Richard Burt and Julian Yates

Introduction

Is it therefore a special reading

which exculpates itself as a

reading by posing every guilty

reading the very question that

unmasks its innocence, the

mere question of its innocence:

what is it to read?

Louis Althusser, Lire le capital,

(15)1

1. Welcome to your Box

1 Althusser’s deconstructive impulse in the ISA essay in Lenin and Philosophy

and Other Essays, the “continuous reading process” as the repressed part of the

essay no one ever acknowledges.

1

Perhaps you have one.2 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

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.3

2

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.4 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

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.5

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,

3

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.6 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.

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

You are, like most subjects, a “capital fellow.” 7 Why not then prosecute your

4

advantage and embark on a feel-good Foucauldian regime of self-optimizing

rationality that will make possible more use values.8 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.9 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

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

5

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

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.10 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

6

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.11 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

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.12

2. Self-Storage Unit as Unread –ability

7

By turning from bare life to shelf-life, we mean to redefine bare life as life that

is lived virtually, as paradoxical practices of reading and writing to death as a way

of (bare) life, of reorganizing and reshelving as practices of resistant to reading

and archiving, or what we call “unread –ability.”13 The affective hit provided by

“self-storage” derives not simply from their soon-to-be-dated but not yet worn off

novelty, their “Schein,” [shine] 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.14 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 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.

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 to be

read.

“This residence [demeures] harbors the essential archive of modernity. In the

genial and genealogical economy of an elliptical narrative that occupies no more

space than a missive, in the absolute brevity of an event that did not arrive, so to

speak, in what arrived without arriving, the entire memory of European modernity

8

comes to be metonymized. There is here the genius of the witness who reminds

us that the testimonial act is poetic or it is not, from the moment it must invent its

language and form itself in an incommensurable performative.” (82-83)

What is (Re)Called Reading?

I’m thinking of the question raised in the introduction, “where did reading go?” We

could pun on library recall to allude to Heidegger’s question on thinking.

Whereas materialist culture critics tend to skip over the box, the storage unit, in

order to get immediately to the physical, empirical thing that is the thing, our

interest in things lies elsewhere. We read things tropologically by first staging

them topologically in a relation dynamic between inside and outside, a desire to

open what is closed, and that generates what we call paralinear reading, a

practice of flipping the box over, looking at it from side to side, accepting that the

box can never be opened, that all we have to read are surfaces.15 Reading as

the resistance to reading does not close off or close down reading but pushes

reading off in new direction, failure thereby becoming a productive practice of

parareading, or reading around, moving from quotations serving as links between

texts and that necessitate treating texts as things in storage units.

Closed reading is re-turning to texts you already read and now reread, but

not necessarily with a deeper understanding (as if reading could be narrated in

linear, progressive form) but as a returning of the screw of interpretation, to

paraphrase Shoshana Feldman, a returning yet again that may seem to be as

9

much a renewal and reopening of the text as it does a belated return to what you

missed in your earlier (re)reading(s).16

Un-Folding Our Cards: Topos-ography

As our opening instance of s/h/elf-help indicates, we are interested in how

the phenomenon of “self-storage” might signal an orientation to reading, and

16 See , for example, the reproduction of part of the preface from The Rhetoric of

Romanticism as the epigraph to the Bibliography in The Resistance to Theory

(121),

2 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html

March 16, 2010

Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit

By PATRICIA COHEN

Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently

exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and

electronically produced drafts of his novels.

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display

at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten

journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The

18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers

10

specifically to reading as necessarily haunted or shot through by other reading

positions, readers, and readings. Benjamin and Adorno provide us with a window

on to what me might name the world of infra-reading or of reading’s relationship

to itself, staging their libraries as topoi, tropic relays in their pursuit of knowledge.

and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized

and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set

of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering,

“born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form

— are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments,

sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors,

are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on

floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster

than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do

survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older

equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s

simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

11

For us, then, Benjamin and Adorno designate a way of reading that is alive to the

angles, to the mediation that is s/h/elf-help. Indeed, language is a medium,

according to Benjamin, and here we come to the third front, the bureaucratization

of the knowledge production in the humanities, the evangelistic invitation to

replace thinking with working, texts with data, reading with data processing—

dispensing thereby with what passes as matter or medium in an immanence of

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to

fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling

through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make

that material accessible.

