Can cross reference homo sacer—at the the limit with Derrida on the xenos, stranger or freogner in OfHositality. Also,the intro Aporias.
Also notonly the work of art, but the facsimle—the mircroscript online, or the pages in WB’s Archive book. Also fasimile not read as such by Agamben
Turnagainst his critique of deconstrucitonas thwarted messianism—ignores his own Catholic hermenutic, his own need to read by not looking, or by turning a text into an image, by dovorcicg word and image.
The time that Remainsa microredaing—one line by Paul.
The crossing of borders always announces itself according to the
movement of a certain step [pas]--and of the step that crosses a
line. An indivisible line. And one always assumes the institution of
such an indivisibility. Customs, police, visa or passport, passenger
identification--all of that is established upon this institution of
the indivisible, the institution therefore of the step that is related
to it, whether the step crosses it or not.
Jacques Derrida, “Dying—awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth”Aporias, p. 11
Possibly add Balzac and Rivette on The Unfisnshed Masterpiece.
Come back to the camp—with Perec—connect detective genre in this chapter to sci-fi Las t Man and hopcalypse genre in the Conlusion.
Possibly connect Derridaon the ssue of title in chapter two to de Man on the title in Concept of Irony and Kirkegaard.
Poijnt of departure for de Man essay would be the footnote on the tape recording of the lectures. The posthumous publication.
Possibly INCLUDE BELOW:
The Non/Sense and Im/Materiality of Security[i]
The passport is not a passe-partout; some countries do not allow you to visit others; some require visas; etc.
Issuing a passport is by definition a process of selection—, a vehicle of pass-porting people and (no)pass-deporting people.
How to do you talk about things? Question of genre. Life writing. People write about things as if they were people.
Bios is Agamben and Bryson as zoography Overlooked
Social Life of Things second essay on biography of things.
I think we can underline the graph in bios—biographies—that biography as a form of writing already complicates what bios is, starting from the material thing of the passport. Then we can go to Derrida and Paper Machine and complicate the notion of what a person is when being processed, and conclude in a way that sets up the intro—people processing through storage, shelf-life as a response to bare life-- and also transport(ation)—teletopical reading.
Papers, Please
Alles ist in Ordnung
The biography is the uncritically assumed default people use when they
Lively effects of the genre produced by the medium of YouTube.
(Just) Passing Through, Passing Around (Barely)[ii]
We lead with the Youtube segment about passport as figure of
processing citizenship through paper and the problems of what the
passport is (thing then book) and narrating when it is what is. The
passport as thing / book raises a problem of form, its materials already mediatized.[iii] The passport works as a figure for a problem of form related to materiality, a problem of determining the form of the object / thing (see de Man on Riffaterre in “Hypogram and Inscription”). The passport as “book” offers resistance to a narrative, especially a genetic narrative of its construction and assemblage; it resists both as an open and closed book since when it is open it still hides microchips with data loaded on them; and it puts into question the difference between reading and skimming, and the corollary distinction between machines and humans as readers (Humans read and skim, but machines only read). Moreover, the passport is a hybrid, both a printed book and yet also a kind of Kindle that doesn’t function (you can’t read the digital data or subtract from it, add to it / alter it).
Cover Stories
The cover of the passport book is
foreign, an import, and the entire media story occludes the foreigner.
It was as if the guy were saying that the passport protects you from
non-Americans entering the U.S., as if it were not about being away
from the U.S. but being safe from foreign nationals" while residing in
the U.S.
It's the security of the object that matters, not the security of the
citizens (which is never mentioned). And it is spoken of only in terms
of entering the U.S. as if the only way anyone could enter the U.S. is
with a U.S. passport (as if foreigners never visited or resided as
aliens in the U.S. legally).
Somehow the narrative of the thing starts playing out inadvertently (because of the narrowly nationalistic focus on the U.S. passport rather than on passports in general) in all sorts of weird ways about human rights versus rights as citizens (“We, the people,” not “we, the citizen”)
How A US Passport Is Made (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/how-a-us-passport-is-made_n_215287.html
Note that the passport has a “life”: it is first a “thing,” then a “book” with fine print and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing) with three blank but formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) when assembled (the paper covering over the foreign chips, which were loaded and locked), and finally a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing). Only machines “read” the passports (officers “skim” them). This narrative of passport production reveals and hide its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside (chip) being covered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover): the made in America for Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in America (printing, stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model of assemblage in which non-American digital parts and cover get imported and data then gets “loaded on” to the imports and covered up without Americans even knowing (unless they watch this video).
“There’s nothing there. You can buy these chips all over the world simply because they’re memory chips.”
“So it is not until this piece of plastic (waves the cover around) arrives in the United States that you actually, really, in my opinion, start producing a passport. This piece of plastic will arrive at a secure U.S. government facility, the Government printing offices clinic in Washington, D.C. and they then begin the work on it. They then print the cover. They then print . . . the fine detail printing in the passport that makes it clear that not just anybody made it,
Interview:
There’s lots of security embedded measures, like in a five dollar bill
Yes, there’s microprinting, fine printing . . . then laminates it all together, stitches it into a book, and the only thing they do in the process of it to the chip is format it.
Interviewer: put the operating system into it.
