returns and mnemonics

“Kitty want in?”: Whether voiced by a child entering into language or Descartes as he toys with his pet during philosophical turns, this is an utterance caught between the ludic and the performative. Shchrodinger’s Cat, Paul De Man’s “cat out of the bag,” Maxwell’s sorting demon – all mnemonics for a playful repetition that becomes something else, of a ritual that exceeds its own feedback loop.

One of things I find most fascinating about Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” is the way in which its own repetition and return is rarely discussed. The sudden appearance of Benjamin’s works amid the academic intelligentsia in the 1960s brought into circulation texts that had been dismissed as trivial at an earlier point in history (in Germany; but also by Erwin Panofsky in London, a perhaps even more puzzling and distressing slight). Much of this neglect can be explained in terms of politics, anti-Semitism, and fear. Yet, there is something peculiarly elusive about Benjamin’s “fit” within various modes of knowledge production, past and present.

His Marxist methodology was of particular concern for later members of the Frankfurt School – and, indeed, his habilitation committee voiced a similar reservation over his Ursprung thesis (a “metaphysical” text that never leaves such registers for a truly historical or materialist account, according to its detractors). The problem, however, is not the absence of dialectic but of the presence of a mode of dialectical exchange that the superstructure vs. substructure and its sterile abstractions could hardly take seriously – play. There are countless references to Benjamin’s “sense of play” (his editors and biographers point to it in his letters, his writings, his annotations…). The Ursprung…Trauerspiels is a stunningly intricate and patient work that is also, quite simply, about play. In German even more so than in English that play on spiel generates a double vision of “game” and “theatre.” As George Steiner points out, the Ursprung is a study with a profound interest in both the ludic and the “mimetic-histrionic.”

Play: an event where repetition exceeds the trance of ritual to become a moment of suspension. But this is not simply a suspension synonymous with an open “elevation in potentiality,” in Sam Weber’s terms. That space between the ludic and the mimetic implies a “frozen violence” (Steiner, Ursprung) as much as it does the potential for shifts, transversal movement, revolution, learning, and materialization. Herein lies an interesting aspect of Benjamin’s “Marxism” – a mode less related perhaps to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah than to the kinds of revolutions implied in “Tactical Iraqi” and “Domestic.” I see a challenge before us not to repeat the mistake of Benjamin’s contemporaries, to ignore the trivial in favor of larger abstractions.

In the “The Work of Art,” the “orchid” is a figure comparable to that first experience of hearing the echo of one’s own voice returning, coming back, and yet carrying forward into another register. There is violence in such moments as well as the beauty of unfolding, of “care” as an encounter with the play of me/not me. …..
“mechanical equipment penetrated so deeply into reality….The equipment-free aspect of reality[…] has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

Here emblematic play is a place to re-encounter the “frozen” violence along with the elevation in potentiality to events on the cusp of repetition and becoming. After all, the Orchid, orchis, is an emblem of such ludic-mimetic struggle: a nymph-satyr who, accused of rape, is transformed into a flower emblematic of desire, unfolding, love.