“It’s certainly one of those issues that keeps a lot of people awake

at night,” said Anne Van Camp, the director of the Smithsonian

Institution Archives and a member of a task force on the economics of

digital preservation formed by the National Science Foundation, among

others.

Though computers have been commonly used for more than two decades,

archives from writers who used them are just beginning to make their

way into collections. Last week, for instance, the Harry Ransom Center

at the University of Texas, Austin, announced that it had bought the

archive of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Emory

opened an exhibition of its Rushdie collection in February, and last

12

communication or revelation.17

Reading Out of the Box

The archive is an irreducible condition of reading, a condition that demands we

conceptualize reading not only as the resistance to reading “the text” that will

year, not long before his death, John Updike sent 50 5 ¼-inch floppy

disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “We don’t

really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital

material. “We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks,

and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she

added.

Among the challenges facing libraries: hiring computer-savvy

archivists to catalog material; acquiring the equipment and expertise

to decipher, transfer and gain access to data stored on obsolete

technologies like floppy disks; guarding against accidental

alterations or deletions of digital files; and figuring out how to

organize access in a way that’s useful.

At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a

choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the

13

reach certain impasses, (the answering message keeps playing after the person

who recorded it has died, just keep repeating) but as a question of filing, boxing,

storing, (re)calling error, and (mis)recognition (again none of this is reducible to

the mechanics of retrieval—information processing). and in distinction to the

state's always operational auto-archiving of persons).

look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s

particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative

process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of

Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, said that the archivists

decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the

original computer environment.

Mr. Rushdie started using a computer only when the Ayatollah

Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa drove him underground. “My writing has got

tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the

mechanical act of re-typing endlessly,” he explained during an

interview while in hiding. “And all the time that was taken up by that

mechanical act is freed to think.”

He added: “I had this kind of fetish about presenting clean copy. I

don’t like presenting my publisher with pages with lots of

crossings-out and scribbling. So I would be manic at the end of typing

a page where actually I didn’t want to change anything, not at all.”

14

Part of the reason we will go on to discuss media that includes printed books,

illuminated manuscripts, oil paintings, photography, theater, television, YouTube,

and films (in analog media such as video and laserdisc and in digital media such

as DVD and Blu-ray) is in order to address the question of medium specificity

and so refuse the reduction of mediating technologies to the opening of some

putatively neutral or dispensable “black box.” By contrast, for us, s/helf-life

Some of the early files chronicle Mr. Rushdie’s self-conscious

analysis of how computers affected his work. In an imaginary dialogue

with himself that he composed in 1992 when he was writing “The Moor’s

Last Sigh,” he wrote about choosing formatting, fonts and spacing: “I

am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed

at this size and spacing.

“Oh, my God, suppose it looks terrible?”

“Oh, my God, yeah. And doesn’t this look wrong?”

“Where’s the paragraph indent thing?”

“I don’t know. I will look.”

“How about this? Is this good for you?”

15

necessarily draws on and thematizes the properties of different media to gather

differently encoded objects that might become or be actualized as differently

performed or configured “gatherings” or “things.”18 Indeed, it is difficult to know by

what logic we could separate the medium from the gathering. So, our collection

of heterogeneous materials and media generates a series questions about what

many perceive as a crisis or promise of digitalization: How many narratives of

“A lot better. How about fixing the part above?”

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the

screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and

find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.)

They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The

Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial

comment.

“I know of no other place in the world that is providing access

through emulation to a born-digital archive,” said Erika Farr, the

director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library

at Emory. (The original draft is preserved.)

To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is

equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen

and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors

to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak

16

media transition, digitalization being the most recent, are there to spin? Forms

appear to create a set of impoverished set of narratives about transitions

between media. The science-fiction disaster film is one such version, as are

prehistoric disaster films, both of which threaten the extinction of homo sapiens.

We are asking whether the impoverished narrative of media transitions can be

expanded, complicated, multiplied, or otherwise renewed also as a question of

House.”

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the

context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr

said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact

of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would

require seeing the original computer images.

It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences

by matching which Web sites a writer visited on a particular day with

the manuscript he or she was working on at the time.

Michael Olson, the digital collections project manager at Stanford

University, said that the only people who really had experience with

excavating digital information were in law enforcement. “There aren’t

a lot of archives out there capturing born-digital material,” he said,

referring to the process of extracting all data accurately from a

device.

17

genre--noir novels and science fiction. Can one tear / turn / kindle / burn a new

page in the genre bound narratives of the book as medium?

