If you knew for certain..

In the pub with G., remembering from university those ‘thought experiments’ much beloved by certain philosophers of the ‘analytical’ persuasion. Such as: if you knew for certain that torturing Mr X would yield knowledge of the whereabouts of 7 hostages who would otherwise die, would it be legitimate..

G. thinks these are valid tools of philosophical enquiry. I reply that they invariably seem to involve some impossible posited ‘certainty.’ Since this certainty is an abstraction, it can surely have little or no practical moral value. It appears almost as a tool forcing you to accept the conclusion in question.. ‘If you knew for certain that feeding a live human being to some rats would prevent nuclear bombs being dropped on every capital city in the world…”. These curious hypotheticals are like ruses permitting some particular fantasy-scene of cruelty or whatever. And with the alibi of disinterested theoretical speculation.

Easter 1916; or, the politics of weather erosion.

Let’s begin with a possible addition to the ‘notes on rhetoric’: if your opponent proposes a stark moral choice, you reply 'if only reality were that simple’ and accuse him/her of blinkered binary thinking or whatever. If the shoe is on the other foot, your opponent is unnecessarily complicating (sophistry, over-analysis) the simple reality of the matter. In both cases there is an appeal to a ‘reality’ that is either being obscured through theory and over-analysis or forced into an artificial or schematic framework. Reality can be impossibly messy or obtrusively obvious, depending on your rhetorical purpose.



This rhetorical appeal - to a reality that debunks our cherished myths or mere theories - is commonplace. I've been reading a number of recent articles on the 1916 rising in Ireland, the subject of a recent book by Charles Townshend. Although these reviews ranged from the frankly shrill and silly to the academically serious, they all at some point invoked the sobriety of reality against various dangerous imaginary intoxicants. (Always tricky move in the case of history, as the ‘reality’ in question no longer exists. )

First, the historian Mathew Kelly in the LRB. It’s a detailed and interesting review, but here is Kelly quoting from the Proclamation of the Republic:

“The Irish republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irish woman” .

‘The reality’, he adds ‘was much more complicated’. An odd remark for two reasons. It is surely little more than a banality that 'reality will be more complicated' than an engaged historic actor can grasp. (Why would we need historians otherwise?). Secondly, the Proclamation was presumably a political-rhetorical act of a certain kind, not an intended 'representation of reality'. Of course ‘reality’ is ‘more complicated’ than a pre-emptive rhetorical strike. (Arguably, the Proclamation was a peculiar variant of ‘Performative speech act’).. Here we have the gesture of debunking but with no intellectual content.

Undoubtely the worst of the articles on offer was Martin Kettle’s in the Guardian. Again, the usual device:

“At the heart of all recent refusals to bow the knee to the celebration of heroic violence has been a belated recognition of the reality of the Northern Ireland experience”.

1916 is an example of such ‘celebration’, ‘but’, he intones [ha]:

“there is a long and dignified tradition of resistance  to the fetishizing of 1916. it stretches in an unbroken line from Eoin Macneill’s original attempt to countermand the rising”

It is difficult to see how MacNeill could have been de-fetishizing what had not yet been fetishized, but in any case the point is wrong. MacNeill’s objections to the rising were strategic. He thought military action by the rebels must be in response to some provocation or clampdown by the British. (Does Kettle imagine that MacNeill thought 'I'd better countermand the rising before it gets bloody fetishised'?). But once more, ‘fetish’ is there simply to suggest quasi-religious obsession. In terms of historical veracity or logic, it is nonsense. Kettle’s illogic and distortion result from his determination to see dangerous romantic myth on the one hand and sober reality on the other. He also telescopes the past through the present in an attempt to produce spurious journalistic relevance:

“It is also the legacy of a state born in martyrdom and violence, created around the romance of the deed, whose origins are steeped in the pseudoreligious cult of the transformative blood sacrifice and purging authenticity of the acts of a committed minority that al-Qaida or Hamas could recognise.”

