Chapter One:
Reading Out of the Box: Staging Things, Toy Stories
Articles lost.—What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, a landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.
--Walter Benjamin, “Lost-and-Found Office,” in One Way Street, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 468.
“In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son.”
--Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 47 (cited on p. 73 as an epigraph)
Interval as Staging Ground: The Teletopical Poetics of Close(d) Reading
As a kind of teaser introduces our first chapter, we begin with a mini-allegory of the carousel as cinematic writing machine in Hitchcock's TheRing.[1] The title of the film runs rings around the film by multiplying the meanings of “ring.” The title initially seems to refer to the boxing ring, since the film title appears in a single long take superimposed over a freeze frame longshot of a boxing ring. But the frozen shot of the boxers each touching hands and seen in profile already prefigures a pattern of triangulation that follows in which the boxers form an antagonistic and inseparable pair, a static object of art, with a third man, the referee watching them as if he were a stand in for the spectator. There is also a wedding ring from a husband and a bangle from his rival, who are also sparing partners in the boxing ring. A gypsy fortune teller also displays a deck of cards in a circle which ends with two kings, the King of Diamonds and the King of Hearts, which describe up the man described by the fortune teller, as “a tall, rich, young man” she will marry.
Tickets sold to the boxing match also appear in a roll, all marked 6D. And the best man drops the wedding ring and mixes it up to great comic effect with a button that has popped off his vest while he is on knees looking for the ring.
But the circle of the circle, as it were is the carousel. The woman courted by both men is a ticket seller. When she sells tickets, several shots with the carousel appear. In the early shots of the film, the carousel appears blurred in the background behind the face of one of the eventual rivals, as if it were a mechanism producing his fantasy of the woman, briefly shown just after he first spots her becoming a ghost like enlarged face. Later, similar effects are used as she imagines her fiancée in a boxing match.
Let us take a brief detour: The carousel is a kind of stroboscope or cinematic prototype; there is an early shot of it from a ride that is a machine like p.o.v.; similarly, the tickets, also serial, are comparable to a spool of celluloid film, each ticket a frame; when the tickets become open, the woman makes a silent pitch to the guy she later falls in love with but does not marry, as if the tickets were soliciting and activating the romance plot; and of course, one buys a ticket to the cinema, and the boxing match is indoors; and later we see two sequences in which the tickets are show close up and in time lapse photography as the show sells outs. Similarly, a poster, partly obscured, links rounds to money; anyone who goes more than one round gets X pounds. So the “cinema” generates revenue for the challenger; we see the text of the poster and “A” pound looks like a weight used for weight lifting, a kind of ideogram rather than a number or letter.
We are now back on track. We also see the carousel’s bottom part at the top of the frame shot in deep focus, sometimes slowing to a stop as mothers and children get on and off. (The first rides we see are all for couples, each couple paired up in two seater rides.) Then we get some shots of the carousel that shows us words written on the top circle. The boxing star is named “One Round Joe” so boxing rounds are opposed to the endless rounds of the carousel, and also in a brief racist bit, to the rounds of a policeman who is not watching the crowd but instead has been diverted by the act and watches it as the crowd does. Only in the last shot of the carousel, a transitional shot from day to night, do we read the words on it in sequence, “Rapid Riding Machine of the Times.”
It’s kind of like the flashing neon “Blonde Girls Tonight” looped message outside the theater near the beginning of The Lodger which parallels the ticket tape neon news lights on a building telling us the latest news on the serial murderer dubbed “The Avenger” and the newspaper headlines sold first thing in the morning on the street announcing the latest murder.
We see the carousel again in The Ring when the Western Union messenger turns up with the message from the fiancée giving her unwished news of his success. The carousel is a riding machine as writing machine as cinema machine, the film as an amusement ride, but not so amusing in its programming of romance as a freak show. As if to underline the point, Hitchcock has a pair of Siamese twins shows up at the wedding. (Although ostensibly a romantic melodrama, The Ring is a lot like Browning’s Freaks, which contains its own revenge melodrama, and anticipates the much later noir, Nightmare Alley.)