The newness of new media

WB history of technology is not chronological but punctuated by cuts, by modes

of abeyance. Shein. The new is a rhetorical effect, a resource, rather than a

condition.

Located in Silicon Valley, Stanford has received a lot of born-digital

collections, which has pushed it to become a pioneer in the field.

This past summer the library opened a digital forensics laboratory —

the first in the nation.

The heart of the lab is the Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device,

nicknamed FRED, which enables archivists to dig out data, bit by bit,

from current and antiquated floppies, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, computer

tapes and flash memories, while protecting the files from corruption.

(Emory is giving the Woodruff library $500,000 to create a computer

forensics lab like the one at Stanford, Ms. Farr said.)

With the new archive from David Foster Wallace, the Ransom Center now

has 40 collections with born-digital material, including Norman

Mailer’s. Gabriela Redwine, an archivist at Ransom, is impressed by

Emory’s digital emulation, but said the center was not pursuing that

kind of reproduction at the moment.

18

I, however, had something else

in mind; not to retain the new

but to renew the old. And to

renew the old—in such a way

that I myself, the newcomer,

“Our focus is preservation and storage now,” she said. “Over the last

couple of years, we’ve been learning about computer forensics.”

The center is trying to raise endowment money to hire a digital

collections coordinator while Ms. Redwine works on preservation and

processing. In the meantime, most of the digital material is off

limits to researchers.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 24, 2010

An article on March 16 about digital archives from Salman Rushdie on

display at Emory University misstated part of the name of the Emory

library that has the archives. It is the Manuscript, Archives, and

Rare Book Library — not the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book

Collection.

19

would make what was old my

own—was the task of the

collection that filled my drawer.

--Walter Benjamin, SW 3, p. 403

The book develops our account of unread -ability by going back to the decades

just prior to World War Two, in Chapter One, “Articles Lost: Toys, Topoi, and the

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html

3 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

4 http://www.ExtraSpace.com

5 http://www.PublicStorage.com

6 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).

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

7 For this formulation see Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money,

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

20

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 capitalism rewires space,

101.

9 Endnote to self—tie this point to The Counterfieters and Given Time—the subject as

accumulation, as capitalized, versus divested, ash. The importance of the notion of

resistance as we use it—Derridean—is the resistance and reading as a way of

managing resistance offers no guarantees. It will not free you from the

continuous necessity of reading—there’s no exit, you can’t get no clean—it’s a

condition of living, that is life, and you will have paid your money. It’s not about

capitalization, or a calculus of the subject—see Given Time and Gift of Death—

the subject as a capital seller—its a pure expenditure—that’s what living is—you

don’t get their life back, you don’t get a refund.

Materialists want to feel done, but they want to have the hallucinogenic

experience of the real that it is actually phenomenalized in the facsimile.

You cannot be done with reading—when you think you’re done, you’re a

consumer, or in ideology—you just bought something without knowing what

you’ve ought or done.

21

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

Case of Benjamin Walter,” taking up the infamous story of the missing briefcase

Unconscious likes to rest, it doesn’t want to be put into play.10 Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, Augé

11 Harvey, Dvis, Clifford, Nora et al.

12 Haraway + Latour in CI

13 Following out the logic of Agamben’s deconstruction of citizen and stateless

person that follows from the virtualization of homo sacer, we maintain the political

space is not the camp bt the storage unit; we maintain further that the one who

lives a more or less bare life cannot properly be reduced to the refugee, the exile,

the detainee, the prisoner, the soldier, and so on. We will contrast Agamben’s

figure of bare life—the Muselmann, in Remnants of Auschwitz and Homo Sacer

—to Derrida’s figure of death—the Maranno, in Aporias. We will also consider

academics I the humanities as ronin or picaro figures.

14?? By redefining life and death as irreducible to organic and inorganic matter, we

are introduce into our paradoxical of writing to death as away of living life virtually

virtual bare life including within it death as a “destinerrant” notion rather than final

22

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

of destination, even, as we shall see in Chapter Five, when it comes to films

more or less about deportations of French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

While we retain the concept of the victim without making sacrifice the

condition of meaning production, we maintain that defining the conditions for the

sacralized victim is a problem both for the victim and the victimizer (who faces

bureaucratic and epistemological problems of classification), and even more so

for the victimizing victim. Agamben’s account of four lines in Pindar’s fragment

169--”The nomos, sovereign of all, / Of mortals and immortals, / Leads with the

strongest hand, / Justifying the most violent” as “a scandalous confiscation of the

two essentially antithetical principles that the Greeks called Bia and Dike,

violence and justice” (31) and his reading of Hoelderlin’s translation of a line in