This is of course absurd hyperbole. What modern state has not been 'born in violence'? (and gone on to celebrate its violent inception). But it's worth noting how many writers stress the 'blood sacrifice' stuff when writing about the rising. (Kettle also throws in 'cult' to suggest some kind of brainwashed messianism). In fact the only rebel who uttered such rhetoric was Pearse, and though this rhetoric may have proved effective in certain respects, it would be rather silly to think this represented a common ideology. James Connolly, and the Irish Citizen Army, for example, certainly had no such belief in 'blood sacrifice'. And mention of Connolly should remind us also that that Rising comprised an alliance between two groups, the IRB and the Citizen Army, not knitted together by a single political doctrine but by the belief that only force would effectively end British Rule. The elevation of Pearse's peculiar Christological speeches and poetry to some kind of representative status is, then, itself a transparently political manoeuvre, which would have political violence (when used by one 'side') inevitably tagged as regressive, irrational, romantic and, more to the point, pathological.

Finally, even the eminent Roy Foster is not exempt from a weaker variation of this kind of ploy. Here he delivers a killer punch:

'Nowadays, the icons of 1916 are features on the Dublin tourist trail, which includes a "Rebel Tour" -even if the "bullet-holes" on the GPO's pillars have recently been declared to be nothing more than weather erosion'

What exactly is the force of that ‘even if’, other than a meaningless bathos? Should the tour now be abandoned? I have read at least one historian make a persuasive case for the bullet holes thesis – why is this automatically trumped by the anonymous ‘declaration’? Presumably because weather erosion is a factum brutum, bullet holes are an ‘interpretation’; one is simply present in reality, the other a sentimental projection; ‘weather erosion’ has the prosaic certainty of science and nature on its side, bullet holes form part of some mythological narrative. (The ‘rebel tour’ is in fact conducted by a published historian, and is certainly no exercise in icon- or hagiography)

Were the rebels inspired to violent action by Romantic myth, or was a certain rhetoric enlisted (by some) in the service of a violence already deemed necessary. In any case, the ease with which phrases like ‘romantic myth’ spin off the tongue should be sufficient grounds for caution. Such clotted, automatic phrases are themselves often the symptoms of real 'myth' at work. It would be convenient if myths always resided in the past rather than the present, if they belonged to the pre-modern rather than the contemporary, it they were never on the side of liberal democracy, if the latter were simply synonymous with enlightenment.. But this is just wishful thinking. The significant (and toughest) myths are the ones so embedded in our present that they can pass themselves off as the wide-eyed presentation of the real.

Joining Hands

Over at ReadySteadyBook, a review of a new Memoir of Samuel Beckett. It mentions in passing that Beckett considered writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnet 71:


No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

cf this from Keats:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Please see Ellis Sharp's fully justified corrective to my lazy cutandpaste of an online version of Shakespeare's sonnet.

A new rhetorical trick

Thus, a new rhetorical device is given us: let us call it the Galloway.

The Virtual Stoa was ridiculing Stephen Pollard, who’d been forced to retract a potentially libellous post on Interpal (the usual). To cut a long story short, one of the comment-box rejoinders went something like:

‘Do you really want to be in the same camp as Galloway on this one?’

Delightful. And can be pushed to absurd limits: ‘Small dogs should not be thrown in the air and volleyed’ ‘Oh Really, you’re not concerned that this places you in the same camp as Galloway?" Needless to say, for 'Galloway' you can substitute a designated bogeyman of your choice.

Nb. A lone emailer demanded to know why I ‘defend Galloway’. In case anyone else is proposing to ask me such a question, my answer to him was: “Find one positive word about Galloway on this blog and we can talk’.

Donkeys and Nubbly Jumpers

Emma Brockes interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah:

I ask him what he is reading at the moment. "Chomsky", he says. "I am always reading Chomsky."
I tell him I find Chomsky hard work. "Really?" he says. "Really? That's cos you ain't got a Birmingham accent." And he throws back his head and brays like a donkey.

Thus, Zephaniah's comment is magically 'refuted' by his own laugh. As punishment for mentioning Chomsky, Brockes turns him into a donkey. More of this in a minute.

