Cadava, E. - Lapsus Imaginis, The Image in Ruins

7/28/2019 Cadava, E. - Lapsus Imaginis, The Image in Ruins

1/27

"Lapsus Imaginis": The Image in RuinsAuthor(s): Eduardo CadavaSource: October, Vol. 96 (Spring, 2001), pp. 35-60Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779116Accessed: 07/10/2010 14:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/779116?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpresshttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/779116?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress


2/27

Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins*

EDUARDO CADAVA

The disasterruins everything, ll thewhileleavingeverythingntact.Itdoesnot touchanyone n particular;"I"am not threatenedby it, butspared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened;t is in thisway that thedisaster hreatens n me what is exterioro me-an otherthan I whopassivelybecomeother.There s no reachingthe disaster.Outofreach s hewhom t threatens,whetherfrom farorcloseup, it isimpossibleo say: the infinitude of the threathas in someway brokenevery imit.

-Maurice Blanchot, TheWritingof theDisaster

There can be no image that is not about destruction and survival, and this isespecially the case in the image of ruin. We might even say that the image of ruintells us what is true of every image: that it bears witness to the enigmatic relationbetween death and survival, loss and life, destruction and preservation, mourningand memory. It also tells us, if it can tell us anything at all, that what dies, is lost,and mourned within the image-even as it survives, lives on, and struggles toexist-is the image itself. This is why the image of ruin-again, speaking for allimages-so often speaks of the death, if not the impossibility of the image. Itannounces the inability of the image to tell a story: the story of ruin, for example.It is because of this silence in the face of loss and catastrophe-even when ruin* This essay began several years ago in response to MarkWigley's invitation to contribute to a spe-cial issue of Assemblage evoted to the relation between space and violence. It is partially drawn fromthis shorter early version, published under the title "Leseblitz:On the Threshold of Violence" inAssemblage 0; from two longer and different versions I delivered at the Tate Gallery in London in thespring of 1997 and at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in the spring of2000; and from a brief meditation on the relation between images and history entitled "VanishingRemains," published in 1999 in Via Dalle Immagini: Versoun'arte della storia, ed. Salvatore Puglia(Salerno: Edizioni Menabo). I am grateful to the National Monuments Record in London for permit-ting me to reproduce this image of the bombed-out Holland House Library and to the many friendsand colleagues who have discussed the essaywith me in all its manifestations. I am especially grateful toHal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh for encouraging me to gather, recontextualize, and expand theseruins and fragments into the present essay.OCTOBER 6, Spring2001, pp. 35-60. ? 2001 OctoberMagazine,Ltd.and Massachusettsnstituteof Technology.


3/27

OCTOBER

remains undeclared-that the image is alwaysat the same time an image of ruin,an image about the ruin of the image, about the ruin of the image's capacity toshow, to represent, to address and evoke the persons, events, things, truths, histo-ries, lives and deaths to which it would refer.This is why,we might say, the entire logic of the world can be read here, andit can be read as the logic of the image. Like the world, the image allows itself tobe experienced only as what withdraws from experience. Its experience-and if itwere different it would not be an experience at all-is an experience of the impos-sibility of experience. The image tells us that it is with loss and ruin that we haveto live. Nevertheless, what makes the image an image is its capacity to bear thetraces of what it cannot show, to go on, in the face of this loss and ruin, to suggestand gesture toward its potential for speaking. In other words, the fact of theimage's existence-and here I refer only to an image worthy of the name "image,"to an image that would remain faithful to the ruinous silences that make it what itis-ruins the ruin about which all images speak-or at least seek to speak.The image, then: this means "of ruin"-composed of ruin, belonging toruin, taking its point of departure from ruin, seeking to speak of ruin, and notonly its own-but also "the ruin of ruin," the emergence and survival of an imagethat, telling us it can no longer show anything, nevertheless shows and bears wit-ness to what history has silenced, to what, no longer here, and arising from thedarkest nights of memory, haunts us, and encourages us to remember the deathsand losses for which we remain, still today, responsible.

*

IWhat does it mean to assume responsibility for an image or a history--for animage of history, or for the history sealed within an image? How can we respond,for example, to the image and history inscribed within this strange photograph-especially when, before our eyes, it ruins the distinctions it proposes? It bequeathsto us a space-the space of the photograph as well as the photographed space-in which we can no longer know what space is. It offers us a time-the time of thephotograph and the photographed time-in which we no longer know what timeis. We know neither what remains inside or outside the violated space, inside oroutside the interrupted time, nor what space and time can be when they areruined in this way.The limits, the borders, and the distinctions that would guaran-tee our understanding of the image have been shattered by an explosion fromwhich no determination can be sheltered.How can we begin to read this image, then? In exhibiting and archivizingthe remains of its implosion, the image remains bound to the survival of the

36


4/27

Holland House Library (Photo: ? CrownCopyright.NMR).


5/27

OCTOBER

traces of a past and to our ability to read these traces as traces, to read, that is,what Walter Benjamin would call the image's "historic index." As he explains in anote from "KonvolutN" of his Passagen-Werk,o say that images are marked histori-cally does not mean that they "belong to a specific time"-the time of thecamera's click, for example-but that they only "enter into legibility [Lesbarkeit] ta specific time." "This 'entering into legibility,"'he goes on to say,

constitutes a specific critical point of the movement inside them. Everypresent is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: everyNow is the Now of a specific recognizability [Erkennbarkeit].n it, truthis loaded to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, andnothing else, is the death of the intentio,which accordingly coincideswith the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is notthat the past casts its light on the present or that the present casts itslight on the past; rather, an image is that in which the Then [dasGewesene]and the Now [dasJetzt] come together into a constellationlike a flash of lightning. In other words, an image is dialectics at astandstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purelytemporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now isdialectical: not temporal in nature but imagistic. Only dialecticalimages are genuinely historical-that is, not archaic-images. Theimage that is read-which is to say, the image in the Now of its recog-nizability-bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous crit-ical moment on which all reading is founded.'For an image to be read (for it to "enter into legibility" in the "Nowof its rec-ognizability"), it must encounter a constellation of dangers, not the least of whichis its own dissolution. The possibility of this dissolution, however, belongs to whatmakes an image an image, and, in particular, to what makes an image a genuinelyhistorical image. It names, among so many other things (including the dissolutionof the subjectivity that might wish to read the image), the movement at the

image's interior, the dialectical transfer between the Then and the Now that,simultaneously composing and fissuring the image, occurs with what we might call"the flash of history."If the historical index of an image-"the imprint of the per-ilous critical moment on which all reading is founded"-therefore signals the rela-tion between an image and the time in which it can be read, it tells this time (thetime that dates it, but a time that is not only the time in which it was produced)that it can be read "Now."But this "Now,"composed, like the present, of all theimages that are synchronic with it, is never simply "Now."It is never separable1. Walter Benjamin, TheArcadesProject, rans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 462-63. Hereafter cited as AP. For the Germantext, see the "Passagen-Werk,"n GesammelteSchriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and HermannSchweppenhauser (Frankfurtam Main:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), Vol. 5, pp. 577-78. Hereafter cited as GS.