Pindar’s fragment as ”doing violence to the most just” (33) runs parallel to the

problem of divine violence (always hidden, never recognizable as such) Walter

Benjamin formulated at the end of in “Critique of Violence.” (Jacques Derrida

goes “post-script-al” on Benjamin’s essay in the post-scriptum at the end of

Derrida’s “Force of Law”: Derrida wonders if Benjamin implies that the Holocaust

could be regarded as an act of divine violence.) Moreover, we maintain that the

virtualization of bare life renders inoperative a distinction between “real” nomads”

23

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

and metaphorical nomads, between the auto-archiving of stateless persons and

of citizens. Agamben’s mapping of a structural analogy between Carl Schmitt’s

account of the state of exception in Political Theology onto Benjamin’s account of

divine violence in “Critique of Violence” in order to same the are the same

demonstrates for us the limits of Agamben’s structuralist rather than

deconstructive mode of critique. We find Agamben’s assertion that Derrida

misunderstands the essay, an assertion Agamben makes in a subordinate clause

and does not bother to defend, one of the most bizarre instances of his more or

less controlled practice of “unreading.”

15 We could also use the Wunderblock turned toy building block or Bildung block

as a reversal of the box metaphor. It’s unpackable box that can be nevertheless

boxed, put in a toy box. But the block offers resistance in a way that box seems

not to do. I just opened Ronell’s Stupidity and see she refers to Schlegel’s

fragments as “writing blocs” [sic], p.149.

17 See Peter Stallybrass, “Against Working.”

18 Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1937) enacts this process, slows it down as we move

from the movie theater that can’t show the film because the electricity has gone,

24

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.”19

Our reading of Benjamin’s briefcase leads us to argue that

incomprehension, incapacity, and other kinds of space shortages are what

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.20

to the source of the power failure, sand, and to a wonderful exchange between

policemen disguised as grocers about oranges, cabbage, banana skin outside

the movie theater, as a kind of short-hand for the medium of film.

20 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

25

As Chapter Four, “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

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.

 

19 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.

26

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 Five,

“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.21 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 Six “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. [Perhaps

move here from the camp thread to and the mediaitization of bare life as

the “live” broadcast or flow of “temp” work turned playtime of surfing—no

more station breaks or station identifications. It would be a way of reacting

Buadrillardian work on “liveness” like Phil Auslander’s as “bare liveness.”]

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

27

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

(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 transformed into a cultural graphology and

thereby oriented toward the tele-topical might become—a crucial tool for re-“bare

live”-broadcasting text events placed in archival cold storage.

Our conclusion, “Reading After Extinction: Last Man Scenarios,” takes the form

of 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

28

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. So,

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

Historicism as Storage Unit22: Aproias of the Archive

21 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 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??

How does the medium of film relate to the briefcase and self-storage unit as

boxes?

29

Difficulty of narrating a positive history in part becomes linear sequencing

depeds on a series of binary oppositions that tend to collapse into each other.

Speiker. We can have a side note to Spieker and the Big Archive—not a birth of

the camp model of biopolitics, as Agamben’s is a “birth of the camp.” We need to

clarify he kind of historicism of bare life and why we want to make an historical

argument about the 1930s and about the aftermath of WWII in double terms. No

single origin, a different conception of time, perhaps. Perhaps we could think of

self-storage not as an alternative to the state’s bioprocessing but as an

alternative for historicizing the structure of modernity, the doubleness, the no

guarantee, and so on, the necessity of reading, of resisting practices that allow

you to feel finished. Reading as pure expenditure as life. The project of self-

storage is a projection.

Our historical point of departure is doubled rather than singular. Our point of

departure is not only the wake of World War II, but a kind of doubly double origin.

In addition to 1945, the other crucial date for us, as for Walter Benjamin is

1933.23 But like WB, we situate 1933 in relation to another double historical

framework, the interwar years of 1918 to 1939. As in the Ursprung des

Deutschen Trauerspiel, the origin is double, not a single moment. We are not

tracing the “birth of the archive,” though, as our first chapter made clear, we are

discussing a biometric turn in the state's autoarchiving practices and historicizing

the modernity of the archive (like the way Agamben says he both is not is and yet

is making an "historical / historico-philosophical argument" rather than the way

30

Lacoue-Labarthes does and to the 1930s exclusively through poetry rather than

technology and media).24 We are talking about reading as question of

biobiblio(thanatos) processing not reducible to chronological time and possible

irreducible to any chronometry (as in Derrida’s Demeure) but as anachronic, not

as a autobiography but as a question of autobiographicity (the conditions of

writing an autobiographicity).  