Right. . . But after they put the format on it, they lock the chip. And then they load a load of passport books into an armored car, and the armored cars takes these to one of the sixteen facilities around the United States to take the next step. we have in this country.
But as I mentioned they lock the chip; they ship the key in effect to these chips . . . via separate means.
There's no passport, raw book, until after it hits the United States. But even if someone were to get hold of these things, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with these books.
Then they are what is called “personalized.” The personal data is put onto the passport, typed on here, and then they’re also at the point loaded onto the chip. And then is when it really becomes an American passport book.
There's an anti-skimming feature, if the book is closed.
So let me ask you a crazy question. These chips can’t be used to track people when they are carrying them, can they?
No.
The only time it can be read is when it is opened--scanned by the officer at the point of entry, as he or she skims this, the machine reads the chip.
if you tried to cut out the chip and sew another one,
the chip will give the officer different information [from what the passport has printed on it].
What about using the covers to fabricate a passport?
Or if you were to order similar plastic covers to fabricate a passport?
Because of the material that we load onto this chip and how that chip lines up with the material here and what the computer at the customs border, what that machine is taught to read, if you have a phony passport with the chip, that chip will go tilt.
People claim they can hack these chips?
Is that possible?
No because we have what we call PKI, public key infrastructure, a type of security algorithm loaded on the chip. We believe that that algorithm cannot be compromised.
The passport can't be skimmed because it is closed.
Me:
So, like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American citizens from their own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover, literally secreting the chips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their "owners."
Technopoly
By attending to sediment, we link question about the polis,
citizenship, who can travel legally where, what they can travel with
and carry on or not, in relation to materials by rephrasing the question of biopolitics and citizenship, on the one hand, and the storage of materials , on he other, as a question of what happens when the State becomes a Host and turns its citizens into parasites. The question of biopolitics is thus also a question of thantopolitics, of the ways in which citizens are alienated from their own data—the printed pages of the passport as book become a cover, literally and metaphorically, for the storage of citizens as data, their reduction to microchips. And the question of “reading” and skimming” the book is all the more bizarre since there is no narrative to read, just a profile reduced to one’s life span and home. (Gaining a passport is thus already a process of people into persons in that you have to have a home—you have to reside in your property or someone else’s—before you can become a person who can reenter the U.S. without a passport, you always a potentially illegal alien. And you have to know English to apply and you have to be literate or know someone who is. The Youtube does not say what is stored on the chips (the word information is not used) whether it is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it. It is information about us, however. That much is clear. But we are alienated through our data processing, we are booked by the State even, just into persons through personalization. But we are only informed by change of how our passports are made. Their making would usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the of effect of the ideas hat we are learning seeing something that we are not supposed to see, know. I think that’s how the Huff Post links—like posting info on how to make a bomb. The video is itself a threat because it gives forgers information they could use to forge. But the issue is that persons are stored as data) when they are turned form persons into citizens. Citizenship passes though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, unsettling distinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside citizenship (equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so on) hostage and hostage taker. Citizenship not as securing of human rights but as Host-age taking. [iv]
occurrence” or Jacques what Derrida calls an “event.”[v]
close/d reading of the passport as thing.
The thing requires a double reading even as it becomes units.
Renais's Night and Fog again. It has a passport sequence that is perfect for us. Also has a photo of notes written by Jewish prisoners. I remembered I wanted to juxtapose it with the book as prisoner in Toute la memoire du monde.
Bare Life and Adorno’s Damaged Life (aphorism, fragment—taken from Nietzsche—almost a direct rip-off formally).
In the epilogue to Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry,
Lacoue-Labarthe talks about "appropriating the means of
identification" being more important than the means of production.
An image of one of Robert Walser’s microscripts (see The Microscripts, to be released soon by New Directions: http://www.amazon.com/Microscripts-Robert-Walser/dp/0811218805).
Susan Bernofsky writes:
The microscripts, now housed in the Robert Walser-Archiv in Zurich, were tiny, densely pencil-jotted manuscripts in which Walser composed the rough drafts of his texts starting as early as 1917. The paper he used for this was an assortment of small sheets of art-print paper, halved calendar pages, envelopes, correspondence cards (often he wrote between the lines of the notes he’d received), and even single-sided advertisements cut from magazines and books. The microscript texts are so difficult to read that when this collection of 526 diminutive pages was first discovered after Walser’s death, they were thought to be written in a sort of secret code. In fact the microscripts were written in Sütterlin script, then the standard style of German handwriting, but in a script that varied in height from one to two millimeters, executed with an often none-too-sharp pencil. These drafts seem to have been primarily an aid to composition: Walser generally recopied his texts within a few days of having written them, and it is not clear whether he himself would have been able to read his own writing had he waited too long.
The microscripts in Walser’s literary estate, which were painstakingly deciphered in over a decade of labor by Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang after the first transcriptions by Jochen Greven appeared in 1972, proved to contain a full six volumes of previously unknown texts (as well as drafts of various pieces published elsewhere). Since Walser left a number of his late prose works uncopied - being largely unable to get them published - the microscripts are a rich source of new material for hungry readers of Walser’s work. The Robber in manuscript occupies a mere twenty-four pages of octavio-sized sheets (Susan Bernofsky’s introduction to The Robber, (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p xii).