38


6/27

Lapsus Imaginis: TheImage n Ruins

from the "Then" that, coming together with it in a "constellation like a flash oflightning," is before or beyond the time from which the image seems to emerge.This means that Benjamin's "Now" does not name a present, just as his "Then"cannot be reduced to the past. Moreover, since the present is constituted in relationto all the images that "Now" give it its signature-that come to it from elsewherebut also from other historical moments-it, too, can never be present.This is why the historical index of an image always claims the image foranother time2-for another historical moment (itself plural, and composed ofseveral other moments) and for something other than linear, chronometric time(which would be, for Benjamin, "purely temporal" and "continuous"). This is alsowhy Benjamin's understanding of the image's historical index cannot be under-stood as either indexical or referential: it can never index or refer to a single his-torical moment or event.3 As he puts it elsewhere, "in order for a part of the pastto be touched by the present instant [Aktualitdt], there must be no continuitybetween them" (AP, p. 470; GS 5, p. 587). Confirming that the relationshipbetween a past and a present is dialectical, in the strongest historical and imagisticsense, the index interrupts the presence of the image. It indicates that the imageonly exists in relation to a time that, signaling the explosion that marks both itsbirth and destruction, prevents it from ever being simply itself. Every effort toread the image therefore must expose it there where the image does not exist. Itmust displace it (make it standstill elsewhere), and this because, in the "Now" ofthe image's legibility, the truth of the image is, in the wording of Benjamin,"loaded to the bursting point with time." It is because the traces carried by theimage include reference to the past, the present, and the future, and in such away that none of these can be isolated from the other, that the image cannot pre-sent the traces of the explosion it recalls-without at the same time exploding, orbursting, its capacity to (be) present. It is in this interruption and explosion of2. I am indebted on this point-and in my discussion of Benjamin's notion of the image's "historicindex" in general-to Christopher Fynsk's "The Claim of History," in his Language and Relation(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially pp. 212-223. Associating Benjamin's discussionof the historic index of the image with what, in the second thesis of the "Theses on the Concept ofPhilosophy," is referred to as the image's "temporal index," Fynsk describes the relation it signifies interms of what Benjamin calls a "secret agreement between generations" (see "Theses on the Conceptof Philosophy," in Illuminations,ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books,1968], p. 254. See also GS 1, pp. 693-94: "The past 'carries with it' a temporal index: the date of itsemergence and of its expiration." This expiration date, he argues, means that the image "must be readby"and "will not be readable before" this date. Moreover, "if the present does not read the past (anditself as implicatedn the past)-if it fails to read and write itself-the constellation of past and presentwill simply flit by" (Language and Relation,pp. 220-21). This is why the moment of reading is criticaland dangerous: the past and the present are both at stake.3. Benjamin's conception of the index should be read in its difference from Charles S. Peirce's dis-tinction between the "index," which bears a physical relation to the object it represents, and the"icon," which resembles the object without having any necessary physical relation to it. See Peirce's"Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in ThePhilosophy f Peirce:SelectedWritings, d. Justus Buchler(New York:Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 98-119. For an elaboration of the pertinence of Peirce's medi-tations to an understanding of photography in general, see Rosalind Krauss's "Notes on the Index," inTheOriginalityof theAvant-Garde nd OtherModernistMyths(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196-219.

39


7/27

OCTOBER

historical presentation that we engage the conditions of "authentic" historicalunderstanding, an understanding which, offering us the truth of time, tells usthat history is something to which we can never be present.

IIHow are we to interpret this image? How are we to develop or imagine it-within the space of this essay, within the assemblage of words that occupy the

space of these few pages? What would responding mean here? Each detail of thephotograph has its force, its logic, its singular place-among so many others, thethree standing men looking at books (with each one demonstrating a differentrelation to the books-one holding and reading a book, the other about to touchone, and the last merely looking at them), the splintered wreckage behind them,the walls made of books, the collapsed ceiling, the shattered glass, the door andwindow, only partially visible behind the debris. A condensation of history andtexts, this photograph remains linked to an absolutely singular event, and there-fore also to a date, to an historical inscription. It opens a space for time itself, dis-persing it from its continuous present. Looking both backward and forward, itasks us to think about "context" in general in a different way. Its context wouldinclude not only the date and circumstances of the photograph itself-this photo-graph of the bombed-out Holland House Library in London was taken onOctober 23, 1940, nearly three and a half weeks after the air raid that led to thelibrary's destruction4-but also those of the initial air raid on September 27 and

4. The photograph was taken by a photographer named Harrison, who worked for Fox Photos. Weknow nothing of its early circulation-Fox Photos itself was bombed during the blitz and lost many ofits documents and negatives-although it does appear that the censor of the "Press and CensorshipBureau" released the image for publication immediately after it was taken. What we know is that in1926 the financier Richard Fox, along with the photographer Reginald Salmon and the journalistErnest Beaver, oined together to purchase a company called Special Press, and renamed it Fox Photos.In a letter from November 20, 2000, Sarah McDonald, a curator at the Hulton Getty (which bought theFox Photo collection in 1989), writes that: "the agency soon established an international reputation,providing a service of press and industrial photography at a time when the new photo-led magazinesand newspapers were clamouring for picture stories." The agency included the photographers ReggieSpeller, Ernst Hess (who was one of the first to use color film for reportage), and William Vanderson.As McDonald notes, "Fox was one of the first agencies to use color extensively in outside presswork,with excellent coverage of personalities and royals. During the war years, the agency purchasedKodachrome 1 color film, virtually unused in the United Kingdom in 1939, in the United States andshipped it across the Atlantic on convoys. The exposed film was convoyed back to the States for pro-cessing and sale. Transparencies were later shipped back to England, forming a now rare collection ofcolor World War II material." She also includes one interesting anecdote from the bombing of theLibrary itself, a little story about the survival of ruins and, in particular, the circulation of books inruin: "the damage was extensive and many volumes were destroyed. A librarian from the AugustinRischgitz Picture Collection, with the help of a couple of GI'sand some wheelbarrows, salvaged severalsets of books from the wreckage, which were otherwise to be disposed of, including a valuable seven-teenth-century encyclopaedia. Hulton subsequently bought the Rischgitz Collection and we still havethese volumes in our possession today. On the inner covers are the original Holland Libraryplates."

40


8/27


of the German Luftwaffe's blitz on London that had begun on September 7.Moreover, it refers, in however encrypted a manner, to the legendary book burn-ings of 1933 that confirmed what Denis Hollier has called "a kind of Nazi biblio-phobia,"5 to the antifascist insistence, in response to the book burnings, on thesurvival of books, to the existence of wartime censorship, to our own passivitytoward disaster, and to the disaster that names our passivity toward what we sooften call "our time." It suggests as well our capacity to turn our backs on the disas-ter all around us by staring into books.Given the several histories and contexts sealed within the photograph-it is,as Benjamin would suggest, full of history and time-what could respondingmean here? How can we respond to the experiences commemorated, displaced,and ciphered by this image? How can we give an account of the circumstances inwhich it was produced, or better, of those it names, codes, disguises, or dates on itssurface? What can memory be when it seeks to remember the trauma of violenceand loss? How can we respond to what is not presently visible, to what can neverbe seen within the image? To what extent does what is not seen traverse the imageas the experience of the interruption of its surface? If the structure of the image isdefined as what remains inaccessible to visualization, this withholding and with-drawing structure prevents us from experiencing the image in its entirety, or, tobe more precise, encourages us to recognize that the image, bearing as it alwaysdoes several memories at once, is never closed.If the photograph evokes a moment of crisis and destruction, then, part ofwhat is placed in crisis is the finitude of the context within which we might read it.This is why,when we respond to a photograph by trying to establish only the histori-cal contexts in which it was produced, we risk forgetting the disappearance of con-text-the essential decontextualization-that is staged by every photograph. Themoment in the image appears suspended and torn from any particular historicalmoment-past, present, or future. As Benjamin explains in his early essay on theTrauerspielnd tragedy, the

time of history is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at everymoment. This means we cannot conceive of a single empirical eventthat bears a necessary relation to the time of its occurrence. For empir-ical events, time is nothing but a form, but, what is more important, asa form it is unfulfilled. This means that no single empirical event isconceivable that would have a necessary connection to the temporalsituation in which it occurs" (GS2, p. 134).Time tells us that the event can never be entirely circumscribed or delimited. Thisis why the effort to determine and impose a meaning on the event recorded in thisphotograph, to stabilize the determination of its context-an act that involves

5. Denis Hollier, "The Death of Paper: A Radio Play," October8 (Fall 1996), p. 4.

41


9/27

OCTOBER

reading what is not visible within the photograph-involves both violence andrepression. This is also why whatever violence there is in the attempt to establishthe context of this image remains linked, because of this repression, to an essentialnonviolence.