24 L-L says that “only a historico-philosophical interpretation is capable of

providing access to national Socialism in its essence, that is, to what gives it its

singularity in comparison to analogous phenomena in the first half of the

twentieth century (which for the sake of convenience we can call

“totalitarianisms”) and to what makes it an exception.”

LL,83.The perhaps fatal weakness or strength of the book is the thinking of the

1930s as an exception that needs to be explained in "historico-philosophic" (83)

terms.  I think Agamben is much stronger in Homo Sacer on his embrace and

rejection of this kind of method.

22 Amplify critique of anti-depressant antiquarianism by describing their tropes.

Everything can be stored, organized, tidily arranged, put in its place through

historicism, which comes with its own containers in the form of periods (other

segments like early and late). Historicism seeks to turn what for us is a

continuum of misdirection and redirection into a fold, a two sided object on which

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

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

reading, the archive retrieval system (file cards, index, inventory) collapsing into

the historical document (the map) through the folds that constitute its objects and

31

We hope it is clear by now that we are doing a cultural graphology of self-

storage, not a cultural studies of the bare life of things in storage units or a

conventional history of the storage-unit in linear, chronological time.25 We are

concerned rather with a home(lessness) fever, a sense of belongings that are out

of place, in which the space of the home itself is at its maximal uncanniness.

its spacings of historical time. The fold hides this trick, so to speak, by which

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

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

inventory, liberating its from its data / base, so to speak.

23 R Same for Agamben and same for Visman. “the link between files and officials

secures continuity, In the

Centrality of WWII (149) also p. 146 domain of instrumental reason, files become the

means for the modern, rationalized exercise of legal power.”Reforms of the 1920s

were stopped by and large by the Nazis in 1933. “the Nazis made full use of

office technologies, such as index cards and the tabbing system (i.e., tabs affixed

to identity cards for purposes of classification). There are very few accounts that

reflect this continuity and focus on the administrative aspects of the Nazi policies

of colonization, deportation, and extermination.” (124)

The Nazis put an end to file destruction:

“After 1933, the Nazi government made use of the rhetoric of simplification . . . in fact the reform-oriented selection of files for physical destruction was explicitly revoked, since the new emphasis on research into ethnic and racial ancestry had increased the importance of retired records. Records were to be retired and reused rather than destroyed.” (126)

32

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 our present to produce

modes of description less troubled by the ontological slide between animal,

human, and machine than the usual scripts on offer.26 Historicism for us,

however, is not limited to traditional modes of historiography (cause and effect,

sequential narratives, anecdotes) but includes historico-philosophical kinds of

temporality historians typically do not recognize as historical: in addition to the

recursive temporality of the uncanny, we are concerned with eschatological time,

33

messianic time, the future “to come,” and the achronic temporalities of what Paul

de Man calls an “occurrence” and Jacques Derrida calls an “event.”27

Reading is always a form of historicism for us. But our historicism is not

reducible to inventories, itemizations that become the databases for

chronological, linear narratives (all very unself-consciously and unthinkingly).

Maybe the Book that Never To-Came. the book as thing as something also to be

read, not assumed, or capable of being quantified and narrated chronology

(Lefebvre's The Coming of the Book we might retitle for us as the History of the

Book (Yet) to Come since Levebvre implies that he has delivered a history in his

book. Blanchot’s The Book to Come (the end of the book in Of Grammatology).

4. The Cultural Graphology of Shelf-Life

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.”28 It may be useful, at this point, to

re-shelve our Derrida in order to put Derrida’s concept of arche-writing with his

notion of the substrate and the archive, recalling that his staging of “the history of

life—of what,” he writes in Of Grammatology, “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

34

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.

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).29 Notably, this activity also “at one and in

35

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.30

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.

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.”

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

36

(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.31 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

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.32 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.”

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. A series of broad

37

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? 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? What is stake in our shift from camp to

storage unit and archivalization?33 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 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

38

be read rather than an origanized space where things are placed in a

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),34 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).35 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 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?