First, the notorious Chomsky interview. An interview in which Chomsky manages to speak in scare quotes (as do those notorious ironists teenagers, it seems), in which Chomsky's own replies are subordinate to Brockes' interpolations, in which her interviewee 'vibrates' and 'threatens to explode' like some faulty electrical appliance; in which he stands indicted by his choice in jumpers, and so on. But the point is that Brockes' style of 'interview' is hardly unique. Reading it, I was first reminded of the appalling Hari-Negri encounter in which, among many other things, that fact that Negri was being interviewed only yards from Buckingham palace was enough to dismiss any claims to radicalism.

The genre is characterized by a number of features: the subordination of speech and ideas to pop-psychological profiling, moving the physical and circumstantial details of the interview to centre stage, the inclusion of the interviewer as a protagonist effectively on a par with his/her subject.

Let us take the second of these. The interviewer draws attention to physical details: the interviewee is eating a biscuit, has nasal hair, a spot of saliva escapes from her mouth, he's rubbing his forehead or wearing scruffy moccasins. This is perhaps not that different from those pictures of celebrities in Hello etc in which cellulite and other 'imperfections' are ringed with white pen. Goodness, this great thinker/ Famous person actually inhabits a body, and is surrounded by all the untidiness of corporeal worldly existence! But the details are more importantly used to smuggle in banalities and stereotypes under guise of neutral description. Thus, Chomsky's 'nubbly jumper' at once gestures to a whole 'alternative' politics, a crankiness, confirmed also by his choice of footwear; Negri's chance proximity to Buckingham Palace spuriously serves as a metaphor for his proximity to Power; Zephaniah's 'donkey' laugh undercuts his claims to intellectuality with a revelation of an animal soul.

X suggests that these details are 'just setting the scene'. Except the interview is little more than a mis-en-scene. What Brockes, Hari etc are trying to do is create a little piece of theatre, with its expressive props and its two protagonists. What the interviewee actually says can be included only in so far as it adds to the scene. Words are on the same expressive level as donkey laughs and nubbly jumpers. And what typically ends up being staged is a curious exercise in ressentiment. The interviewer is the Puck who, 'safely back in the office', places an asses head on her subject.

Infinite Jest

Regarding my previous post on Big Brother, a reader sends me the following from the endnotes of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It's part of an imaginary filmography:

"Cage III - Free Show" - Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.

(re 'infinite jest' - what other books/ films can readers think of that lift their titles from Hamlet (discounting Tom Stoppard). I'll start you off with A Cut-Purse of the Empire', billed as a 'fascinating and fatal account of George Bush's assumption of the presidency'

Note on method

The pieces in Einbahnstrasse, however, are not images like the Platonic myths of the cave or the chariot. Rather, they are scribbled picture-puzzles, parabolic evocations of something that cannot be said in words. They do not want to stop conceptual thought so much as to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby get thought moving, because thought in its traditional conceptual form seems rigid, conventioanl, and outmoded. What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is compelling - that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought, and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.

Adorno, 'Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse, in Notes to Literature, vol. ii

Benjamin is a connoisseur of city experience. In Naples, he notes, the living room spills out onto the street; in Paris, he will treat the street as his living room. Much of his work is composed in cafes. The non-linear layout of urban space, the ambush of advertising signs, and the unexpected encounter: these are incorporated into the work as principles of construction. The vehicles of incorporation are form and metaphor, which lift city experience from the world of empirical fact into the world of thought, thereby illuminating each in the estranging embrace of the other.

Comments eaten by ghosts etc

I'm going to change the blog template soon. I'm also dispensing with haloscan, seen as how it eventually eats all your comments - many ingenious lovely things are gone that I should have saved. Does anyone know whether blogger's own comments also disappear eventually (well, yes, everything does, i know..). So, because I don't know how to pour existing haloscan comments into the new vessel, I'm afraid that extant replies and thoughts will be lost.