It is in this highly unstable and dangerous relationship between violence andnonviolence that responsibilities form, responsibilities that have everything to dowith how we read this image. As we have seen, Benjamin refers to the violence ornonviolence of reading when he claims that "the image that is read-which is tosay, the image in the Now of its recognizability-bears to the highest degree theimprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded" (AP, p.463; GS5, p. 578). Suggesting that there can be no reading of an image that doesnot expose us to a danger-because such a reading would only demonstrate, if itcould demonstrate anything, the noncontemporaneity of the present, the absenceof linearity in the representation of historical time, and therefore the fugacity ofthe past and the present-he warns us of the danger of believing that we haveseen or understood an image. For Benjamin-who committed suicide on the 26 ofSeptember 1940, just one day before the Holland House bombing-the activity ofreading is charged with an explosive power that blasts the image to be read fromits context. This tearing or breaking force is not an accidental predicate of read-ing; it belongs to its very structure. In a passage from "KonvolutN" that associatesthe "critical, dangerous impulse" of truth with the work of "materialist historywriting" (which he also describes as a kind of "blasting"),Benjamin suggests thatthe historical object emerges from out of a destructive explosion: "The destructiveor critical momentum of materialist historiography," he writes, "is registered inthe blasting of historical continuity with which the historical object first consti-tutes itself" (AP, p. 475; GS5, p. 594). This is why history involves the capacity toarrest or immobilize historical movement, to blast the details of an event from thecontinuum of history, or, as Benjamin puts it, to spring them loose "from theorder of succession" (AP, p. 475; GS5, p. 594). It is because history breaks downinto images that there can be no photographic image, no force of arrestment,which does not tell us of the relation between images and history, photographyand memory, and space and violence.

IIITo read means being exposed to time and images. But if the reading ofimages draws us to the necessity of the disappearance into which they withdrawand from which they emerge-as Benjamin tells us elsewhere, "what we know wewill soon no longer have before us-this is what becomes an image"6-it is

6. Walter Benjamin, CharlesBaudelaire:A LyricPoet in the Era of High Capitalism, rans. Harry Zohn(London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 87. See also GS1, p. 590.

42


10/27


because images themselves refer to time. Roland Barthes reinforces this pointwhen, in his CameraLucida,he suggests that if "the photograph possesses an eviden-tial force," its testimony "bears not on the object but on time."7 But what we calltime is precisely the image's inability to coincide with itself. It demands that everyimage be an image of its own interruption-an image of the explosion of spaceand the erasure of time. Exposing the image to the movement of its disappear-ance or dissolution, it exposes it to ruin, to damage, to annihilation. A movementof alteration, it conveys the exposure-the interruption and breakdown-of theimage and thereby prevents it from being merely this image or merely an image.This is why an image is never already constituted but is alwaysin the process of itsconstitution. This is also why,simultaneously constructed and effaced, every imageis a ruin, a lapsus imaginis.The space of ruin is itself exposed to the movement ofruin. The ruin stands in the image that stands in ruin: a miseen abyme, or whichthere are only ever further ruins of ruins. The ruin, the image of ruin, is thereforewithoutimage.It can never be presented.The ruin in the image is in fact the law that forbids its own presentation.The image presents an interruption of history and does so only by interruptingthe principle of presentation. Or, to put it another way, the disintegration of pre-sentation exposes a caesura, a ruin in the presentation of historical experience.As Benjamin explains in his book on the German Trauerspiel, In the ruin, historyhas materially distorted itself into the scene. And, figured in this manner, historydoes not assume the form of the promise of an eternal life so much as that of irre-sistible decay."8 f ruin is at work in every image, this is because the ruin is not sim-ply before the image, is not simply what makes the image an image; it is also what,in and with the image, is not the image and, in not being the image, allows theimage to be what it is: an image in ruins. This ruin means that the image does notmean, does not designate anything-especially because it refers to time, to a timewhose history is alwaysa history of ruins. In the wording ofJacques Derrida,

the ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument thatwas intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is thatwhich happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze.... [It]is not in front of us. ... It is experience itself: neither the abandonedyet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought,simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for itruins the time, the position, the presentation or representation of any-thing and everything.9

7. Roland Barthes, CameraLucida: Reflectionson Photography,rans. Richard Howard (New York:Farrar,Straus & Giroux, 1981), pp. 88-89.8. Walter Benjamin, Originof GermanTragicDrama,trans.John Osborne (London: New Left Books,1977), p. 177. See also GS1, pp.353-54.9. Jacques Derrida, Memoirsof theBlind: TheSelf-Portraitnd OtherRuins, trans. Pascale-Anne Braultand Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 68-69. There are, of course, sever-al indications that Benjamin did not restrict his discussion of ruins to a theme of the baroque culture.

43


11/27

OCTOBER

This is to say that, if time ruins the image, this ruined image also interruptsthe movement of time, in a manner that has, not the form of time, but rather theform of time's interruption, the form of a pause, of an explosion. This ruinedimage wounds the form of time. It suspends and deranges time. But since time-and all time-can be deranged in this way,time itself is perhaps a kind of madness.1Like the image, it is never identical to itself. It can only be what it is by leav-ing itself, by abandoning itself. It is unrepresentable. Never something, never onething, never this or that, it is what is never present. Nevertheless, as Kant remindsus, everything passes in time but time itself. Time repeats itself endlessly. It beginsin repetition. But what is repeated in time is a movement of differentiation anddispersion-and what is differentiated and dispersed is time itself. There can beno passing moment that is not already both the past and the future: the momentmust be simultaneously past, present, and future in order for it to pass at all. Thisis why what is repeated in time is what is never simply itself, what is incessantly van-ishing. If time is a matter of repetition, it is a repetition only of its unrepeatability.This aporetic exposition of time and the image no longer allows for a linear,unbroken presentation of history. It presents itself as a repetition of the prohibi-tion against images, a repetition that tells us that history can only emerge in theinterruption of the continuum of presentation. The sign of this prohibition is leg-ible in the photograph in the X formed by the collapsed wooden beams at its cen-ter. It is as if the prohibition that this X should express, however, intervenes in itssign and makes it into a ruin of the sign that would correspond to the prohibition.By remaining faithful to the prohibition, the very sign in which it could presentitself is interrupted or ruined. This suggests that, without interrupting the histori-cal continuum, without blasting the techniques of representation, there can be nohistorical time. No history without the interruption of history. No time withoutthe interruption of time. No image without the interruption of the image. If, how-ever, this interrupted image is still an image, then "image"means: the disaster ofthe image. It means that every image is an image of disaster-that the only image

In the "Berlin Chronicle," for example-in a passage that, suggesting that memory is a medium inwhich debris and buried ruins are reinterred in the act of recollection, presents the image as a ruin-he writes: "Memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past but rather its theater[Schauplatz]. Memory is the medium of what has been experienced, as the earth is the medium inwhich dead cities lie buried in debris ... facts of the matter are only deposits, layers which deliver onlyto the most meticulous examination what constitutes the true assets hidden within the inner earth: theimages which, torn from all former contexts stand-like ruins or torsos in the collector's gallery-asthe treasures in the prosaic chambers of our belated insights" (Benjamin, "Berlin Chronicle, inReflections, rans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978], pp. 25-26.See also GS6, pp. 486-87).10. I am indebted here to Werner Hamacher's discussion of the derangement of time in his essay,"Des Contrees des temps," in Zeit-Zeichen: ufschiibeund InterferenzenwischenEndzeitund Echtzeit,ed.Georg Christoph Tholen and Michael 0. Scholl (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1990), pp. 30-31.See also Blanchot's similar discussion in The Writingof Disaster, rans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1986), especially pp. 78-80 (hereafter cited as WD).