39

To put it another way, storage recalls reading, either disappearing it or flatlining

into recording media and information processing, user instead of reader, with

passage retrieval being the goal. So speed and the elimination of repetition (what

you don’t have to reread) is progress, and we could se a linear progress in terms

of speed and efficiency from scroll to codex, from dictation to speedwriting, from

mss to print, from book to pdf. The storage unit becomes a morgue for

(re)assemblage of parts of the corpus. This flatling of reading is one of many

modes of unreading that get recalled by storage, a resistance to reading as

resistance to reading, but unread –able for us because of a problem of

classification—there is no poetics of the archive—every attempt to order it

disorders it (as WB says of the collector’s library). And we are concretizing

Derrida’s archive as oriented to the future, to the imperative to remember not to

forget the victims of injustice overtaken by the erasure of the anarchivic death

drive of the archive, as a future yet to be read that repeats a past lapse. Our

model of the not yet read is the autobiographical anecdotes about lapse that

perform or stage lapses by de Man and Derrida—a not yet read text is one you

return to having failed to understand it, not knowing if you will understand it less

or more.

Forgoing Reading

By posing the question of reading things through deconstruction,

psychoanalysis, and narratology as much as through science studies, we want to

connect the question of shelf-life to the question of bare life less by asking how

40

we attach meaning to things and generate sentimental narratives than in asking

how troping things means that attachments to things too become tropes. In

exerting a referential pull yet making itself available as a trope, the self-storage

unit thing helps us to define the archive both as a place of contact with “real

things” that have secure boundaries and protocols for us and as a space of

mediation which, in theory, makes virtual contact with toys possible seemingly at

any time and from any distance.

Yet even this virtual contact involves a translation that foregrounds

attachment as a trope in need of being read: translations involve attachment

disorders. As Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator,” “the higher the

level of a work, the more it remains translatable even if its meaning is touched

upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies only to originals. Translations, in

contrast, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty but

because the looseness with which meaning attaches to them” (262).

Loose Value: Fragments in Translation as Obstacles to Reprocessing /

Repacking

In an oft-cited passage from “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin compares

translation as a passing not from one whole text to another but from one

fragment to another:

Fragments of a vessel that are glued together must match one

another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one

41

another. In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the

sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the

original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the

translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as

fragments are [broken] parts of a vessel.36

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

Although we are relying largely on English translations of the German and

French texts we discuss, we take the passage above as an emblem of our

close(d) reading practice: translation resists a reprocessing of a writer’s corpus

as a totality that allows for a thematic and unifying thread. For an example of this

reprocessing, consider Peter Demetz’s metaphor of the musical score in the final

paragraph of his introduction to Benjamin’s Reflections. Demetz wonders

“whether it would be possible to listen to Benjamin in a musical rather than a

literary way, and to concentrate, as if his individual writings were fragments of an

inclusive score, on the thematic orchestration of his ideas and arguments. His

ultimate secret, I believe, is that he works with a few intimate leitmotifs that

fascinate him thoughout his life, regardless of the particular stage of his

ideological transformations” (xlii-iii). Using the musical score metaphor, Demetz

reprocesses the texts into a totally unified work of art package complete with

Wagnerian Leitmotifs.37

37 Tom Cohen does something similar with Hitchcock in the two

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

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

42

Our interest with close(d) reading as a reading of fragments rather than

systems arises from our concern with the Anglo-American institutionalization of

reading literature and the reception of French theory and German philosophy

have had through their translation into English.38 We have from time to time

consulted the originals, relying on our friends Peter Krapp, Larry Rickels, Galili

Shahar, and Carol Jacobs to help us as needed. We do not mean to dismiss the

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

relocating the signature of AH in images of inscription that

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

idea does.

25 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

43

importance and necessity of translation, and regard translation as a crucial

aspect of paralinear reading we undertake in order not to fall back into a naïve

monolingualism and unjustifiable provincialism. We wish, rather, to engage

translation above all as a question of reading in terms of shelf-life extension, or

survival. Benjamin describes what he regards as the bizarre temporality of

translation and the determination of “the range of life” in “The Task of the

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.”

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Translator”:

We may call this connection a natural one, or, more specifically, a

vital one. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected

with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a

translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as

from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and

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

45

since the important works of world literature never find in their

chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks

the stage of continued life. The idea of life and afterlife in works of

art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity.

Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling

that life was not limited to organic corporeality. . . . The concept of

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.”?