The Ring ends with a shot of a camera filming the fight that ends the film in a kind of live action version of the initial freeze frame photo of the fight, calling up
the film canister containing a bomb in Sabotage and the weird way the title of the film on the canister that Stevie carries on the bus ends up entering / not entering the diegesis as key by leading the detective back to Verloc’s theater and hence to the criminal but that the policeman pockets in order to cover up evidence that Verloc’s wife murdered him, as the policeman hero pocketed a woman’s glove at the scene of the crime in Hitchcock’s earlier film Blackmail to protect his unfaithful girlfriend turned murderess, a glove she had dropped earlier at a restaurant before dumping him for a date with another at a nearby table. In other words, Sabotage auditions the potential of reading the canister / contents only to have them inadvertently and unknowingly sabotaged.
Family Fweud: Reading Rings Around Things
set up the carousel via a circle from shelf help storage) to toys as staging to children's books as tropes of reading) that are linguistic and medial transfers of things that become readable, “thingable,” as they turn into other storage media with specific tropes of containment (frames, shelves, boxes, and so on) and fragmentation.
So troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals.
We close down this introduction, turn our text into a thing, by moving to the trope of the carousel as a way of staging and (being incapable of) reading things addressed by Benjamin in a brief section ofColors: A Berlin Childhood. Entitled “The Carousel,”the section focuses on the child's experience of leaving the mother, speeding up and slowing down.[2]
The revolving deck with its obliging animals skims the surface of the ground. It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying. Music rings out—and with a jolt, the child rolls away from his mother. At first, he is afraid to leave her. But then he notices how he himself is faithful. He is enthroned, as faithful monarch, above a world that belongs to him. Trees and natives line at the borders at intervals. Suddenly, his mother reappears in an Orient. Then, from some primeval forest, comes a treetop—one such as the child has already thousands of years ago, such as he has seen just now, for the first time, on the carousel. His mount is devoted to him: like a mute Arion, he rides his mute fish; a devoted Zeus-bull carries him off as immaculate Europa. The eternal return of all things has long since become childhood wisdom, and life an ancient intoxication of sovereignty, with the booming orchestration as crown jewel at the center. The music is slowly winding down; space begins to stutter [as opposed to mute “animals”], and the trees start coming to their senses. The carousel becomes uncertain ground. And his mother rises up before him—the firmly fixed mooring post around which the landing child wraps the line of his glances.
Berlin Childhood, 122-23
As in Benjamin’s account of habit form playing in his essay on “Old Toys,” his account of the child and mother on the returning carousel bears some similarity to Freud’s “Fort Da” toy story. As in Freud’s “Fort Da,” Benjmain’s account of the carousel involves a story about a child dealing with the loss of his mother. But in Benjmain’s segment, Freud’s infantile, narcissistic, self-centered monarch becomes sovereign as a child through a shocking but pleasurable decentering and repetition (“with a jolt, the child rolls away”), a destabilization of ground and proximity, a kind of time travel in which the present is the first time. And this time the mother moves East as opposed to the father who returns to the Western “fwont” in “Fweud”’s account. The child in the carousel is literally and metaphorically getting high: “It is at the height best suited to dreams of flying.”[3]
The crucial developments in this essay are, first, the varying speed as the ride begins and ends, allowing for the unfixing and refixing of things, a break up and intensification of fixation, and, second, the interval that allows for the mother to appear. It's a later moment of detachment that makes intelligibility necessarily vertiginous as space and things become animated, first mute and then verging on speech by stuttering.[4]In Benjamin’s story, the carousel provides a stage to show that there are no stages of ego development, only rereadings that are also always restagings.[5]
Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of reading).
we can work Weber
in, just before the toys, to use him as support (something good
rhetorically)
In other words, you have given us
not only a breakthrough connection between infrastructures of memory
and infrastrategies of reading by connecting the camp and the storage
unit as you did but some very nice cards to lay down in order clarify
the importance of the toy--and also to elucidate WB perhaps even
better than does Weber as well as a totally brilliant de Man card to
play (the Uboat, which we can turn into a U-Turn Boat)-. Sorry about
that last one.
What is Called Reading, and Where Does it Go?
This book is about how we read and don’t read things. We take the self-storage unit as a way of framing reading as a question in relation to what happens to bare life after World II and the camp becomes, for Giorgio Agamben the nomos of modernity. More narrowly we are framing that question in relation to the present critical moment, the turn away from texts and toward archives things in the “New New Materialism” and material culture studies. As the New Historicism took an archival turn in 1990s that made books things to be looked at and treated as personal items whose owners had left traces in their margins, the act of reading was displaced by the matter of reading. Genre has come to the fore in a kind of sociology of texts and cultural that traces circulation and distribution of books rather than their interpretation or reception: how books are used matters now, not how they are read. Acquisition is reception.
