundamental concept, which guarantees the very possibility of the existential analysis, it is also and first of all because death takes a figure." (58)

Hamlet as haunted book—Derrida’s ghost dance—film as haunted medium.

40 “(The calligraphy parchments that Miklos Nyiszli mentions have not been found.)”107

Another identical message has been buried in the yard of Crematorium II (108-09).

Another version of the uncanny—two notes, but no box.

41 The bound book Derrida discusses Freud’s father gave to him from “an ark with fragments” suggests that the book and its container, the ark, are two different things. But, following Derrida, we know that the archivist sometimes confuses herself with the archeologist, such that the archive is an “anarchive,” the archivist’s desire to find the moment of impression prior to division leads him to enact what she mistakenly thinks she is reenact( the instant the body or writing machine made contact with the support, whether paper or volcanic ash, never existed). But if being an archivist always means recovering even missing data, then the archive begins to resemble the book.

all framed what I will call Derrida's dead metaphors that signal his never articulated as such hauntology of the book: there's a tension in Derrida's writing between articulating a concept that is not a concept (arche-writing) through metaphors taken from "writing" that are nearly always taken from printed books. The supplement becomes an appendix, for example. Sometimes he puts the metaphor is scare quotes. The signature is not necessarily the name of the artist, the name being outside language and outside print.

Derrida never thematized the relation between his metaphors from empirical kinds of writing for his non-phenomenal writing. Deconstruction is indifferent to empirical differences between writing systems since arche-writing in not reducible to any of them.

Yet the hauntology of Derrida's arche-writing can be read precisely in these dead metaphors that mark the limit of his interest in the history of writing, even though he says he wants to go there (at the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing”). The signature as image. Signature attached

See Derrida "restitutions" piece of paper—Duchamp painting with paper clip

Jan van Huyns--signature etched on the table trompe l'oeil

He doesn't because the book has become spectral. He ends Freud's writing pad to be empirical in order to trash Freud for failing to, not doing etc. Derrida is anti-apparatus

(mystic writing pad) even though he draws on metaphors for various kinds of instrumental apparatuses. It's a weird very judgmental long paragraph about Freud's failings near the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” But the book, like the archive is spectral, hence is never closed. But it isn’t open either. Authority both increased and decreased by the addition and endless of the archive. If the same holds true of the library (as one kind of archive), it may hold true for the book as well. Derrida discusses the text and the substrate or subjectile (artaud book; Archive Fever; Paper machine) but never puts any pressure on a distinction between the texts ands it protection or storage device. Open is strictly a metaphor for the archive—never closed. Of the secret itself, there can be no archive. The secret is the very ash of the archive, the place where it no longer makes any sense to say “the very ash” . . . That is what this literature attests. (100)

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what may have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or his ‘life.’ Burned without him, without remains and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash. (101)

Derrida’s ashole of the archive as his “meta-phor-writing” of the arche-writing that

“precedes” speech and (empirical) writing.

“an incompleteness and a future that belong to the normal time of scientific progress but a specifically Jewish archive is not of the order such a relative incompletemess. It is nolonger only the provisional indetermination that opens the ordinary field of a scientific work in progress and always unfinished, in particular because new archives can stul be discovered, cout of secrecy or the pritvate sphere, so as to undergo new interpretations. It is no longer a question of the same time of the same field, and the relationship to the archive. (994, 52)

The truth is spectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible by explanation. (87) The chain of substitutions (even the metaphor of chain) that allows deconstruciton to crate a non-binary structuring of binary structures and hteir exclusions

Archive

“There is no metaarchive.” (67)

Archive fever, a be sick but to be in need of archives

Archive fever means “to burn with a passion. It is never put to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsively repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (91)

There is an incessant tension . . . between the archive and archaeology. They will always be close to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in their co-implication , and yet radically incompatible, heterogeneous, than say, different with regard to the origin, in divorce with regard to the arkhe/ (92)

In his essay on Jensen’s novel Gradiva, about an archeologist who hallucinates the ghost of a young woman named Gradiva an ancient Roman who died when Mt Vseussius erted in Pompeii, Freud wants “explain the haunting of the archaeologist with a logic of repression . . . claims again to bring to light a more originary origin that that of the specter.

