Category: American Annual

What if?

Jeff

George Steiner offers a fascinating conjecture in his introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin:

Allegory and emblem had begun to be studied seriously before Benjamin. Nevertheless, his contribution is at once solid and original. It draws on, it is exactly contemporaneous with Erwin Panofsky’s and Fritz Saxl’s monograph on Dürer’s “Melencolia, I” published in 1923. Benjamin was among the very first to recognize the seminal power of what was to become the Warburg Institute approach to renaissance and baroque art and symbolism. He sought personal contact with the group, but Panofsky’s response to the Ursprung (did he read it?) was dismissive. This marks, I think, the most ominous moment in Walter Benjamin’s career. It is the Aby Warburg group, first in Germany and later at the Warburg Institute in London, which would have afforded Benjamin a genuine intellectual and psychological home, not the Horkheimer-Adorno Institute for Research in the Social Sciences with which his relations were to prove so ambivalent and, during his life time, sterile. Panofsky could have rescued Benjamin from isolation; an invitation to London might have averted his early death. (19)

While Benjamin might have found a more immediately rewarding audience for his dialectical images among the group responsible for iconology, it seems to me that critics would have been deprived of their favorite “failed academic” to hold up as an example of the evil nature of the university system. I think that Benjamin’s insistence on viewing images through the lens of his own peculiar version of linguistic philosophy would have created just as much resistance in other environments. But still, it would have been nice if someone could have provided him with a ticket out of Europe before 1940.

Favorite Footnotes

Jeff

Here, the word [Dada] connotes neither anarchy nor anti-art nor any of the other things that so frightened the journalists* . . .

*I shall have passed through this world with a few people all graced with a quality of absolute purity, that same purity you may have had the fortune to glimpse in the sky one summer evening (André Breton, for example) scorned insulted, spat upon. But if one day my words become sacred—they are already—then let my laughter echo back from far away. My words will never serve your miserable ends, you who sneer at us, filthy creatures. And when I say journalist I always mean scum. To hell with you at L’Intran, Comaedia, L’Oeuvre, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, etc., morons, creeps, bastards, swine. All of you, without exception, glabrous bugs, bearded lice, burrowing your way into reviews, into dubious publications of all sorts, you’ll get what’s coming to you in the end. It all stinks. Ink. Squashed cockroach. Shit. Death to all of you who live off the lives of others, off their loves, their boredoms. Death to those whose hand is pierced by a pen, death to those who paraphrase what I say.

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (76).

Stormy

Jeff

Hanging out at the mall

Things are getting stormier and stormier. I sort-of stopped smoking last Friday. I sort-of lapsed on Monday. I sort-of don’t want to turn this into an addiction-kicking monkey blog.

I’ve started hanging out in shopping malls because you can’t smoke there. Also, I am becoming more and more fascinated with them as a project of sorts. Not quite of the magnitude of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but something kind of like it—only a bit more visual.

I once thought that Southern California had the most highly developed plastic-shopping-mall culture. I’m now pretty sure that the great white north has them beat. When the weather is awful six months out of the year, the sort of indoor culture provided by malls is not just a teenage phenomenon anymore.

Younger

Jeff

Conversation strives toward silence, and the listener is really the silent partner. The speaker receives meaning from him; the silent one is the unappropriated source of meaning. The conversation raises words to his lips as do vessels, jugs. The speaker immerses the memory of his strength in words and seeks forms in which the listener can reveal himself. For the speaker speaks in order to let himself be converted. He understands the listener despite the flow of his own speech; he realizes that he is addressing someone whose features are inexhaustibly earnest and good, whereas he, the speaker, blasphemes against language.

Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth” (II), 1913-14

There were so many things that flowed through my head when I was teaching the photography class (just over a week ago) that I wanted to write my way through. But there was no time, and even now as I take this moment the guilt rises that I haven’t written my final comments to all of them. I am easily overcome by messianism when speaking about photography. I often think of writing as so many nuts, bolts, and screws—but I never think of photography that way.

I was teaching about style using Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, rather than using a parade of stilted stylistic examples. The thing common to both is a conception of style as something internal, rather than the external dress of a work. Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero offers the rather succinct thesis that language represents a horizon, a horizontal plain that governs possibility. In photography, the limits of the materials (particularly in regard to contrast or dynamic range) set up a sort of horizon which photographs dwell within. A photograph can be nothing more than a thin approximation of a slice of the experience available to the eye. A photograph is flattened in dimensions, compressed in tonality—in essence, a sort of shorthand in much the same manner as language for a boundless world of experience.

Style is a vertical dimension; Barthes claims that it is tied to our corporeal bodies and our position in time. I spoke to the class about this because so many of the people there seemed intimidated by the concept of “art” (as in fine art) in general. Style, the way I prefer to think about it, is not something validated through canonization but rather something that is intrinsic to having a discernable point of view. In other words, everyone has style whether they work to extend it skyward or not. In speaking on this topic, for the first time I began to see a congruence between style and ethos. It was almost a sort of conversion.

Reading Benjamin’s letters, I noticed that in the ecstatic correspondence with Carla Seligson of June 5, 1913 he remarks concerning his memories of a visit to Paris, “a wonderfully consummated experience,” that:

The following truism can be found in Brand [Ibsen’s Play] Here of course, it should not be taken so solemnly.

Happiness is born of loss
only what is lost remains eternal.

I resist assigning much value to silence or loss. Part of it, I think is that Benjamin was under the heady influence of being twenty-one years old. Like Yeats, who wrote most of his “old age” poems in his early twenties, I think Benjamin grew “younger” as he aged. I hope I can do the same.

Blogging and Habit

Jeff

Because I have not had the time to either read blogs, or writing posts here, I’ve reached sort of an impasse. It amazed me just how little I really missed it. It’s been a persistent habit; I’ve been doing this for many years. I’ve also started taking drugs—Zyban to try to quit smoking. Though I’d like to give up the smoking habit, I really don’t want to give up the blogging habit—either as a reader or a writer.

I started asking myself pointed questions about my reading habits. It crossed my mind, while teaching the photography class, that I only read photographic (technique and news) magazines for around three years. After that, they were really boring. They repeated themselves over and over again with the same clichéd techniques. Was blog reading like that?

The same sorts of questions about authority, authenticity, and voice just go round and round and round again. Somewhere at this moment I’m sure someone is having deep thoughts about women in blogging, or about the latest governmental injustice, or about the future of literature in the age of five-minute attention spans. After several years, it gets really old. But then I thought— no—the people that I’ve read consistently over this same span don’t usually spend too much time on this sort of thing. Most of them are as bright and lively, unique and interesting, as they have ever been. It’s just that I have less time to keep up.

I think the thing that has always attracted me about blogging is that things are constantly being made. Not in the sense that anyone has a master plan about what they want to achieve through public writing (though some do), but in the sense that by developing the habit of trying to say something interesting on a regular basis, a sort of chronicle of interesting things happens. Each one is as unique as the individual behind the page. The snowflake metaphor comes to mind. But at the same time, the amount of interesting things to read sometimes approaches blizzard proportions. You want to go inside and shut the door.

I’ve always wanted to approach blogging as a techne in the Aristotelian sense: an activity that is dependant on a sort of awareness and reasoning about the object being made. It isn’t an empty habit, but rather an art of maintaining a sort of liminal awareness of the activity without being overtly conscious of it. It favors the accident, the subtle twist of fate, and above all—sustain. Having faded back into a distant echo, I’d like to find something to make noise about.

But there is a weird sort of emptiness about the prospect that just doesn’t abate.