44


12/27

Lapsus Imaginis: TheImage n Ruins 45

that could really be an image would be the one that shows its impossibility, its dis-appearance and destruction, its ruin.11 The image is only an image, in otherwords, when it is not one, when it says "there s no image."12 he image thereforedoes not demonstrate. No assertion about the image (and this means no "imageof the image") can show us the truth of the image. The image is rather a monsterof time-in which time does not properly tell time. It is, in the wording of WernerHamacher, a "monstruumwithout monstration."13

IV

Let us return to this strange photograph. Taken on October 23, 1940, itstages a scene of reading that asks to be read in relation to the ruin and violencewithin which it takes place. This ruin and violence include not only the ruin andviolence given in the photograph, but also that effected by the German Luftwaffeair raids on London. One year after it invaded Poland, Germany began its blitz onLondon in early September. It turned to night bombing in early October, and con-tinued its barrage of bombs and incendiaries until November 13. Six hundredbombers were directed against London in the initial blitz. Until November 13,with only ten days excepted, between 150 and 300 Luftwaffe bombers dropped atleast 100 tons of explosives on London each and every night. Thirteen hundredtons of high explosives and almost one million incendiary bombs were dropped,killing more than thirteen thousand people and injuring twenty thousand more.First blasting the densely populated dockland streets of terraced houses, ware-houses, and factories, these bombs and explosives eventually brought fires and thespread of burning embers across the city of London, in the process transformingit. Roads were blocked with debris, bus and rail services were dislocated, commu-nication links were interrupted and even engulfed by fire. Churches, schools, hos-pitals, public houses, shops, and houses were ruined. Pavements and streets werecovered with wreckage and the fine, frosty glitter of powdered glass left behind byshattered windows and collapsed roofs everywhere. Thousands of people were left

11. Taking our point of departure from this image of disaster and ruin, we could even say that thetruth of photography lies in the relation it stages between light and ashes. As Man Ray wrote in 1934,in an essay entitled "The Age of Light," images are always only the residue of an experience. This iswhy what we "see" in an image is what has "survived an experience tragically, [what recalls] the eventmore or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames" ("The Age of Light,"in Photographyn the ModernEra:EuropeanDocumentsand CriticalWritings,1913-1940, ed. ChristopherPhillips [NewYork:Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989], p. 53).12. On this point, see Bernard Stiegler's "L'Imagediscrfte," in Derrida's and Stiegler's Echographies:de la television Paris: Editions Galilee, 1996), p. 165.13. See Hamacher, "The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka," in Premises:Essays onPhilosophyand LiteraturefromKant to Celan,trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1996), p. 316. Hamacher uses the phrase not to describe the image, but as a "name" for the name.


13/27

OCTOBER

homeless. Reading itself declined due to sheltering in ill-lit spaces. Moreover, byOctober 9, more than one hundred thousand books had been destroyed or severelydamaged in the bombing of University College Library. The attacks were sointense that the blitz eventually became routine. Air-raidsirens were even at timesignored unless the noise of gunfire or bombs was dangerously close.14

During the two months of sustained bombing, the space called "London"-aspace with an immense and stratified history, with its walls, its buildings, and itsstreets-became a space that could no longer be inhabited in the same way, thatcould no longer be recognized as itself: the German blitz in fact attacked spacemore than it did people. During World War II, England lost about 365,000 peo-ple-only half the number killed in the World War I. The destruction of property,however, included damage to four million houses, and the total destruction ofnearly half a million.15 This destruction also included the destruction of reveredand talismanic buildings such as the Holland House. The last of the great countryestates in London and one of Europe's last international salons, this seventeenth-century Tudor house was completely destroyed except for its east wing when, onthe night of September 27, incendiary bombs dropped on its west wing. From themid-eighteenth century until the 1840s, the House had been a political, social,and literary center for the Whig aristocracy. It was frequented by the most emi-nent patricians and intellectuals of the day: associates of the EdinburghReview,members of the diplomatic corps in London, ambassadors and ministers ofEuropean courts, and literati such as Byron. A transmission center for patronage,political discussion, and gossip, the Holland House was once referred to byCharles Greville as "the house of Old Europe."16Taken one day after the one-hundredth anniversary of Lord Holland'sdeath, this strange photograph therefore figures, among so many other things,the ruin and memory of "Old Europe": the explosion and collapse of a certainidea of Europe-with its traditions, hierarchies, social orders, and institutions-and the traces of its survival in the still standing archive. It evokes a violence thatwished to reduce "Europe"to rubble, that hoped to destroy an "older"Europe inthe name of a younger one attempting to establish its hegemony across theContinent and beyond. Responding to this violence in the name of another Europe,England and its allies stalled this European "unification"by combating Nazism.This war over the identity of Europe, over its spaces and borders, is no doubtindissociable from a Europe whose spaces and borders are today again not given.This Europe that has never been and will never be identical to itself, this Europe isagain, as Derrida has noted, the uncertain space of racism, anti-Semitism, and

14. I have drawnhere on Angus Calder's TheMythoftheBlitz(London:Jonathan Cape, 1991), especiallychapters 2 and 6, and Philip Ziegler's London at War:1939-1945 (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).15. See Calder, TheMythof theBlitz,pp. 41-42.16. Cited in Leslie Mitchell's HollandHouse(London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1980), p. 306.

46


14/27


nationalist fanaticism-and this despite and even because of recent events inEastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: what we call "perestroika,"the fallof the Berlin Wall, the different movements of "democratization," and the variouscalls for "new" national identities.17 This Europe was already written into both thespace of Holland House and the space of this ruined image, this image of ruins. Itis this space-a space that ruins the distinction between the privateand the public-that will be translated in 1955-57 into a people's park that includes a youth hostel,teashops, and a series of lawns. The postwar effort that works to transform thisonce aristocratic enclave into a more democratic public space will repeat theexplosive work of the violence sealed within this ruined image.

VWar not only names the central experience of modernity; it also plays anessential role in our understanding of technological reproduction in general andof photography in particular. As ErnstJinger noted in 1930, evoking the relationthat for him exists between war and photography:A war that is distinguished by the high level of technical precisionrequired to wage it is bound to leave behind documents which are dif-ferent from and more numerous than those of earlier times. It is thesame intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemyto the exact second and meter, that labors to preserve the great histori-cal event in fine detail.... Included among the documents of particularprecision, which have only recently been at the disposal of humanintelligence, are photographs, of which a large supply accumulatedduring the war. Day in and day out, optical lenses were pointed at thecombat zones alongside the mouths of rifles and cannons. As instru-ments of technological consciousness, they preserved the image ofthese devastated landscapes.18ForJiinger, there can be no warwithout photography. This is why the entiretyof his writings on photography suggest the ways in which the German war of lightand disaster illuminated the links between photographic technology and the tech-niques of modern warfare. While the English began equipping their bombers withphotographic apparatuses, the German blitz flashed its death across the skies andlandscape of Europe. Dividing night into night and day, it illumined the space of

17. See Derrida, The OtherHeading: Reflectionson TodaysEurope,trans. Pascale-Anne Brault andMichael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 37-38.18. See Junger, "War and Photography," trans. Anthony Nassar, in New German Critique 59(Spring/Summer 1993), p. 24.

47


15/27

OCTOBER

war. "What had taken place in the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre," Paul Virilioexplains, "wasnow happening in the skies of England."19Indeed, we could evensay that the blackout that was enforced during the blitz-the event that, accord-ing to historian Philip Ziegler, "impinged most forcibly on the life of the averageLondoner"20-transformed the entirety of London into a kind of gigantic dark-room, into a massively photographic space.Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, the Luftwaffebombers dropped incendiaries both to trace the bombing area in London and tolight up nocturnal targets. London became subject to the glare of explosives andthe blinding light of the searchlights whose skywardbeams traced a kind of lumi-nous cat's cradle in the night. To say that there could be no blitz without the pro-duction of images is to say that there could be no lightning war without the flashof the camera.21 No blitz without photography-and in part because both are amatter of speed. Like the rapidity of the blitz, the technology of the camera alsoresides in its speed. Like the instantaneity of a lightning flash, the camera, in thesplit-second temporality of the shutter's blink, seizes an image, an image that

19. Paul Virilio, Warand Cinema:TheLogisticsofPerception,rans. Patrick Camiller (New York:Verso,1989), p. 75. In the experience of the German light wars, the technology of warfare comes togetherwith the techniques of perception. As ErnstJunger writes in his essay "On Pain," "photography is aweapon employed by the modern type. For him, seeing is an act of aggression. ... Today we alreadyhave guns equipped with optical cells, and even aerial and aquatic war machines with optical controlsystems" (Juinger, "Photography and the 'Second Consciousness': An Excerpt from 'On Pain,"' trans.Joel Agee, in Photographyn the ModernEra: EuropeanDocumentsand Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed.Christopher Phillips [New York:Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989], pp. 208-9).Capturing space and capturing images prove to be similar activities. This helps explain why,today more than ever, the camera is on the side of destruction. We need only recall the tragedy of whatwe now refer to as the "Warin the Gulf." If this war taught us anything, it taught us what the blitzalready had suggested was true of all wars-that there can be no war that does not depend on tech-nologies of representation. This was a war whose entire operation depended on the technologies ofsight: satellite aerial photography, light enhancing television cameras, infrared flashes and sightingdevices, thermographic images, and even cameras on warheads. This was a war in which the warmachine was in every waya photographic machine.