In the outbidding he wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist . . . He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one the other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of literature and those of classical objective science . . . an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression. . . . In its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the impression. . . . An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible form the impression of hits imprint,

Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! (97-98)

Derrida implicitly ties this desire for no detachment to Shaprio’s desire for total attachment in “Restitutions.” But attention to books on their scenes of (un)reading, figuration, like

Annuciation of Master Flamelle—reading by heart—fisting the text—open and closed window casements. Is the page covering her fingers, protecting her, linking their mystery and placement to her other hand over her heart—the inwardness of text and heart match.

Or is are the fingers penetrating the page, holding it between her fingers so that the page is hidden behind her fingers, in which case penetration of reading, and heart is linked to the mystery of concept. Mary not entirely covered or protected but has to penetrate , do violence, as she too is “raped” by God through the word, the ear. What is being opened and shut in this story of messianic announcement? What kind of narrative is being told here? What is the relation between the holy spirit and the book, reading the fold over?

Derrida talks about the way the metaphor of writing keeps returning in Plato (and

Rousseau and Saussure) at key moments to keep the outside outside and the inside inside. “The scriptural ‘metaphor’ thus crops every time difference and relation are irreducible” (163)

But the metaphor is not single—letters emerge in the quotation from Socrates on p. 163 in relation to division (three classes) and affixing (that results in a unified collection)

“in the end he found a number of the things, and affixed to the whole collection, as to each single member of it, the name “letters.” It was because he realized that none of s could get to know one of the collection all by itself, in isolation from all the rest, that he conceived of the “letter” as a kind of bond of unity uniting as it were all these sounds into one ad he gave utterance to the expression ‘art of letters,’ implying that there was one art tat dealt with sounds.

So there are two moments of “writing” as metaphor, not only letters but affixing (letters become names). Things become members. The collection establishes property, boundaries of a physical space and a human body.

In a certain sense, one can see how this section could have been set apart as an appendix, a superadded supplement. And despite all that calls for it in the preceding steps, it is true that Plato offers it somewhat as am amusement a superadded supplement. (73)

The entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss have done without. In truth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other.

(67)

Spectral analysis

Overture as over-ture and overt-ure.

Hors-d’ourvre—Derida’s movement istypically one of exteriorization—separation, framing, goinginbut coming backform what unseen outside? Like the lace in van Goh’s shoes— back of the shoes or back of the painitng. The utside is what is hidden.Interiroirzation is like minturization and magnification aat the same time—a zoom effect.

Hover ture Neither quite overt nor over.

Temporality, temporaization gets subordinated, erased by spatial metaphors. No first or before, except under erasure.

Sous—rature.

But there is a fix here, a hit of deconstructive delivery that involves a reattachment disorder, a skipping over repair, re-storation as re-storing—in the archive.

.

Quand il ecrit: “A Guest + a host + a Ghost”, il nous parle strictement—et dialectiquement

—d’une operation visuelle, pusique recevoir plus etre recu donnet en cette logigue apparaitre (tel un fantome). Cela pourrait etre une defintion de l’aura. Mais Duchamp, comme on le sait, nommait l’apparaition un moule, “natif,” et “negatif”: l’aphorisme nous parliat donc de la reversibilite et de l’empreiente.

Les deux duchampiens sure le langage possodent une incontestable valeur heuristique: ilsont le plus souvent des hypotheses topiques lancees en vue d’une transformation perceptuelle du lieu and et du corps. Come si juer a “retourner” les mots permettait de saisir quelque chose de la reversibiltie du lieu. Et, lorsque Duchamp aborde cette reversibilite, c’est le motif du contact qui, immanquablement, apparait: par exemple dans l’expression “haut-relief et bas-fonds, Inc” or semble posee la question de ‘l’entreprise d’incoporation” par quoi l’artiste prend en charge la mise en reversibilite du haut et du bas, du relief et du fond, come on le bot dans tant de ses propres ouevres.