Speaking of words being virtually consumed, always been intrigued by this from Kafka:

The easy possibility of letter writing must [..] have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. [..] Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can hold. All else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this simply nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it..

When he says ghost, does he mean the spectre of Felice (or whomever) generated by the writing? Is he saying that one never quite writes to an actual person, always partly to an imaginary point, an enabling fantasy? He speaks also of his own ghost. Again, does he mean that the ‘I’ of the letter lives and breathes only in paper and ink? That writing inevitably produces a residue of fiction, a second 'I' who accrues between the sentences and who does not survive the transition back to everyday life?

Walter benjamin remarks somewhere that someone's letters (say his to Adorno), laid end to end, have their own rhythm, their own story, parallel to but distinct from the rhythms of the life. They join hands with each other over the author's head. They seem to exist in a parallel time, or even to be the lines traced by a parallel self, a 'ghost' even - a ghost of the possible.

ps wonder who this mysterious individual is (sitemeter):

Domain Name (Unknown)
IP Address 71.214.85.# (Unknown Organization)
71.214.85.6
ISP Unknown ISP
Location Continent : Unknown
Country : Unknown Country
Lat/Long : unknown

Blog Herald

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Walter Benjamin

That curious supplement called reality

Another thought occasioned by "Big Brother": that curious supplement called 'reality'. ie, the audience of Big Brother knows it's choreographed, manipulated, artificial etc, and yet the fact that it is 'real' continues to be the crucial 'ingredient'. If the same 'housemates' sitting on the sofa yawning and exchanging small talk were part of a scripted soap opera, you'd of course think it utterly boring and not worthy of a minute's time. But the identical scene with identical dialogue becomes engrossing soley due to the knowledge that it is 'real' - it''s that little supplement that holds the attention in place, that transfigures the actionless, badly written TV drama into something deserving of your fascination.

Now, at the risk of a making a rather ridiculous leap, this 'supplement' of reality figures also, but in a different way, in the Wilkomirski affair. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments was published as the memoir of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. It was praised as profoundly moving, a literary masterpiece, 'visceral power' and haunting prose that would grave itself in your memory and so on. The author turned out to be an imposter, a fraud. His 'memories' were fictions. With considerable embarassment the book was withdrawn, the reviewers who had praised it were made to look foolish, as if mistaken not just about its status as memoir but about its literary worth.. What then had happened to the haunting prose, the painfully moving descriptions? Had these simply disappeared down the plughole along with its reality? Seemingly yes. Although technically independent of autobiographical veracity, these literary qualities had nonetheless t0 be underwritten by it. Like the shem in the Golem's mouth, once removed, the thing loses life and animation.

Catlitter

X asks me about Gallowaycat. No, I have nothing to say about that in particular (nb surely one imitates rather than, as some would have it, impersonates a cat), other than:

Laughter, at those who, clearly addicted to and enjoying this spectacle, seek to place themselves morally above those participating..
As if this sneering condescension at the inanities and degradations of the game weren’t already the game itself; as if their particular brand of smug derision, of ironic enjoyment isn't itself manufactured by the show; as if those who are on-screen and visible are degrading themselves significantly more than the million invisible voyeurs lapping up the snuff theatre.

Admirably they perform their Big Brother task: mop up whatever morsel of scandal we place in front of your nose, talk about it eagerly and with excitement as if you’d just thought of it yourself. At no point reject it as tedious unimportant guff and continue with your own agenda.

Moretti and the Ptolemaic Monstrous

The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that whcih can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared.. is heralded by a species of monsters.

Franco Moretti’s latest work proposes a shift in literary studies from the individual canonical text in all its cross-grained opacity to a "construction of abstract models" based on larger quantitative movements. Part of his chapter on graphs deals with a familiar question: does a form like the novel take off, develop and decline due to some internal logic, or is there (for example) a dialectical relation between it and the reality it claims to represent or respond to. Or both. Moretti’s analogy is the Ptolemaic system:

It’s only when Ptolemaic astronomy begins to generate one ‘monstrosity’ after another, writes Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that ‘the time comes to give a competitor a chance’ chance’—and the same is true here: a historical novel written in 1800, such as Castle Rackrent (or in 1805, like Waverley’s abandoned first draft) simply didn’t have the incredible opportunity to reshape the literary field that the collapse of the gothic offered Waverley in 1814.