Linking war to photography and weapons to images, Junger would go on to argue that moderntechnological warfare gives birth to a specifically modern form of perception organized around theexperience of danger and shock. This is why, in his essay "On Danger"-written as an introduction to a1931 collection of photographs and accounts of catastrophes and accidents entitled Der gefdhrlicheAugenblickTheDangerousMoment)-he notes that the moment of danger can no longer be restricted tothe realm of war.Identifying the contemporary zone of danger with the realm of technology in general,he claims that a modern type is arising in response to the "increased incursion of danger into dailylife," whose aim is to develop an anaesthetized relation to danger (Junger, "On Danger,"trans. DonaldReneau, in New GermanCritique 9 [Spring/Summer 1993], p. 27). The effects of this anaesthetizationcan be read, in the image of the bombed-out Holland House Library, n the calm and leisure exhibitedby the three men, and this despite the fact that they are standing amid several signs of warand danger.20. See Ziegler, London at War,p. 67.21. As Calder explains, the word "Blitz"was taken from Blitzkrieg,"lightning-war,"and "applied bythe world's press to the swift German conquest of Poland in September 1939, and then to the swiftGerman advance in France and the Low Countries from May 10, 1940. As heavy bombing of Londonbegan in the late summer, the word 'Blitz' became 'almost overnight a British colloquialism for an airraid"' (TheMythof theBlitz,p. 2).

48


16/27


Benjamin likens to the activity of lightning. "The dialectical image," he tells us,"flashes (aufblitzendes)" AP, p. 473; GS5, p. 592).Linked to the flashes of memory, the suddenness of the perception of simi-larity, and the irruption of events and images, Benjamin's vocabulary of lightninghelps register what comes to pass in the opening and closing of vision. Lightningsignals the force and experience of an interruption that enables a suddenmoment of clarification or illumination. What is illumined or lighted by the punc-tual intensity of this or that strike of lightning, however-the emergence of animage, for example-can at the same time be burned, incinerated, consumed inflames. This is why, Benjamin notes in his discussion of the German mourningplay, the "content of truth does not emerge in an unveiling, rather it manifestsitself in a process that one might call, in a simile, the flaming up of the veil thatenters the circle of ideas, the burning of the work, in which its form reaches thehigh point of its luminosity."22A luminosity that blinds as much as it enlightens,the flame tells us that truth springs forth in the burning of the work-the workthat burns, that is being consumed by the flames, but also the work that burns itscontents. We could even say that truth means the making of ashes. That there canbe neither truth nor photography without ashes means that, like Benjaminianallegory, both take place in a state of ruin, in a state that moves awayfrom itself inorder to be what it is. Like the photograph that tells us what is no longer beforeus, truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longerpresent. That history is to be read in its transience means that its truth comes inthe form of ruins. There is no photograph that does not turn its "subjects" toruins. This is why this image of ruins tells us that, in every image, in every trace,and consequently in every experience, there is this explosion and incineration,this experience of explosion and incineration, which is experience itself.23Effacing what it inscribes, the image bears witness to the impossibility of testimony.It remains as a testament to loss.

VIIn Benjamin's etiology, shock is what characterizes our experience. In his"Workof Art" essay, he links this shock to the work of the camera, claiming thatthe camera gives the moment "a posthumous shock" (I, p. 175; GS 1, p. 630). Inlinking the experience of shock to the structure of delay built into the photo-graphic event, he suggests what for him is the latency of experience; namely, thedistance between an event and our experience or understanding of it. This dis-

22. Benjamin, Originof GermanTragicDrama,p. 31. See also GS1, p. 211.23. This sentence is drawn in part from a statement that Derrida made in a 1986 interview, publishedunder the title "'ThereIs No OneNarcissism' (Autobiophotographies)."See Points... Interviews, 974-1994,ed. ElisabethWeber,trans. Peggy Kamufet al. (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 209.

49


17/27

OCTOBER

tance tells us that we experience an event indirectly, through our mediated anddefensive reaction to it. For Benjamin, what characterizes experience in general-experience understood in its strict sense as the traversal of a danger, the passagethrough a peril-is that it retains no trace of itself: experience experiences itselfas the vertigo of memory, as an experience whereby what is experienced is notexperienced.It is here that we can begin to register the possibility of a history which is nolonger founded on traditional models of experience and reference. The sugges-tion that we cannot experience experience directly requires that history emergewhere understanding or experience cannot. In Benjamin's words, "The greaterthe extent of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more incessantly con-sciousness has to be present as a screen against stimuli, the more efficiently itoperates, the less these impressions enter Erfahrung;rather, they fulfill the con-cept of Erlebnis.Perhaps the peculiar achievement of shock defense may in the endbe seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in con-sciousness at the cost of the integrity of its [the incident's] contents" (I, p. 163; GS1, p. 615). "Only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously,"Benjamin writes elsewhere, only "what has not happened to the subject as an expe-rience [Erlebnis], can become a component of the memoire nvolontaire"(I, pp.160-61; GS 1, p. 613). It is what is not experienced in an event that paradoxicallyaccounts for the belated and posthumous shock of historical experience. If historyis to be a history of this "posthumous shock," it can only be referential to theextent that, in its occurrence, it is neither perceived nor experienced directly. ForBenjamin, history can be grasped only in its disappearance.This helps explain why these three men, looking at the books in this photo-graph, remain passive to the disaster behind them: it is as though what has hap-pened has not happened. If we wish to situate the photograph within a discussionof the relation between shock and photography, we should note that, in its depic-tion of the men's seeming indifference to the disaster around them, the photo-graph also exhibits its relation to what was perhaps the most pervasive rhetoric ofBritish propaganda during the war and, in particular, during the blitz: the sensethat-despite the fear, apprehension, confusion, and demoralization that so oftenattends war-the British were models of courage and fortitude. The speeches ofWinston Churchill, the broadcasts of J. B. Priestley, and the daily and weeklyreports of the BBC Radio News helped perpetuate the sense that civilian moralenot only survived exposure to the violence and trauma of war but also guaranteed,in the wording of Angus Calder, "that the British people, as a whole, deserved tosave Europe and defeat Hitler."24Exhibiting calmness, indifference to the dangeraround them, resolution in the face of loss and death, Londoners worked to man-

24. See Calder, TheMyth of theBlitz,p. 142.

50


18/27

Lapsus Imaginis: TheImage n Ruins 51

ufacture an image of themselves as exemplary survivors. The photograph of thebombed-out Holland House Library is only one of the innumerable photographsand representations that were circulated to confirm this image of Englishendurance.25 The effects of this propagandistic work were legible everywhere, andled Anna Freud-who with several of her colleagues had set up a network of psychi-atric clinics to deal with the neuroses caused by the bombing-to say that she hadnever seen anything like the calm exhibited by the Londoners. As Ziegler notes,she expressed her surprise that "not one case of shell-shock had been reportedand that she had not heard of a single breakdown that could be directly attributedto the bombing."26If, however, this photograph conjures what Calder has called "The Myth ofthe Blitz"-the myth that the entirety of the British population exhibited courageand strength in the midst of violence and death-it also suggests another modelfor reading the presumed distance from disaster, a model offered to us by AnnaFreud's father. In Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple,for example-and here he antici-pates Benjamin's reflections on shock-Freud insists on the distance between atraumatic event and our experience of it. Confronted by an event that paralyzesus by the magnitude of its demand, an event that we recognize as a danger, wefend off the danger through the process of repression: the danger is in some wayinhibited, and its precipitating cause-in this instance, the blitz itself-is forgotten.The forgetting that attends the experience of shock, "the fact of latency,"asCathy Caruth has argued in regard to Freud, "would seem to consist, not in theforgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known; but in a latency inher-ent to the experience itself." The historical power of shock, she goes on toexplain, "is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it