Didi-Herman, La resemblance par contact, 255

Impressions of auras and of death masks. Carlo Ginzburg ignores the singularity of impressions(318) see dicsusion of Anemci

Cinema, pp. 317

She never considers book as spirits in her model of power, which is just the same old,

Greenblattian colonialism—mastery—without even the writing lesson—just the burning of the manuscript. Power is instrumental, the book is instrumental (theatrical illusionism), and spirits are unrelated to texts. Vanished into air thin air

Spirits as actors, but actors unrelated to texts

L’empreinte redouble.(239)

Mais on peut teneter un cheminement a travers quelques exexmples, qui nous feront tres vite osciller entre diverses manieres, pour ’empreinte, de reproduire, mais aussie d’alterer et de deconstuire tout ce qu’elle touché: par dedoublement, pare redoublement, par renversementL’empreinte dedouble. D’une part, elle cree un double, un semblable; d’autre part, elle cree un dedoublement, un duplicity, un symmetrie dans la representation

(pensons seulement aux planches du test de Roschach, definies comme “formes fortuites,”maid done le processus deformation, ces taches dupliquees par pliage et part contact, cree la souveraine pregnance d’une symmetrie (230)

Derrida’s almost self-reference to The Factor of truth in restitutions (264) linking divisibility of the letter to the pair of shoes, but he doesn’t explicitly give the reference. His inconsistent practice of self-citation, of not giving references in his lectures to other texts, is a way of dealing with detachment, attachment in his own oeuvre.

His tropological substitution of a term like arche-writing fails to cognize or recognize the death of metaphor through which he arrives at a meta-phor-writing exteriority as deconstructive deconstructor.

Derrida does not quite thematize this process whereby division and detachment crate layers that connect, dropping of top of each other (not necessarily in an ordered manner, as if in a specular doubling or mirror stage but in a manner like the bar of cinema which must exist between frames for the projected image to be viewed). But Did-Humeberan hasa very Catholic notion of the symmetrical, the pregnancy, the aura, the scared, the tactile—the impression yokes the work of art ot he sacred, even if htat work is modernist.

Hence he frames Duchamp with prehistoric cave paintings, hten Catholic Renaissance

(Otalian) castings auras, death masks, and so on.

He leaves out Batailles base materialism, anyreistance to form in formlessness.

Attachment becomes tactility of the unseen image—like having a missing limb you still feel.

Note for Anemci Cinema shows the title written backwards.

Dominic reading is just like the Bibliomaniac. What does using mean? Spitzer uses the word “user” in Linguistics and Literary History: drug use and utillatarian—doesn’t undersand its own addiction ot the hit.

Follow out Derrida’s call for a spectral analysis in Restitutions.” The restoration of internal purity must thus reconstitute, recite . . . that to which which the pharmakon should not have had to be [added and attached] like a literal parasite: a letter installing itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to distort [like static, = bruit paratiste] the pure audibility of a voice. Such are the relations between the writing supplement and the logos-zoon. In order to cure the latter of the pharmakon and get rid of the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of logic itself, of ‘good sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being what it its, the outside is outside and the inside. Writing must thus returns being what should have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an excess.

(128)

And we might put related pressure on Derrida’s real and virtual (in Demeures) as well as on subjectile as virtual in Paper Machine. He leaves the real too quickly. A variety of attachment disorders that haunt the book’s physical materiality as well as sits immateriality. So hauntology gets one into a bidding war with Derrida and historians of the book—who can be more material and at the same most able to theorize consequent issues of unread -ability.

What holds for the vanishing of the book holds as well for painting. Latour essay on digital image—where is the painting? But that was already a question about the real painting for

Richard Wollheim.

Where is the book?

Discourse of discursive enclosure, subjectivity, intellectual property, copyright and so on that emerges in the 18th century is accompanied by recoil effects—forgery, new

Shakespeares (Bacon), new family romances). Include Shakespeare’s deaths as well as his lives. The frame, ales a world of supplementary desoeurverement. It cuts out but also sews back together. By an invisible lace which passes thorugh the canvass, passes ouinto it and hten out of it. Hors-doeuvre in the oueuvre, as oeuvre (here the deadmetpahor allows for the equation “as” and placement within—a mise-en-abyme or Chinese boxes structure). The laces go through the eyelets [which also go in pairs] and pass on to the insviisble side.