Given these developments, our question might be posed as follows: When we were doing all this archival research to find new things to talk about, where did reading go? But for us, reading is not something that goes away and then may return. The kind of panic narrative that underlies such a narrative and that one finds in various debates about whether cultural studies should be stopped or we should return to formalism forget to take into account that reading always goes missing. As Paul de Man pointed out in The Resistance to Theory, “the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading.” Moreover, this resistance cannot be overcome, de Man maintains, even by the closest of readers.[6] Nevertheless, de Man practiced the allegory of reading, which he defined as the impossibility of reading, in a very specific manner, as a return and rewinding to moments of failure in texts that seemed almost to have succeeded. With his amazing flair for calmly while dropping an irony charged cluster bunker buster bomb, de Man observes, while waiting for the aftershocks:
It would appear that this concentration on reading [in reader response criticism] would lead to the rediscovery of the theoretical difficulties associated with rhetoric. This is indeed the case, to some extent; but not quite. Perhaps the most instructive aspect of contemporary theory is the refinement of techniques by which the threat inherent in rhetorical analysis is being avoided at the very moment when the efficacy of these techniques has progressed so far that the rhetorical obstacles to understanding can no longer be mistranslated in thematic and phenomenal commonplaces. The resistance to theory which, as we saw, is a resistance to reading, appears in its most rigorous and theoretically elaborated form among the theoreticians of reading who dominate the contemporary theoretical scene. (17-18)
Reading fails, then, but its failure can best be detected and appreciated in the best, contemporary theorists of reading by returning to their texts.
De Man includes himself, of course. De Man's “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’” the word “Aufgabe” may be translated both as “task” and as “giving up.” De Man seizes on the second meaning to say that translation always fails for Walter B because the translator has to give up. De Man’s example is a bike race. But his example doesn't quite fit his point because, as de Man says, the translator doesn't drop out of the race but gives up on refinding the original.[7] So the translator takes a detour that never ends. De Man’s trope for failure fails. It perhaps means that criticism involves a photo finish that never stops developing. In “The Resistance to Theory,” to refers disparagingly to “criticism by hearsay,” and in an example of an anecdote based on hearsay and rumor which attaches itself to a theory of failure as a “is but is not kind of (non)failure:” “Jacques Derrida was doing a seminar with this particular text in Paris, using the French—Derrida’s German is pretty good, but he refers to use the French, and you are a philosopher in France you take Gandillac more or less seriously. So Derrida was basing part of his reading in the “intraduisible,” on the untranslatability, until somebody in his seminar (so I’m told) pointed out to him that the correct word was “translatable.” The first sentence of “The Resistance to Theory” is about what De Man “failed to achieve.” (p. 3)
So we begin by posing as a question in different forms: what does it mean for reading (things as much as texts) to fail? And what does it mean to locate that failure by rewinding a text to the moment where it went wrong? And why does reading persist as resistance? After all, reading and translation happen and events occur between texts, de Man says: “translation is an occurrence . . . that’s an occurrence. That is an event, that is a historical event. As such the occurrence can be textual, is generally textual” (103). De Man refers to this occurence or event not only as translation but as “inscription,” though he defines that term only negatively, and he also speaks of an “infracirculation” of language. We will discuss these two terms later in this book.
Toy Stories: Close(d) Reading Things
We take up the question of reading as the resistance by readers to reading, or what we called “closed(d) reading,” specifically in relation to things, which we will insist are being read even when critics, adopting an anthropological pose, think they are merely describing and inventorying things, placing them in a sentimental narrative.[8] Things have to be staged, and that means that the thing always becomes a topos. In our book, the toy is the central topos for the thing, central because the toy comes with orientations and directions attached for use (and allows for the possibility of misuse, arguably the definition of play). Here we follow Walter Benjamin’s lead in his four essays on toys and child’s play. For Benjamin, the toy always has a double, spaced temporality: it is displayed in a toy store window or a museum exhibition and then it is played with at home. For example, he begins “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Maerkisches Museum,” with a description of the exhibition “Let us start by explaining what is special about this exhibition: it includes not just “toys,” but also a great many objects on the margins. . . . the catalogue . . . is no dead list of objects on display, but a coherent text full of precise references to the individual exhibits as well as detailed information on the age, make, and distribution of particular types of toys.”