46

life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own,

and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the

final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the

standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of all by such

tenuous factors such as sensation and soul. The philosopher’s

task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more

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

Species Meet…

27 History of the book is entirely stuck in use value (with the Sentimental /

Victorian novel[s] as the default for narrative) whereas WB and TA are into the

damaged lives of readers and books. Looking at Anthony Rota's Apart from the

Text, a history of the book

according to its parts (paper, dust-jackets, bindings etc) and

thinking it is a perfect example for us of the way reading disappears

in the history of the book or book history studies. We are

effectively rerouting bibliography (sociology of texts) through the

archive (collection, library) and hence through philology (Thomas Greene’s

the vulnerable text; De Man's return to philology) and hence to

revision and editing as well as reshelving and refiling as

instances of unread –ability and (mis)recognition as well as tropes, primarily

personification (the library is “alive” when used by researchers). "Apart from the

text" does not exist as

such but comes into recognition as the "materials" or "constituent

47

encompassing life of history. And indeed, isn’t the afterlife of works

of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures? (257)

Benjamin creates obstacles to writing, delays, as well as to reading, resistance

on the side of writing and reading, that demands concentration from the reader of

parts of the whole" only through mediation, only through formal

materiality. We are extending reading from "the text" (reading as

linear, information processing, or programmatic close readings--I should

say predictable) to include reading the "while" thing--the paratext,

storage, and taking "printing" seriously as impression, a part of

writing to be read (in addition to the paratext) but also as a storage medium (not

only gathering dust but subject o degradation, failed domestication (Adorno’s

books as cats), and even as specters; even more, we are viewing the book as a

mixed medium the better to engage books as “imagetexts” (reading as

hallucinogenic in the case of Freud on Gradiva, for example). Warburg's notes,

his scholarly apparatus, or what WB calls "papers" in the library not

shelved (not catalogued) go unread. Rota and others skip over a lot of library

science, dipping in where they please. They skip the question of

ordering books--Dewey decimal (standardization) versus alphabetic that

has consequences for research (as Saxl says in his essay on Warburg)

but also for the essay as memoir, first hand experience (as Gombrich

frames Saxl's essay). Sherman is good in wittily trying to recuperate areas of pathology like dirty books and bibliomania, but bad at the way he actually recuperating them (dust becomes the real; he’s never read WB on dust). He has no concept of biblioclasm (the print equivalent of iconoclasm). He is limited by

48

Benjamin, that the reader be slowed down. As thee editors of Benjamin’s

Archive write, “In order to aid the cogitations in finding their way to an appropriate

realization on paper, some resistance is necessary; he places objects in the way

of a too rapid reading” (500; 551).

We also that translating someone like Walter Benjamin that would a remain

problem even if our German were totally fluent, a problem that de Man, Carol

his progammatic approach to reader—“use” and “misuse.” By contrast we are talking about reading as handling (with care). We could pun on the “hand” (Heidegger, Derrida, Marc Shell) and “handle” (since handle includes holding the book with one’s hands (or using a mouse to scroll a digital text or r to hold an e-book and touch the screen or a button to turn the pages, shipping it, and holding it in storage, as well as retrieving it).28 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84.

29 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.

30 Derrida “Of Grammatology”

49

Jacobs, and Samuel Weber have all faced when writing about him in English.

Weber’s introduction to his Walter Benjamin’s -abilities (2009) provides probably

by the best example of this problem. Weber explains that his book traces

Benjamin’s tendency to use the suffix “ability,” preceded by a dash, to form

concepts through bizarre sounding nouns rather than create concepts through

neologisms. Weber says he was tempted to write the book in German since it is

31 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).

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

33 “The Camp as ‘Nomos’ of the Modern,” Homo Sacer, 168-80. a universal

50

“of course the language in which Benjamin wrote and in which I generally read

him” (4), and gives several examples, all of them quoted in the original German

and not translated into English.

There is nothing remarkable here, of course. Weber tactfully and rightfully

plays the expertise card, thereby laying claim to a certain kind of intimacy and co-

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.

34 Aramis

35 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

51

citizenship with Benjamin. We would simply point out that the experience of

reading Weber's book can never be commensurate with his experience of writing

it, even if a reader whose native language were German were to read it.

Moreover, “-ability” is in the case of translation, “untranslat-ability.” Weber

explains that it can be written that “-barkeit” may be translated as “-ibility” or “-

ablity.” What Benjamin calls the necessary failure of translation involves a

resistance to movement back and forth, to the metaphor that defines translation

as a carrying over. Weber imagines what would happen “if this book is ever

translated into German—‘back’ into German I was tempted to write” (p. 4), but he

puts the word “back” in scare quotes because he tends, he says, to read

Benjamin in German, not because Weber wrote his book in German first and

then translated it into English.