And when they come back form it, do they emerge from the other side of the leather or the other side of the canvass? (304) Truth in Painting

“Restitutions”

A similar illogic at work in B Johnson’s addition and typographic miniature of synoyms for

Outwork: prefacing in her translation.

Extends to graphic design, graphic layout

Where shall we stop? What is it to stop?

Restitutions, 132

I should likke to have a spectral analysis made of the pair, and of its always being detached . . . 360

Commenting on Shapiro’s title “The Still Life as Personal Object,” Derrida writes:

Here it would be visibly detached personal object (having to do with the ear), like a picture of shoes, in an exhibiton, detached form the body of a dead subject. But coming back [as a ghost]/ Coming back alive to the dead man, who from then on is living, himself [a ghost] returning. Causing to come back. Here is this “personal object,” detachable and coming back t the ghost. 360

But did this spectral analysis concern the real shoes or the shoes in the painting?

376 truth as reattachment (279) which takes one underneath, to the other side, reversible side of the canvass as well as what is on its surface. The “strange loop . . . of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than the united shoes, but after a sort of sketched out knot—it forma a circle at ts end, an open circle, as though provisionally, ready to close like pincers or a key ring. A leash. In the bottom right- hand corner where it faces, symmetrically, the signature “Vincent,” inread and underlined.

It occupies there a place very commonly reserved for the artist’s signature. As though, on the other side, n the other corner, on the other edge, but symetrically, (almost) ona level with it, it stood in place of the signature, as it took the (empty, open) place of it.

(277)

If , as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, in an important nuance, the wearer of the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of the painting to the signature .. of the shoes to the owner, or even of Vincent to Van Goh, in short a complement, a general reattachment as truth in painting (279)

See my essay, Backing Up the Virtual Bayeux Tapestries:

Attachment Disorders, or Turning Over the Other Side of the Underneath

Detachment is intolerable. 283

If, as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, an important nuance, the wearer of the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of the painting to the signature (to the sharpness, the pointure, that the pierces the canvas), of the shoes to their owner, or even of Vincent to Van Gogh, in short a complement, a general reattachment as truth in painting? . . . . No more detachment: the shoes are no longer attached-to-Van-Gogh, they are Vincent himself, who is undetachable from himself.

They do not even figure one of his parts but his whole presence gathered, pulled tight, contracted into itself, with itself, in proximity with itself: a parousia. --Jacques Derrida,

“Restitutions,” The Truth in Painting, 279; 369 A kind of indivisibility remains in the concept of attachment—he assumes that the lace is unbroken. But its overuse means that it will break, the knot cannot be tied, the loop formed, the signature signed. The lace is divisible (potentially) like the letter—but empirically—it breaks, has to be retied, eventually replaced. Bu the broken lace acan be fixed—can break even several times before it becomes too short to function. One could even not use all the eyelets.

So the attachment of the lace could be become, if one were really poor or cheap, more and more fragile, at risk of breaking again.

We have remained in these uncanny halls, where they we try to transform their profound emotion into artistic creation; not to find a solution to the puzzle of human essence, but rather to a new formulation of the eternal question, why the fate of creative men lies in the region of eternal, everlasting unrest, whether they find their reflected image in Hell,

Purgatory, or Paradise.

O (k)no(w)

42 Georges Didi-Huberman Image in Spite of All (Chicago, Chicago UP, 2008 trans. Shane

B. Lillis). Didi-Huberman draws on the many comparisons made by many victims between the camps and Dante’s Hell. Yet the Hell to which he refers must also include the archive from which they are stored and (some would say “snatched”) allowed to be exhibited in

2001. Once archival reconstruction and exhibition begins, the referent of Hell, itself a literary metaphor, may no longer confined to the camps themselves.

43 In speaking of the Rudolf Hoess’s, the Comnadant of Auschwitz, presentation of an of photographs taken at Auschwitz to otto Thiernick, the Nazi Minister of Justice, Didi-

Huberman, writes that “this use of photography verged on a pornography of killing” (24).

See also Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Holocauste ordinaire: Histoires d'usurpation : “Dans cet essai poignant, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat dénonce avec une précision implacable la pornographie de la mort et du massacre ainsi que cette volonté destructrice de toujours vouloir "parler à la place de l'autre" afin de mieux l'exclure. In Image in Spite of All, Didi-

Huberman notes that Godard had shown in 1968 images of totalitarianism and pornography together but does not discuss Godard’s use of pornographic images in

Histoire(s) du cinema.