The successor or competitor form enters the field not through its sheer originality or brilliance, but due to impasses that have developed within the hitherto dominant, creating a space for intervention. What I find interesting here are two things. Firstly, a suggestive model – or sketch thereof – of how the emergence and disappearance of forms is provoked by, is the result of meeting or failing to meet (in however indirect and deferred a way), a historical world outside them. As Moretti puts it:

The process is, however, open to a ‘Kuhnian’ reading, where a genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give a competitor a chance—when its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality: at which point, either the genre betrays its form in the name of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it betrays reality in the name ofform, becoming a ‘dull epigone’ indeed.

Secondly, though, a certain notion of the ‘monstrous’. Here’s another account of its appearance in the Ptolemaic system:

"The concept of the epicycle was one of the characteristic features of the Ptolemaic system. In the centuries following its formulation, the gradual accumulation of astronomical data by medieval Christian and Moslem astronomers revealed further irregularities in the movements of the planets which required further adjustments to the traditional geocentric system. To account for these irregularities, more and more epicycles were proposed and as time went on the theory underwent successive modifications and amendments. By the early sixteenth century the whole Ptolemaic system had become, in the words of a contemporary astronomer, "a Monstrosity", a fantastically involved system entailing a vast and evergrowing complexity of epicycles."

Now perhaps Moretti touches on this (I haven’t read him in enough detail to say), but where and what is the literary equivalent of this ‘monstrous’? Joyce's Ulysses was referred to as a 'monster', but this was because it escaped the nets of existing classification, it was a herald of the new which could not be named according to the old and available forms. It appeared monstrous only according to those forms. But the Ptolemaic monstrous is a kind of hypertrophy or mutation within those old forms. The old system over-proliferates, bulges and becomes baroque in an attempt to accommodate growing ‘irregularities’ in reality. We thus have a kind of creative flourishing, a production of the unfamiliar (the 'grotesque' multiple epicycles etc), but as a defense against new material and a determination to stick to the old. A defense against the new rather than an attempt to run with it is the source of monstrous innovation. I wonder then, what the literary equivalents of such a ‘defensive monstrous’ would be??

(On Moretti, see also here & comments)

Accept no imitations

Like Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch is a middle class media type who endlessly opines about middle class media types. This might be thought an admirable exercise in self criticism, did he not also seem to exempt himself from said category. This very gesture of self-exemption being, no doubt, itself quintessentially middle-class - the illusion of being outside the game and its stakes can be entertained only by those economically comfortable enough to be leisured and ludic. (The gesture is also, no doubt, just a pre-emptive and guilty act of disavowal that’s peculiarly and comically English). But anyway, Aaronovitch has now ventured into the blogworld proclaiming:

For quite a while now some of the best bloggers have imitated us columnists

This usefully encapsulates what is to my mind the exact reverse of the truth. There are indeed blogs who are parasitic on print journalism, in terms of subject matter and rhetorical style, and who, even as they launch another polemical attack on their chosen columnist, pay him/her the tribute of mimesis. And there is indeed a certain blog contingent whose posts bear the subscript or at least aspiration that ‘this will appear in tomorrow’s Times’, but these have only one foot in the blogworld. Some resemble nothing so much as those early filmmakers who still obeyed the rules of theatrical space, or the photographers who took their cue from portrait painting. And as Nietzsche said:

The profoundest and least exhausted blogs will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees.

Odradek

Over at Long Sunday, Amie writes:

As you know the title of the text in which Odradek appears is translated as 'The Cares of a Family Man', which is suggestive enough, it being a matter of Kafka. A somewhat more literal translation of the German 'Die Sorge eines Hausvaters' would be 'Thhe Concern of a House Father.' The House Father, who is the narrator, is concerned for he just cannot account for or settle accounts with this strange 'being' of wood and thread who keeps unraveling all accounts and laughs when called to account for itself! (Is it also Kafka's laughter?)

