In defense of quotations, in service of interruption

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through that interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Walter Benjamin wrote these words in “One-Way Street,” published in 1928 (Vol. 1, 447-448). Hannah Arendt says of Benjamin that "he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations" (4). In his “Program for Literary Criticism,” Benjamin’s 8^th notation warns against summary in the service of criticism, arguing that “[g]ood criticism is composed of at most two elements: the critical gloss and the quotation,” and that rather than summarizing, “a criticism consisting entirely of quotations should be developed” (written in 1929 or 1930, Vol. 2.1, 290). Notation 37 says: “One should adopt as a maxim: never write a critique without at least one quotation from the work under review” (294). 

What purpose does quotation serve?

In the above excerpt, Benjamin argues for its benefit to the writer: copying text again allows one to see things that reading keeps hidden. Benjamin further characterizes this opening-up in his discussion of Brechtian theater (“What is Epic Theater? II,” 1939). He writes that for Brecht, the “art of epic theater” resides in its ability to astonish its audiences, to depict a situation such that it is defamiliarized, allowing audiences to see it as if “for the first time” (Vol. 4, 304). In order to render a situation unfamiliar, to allow audiences to see it with new eyes, Brecht interrupts the action of the play.

Benjamin relates this act of interruption to the quotation, calling interruption “the basis of the quotation.” He writes, “Quoting a text entails interrupting its context” (305). Interruption yields defamiliarization; defamiliarization yields new discovery. Quotations pull fragments out of their immediate contexts. They interrupt the text and produce a new text, one that is suddenly imbued with meaning beyond its meaning—the meaning of defamiliarization. The meaning of new discovery. 

Arendt explains Benjamin’s reliance on quotation in the service of interruption as a response to his cultural moment, to a social environment marked by first one war (the Great War), by the political unrest and economic challenges that followed that war, and then, most tragically for Benjamin, by the fascist prelude to a second war.

She writes: 

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of “peace of mind,” the mindless peace of complacency. “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions” (Schriften I, 571). This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair—not the despair of a past that refuses to “throw its light on the future” and lets the human mind “wander in darkness” as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is “not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy” (Schriften II, 192). —Hannah Arendt, Introduction to  Illuminations (38-39)

The quotation destroys context. It interrupts time, interrupts history, interrupts the present by breaking it up to re(de)contextualize the past. This interruption destroys complacency because it constantly reorients its audiences to language and forces them to see and to read as if for the first time. The quotation, the fragment, is “torn out of” the moment of its origin (Arendt 39, quoting Benjamin). It is the jetztzeit of language. 

... And then there's this: “Citation,” literary theorist Eduardo Cadava argues in his Words of Light, “is perhaps another name for photography” (xvii).

For my rower

We build ourselves a Holocaust narrative in photographs—of the living, of the dead, of the soon-to-be-dead. I’ve stared at their faces so many times, for so long. I’ve counted them, labeled them. I wrote my Master’s thesis on memorial genres at Yad Vashem, and when I was finished I experienced an ethical crisis: What did it mean, that work that once gave me nightmares no longer kept me awake? What did it mean, that my horror was no longer piercing but blunted, duller now, the kind of discomfort that I could sometimes stop thinking about? 

Did I have any right to keep working on and with this memory if it no longer sufficiently moved me? 

In the midst of this trouble, a moment of defamiliarization. I was flipping through The Last Album—a book I’ve owned since I was a child. This hardcover text was compiled by Ann Weiss after a 1986 trip to Auschwitz during which she was shown a room that held photographs brought to the camp in early August 1943. They belonged to the residents of the Będzin ghetto in the Zaglembia region of south central Poland and were likely hidden by Jewish women who worked in the camp. The Underground knew that this was the last major transport of Polish Jews to the extermination center (Weiss 36-37). 

When I flipped through the book this time, a woman looked back. She was not suffering; she was not wearing a striped uniform, head shaved; she was not dying. She sat there looking at me from page 78, a woman before, perpetually suggesting an after but also holding it off… she hasn’t even started to row; the trip to Auschwitz can only come much later, I assure myself. The Talmud says, “Whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved an entire world.”

Can you save a long-gone woman whose memory lives in a photograph? 

Phonic constellation: Rowing in the “now of recognizability”

The dialectical image is an image that flashes up. The image of what has been—in this case, the image of Baudelaire—must be caught in this way, flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The redemption enacted in this way, and solely in this way, is won only against the perception of what is being irredeemably lost… —Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” April 1938 - February 1939 (Vol. 4, 183-184)

What distinguishes images from the "essences" of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through “historicity.”) These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences,” from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural <bildlich>. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded. —Walter Benjamin, “Convolute N,” The Arcades Project, [N3,1] (462-463, emphasis mine)

Image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. The rower is such an image, and the constellation of her past and my present defies temporality. The oars she holds are the same oars that I have held countless times; she sits ready to row in a position my body knows all too well. I feel the motion of the water, the anticipation of the first stroke, the suspension of time that occurs when you pull away from the dock and give yourself to the water. 

This image sounds. Rowing is rhythmic: the splash as the oars enter the water, the whoosh as the water is displaced, the click of the oars as they are lifted from the water, the measured slide of the seat, the splash as the oars enter the water, the whoosh as the water is displaced… —it keeps times and displaces time.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about the noise of old cameras—the noise of time:

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood (15, emphasis mine).

The rower’s presence in the photograph is not a silent one: a clock for seeing captures an activity that keeps time. I am not sure whose oars I am hearing, whose passing water. Hers or mine? But I do know without a doubt, now, that the constellation—the woman—has a sound, a “phonic substance,” as Fred Moten calls it (62).

The Angel of History

In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin describes Klee’s Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, with his face “turned toward the past” (1940, Vol. 4, 392). The Angel sees the catastrophe of history but is powerless to do anything about it; he is propelled backward into the future, wings outspread. My rower is a paradox, sitting still and yet already borne ahead (backwards) across the water and across time, into a suitcase enroute to Auschwitz and into an album enroute to a young girl (to me) who would keep it close for the next fifteen years.

She is in an album; her photograph rests in European soil; she is on the water. She sits poised at the dock—the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed—but we know that she cannot, will not stay. 

A storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in her oars; it is so strong that the rower can no longer hold them still. 

She leaves us on the dock, caught in the liminal space between witnessing a portrait of life and witnessing to one face in six million. 

This storm drives her irresistibly into the future, to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows toward the sky.

All those the rower has passed over the course of a century constitute a growing shadow on the dock: the photographer, the neighbors she likely left behind so many years ago, the women in Auschwitz who saved her image from incineration, Ann Weiss. Me. I see her sit ready; I watch her go. 

What we call progress is this storm.

—Italicized excerpts from “On the Concept of History”

On the name

The rower has a name. As the years passed, The Last Album sacrificed the finality of its title for a second edition. When the photographs were published, the past was awoken, and with it memory. The first edition of the text, the text I’ve owned for more than a decade, was dedicated “as a grave marker, and final resting place” (9) to those whose stories and names were unknown, “a tombstone and final kaddish for those who have no one to remember them” (11). 

But some were remembered, after all. The photographs served as a moment of Aristotle's phantasia, a bringing-before-the-eyes of people and communities long gone. As the author received correspondence from survivors or family members who recognized these long-gone individuals (and as she gained access to notes written on the backs of some of the photographs), she gave them (back) their names.  

Benjamin’s 1916 “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” speaks of the originary, creative act of divine naming. The name has biblical roots for Benjamin, and he returns to the creation story in Genesis in which God calls things into being—“Let there be,” he says—and then names the things that he has spoken (Vol. 1, 68). The pattern of God’s speaking and naming is broken, according to Benjamin, in the creation of man, who is not the product of word and name but is instead the inheritor of God’s “creative power” (68). God did not name man, and today man (and woman) are themselves namers: 

The deepest images of this divine word and the point where human language participates most intimately in the divine infinity of the pure word, the point at which it cannot become finite word and knowledge, are the human name. The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language. Of all beings, man is the only one who names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name. (69)  

Today, Benjamin contends, it is through our practices of naming that we retain what connection we have to the divine—the name is our “residue of the creative word of God” (74).  

The rower’s name is Minka. 

Redemption?

Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.  
     —Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” 1939 (Vol. 4, 185)

Can my identification with—my feeling through time—the swing of the oars and the motion of my/our body—be at once, paradoxically, rhythm and the disruption of time’s (linear) movement…

the fissure? 

Oar to oar

The knowledge that the first material on which the mimetic faculty tested itself was the human body should be used more fruitfully than hitherto to throw light on the primal history [Urgeschichte] of the arts. We should ask whether the earliest mimesis of objects through dance and sculpture was not largely based on imitation of the performances through which primitive man established relations with these objects. Perhaps Stone Age man produced such incomparable drawings of the elk only because the hand guiding the implement still remembered the bow with which it had felled the beast. —Walter Benjamin, unpublished fragment, 1936 (Vol. 3, 253) 

Perhaps I’m able to write about the rower because my body, my hands remember how to row. 

The rower sits at the edge of the frame; you stand immediately before her, above her, on the dock with your camera. She is sitting ready—that’s what we call it, in the rowing world—knees up (boots just visible at the bottom of the frame), leaning forward, arms extended. Ready to row; always already ready. At any moment she will drop the oars into the water, pull back, and disappear from the frame. She will move backward when she goes, still facing you as the distance grows.  

What made me pause when I saw this photograph was my embodied knowledge of what comes next for this young woman—the thrill of the beginning of a row, the difficulty of the first stroke cutting the water, the eventual settling into a rhythm.

But what held me there was her left hand. It enacted such familiarity as to take my breath away. The rower has four fingers wrapped around the oar. Her thumb is extended to the oar’s end to help control the stroke.  

I had no words except that I could feel it—could feel the wood, the inevitable blisters, the flex of muscles in her hand as she kept the oars, the rhythm, the whole thing—the boat as well as the frame of possibility for my identification, the past and her present, her presence and inevitable disappearance—under control with her thumb.  

I quickly learned one word for that lack-of-breath: punctum, as Roland Barthes puts it in Camera Lucida, his meditation on love and loss and photography, “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice” (27). It is a moment, an image, of such painful, intimate familiarity. I can feel her oars when I look at her photograph.  

I did not take her photograph. But I create her, time and time again, in my memory, in my (re)performance of her row, because I have been a rower, too, an acolyte of the water.  

Leon Wieseltier says in a Foreword to The Last Album that “[t]here may be very little to say about the sensation of the real, except that it is absolutely necessary. And since it is also fleeting, there is a lifetime’s work for the mind in recovering it” (13). 

The mind, but also the body.  

I attempt to recover, uncover, revive the real as I remember, and I remember her by re-membering her. I re-member her in the motions of the stroke, cutting the oar through the water. The movement of my body and the movement of the boat are both very real. The feeling that we row together is real. The weight of the boat on the surface of the lake is nothing if not real, passed from her to me in Trinh Minh-ha’s stunning formulation of female transmission: “mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand” (121). Oar to oar.  

Commitment

What does it mean for a work of art to be “committed”? For Benjamin’s contemporary and frequent interlocutor Theodor Adorno, writing after the war that took Benjamin’s life, committed art is art that is politically inflected. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer define it as “art that attaches itself to a political rather than to an aesthetic ideology” (4). Years earlier, Benjamin wrote in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” that non-committed art, l’art pour l’art—art for art’s sake—reaches its “consummation” in the slogan fiat ars—pereat mundus… “Let art flourish—and the world pass away” (1936, Vol. 3, 122 and 133). This is the slogan of fascism’s aestheticization of politics, a rendering aesthetic that for Benjamin, inevitably leads to war.

In “The Author as Producer,” prepared for the Institute for the Study of Fascism in 1934, Benjamin writes that it is the political duty of the author to side with the proletariat. He writes, “Rather than asking, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I would like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’” (Vol. 2.2, 770). The writer must be in “solidarity” with the proletariat not only as a thinker but as a producer. 

The photomontage is invoked as an example of the potential for solidarity. Benjamin writes:

Let us think back to Dadaism. The revolutionary strength of Dadaism consisted in testing art for its authenticity. A still life might have been put together from tickets, spools of cotton, and cigarette butts, all of which were combined with painted elements. The whole thing was put in a frame. And thereby the public was shown: Look, your picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than painting. Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text. Much of this revolutionary content has gone into photomontage. (774)

Benjamin laments the failure of photography to remain revolutionary, citing its contemporary tendency to render things beautiful rather than realistic—“For it has succeeded in transforming even abject poverty—by apprehending it in a fashionably perfected manner—into an object of enjoyment” (775). 

But. Two things:

1. The potential of montage must remain. Montage, like Brecht’s Epic Theater, produces interruption that “constantly counteracts illusion on the part of the audience” (778). The montage, the quotation, Brecht’s theater,  jetztzeit: repetition on the theme of the radical political potential of fragmentation. The totality, the unbroken, are dangerous; they suggest the kind of progress that, for Benjamin, forgets about ordinary people like my rower (“On the Concept of History,” 1940, Vol. 4, 391-392). Disrupt the scene. Force seeing—again, anew, for the first time. 
   

2. In “Author as Producer,” Benjamin says, “What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value” (775). What would such a caption look like, on the photograph of the rower? 

This is a Jewish woman from Poland whose photograph was carried to Auschwitz in 1943, either by the woman herself or by someone who loved her. When she was alive, she spent a day on the water, but she was so much more than I’ll ever know. To see her is to dwell in the not-knowing, and that dwelling is mourning. 

Is that political enough? Where is the line between ethical commemoration and political commemoration? 

Maybe, on the photo of this pretty young woman, smiling: Fascism brought her image to Auschwitz, and we'll never know the rest. 

Prescience

In December 1938, Benjamin published a review of Stephan Lackner’s Jan Heimatlos: Roman—Johnny Homeless: A Novel. His essay begins, “While the ties between the German people and the German Jews are being annihilated for an unforeseeable time to come, a novel has been published which sets out to depict the nature of these ties” (Vol. 4, 135). The family described in the novel consists of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother with a grown son. With the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, it comes out that the son is only really the biological child of his mother, “the outcome of an indiscretion”; he and his mother are therefore safe from Nazi persecution in a way that his father is not. 

Ultimately, the father in Lackner’s novel commits suicide. Benjamin describes the scene as follows, with a quotation from the book:

“My ancestors have lived on the Rhine since Roman times,” [the father] tells the young man at the start of the novel. “What the Austrian and Levantine scoundrels who have taken over this pitiful Reich may have to say about me is no concern of mine. We’ll wait it out here until the Germans come back to their senses, or until we go under.” Now that the second of these alternatives threatens to come to pass, the novel takes on documentary significance. (136)

Two moments of prescience, both haunting. First: less than two years after publishing this review, Walter Benjamin, himself a German Jew, would also be dead at his own hand. Unlike the father in Lackner’s novel, Benjamin did not try to “wait it out” in Germany. Benjamin identifies the writing on the wall in Lackner’s work: the father determines to wait until “we,” the “we” of Germany’s Jewish population, are either re-accorded a place in society or until “we go under”; Benjamin notes that “the second of these alternatives threatens to come to pass.” When he wrote this review in 1938, Benjamin was living in exile. He continued his attempt to outrun the Germans when he prepared to leave France in 1940. When restrictions tightened and it no longer looked like he would be able to escape, Benjamin took his own life just over the French-Spanish border in Portbou, Spain.

Prescience. Second: Benjamin writes of a temporal moment when the “ties” between Germans and German Jews were being “annihilated.” It would be almost another year, not until the Fall of 1939, that Germany would march into Poland and set in motion the storm that carried the rower’s photograph to Auschwitz in 1943.

What happened to the woman in the photograph? 

Annihilation is frequently used to describe the destruction of Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis. But annihilation suggests total destruction, rendered complete and taking with it all traces to which memory can attach, all of the fragments that once made a life. In the wake of destruction, the rower remains. She is a fragment of a woman far more whole, far more complex. A woman lost to history, but a fragment saved.   

What is left, in the absence of narrative? In the absence of her childhood, her education, the names of her lovers and her plans for the future? Has she been annihilated? There is at work in the rower an affect that is animated not by narrative but by the way the photograph settles on me, the ghost of the oars in my hands. As Barthes says in Camera Lucida, “[t]he photograph itself is in no way animated… but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure” (20). 

She animates me, and in my re-membering of her body she escapes Benjamin’s prescience, escapes annihilation where annihilation suggests totality. Diana Taylor writes in “Trauma as Durational Performance” that “[t]rauma lives in the body, not in the archive” (51). So where do we put memory when the body is gone? In your own body, Trinh Minh-ha answers. I come to Kaja Silverman through Marianne Hirsch and The Generation of Postmemory (a quotation of a quotation, double decontextualization): “If to remember is to provide the disembodied ‘wound’ with a psychic residence, then to remember other people’s memories is to be wounded by their wounds” (174). I remember her, I re-member her, and the destruction (though seventy years past) is incomplete. 

Portbou, Spain

The immediate occasion for Benjamin’s suicide was an uncommon stroke of bad luck, Hannah Arendt writes. ...One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible. (18)

A stroke of bad luck. The stroke of the oars is real; a stroke of luck is made real by its outcome. The rower continues rowing in a photograph brought to Auschwitz; a stroke of bad luck brings Benjamin to Portbou, Spain.  

The detritus of history

“Here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen,” Benjamin writes (fragment written 1931, Vol. 2.2, 545). “In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.” “These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.” “So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.” 

Benjamin speaks, of course, of Mickey Mouse. 

In the introduction to Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings note that Benjamin was concerned with “a wide array of cultural objects” (8)—including elements of popular culture, like children’s toys… and Mickey Mouse films. They write:

Beginning in 1924 Benjamin analyzed a wide variety of cultural objects without regard to qualitative distinctions between high and low, and indeed typically took as his subject the “detritus” of history, that is, neglected and inconspicuous traces of vanished milieux and forgotten events. He concentrated on the marginal, on anecdote and secret history. (8)  

While Mickey Mouse has proven himself to be far from the “detritus of history” (a fact Benjamin couldn’t have known in 1931), the rower—and her photograph, in particular—is herself marginal, a neglected and inconspicuous trace of a vanished (destroyed) milieu. The Holocaust is remembered, but its memory lives in the tension between the commonplaces of the one and the six million, between individual lives lost and the overwhelming totality of genocide. The individual victims that have committed themselves to collective memory have done so sometimes through the extraordinary traces they left behind, sometimes by chance:  

Anne Frank and her diary; 

Emanuel Ringelblum and his milk cans; 

a nameless boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, his hands up in surrender during his deportation;  

Walter Benjamin. 

Other individuals are remembered by only a few, or perhaps exist only in traces that live in some liminal space. Ann Weiss rescued the rower from such liminality. She describes the visit to Auschwitz that led to the discovery of the photographs in The Last Album: 

We were given a detailed tour of Auschwitz I, a facility designated principally for political prisoners, which is now a series of museum buildings. I found it harder and harder to stay with the tour. The Auschwitz guide droned on, rattling off facts, as if she were reciting a grocery list. Her tone and manner belied the fact that she was speaking about the destruction of human lives. 

I separated myself from the guide. When the group left with the guide, I remained in a room filled with shoes once belonging to the prisoners. Alone, I studied their broken forms, and thought of their owners.  

After a long while in the silence, I began to search for the group. Running from building to building, finally I heard voices in the distance. I entered a corridor just as my group was gathering for the bus. I heard the guide say, “Maybe you’d like to see what’s in this room?” “Yes,” was the reply. In the dimly lit corridor, en route to the bus, the guide paused and unlocked the door. We walked into the room.  

When I looked at the photos in the room at Auschwitz, I saw six million faces conflated into one face. The familiar refrain “six million” translated into six million times the individual, six million times Naftali and Raizele and Tziporah and Emanuel. Six million pairs of eyes. I could not speak. I could barely breathe. (25-26)

Weiss writes of a photograph of a young boy, holding a bouquet of candy on the first day of school, as the impetus behind her project. I understand how she felt (at least to an extent) because the rower has become the impetus behind so much of my own work. She is published in Weiss’s album, but still she is marginal; we know little about her, she is an inconspicuous face in six million. It is simply the fact that I recognize my own life in her, to call back to Benjamin's reflection. I wonder what he would say about this woman, rowing.