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A Small History of 'A Small History of Photography,' and other random notes on 3 Benjamin essays
This is largely for my own benefit, so I guess only glance at if you're Way Too Into Benjamin? :/
Notes from the Cohen Meeting:
-suspicion of Charm in English Academia
-narcissistic econonomy
-Freud's 'On Narcisism'
-Lure of a number of stock types derived from narcissistic self-enclosure
-Secret Garden
-Check Frost's "Mending Wall"
-Milne, Wodehouse, Paddington, Wind-in-the-Willows
-closed circuit, self-sustaining world
-time and repetition
-privilege (but poverty doesn't admit MANY things, not just charm)
-despite itself
Dickens: Old Curiosity Shop, maybe Twist, maybe Copperfield
re: Who essay in March--
Bakhtin: Dialogic Imagination, Epic and Novel, forms of chronotope in Novel, sociohistorical empty space of epic/saturated novel
Fantasy: Rosemary ______, New Axioms, Routledge
ESSAY 1: UNPACKING MY LIBRARY:
Unpacking My Library:
- In a PhD dissertation on the poetics of Charm/the heimlich*, I'd need to (and would have room to) discuss, as Benjamin sort of begins to do here, the artifact quality of charm. I wonder how often houses/antiques are marketed explicitly in terms of charm? How that interacts with Quaintness? The aesthetic dimensions of an investigation of charm could not be ignored, and should be flagged in the papers' conclusion as a necessary part of a fuller analysis.
- "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am." GOD I love this opening. There's something to be said about the charm of it--the way charming form lends itself to charming subject matter. Benjamin is so prolific and so interesting that sometimes I think I'll melt*** with envy and inadequacy.
- 'The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me the mood-it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation-which these books arouse in a genuine collector.' -- how important is /audience/ to charm? Maybe appeals to the reader are NOT stylistic or incidental--perhaps they comprise the operation of charm. The shared mood, temporal and sentimental. And here, the detail is Proust-like--dust in the air is a frozen or slow-floating image, time is still. Detail and charm--the more complete a world, the more self-sufficient? The more immune to change/sudden authorial reveal? The more shared the mood? Not just anyone /with a collection/ is a Collector--it is a mental attitude rather than a mere descriptive term attending upon the possession of books which are held to be desirable by some external standard. Benjamin says so himself: 'collecting rather than a collection.'
- Stray thought: someone is appealing when they love, but are they charming? Is the closed-circuit of Charm harmed by the outward gesture of loving something outside? Is it possible to be both charmed and charming oneself?
- '...the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.' Charm and custom. The Proustian quality of 'memories' as charming here. The irresistibility of the memory-trace. The irresistibility of charm? How does that come at odds with the Willing Reader?
- 'And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is in the order of its catalogue.' The ordering as more than a subduing--ordering as a mechanism of charm. The ordered, written world of David Copperfield as charming.
- 'also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value-that is, their usefulness-but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.' Charming vs. useful. 'The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.' Ambiguity here--unintentional, I think. Them--books or collectors? The books are Passed Over a la Pass Over, the collectors are under the enchantment. At odds.
- 'And when he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired. So much for the magical side of the collector-his old-age image, I might call it.' Magical
- 'I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book mingles with its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles itself with the excitement of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals- the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world-that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury editions.'
- 'Everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical.' whimsy/charm
- 'The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone. Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library, which is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself.'
- 'On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom-the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.'
- A comment on the making, and then a recollection, 'but I was going to tell you how I acquired this book.' diatribe, carried away '; that particular volume had inspired in my a desire to hold on to it forever.' 'The following morning at the pawnshop is no longer part of this story, and I prefer to speak about another incident...'
- 'Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day-or, rather, of night-what memories crowd in upon you! Nothing highlights the fascination of unpacking more clearly than the difficulty of stopping this activity. I had started at noon, and it was midnight before I had worked my way to the last cases.'
- 'Actually, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector's attitude towards his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility towards his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type.' If SOMEONE says SOMEONE (POSSIBLE DERRIDA, FUCK, WHO KNOOOOOOWS) is always ahead of us, perhaps charm is always behind us--nostalgic, maybe Cash-in-the-Attic, but not Attic, lacking that distant dignity. The way things 'were' and still should be, not the way things really were at a great distance, in the foreign country of the past. This political suspicion of charm--is it an extension of the personal unwillingness to be charmed? To succumb? To be 'taken with' something is to be 'taken.' Violent, sexual.
- 'The phenomena of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects only get their due in the latter. I know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.' Is charm dependent of something being imperiled, or even just fragile? Clearly private wealth isn't on the wane, and the ability to collect remains unchallenged--if more politically questionable, /perhaps,/ or less personally respected? We don't look with kind awe on the erudition and discretion of the collector as we used to, perhaps. Are the nerdy collections of the comic book geek, more about /love/ than extrinsic value, broadly considered 'charming'? I think perhaps a source of others' amusement, but not necessarily a Charming hobby.