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).

36 See Carol Jacobs, “Monstrosity of Translation” for the restoration of the

adjective “broken” (Zohn drops it) and for an illuminating and very generous

discussion of Zohn’s many amazing errors in his translation.

38 Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co.

Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort (2008).

52

Our attention to such small details arises from a desire to attend to the kinds

of resistances and repressions that are so common in translation as to go

unnoticed. For example, scholarly introductions in the original are typically

deleted and replaced by a new scholarly apparatus written in the language of

translation.39 In the case of Benjamin, the translation resorts and reshuffles the

German edition deck, as it were. What were collected together in one volume of

unpublished writings for example, are in the English translation, folded into all

four volumes of the published writings, the difference between published and

unpublished noted only in a footnote at the beginning of any unpublished work.

The table of contents implies a unity that the corpus lacks. Similarly,

emendations to Harry Zohn’s controversial translation of “The Task of the

Translator” are mentioned in an endnote but not noted as they occur on a case-

by-case basis. Readers are thus always playing without a full deck when they

read, whether what they read is written in a language foreign to them or not.

Traffic Jam

My story about the jam at the airport sets up a distinction between what we are

doing with materiality and form, narrative, who reads, how reading differs from

skimming, how readings done by machines and by humans, how the cover block

reading, and so on as a question of sedimentation rather than sentimentality.40

39 The preface to Hans Blumenberg's Shipwrecked provides another good

example of the ways in which translations are always new editions; in this

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

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

53

New new historicists want to think everything can be eaten, that it's

all cakes, with jam or icing linking the layers together.   More,

more, more.  Stimulation, invert the sentence to get more chiasmuses: (thoughts

shape, and shaping thinks!!!! Materiality is content, and CONTENT IS

MATERIALITY!!!!!). (By the way, chiasmus is the favored trope of historicists

40 I think we should talk about detection devices at security stops (airplanes,

courtrooms, museums), as in the scene from Total Recall. You mentioned the

airport security line as an example recently. What’s being detected is what can

cannot or cannot bring onboard of course, but also what may be part of you or, if

food, become part of you. No doubt everyone has a sentimental story like this

one of mine: when I came back from seeing my Mom after my trip to Taiwan in

April, I had to give up two jars of jam she had made to the guard. The jam

something very nice in itself and had sentiment / sediment because my Mom

made it. But the jam was even more meaningful because my Dad (cue violins)

used to make it and give as gifts to people, and he was always really happy

about how happy it made them. I wasn’t allowed to give them to the guard, who

had to throw them away. The odd thing is that it wasn’t the jam that was the

problem but the amount of jam. It was that the jars were just a little too big (the

containers somehow posed a threat, not their contents). So in these situations,

you are being anxiety-separated by the search and destroy, as needed, what you

can bring because we (the guards) can only take from you, not receive (that

would be forced giving, the gift a stolen property)

54

because it is specular and seems to lose nothing—like an hourglass that can be

turned over and over and over again. The container contains time, regulates its

passing one grain at a time.)

But sediment is a geological metaphor but not as layer cakes of fossils but more,

as shifting layers of sand, some of which gets in your food when you have lunch

at the beach on a windy day.   Even jam gets sticky, jams up the work, the flow of

traffic.41

41

Also something on inhuman and inedible.

We are still clumsy in our efforts to approach these clumsy works

[chambermaids’ romances]. We feel it is strange to seriously books that were

never part of a ‘library.’ But let us not forget that books were originally objects for

us—indeed, a means of subsistence. Let us use them to study novels from the

point of view of their food chemistry!”

WB, “Chambermaids’ Romances of the Past Century,” Selected Writings, 2:1,

230.

55

Working On It

Anti-depressants that make you a worker; it’s have no writer’s blocks, of the

obstacle as always bad (a Manichean world of “thinking, bad; work, good”

asBoris Karloff might have put it James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. No

experience of negation. What used to be called “positive thinking” is now just

working. No breaks. Non-union workplace.

Smart drugs for ADD research because there’s never enough time to read.

Fantasy of no writing (or reading) blocks, of reading without resistance, means

forgetting the plug in, the signifier that makes the “machine” work.

56

NOTES

57