44 Errol Morris’s Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Letucher (1996) and Agamben’s

Remnants of Auschwitz (1994) mark watershed transitions: Agamben divorces ethics from legal questions in the first chapter and turns to Foucault’s conception of the archive in his last chapter to best refute revisionists, and Morris focusing on both a trial of a Canadian revisionist tried for hate speech after he claimed in print that the holocaust didn’t happen as well as evidence Fred Leutcher surreptitiously gathered from the ruins of Auschwitz-

Birkenau to support the defendant. Morris interviews the Auschwitz archivist and Nazi documents to refute Leuchter. On the doubling legal and buereuacratic archive as hisotircal research archive in the nineteenth century, see Sven Spieker, the Big Archive:

Art from Bureacracy (MIT, 2008)

45 As Rudolf Gasche writes, “if knowledge remains on the threshold of a responsible decision, if a decision is a decision, on the condition that it exceeds simple consciousness and simple theoretical determination, the responsible self must, in principle, be unable— that run the risk of not being able –to fully account for the singular act constitutive of a responsible decision. It follows from this that responsibility is necessarily linked to the secret—not, of course, in the form of withholding knowledge regarding a specific decision but in the form of an essential inability to ultimately make the reasons for one’s actions fully transparent. . . . But, while a decision that that is based merely on knowledge annuls responsibility, a decision that forgoes knowledge and defies the demand to give reasons is not without problems that threaten responsibility as well.” “European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007), 307.

46 (not limited to Foucault’s account, that Agamben relies on in Remnants of Auschwitz)

47 There would not even be any space for the aporia because of a lack of topographical conditions or, more radically, because of a lack of the topological condition. A subquestion to this limitless question would concern what affects these topographical repetition and

“quasi-technical reproducibility” (33)

48 Presumably Didi-Huberman has in mind WB’s letter to GS.

49 He avoids the moment of decision, of taking responsibility for the decision (which is not a more choice ceaseless struggle ethos against the powers [of] monstra, the monster of savagery.

Didi-Huberman wants an operable machine that guarantees its ethics from the start but ends up bankrupting the archive, melting down, if not burning up, the images that remain.

50 Jacques Rançiere, The Future of the Image; Jacques Rançiere, Film Fables; Georges

Didi-Huberman Image in Spite of All (Chicago, Chicago UP, 2008 trans. Shane B. Lillis).

51 For a reading of the tattoo as a mode of writing not yet identified with the Holocaust, see

Fleming, Graffiti, 79-112.

52 Foucault on drugs

53 Similarly, endnote 16 (113) links Walter Benjamin’s briefcase manuscript of the lost manuscripts in The Instant of My Death.

54 Derrida may be creating an almost invisible link between himself, de Man, and Blanchot, even if Derrida has stood in the line of fire of very different firing squads from those of

Blanchot and de Man. Hence the postscript and division of textual territories. 55 "This haunting is the passion itself." (72)

56 In addition to the screenplay reference, Derrida writes: "(One can imagine someone showing a photograph: look at me at this age, when I was a young man: I still remember it, the young man I will have been)" (58) and “Freeze-frame in the unfolding of a film in a movie camera: the soldiers are there, they no longer move, neither does the young man, an eternal instant, another eternal instant" (74).

57 by tracing the briefcase topos back to the Surrealist moment of Duchamp's box in a valise and the storage of Duchamp artifacts by Joseph Cornell in what he called the

Duchamp dossier, discovered only after Cornell's death.

58 analog broadcasting ended yesterday? We have finally gone digital. So RW chapter could also set up the crisis of the digital and reengage the issue of narrating media transitions we will have set up in the Tempest chapter. And RW's death would set up Perec, as a different, Videodrome sort of entry into life after death. And the another gripping aspect of your chapter's attention to traffic networks is that it helps us get a better foothold on "things" by grounding them as it were in traffic networks, in mobility. (An endnote on Tati's Playtime will work right in and connect back up with the carousel discussion in the intro.

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