- 'O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has be able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm.'**** For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector-and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be-ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive to him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.'
* It is perhaps important to note that the Charming/heimlich is not necessarily just anything that is /not/ uncanny--anything prosaic and narratively normative. To so characterize it is to deny it existence in its own right, rather than setting it up as the effective counterpart of the Uncanny (Two Sides of the Same Coin, as the Merlin Slash Dragon would have it). While we have to feel the suspicious resonances of 'charm' as a fetish/token or an enchantment**, we have to sideline the sort of colloquial Scottish (am I right about this?) sense of Canny as (Random House Dictionary): "1. careful; cautious; prudent: a canny reply. 2. astute; shrewd; knowing; sagacious: a canny negotiator. 3. skilled; expert. 4. frugal; thrifty: a canny housewife. 5. Scot. a. safe to deal with, invest in, or work at (usually used with a negative). b. gentle; careful; steady. c. snug; cozy; comfortable. d. pleasing; attractive. e. Archaic. having supernatural or occult powers. –adverbAlso, can·ni·ly. 6. in a canny manner. 7. Scot. carefully; cautiously.". We have to forget everything in this definition of the canny BUT "e. Archaic. having supernatural or occult powers." THAT.
** This kind of reminds me of my high school work at UChicago in Middle Kingdom Egyptian magical thinking systems, specifically the mechanics of Egyptian love spells, and how they have the same formulation as curses (and, as an interesting side-note, occasionally express male/male desire, with no obvious change in formulation). 'Charm' is a suspicious operation--it works against one's conscious will, one is charmed against one's volition or better judgment, as David Copperfield is in the eponymous book by his first wife Dora (against the manifestly superior claim Agnes has on his affection). 'Charming' is not a consensual happening, even at its most benign/unresisted/subtle, and the magical resonance the word carries is a testament to that. As the love spells would imply, there's, as Cohen suggested, a seduction at work here.
*** This reminds me of the Hamlet (Act 1, scene 2) folio editing question: I think too, too sullied is better than too, too solid, which is too, too obvious and lacks the palpable /dirtiness/ and disgust. 'Sullied' just does more, carrying the weight of the 'solid' meaning already in the action of melting and adding the sticky, tacky, almost Jhonen Vasquez-y/Gnostic theological disgust with corporeality. Who cares which is more likely to be a correct interpretation of authorial intent? One is better than the other, and it's this one.
**** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookworm
Notes from the Cohen Meeting:
-suspicion of Charm in English Academia
-narcissistic econonomy
-Freud's 'On Narcisism'
-Lure of a number of stock types derived from narcissistic self-enclosure
-Secret Garden
-Check Frost's "Mending Wall"
-Milne, Wodehouse, Paddington, Wind-in-the-Willows
-closed circuit, self-sustaining world
-time and repetition
-privilege (but poverty doesn't admit MANY things, not just charm)
-despite itself
Dickens: Old Curiosity Shop, maybe Twist, maybe Copperfield
re: Who essay in March--
Bakhtin: Dialogic Imagination, Epic and Novel, forms of chronotope in Novel, sociohistorical empty space of epic/saturated novel
Fantasy: Rosemary ______, New Axioms, Routledge
ESSAY 1: UNPACKING MY LIBRARY:
Unpacking My Library:
- In a PhD dissertation on the poetics of Charm/the heimlich*, I'd need to (and would have room to) discuss, as Benjamin sort of begins to do here, the artifact quality of charm. I wonder how often houses/antiques are marketed explicitly in terms of charm? How that interacts with Quaintness? The aesthetic dimensions of an investigation of charm could not be ignored, and should be flagged in the papers' conclusion as a necessary part of a fuller analysis.
- "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am." GOD I love this opening. There's something to be said about the charm of it--the way charming form lends itself to charming subject matter. Benjamin is so prolific and so interesting that sometimes I think I'll melt*** with envy and inadequacy.
- 'The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me the mood-it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation-which these books arouse in a genuine collector.' -- how important is /audience/ to charm? Maybe appeals to the reader are NOT stylistic or incidental--perhaps they comprise the operation of charm. The shared mood, temporal and sentimental. And here, the detail is Proust-like--dust in the air is a frozen or slow-floating image, time is still. Detail and charm--the more complete a world, the more self-sufficient? The more immune to change/sudden authorial reveal? The more shared the mood? Not just anyone /with a collection/ is a Collector--it is a mental attitude rather than a mere descriptive term attending upon the possession of books which are held to be desirable by some external standard. Benjamin says so himself: 'collecting rather than a collection.'
- Stray thought: someone is appealing when they love, but are they charming? Is the closed-circuit of Charm harmed by the outward gesture of loving something outside? Is it possible to be both charmed and charming oneself?