25. That the image is most probably staged can be confirmed by comparing it to the image of thebombed-out library that appeared only one day earlier in the London Times.In the photograph of thedestroyed library that was reproduced in the October 22, 1940, issue of the Times(p. 6), the booksalong the walls are much more disheveled, there is more debris scattered across the ground, there areno people inhabiting the space, and the atmosphere of the scene is strikingly more dark and ominous.In addition, the bombing of the library was not announced in the Timesuntil over three weeks afterthe event. While this delay could be attributed to the disarrayand chaos resulting from the blitz, it isalso most certainly an effect of censorship: the British Ministry of Information was reluctant toannounce the destruction of some of the city's most revered and historically significant buildings. Bothof these incidents-the reproduction of the image in the London Timesand the delay with which itappeared-suggest that the image before us was, among other things, staged to combat the psychologi-cal effects of the blitz: the Germans may have tried to destroy our books, our buildings-the symbolsof our civilization-but we are still reading.For an excellent discussion of the way in which the rhetoric of the survival of books-in the faceof their incineration or threatened destruction-circulated within the several antifascist discourses ofthe Popular Front, see Hollier's "The Death of Paper.""Books may burn," he writes, "but the idea ofthe book, that is, the presence in itself of the idea of the Book, could never fall prey to the flames... bookburning is destined to remain a symbolic act" (p. 5). Hollier briefly discusses the image of the HollandHouse Libraryruins, suggesting that it "fitsperfectly into the line of antifascisticonography" (p. 9).26. Cited in Ziegler, Londonat War,pp. 170-71.


19/27

OCTOBER

is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all."27The force of trauma is so terrible and pervasive that it leads us to believe that wehave not been touched. This is why, Blanchot explains, "we are not contempo-raries of the disaster" (WD,p. 6); it remains "unexperienced. It is what escapes thevery possibility of experience" (WD,p. 7). In the long run, he goes on to suggest,the disaster is perhaps our own passivity to the disaster: we experience what weexperience in the mode of forgetting. This is why there can be no reading that isnot under the threat of disaster, that is not under its surveillance. Disaster is per-haps what gives us our right to read. Reading under the light of disaster-whatBlanchot calls "the passivity of reading" or "passivity'sreading" (WD,p. 101)-letsus know why ruin and disaster belong to the banal. As Benjamin would have it,"That things just go on," and have gone on this way,"this is the catastrophe ....Catastrophe is not what threatens to occur at any given moment; it is what is givenat any given moment."28

Staging the relation between traumatic experience and the photographiceffect-both perform their work by arresting time and experience, by disorderingmemory and the work of representation-this remarkable photograph evokes adevastation that destroys our ability to refer to it. It exhibits, in the wording ofRosalind Krauss,a "trauma of signification."29

VIIWhat is our world? What can our world be if it can be revealed only by tech-nology in general and photography in particular? If technology is a mode ofunveiling, in what way can our world-a world that is alwaystouched by technicityand therefore no longer simply a world-reveal the essence of technology? Ifmodernity is another name for the globalization of the world, can our world besaid to globalize the meaning of history? These are the questions that motivateBenjamin's efforts to represent history and modernity in the language of photog-

raphy. In his "Theses on the Concept of History,"assembled shortly before his sui-cide in 1940 while fleeing from Nazi Germany, Benjamin persistently conceives of

27. Cathy Caruth, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History," in YaleFrenchStudies79 (1991), p. 187.28. Benjamin, "Central Park,"trans. Lloyd Spencer, in New GermanCritique34 (Winter 1985), p. 50.See also GS 1, p. 683. Benjamin repeats this point in "KonvolutN." There, he writes: "The concept ofprogress should be grounded on the idea of catastrophe. That things just keep going on' is the cata-strophe. Not an ever-present possibility, but what in each case is alwaysgiven. Thus, Strindberg-in 'ToDamascus'?-: Hell is not something that awaits us, but this very life, here and now" (AP, p. 473 / GS5,p. 592).29. Kraussuses this phrase in reference to Marcel Duchamp's "With My Tongue in My Cheek." See"Notes on the Index: Part I,"p. 206.

52


20/27


history in the language of photography, as though he wished to offer us a series ofsnapshots of his latest reflections on history. Written from the perspective of disas-ter and catastrophe, the theses are an historico-biographical time-lapse camerathat flashes across Benjamin's concern, especially in his writings of the '30s, overthe question of what remains of what passes into history-a question he exploresin terms of the photograph.Within the photograph-as I have suggested, a condensation of past, pre-sent, and future-time is no longer to be understood as continuous and linear,but rather as spatial, an imagistic space that Benjamin calls a "constellation" or a"monad." "Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation pregnant with ten-sions," he writes, "it gives that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into amonad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where heencounters it as a monad" (I, pp. 262-63; GS1, pp. 702-3). If this break from thepresent signals the taking over of a past, the arrest of present thought in a constel-lation or monad "blasts" his past open. It "shatters the continuum of history"andcalls forth the history hidden in any given image. It discloses the breaks, withinhistory, from which history emerges. Focusing on what is sealed or hidden withinan image, on the transitoriness of events, on the relation between any givenmoment and all of history, Benjamin's historical materialist seeks to delineate thecontours of a history whose chance depends on overcoming the idea of history asthe mere reproduction of a past.This history emerges in a moment of disaster, in the time of the disaster thatstructures the danger of history. In the almost-no-time of this breakdown, think-ing comes to a standstill. It experiences itself as an interruption. As Benjaminexplains, historical thinking involves "not only the movements of thoughts, buttheir arrest as well" (I, p. 262; GS 1, p. 702). As he explains elsewhere-citing aremark by Ernst Bloch-history happens when it "flashes its Scotland badge" (AP,p. 463; GS5, p. 578), when it enacts this force of arrest. This is why he associatesthe radical temporality of the photograph with what he elsewhere calls the"caesura in the movement of thought" (AP, p. 475; GS5, p. 595). Announcing apoint when the "pastand the present moment flash into a constellation," the pho-tographic image-like the image in general-interrupts history and thereby facili-tates another history, another possibility for history. It translates an aspect of timeinto something like a certain space,a certain interval, and, in so doing, it worksdialectically to spatialize time and temporalize space-without ever stopping timeor preventing time from being "itself,"since time can never be thought awayfromthis spatialization. Within the photograph, time presents itself to us as this "spac-ing."What is spaced here-within what Benjamin elsewhere calls "the space of his-tory [Geschichtsraum]"AP, p. 458; GS5, p. 571)-are the alwaysbecoming and dis-appearing moments of time itself. It is precisely this continual process of becom-ing and disappearing that, for Benjamin, characterizes the movement of time.Effecting a certain spacing of time, the photograph gives way to an occurrence:the emergence of history as an image.

53


21/27

OCTOBER

This is why, from the very moment of the photographic event, the image thattelescopes history into a moment-an abbreviation or miniaturization that tells usthat history can end or break off-suggests that what inaugurates history is writteninto a context that history itself may never completely comprehend. This contextexceeds the limits of its representation. This is why what is at stake in reading anyimage is the possibility of registering what withdraws from the image-its seman-tic and referential dimension-and what remains of the image after meaning haswithdrawn from it. To read what exceeds the permeable borders of an imagetherefore demands that we respond to what remains of the image, to what is notexhausted in our effort to understand these remains, beyond or before the tempo-ralization of the image-a temporalization that renders signification and refer-ence possible, even as it remains irreducible to them.To write history-to read an image-is therefore not to re-present some pastor present presence. "To articulate the past historically," Benjamin writes, "doesnot mean to recognize it 'as it really was.' It means to take possession of a memoryas it flashes up at a moment of danger" (I, p. 255; GS1, p. 695). History thereforebegins where memory is endangered, during the flash that marks its emergenceand disappearance. It begins where representation ends. As Jean-Luc Nancy tellsus, "The historian's work-which is never a work of memory-is a work of repre-sentation in many senses, but it is representation with respect to something that isnot representable, and that is history itself."30This means that history and memorycan only occur to the extent that they ceaselessly move awayfrom us. If it were notfor the disappearing trace of their own transience, history and memory would infact never happen.

VIIIThis is why the movement of history corresponds to the photographic event:both ask us to think about what happens when an image comes to pass. In the fifthof his "Theses on the Concept of History," Benjamin addresses the possibility ofseizing the image of the past for and in the present, suggesting that the "true pic-ture" of history intends the present: "The true picture of the past flits by. The pastcan be seized only as an image which flashes up [auJblitzt]at the instant when itcan be recognized and is never seen again.... For it is an irretrievable image ofthe past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognizeitself as intended in it" (I, p. 255; GS1, p. 695). What "threatens to disappear" hereis not the past, but an "irretrievable image of the past."While we might say that wecan recognize ourselves in this image of the past only insofar as we are destined byit, the temporality of this picture of history coincides with an interruption of both

30. See Nancy, "Finite History," in The States of Theory,ed. David Carroll (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990), p. 166.

54


22/27


recognition and intention: it is irretrievable, it can neither be recognized norintentionally realized in the present. This is why what the image intends is theirretrievability of the present itself.This image of the past-and of the irretrievable present it intends-may be"fleeting" and "flashing,"but it is also susceptible to being held fast-even if whatis seized is only the image in its disappearance. In other words, if "the true pictureof the past flits by," t is not so much that we are unable to grasp the truth of thepast, but rather that the truepicture of the past flits by,the truepicture of the pastis the one that is alwaysin a state of passing away.If Benjamin suggests that a "truepicture of the past"does not give us history-or rather, is the only thing of historywe get-he still suggests that it can be viewed as true. This is why to understandhistory as an image is neither to assert that history is a myth nor to suggest that acertain "historical reality" remains hidden, behind our images. Rather, inBenjamin, it is always as if we were suspended between both: either somethinghappens that we are unable to represent (in which case all we have are images thatsubstitute for reality), or nothing happens but the production of historicallymarked, fictional images. In either case, the image is a principle of articulationbetween language and history. This principle is indissociable from what, withinthe image, inaugurates history according to the laws of photography, the laws thatdetermine-even as they are determined by-the involuntary emergence of animage. As Benjamin suggests in his notes to the Theses,"History in the strict senseis an image from involuntary memory, an image which suddenly occurs to the sub-ject of history in the moment of danger" (GS 1, p. 1243). For Benjamin, these lawsnot only account for the force of images on whatever we might call the "reality"ofhistory, but also for the essential imagism at work within the movement and con-stitution of history. Images are essentially involved in the historical acts of the pro-duction of meaning. Their links with knowledge give them their force, and hencetheir consequence within the domains of history and politics. This is why thematerialism of Benjamin's theory of history can be allegorized in the photograph-ic image. To the extent that the function of the camera is to make images, the his-toriography produced by the camera involves the construction of photographicstructures that both produce and reconfigure historical significance and under-standing. Benjamin makes this point in his drafts to the "Theses,"in a passage thatnot only understands history as imagistic, as textual, but also links it to the cita-tional structure of photography itself:

If one wants to consider history as a text, then what a recent authorsays of literary texts would apply to it. The past has deposited in itimages, which one could compare to those captured by a light-sensitiveplate. "Only the future has developers at its disposal which are strongenough to allow the image to come to light in all its details ...." Thehistorical method is a philological one, whose foundation is the bookof life. "To read what was never written," says Hofmannsthal. The read-er, to be thought of here, is the true historian. (GS 1, p. 1238)

55


23/27

OCTOBER

For Benjamin, the image can only "enter into legibility" at a particular time:when possible pasts emerge, like an image from a photographic negative, to meetus from future possibilities. This is why every image is an image from the future-an image of possible, future pasts. An image of the future, the image can never besaid to exist.

IXWriting of the Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who "ordered the erection of thealmost infinite wall of China" and "who also decreed that all books prior to him be

burned,"Jorge Luis Borges suggests, in his 1950 essay, "The Wall and the Books,"that "the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operationswhich in some secret way cancel each other." He goes on to explain that "the wallin space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death," since"all things long to persist in their being." Nevertheless, if Shih Huang Ti walled inhis empire because he knew that it was perishable and destroyed the booksbecause he understood that they were sacred, this little parable about the preser-vation and abolition of history tells us that there can be no burning of books with-out the erecting of walls and no creating of walls without the burning of books-and this even if these acts are "not simultaneous."31But what if the walls are walls of books that remain standing, while buildingsare burned? What is space when it is linked to both texts and violence? What is itwhen it belongs to memory? This photograph-only one small piece of the massof archival photographic material given to us by the war-this photographbelongs to the questions of artificial memory and of the modern modalities ofarchivation.32Affecting the entirety of our relation to the world, these questions

31. See Borges, "The Wall and the Books," trans. Eliot Weinberger, in JorgeLuis Borges:SelectedNon-Fictions,ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York:Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 344-46. Borges returns to the fig-ure of the burning library in his 1977 collection of poems, TheHistory of theNight. There, in a poementitled "Alexandria, A.D. 641," he writes: "Since the first Adam who beheld the night / And the dayand the shape of his own hand, / Men have made up stories and have fixed / In stone, in metal, or onparchment / Whatever the world includes or dreams create. / Here is the fruit of their labor: theLibrary. / ... The faithless say that if it were to burn, / History would burn with it. They are wrong. /Unceasing human work gave birth to this / Infinity of books. If of them all / Not even one remained,man would again / Beget each page and every line, / Each work and every love of Hercules, / Andevery teaching of every manuscript. / In the first century of the Muslim era, / I, that Omar who sub-dued the Persians / And who imposes Islam on the Earth, / Order my soldiers to destroy / By fire theabundant Library, / Which will not perish" (in JorgeLuis Borges:Selected oems,ed. Alexander Coleman[New York:Penguin Books, 1999], p. 393).32. Charles Baudelaire was perhaps the first writer to define photography as an archive of memory.In his "Salon of 1859,"in the section entitled "The Modern Public and Photography,"he uses this defi-nition to distinguish photography from art. He notes, writing of photography: "If she saves from obliv-ion the crumbling ruins, books, engravings, and manuscripts that time devours, the precious things

56


24/27


not only touch on the relation between technology and memory, on the conse-quences of new techniques of archivation on our conception of history, but alsoon the question of whether or not there is an outside of the archive. In what waydoes the archive presume the possibility of memorization, of repetition, or ofreproduction, and thereby a certain exteriority-the exteriority of what is to beremembered, repeated, or reproduced? To what extent does the logic of repeti-tion that defines the archive belong to what Freud understands as the death drive,to destruction in general? To say that the archive begins with the breakdown ofmemory is to say that it begins with forgetfulness, with an amnesia that ruins itscommemorative principle. This is why, as Derrida argues in ArchiveFever, he ques-tion of the archive is never simply a question of the past but also a question of thefuture.33 To the extent that the archive depends on both the preservation anddestruction of inscriptions, its structure would seem to imply reference to thingsbeyond its limits. But this strange image of shattered archival space is itself des-tined for the archive, is even archivized, fleetingly, in the pages of this essay. If theviolence that exposes the archive to its radical precariousness, to its fragility,allows us to glimpse its finitude, this violence also enables its survival. We needonly recall the history of the burning of libraries-from Alexandria to Strasbourgto Louvain-and all innumerable written accounts and literatures these conflagra-tions have occasioned.34If the archive names a body of texts whose existence is threatened by war,the war also assures its continued existence. In TheMyth of theBlitz, Calder notesthat "the Blitz (the bombing of 1940-41) exists . . . in an uncountable prolifera-tion of published accounts and published and unpublished documents as well asin the tape-recorded or filmed memories of 'talking head' survivors.""No archiveof such abundance," he goes on to say, "exists for any other 'major event' inBritish history" (MB, p. 119). In linking the destructive violence of the blitz-aviolence often directed at the archive, as evidenced in the German bombing ofthe library at Louvain in May of 1940 or in the various book burnings ordered bythe Nazi regime-to the proliferation of texts, Calder here suggests that the blitzstrangely helped preserve the archive, that the very destruction that exposed thearchive to ruin also permitted and conditioned it. Not only is violence the very

whose form will disappear and which demand a place in the archives of our memory, she will deserveour thanks and applause" (Baudelaire, "Salon of 1859," trans. P. E. Charvet, in SelectedWritingson Artand LiteratureLondon: Penguin Books, 1992], p. 297).33. "The question of the archive is not," he writes, "aquestion of the past. It is not the question of aconcept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivableconcept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of aresponse, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what thatwill have meant, we will only know in times to come" (Derrida, ArchiveFever:A FreudianImpression,trans. Eric Prenowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], p. 36. Hereafter cited as AF).34. On the burning of the Louvain library,see Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Die Bibliothekon Lowen:EineEpisodeaus derZeitderWeltkriegeMunich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988).

57


25/27

OCTOBER

condition of this preservation, but, in turn, we might say that there could be nowar,no destruction, without the archive: the archive ensures that violence will per-sist. This fact is all the more legible today when the militarization of technologycorresponds to the textualization of its weaponry. Today missiles and warheads canbe understood more and more as missives, as dispatches in writing, guided as theyare by information and codes, inscriptions and traces.35To say that today's missilesare indissociably linked to language, to texts and writing, is not to reduce them tothe inefficacy that some would rush to see in books. Rather, it signals-exposesand explodes-what in writing corresponds to the power of destruction: nodestruction without texts, and no texts without destruction. As Derrida puts it,locating the Freudian death drive within the archive itself, what makes archiviza-tion possible is also what "exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces withdestruction, introducing a priori orgetfulness and the archiviolithic at the heart ofthe monument .... The archive alwaysworks, and a priori, against itself" (AF, p.12). The "silent vocation" of the death drive, he adds, is "to burn the archive andto incite amnesia."36If texts survive the death they bring, however, it is because they come as whatexceeds the categories of life and death. The archive has alwaysbeen a name forboth what passes away and what remains. The blitz and its effects announce theparadoxes of the archive: as what alwaysrefers elsewhere, the archive exceeds itsborders, enacting the "anarchivation" without which it would not be what it is. AsBlanchot explains, citing and responding to a sentence from Mallarme:

"There s no explosionexcepta book."A book: a book among others, or areference to the unique, the last and essential Liber, or, more exactly,the great Book which is always one among others, any book at all,already without importance or beyond important things. "Explosion,"abook: this means that the book is not the laborious assemblage of atotality finally attained, but has for its being the noisy, silent shatteringwhich without the book would not take place (would not affirm itself).But it also means that since the book itself belongs to shatteredbeing-to being violently exceeded and thrust out of itself-the bookgives no sign of itself save its own explosive violence, the violence withwhich it excludes itself, the thunderous refusal of the plausible: theoutside in its becoming, which is that of shattering. (WD,p. 124)

35. On this point, see Virilio's recent book, TheInformationBomb,trans. Chris Turner (New York:Verso, 2000). See also Derrida's "No Apocalypse, Not Now: full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven mis-sives," n diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984), pp. 29-30.36. Derrida reinforces this point later when he suggests that "the archive is made possible by thedeath, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. Butbeyond finitude as limit, there is ... this properly infinite movement of radical destruction withoutwhich no archive desire or fever would happen ... [Freud's texts explain] why there is archivizationand why anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of anarchivization and produces the very thingit reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond" (AF,p. 94).

58


26/27


Pointing to the "dying of a book" that is "in all books" (WD, p. 124), heevokes Mallarm6's insistence on the abolition and effacement of the book. AsMallarm6puts it in Variationsur un sujet, t is "aquestion of disasterin the library" "ils'agissaitde desastredans la librairie').37For both Blanchot and Mallarm6, this disas-ter-the dispersion and explosion without which a book would not be a book-iswhat brings us to reading.38But this is why reading books and images means: read-ing the ruins left behind by a shattering explosion, reading the traces of what is nolonger present. This is also why,we might say,ruins and traces alwaysawaitus.

XThere can be no image that does not emerge from the wounds of time andhistory, that is not ruined by the loss and finitude within which it takes place, with-out ever taking place. This means that the image testifies not only to its ownimpossibility but also to the disappearance and destruction of testimony andmemory. This is why, if the history and events sealed within this photograph of thebombed-out Holland House Library call out for memory-and for a memory ofthe violence and trauma it evokes-this memory could never be a memory thataims to restore or commemorate. If the past is experienced in terms of loss andruin, it is because it cannot be recovered. Nevertheless, that this violence and

trauma, this loss and ruin, live on in the various historical, political, religious, orliterary forms that today inherit their legacy means that the experiences to whichthey would refer are not behind us. There is no historical "after" o the trauma ofloss and violence.39 If we can no longer believe that memory and commemorationwill help us prevent disaster in the future, however, we are still obliged to imaginea means of remembering what remains without remaining, what, destroying andconsuming itself, still demands to be preserved, even if within a history that cannever enter into history. If nothing can replace what has been lost to history, is itpossible to interrupt the course of history and its catastrophes, or are we endlesslycondemned to reiterate and enact this condition of loss and displacement? Thisquestion tells us why we must learn to read the past, and, in particular, the irre-

37. Stephane Mallarme, "Etalages," n Variations ur un sujet, n Ouevrescompletes,d. Henri Mondorand G.Jean-Aubry (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945), p. 373.38. In the wording of Blanchot, "Literatureis only a domain of coherence and a common region solong as it does not exist, as long as it does not exist for itself and conceals itself. As soon as it appears inthe distant presentiment of what it seems to be, it flies into pieces, it enters into the path of dispersionin which it refuses to be recognized by precise, identifiable signs" ("LaRecherche du point z6ro,"in LeLivrea venir [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], p. 277).39. Evoking Adorno's famous claim about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz,Hamacher makes a similar point in relation to the possibilityof writing history after an "absolutetrauma."See his 'Journal, Politics," trans. Peter Burgard et al., in Responses:OnPaul de Man 'sWartimeJournalism,ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988),p. 459.

59


27/27

OCTOBER

trievable images of the past, in a way that knows how these images threaten to dis-appear as long as we do not recognize ourselves in them-but ourselves as theones who, touched by the ruins of time and history, are no longer simply our-selves. This is why,as the Italian artist Salvatore Puglia has suggested, what remainsfor us is

to collect the fleeting images of what has disappeared, to recollect thefloating fragments of this history of disappearance. What remains isthe possibility of a gesture: to hand, to hold out, in the scattered mem-ories to which we are condemned, some vestigia, some expressions of amultiple anamnesis.40What remains are the fragments, the ruins of an image or photograph-perhaps one like this.

40. This passage is from an unpublished manuscript entitled "Abstracts of 'Abstracts (ofAnamnesis).'" The text was delivered at the Alexander S. Onassis Center at New YorkUniversity in con-junction with Puglia's exhibition, "Abstracts(of Anamnesis)" in the spring of 1995. On the necessity ofinterrupting or ruining the image, see Puglia's comments in a recent interview entitled "AnArt of thePossible," included in Fynsk'sInfantFigures:TheDeathof the "Infans and OtherScenesof Origin(Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 147-49.

60

Cadava, E. - Lapsus Imaginis, The Image in Ruins

Documents

Transcript of Cadava, E. - Lapsus Imaginis, The Image in Ruins