Odradek is the unclassifiable, anachronistic thing, the fugitive objet, that prevents the House Father setting his house in order. Its presence results in - or facilitates - a kind of postponement which is perhaps glossed also by this passage:

'"I could conceive of another Abraham - to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer -, an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demands for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fal back on, he cannot leave - this the Bible also realised, for it says: " He set his house in order"'

n.b., If anyone has an electronic copy of Zizek's "Odradek as a Political Category", I'd be curious to see it.

Dead in his own lifetime

“when someone is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away,” says Goya in a play we wrote, “his silhouette goes cold.”’

What Berger makes Goya say in his play is connected also to another of Berger’s favourite notions, this time from Walter Benjamin, that storytellers are “death’s secretaries”. What he means by this, I think, is that with stories their end is in their beginning. Each event bears the silhouette the End. This is also what Goya sees around the dead. Their life is ‘closed’. It has become the story leading up to their death. To use Benjamin’s example, the man who dies at 35 becomes, through death’s fiat, the man who was always going to die at 35. Death seems to give a kind of ‘verdict’ on the life. It takes a life but releases its meaning. I remember, when Debord commited suicide, a friend rang me distraught. It was as if this one act had thrown new shadows over the man's work.

But Benjamin acknowledges that this very idea of death, and of storytelling, belongs to pre-modern times. We no longer think of death as something that exchanges a life for its meaning. We no longer accept the sense of destiny or ‘telos’ implicit in the storyteller’s art. Storytelling, where events are summoned and defined by an End they do not know, denies the openness of lived experience; it distorts the actuality of time as ‘just one thing happening after another’. The veil of finality that Death lends to life is the false consciousness of time.

So although Benjamin is attracted to the World of the storyteller, just as he is attracted to archaic and outmoded things of all kinds, his literary production takes its cue instead from the modern world of street signs, snapshots, the ‘insistent, jerky nearness’ of the advertisement.

Nonetheless, the bond between death and significance is preserved and held to be necessary. Because what fascinates Benjamin is historical transience. It is not so much that death releases a thing’s eventual meaning. The death of historical phenomenon – whether it be something like the Paris arcades or, more generally, a whole culturally specific form of life – empties them of their ‘illusio’, our ready investment in them, their unshakeable immediacy, their ‘blinding obviousness’. Drained of this immediate significance they are left behind as so many enigmas and questions, or perhaps just objects of condescension and disbelief. But this draining away of (obvious) meaning is paradoxically the condition required by critical thinking to retrieve meaning on another level. It creates the distance in which interpretation can thrive. In order to penetrate its sense the thinker must first encounter the thing as opaque, stained with nonsense.

But there is a further twist. Benjamin’s point is that in staring into the enigmatic objects and behaviours of the past, especially the earliest forms of the Modern, the present too is made strange, illuminated from a point outside it - marked with death. Through the peculiar nature of his historical studies, Benjamin is able to outflank the present and see it as already historical. As Adorno says of WB:

He is compelled.. to scrutinise living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, ‘ur-historical’ and abruptly release their significance.. He viewed the modern world as archaic.

This ‘outflanking’ puts WB in a peculiar position. To some extent, it involves an over-familiarity with Death. It is this which WB finds also in Kafka, as in:

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’

Benjamin himself, I think, said that what enabled him to see the present as already historical was a new phase of capitalism in which things were no sooner supercharged with value than they were consigned to obsolescence and oblivion, the presently ‘archaic’ had only last week been the latest thing. The ceaseless (and monotonous) production of novelty and fashion was infact orchestrated by Death. But what I also think allows Benjamin to be a ‘survivor’ in the very time he lives in, to see that time as already past, is something else. It is a sense of approaching historical catastrophe (What he himself called "An inner intimation of coming events"). It is this sense – sometimes quite obscure, sometimes faced full on – which to me links the world of WB with those of Kafka and Bruno Schulz.