- '...the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.' Charm and custom. The Proustian quality of 'memories' as charming here. The irresistibility of the memory-trace. The irresistibility of charm? How does that come at odds with the Willing Reader?
- 'And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is in the order of its catalogue.' The ordering as more than a subduing--ordering as a mechanism of charm. The ordered, written world of David Copperfield as charming.
- 'also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value-that is, their usefulness-but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.' Charming vs. useful. 'The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.' Ambiguity here--unintentional, I think. Them--books or collectors? The books are Passed Over a la Pass Over, the collectors are under the enchantment. At odds.
- 'And when he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired. So much for the magical side of the collector-his old-age image, I might call it.' Magical
- 'I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book mingles with its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles itself with the excitement of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals- the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world-that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury editions.'
- 'Everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical.' whimsy/charm
- 'The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone. Not even both factors together suffice for the establishment of a real library, which is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself.'
- 'On the other hand, one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom-the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.'
- A comment on the making, and then a recollection, 'but I was going to tell you how I acquired this book.' diatribe, carried away '; that particular volume had inspired in my a desire to hold on to it forever.' 'The following morning at the pawnshop is no longer part of this story, and I prefer to speak about another incident...'
- 'Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day-or, rather, of night-what memories crowd in upon you! Nothing highlights the fascination of unpacking more clearly than the difficulty of stopping this activity. I had started at noon, and it was midnight before I had worked my way to the last cases.'
- 'Actually, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector's attitude towards his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility towards his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type.' If SOMEONE says SOMEONE (POSSIBLE DERRIDA, FUCK, WHO KNOOOOOOWS) is always ahead of us, perhaps charm is always behind us--nostalgic, maybe Cash-in-the-Attic, but not Attic, lacking that distant dignity. The way things 'were' and still should be, not the way things really were at a great distance, in the foreign country of the past. This political suspicion of charm--is it an extension of the personal unwillingness to be charmed? To succumb? To be 'taken with' something is to be 'taken.' Violent, sexual.
- 'The phenomena of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects only get their due in the latter. I know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.' Is charm dependent of something being imperiled, or even just fragile? Clearly private wealth isn't on the wane, and the ability to collect remains unchallenged--if more politically questionable, /perhaps,/ or less personally respected? We don't look with kind awe on the erudition and discretion of the collector as we used to, perhaps. Are the nerdy collections of the comic book geek, more about /love/ than extrinsic value, broadly considered 'charming'? I think perhaps a source of others' amusement, but not necessarily a Charming hobby.
- 'O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has be able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm.'**** For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector-and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be-ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive to him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.'
* It is perhaps important to note that the Charming/heimlich is not necessarily just anything that is /not/ uncanny--anything prosaic and narratively normative. To so characterize it is to deny it existence in its own right, rather than setting it up as the effective counterpart of the Uncanny (Two Sides of the Same Coin, as the Merlin Slash Dragon would have it). While we have to feel the suspicious resonances of 'charm' as a fetish/token or an enchantment**, we have to sideline the sort of colloquial Scottish (am I right about this?) sense of Canny as (Random House Dictionary): "1. careful; cautious; prudent: a canny reply. 2. astute; shrewd; knowing; sagacious: a canny negotiator. 3. skilled; expert. 4. frugal; thrifty: a canny housewife. 5. Scot. a. safe to deal with, invest in, or work at (usually used with a negative). b. gentle; careful; steady. c. snug; cozy; comfortable. d. pleasing; attractive. e. Archaic. having supernatural or occult powers. –adverbAlso, can·ni·ly. 6. in a canny manner. 7. Scot. carefully; cautiously.". We have to forget everything in this definition of the canny BUT "e. Archaic. having supernatural or occult powers." THAT.
** This kind of reminds me of my high school work at UChicago in Middle Kingdom Egyptian magical thinking systems, specifically the mechanics of Egyptian love spells, and how they have the same formulation as curses (and, as an interesting side-note, occasionally express male/male desire, with no obvious change in formulation). 'Charm' is a suspicious operation--it works against one's conscious will, one is charmed against one's volition or better judgment, as David Copperfield is in the eponymous book by his first wife Dora (against the manifestly superior claim Agnes has on his affection). 'Charming' is not a consensual happening, even at its most benign/unresisted/subtle, and the magical resonance the word carries is a testament to that. As the love spells would imply, there's, as Cohen suggested, a seduction at work here.
*** This reminds me of the Hamlet (Act 1, scene 2) folio editing question: I think too, too sullied is better than too, too solid, which is too, too obvious and lacks the palpable /dirtiness/ and disgust. 'Sullied' just does more, carrying the weight of the 'solid' meaning already in the action of melting and adding the sticky, tacky, almost Jhonen Vasquez-y/Gnostic theological disgust with corporeality. Who cares which is more likely to be a correct interpretation of authorial intent? One is better than the other, and it's this one.
**** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookworm