After a brief glance at Rolf Tiedemann’s essay, which appears at the end of the English translation of The Arcades Project (which used to be the introductory essay to the original German), it seems Tiedemann speculates that had The Arcades Project been “finished” it would have offered “nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century”—no small accomplishment (929). However, seeming not to lament a work interrupted, Tiedemann suggests that most of Benjamin’s central theoretical concerns, while present in The Arcades Project, were developed and exist in a more comprehensive forms in his other essays and publications. And so, intended or not, to remain unfinished appears to be a governing principle of Benjamin’s masterwork.

Can there be intention in (un)intention? Some version of this question seems central to the structure and thought of the text. And, if this text is to be considered as archive (unfinished) the question of how to delimit its contents needs to be asked. How does one respond to the dialectical image—the “genuinely historical” image? Is the archive drive that response?

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. [N3,1]

In other words this dialectical image in the now of its recognizability seems (from my limited reading so far) to be not just a theoretical element in The Arcades Project, but also a key to its structure. It is an idea that applies to the incomplete nature of the text as well as (in my mind) illuminates Benjamin’s method of reading and recording: collecting. The now signals the simultaneous death of intention and the birth of truth—a truth that is experienced (felt). I can’t help but imagine that the numerous citations and responses accumulated in The Arcades Project are record of Benjamin’s own flashes of the now deep in the stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Since rescue of the dialectical image is an impossibility—the image inevitably lost to successive serial moments—the idea, as concrete structure, remains ambiguous [N9,7]. And maybe the idea becomes more elucidatory in terms of method.

Initially, when I think of “method” what comes to mind is the scientific method (defined, organized), or methods of artists or composers for example the Suzuki method to violin, or the Abramovic method of performance, etc. While “method” suggests in these cases something definitive by naming, The Arcades Project as “archive-as-method” proposes something less proven—a method that becomes form not as a means towards production, rather as means towards actualization: unfinished, ragged, a collection (its collector “resident of the interior”), The Arcades Project is a method of “fathoming” [N2a,4]. Trace this image: a weighted line thrown from a ship: the line jumps as knots tied to measure depth clip at regular intervals over the rail—disruptions, resistances to the tug of the weight. Or, in the resounding once the weight strikes the sea floor—the line vibrating. Arcades is anti-method: “Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn” [N9a,7].

 

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[Train] like Lumèrie’s train, again here, the metaphor of temporal continuity

(not progress)

Here, though instead of the photogenic moment (external)

—the train passing through the point of intersection between the three main spatial directions—the bodies in the interior of the train [car]: their stasis

now illuminated, now recognizable

as passengers in that they are not moving [given that they are not moving]

—at what intersection are they—what shock or

explosion into the now?

By the time I left the Massachusetts Archives I’d accomplished the vague goal I’d set for myself of looking at photographs taken by some sort of public works department (in this case it was photographs from what is now the Port and Harbor Planning agency) that documented areas of land near the coastal boundaries of the state. While on one hand this goal was an extension of my post from last week that cited Public Works as agents in the archiving (banking) of snow dropped by the recent winter storms, the other reason, the potentially more primary reason, is my own subjective interest in coastal landscape. My hope was that archival documentation of this landscape, as the subject of potential development for public works and construction projects would illuminate further the inherent liminal qualities of such space. Harbors, canals, beaches, bays, bulkheads, low-lying or elevated industrial zones, inlets, vacant dunes—I had hopes of pristine aerial photographs clearly capturing the waste (of a sort) between the developed/urban lands and the ocean.

Of course there was nowhere near enough time to actually see if these imagined photographs actually existed on this first, single visit. This knowledge that the work one does in an archive is never complete is a dilemma and anxiety that both Farge and Steedman allude to. The photographs I did view were not aerials, rather small prints taken by an anonymous employee of the Harbor Planning agency. And, I realized that the distance I was looking for, the flattening of the ground and inherent wide angle of the aerial image, simply wasn’t present in these unremarkable, though surprising for their clarity (take for example the photo below, look at the texture on the water), prints, which resembled more the vacant yet charged documentation of an early Smithson “Non-site,” or backdrop for an Acconci performance.

It wasn’t until I sat down in the central glass-walled reading room that I began to note my surroundings, and I recorded these observation in my journal:

Registered / Concrete / Carpet / vault-like /

The micro-film reader named—“Library Researcher”

card catalog stacks / marriage records

A family history

Birth / Marriage / Death / indexes

I wait for my boxes from the vault

Hurricane of 1938 / was this that “sudden storm?”

that wiped out the east coast

fishing industry

What will be in the report?

When I was browsing the archive’s holdings it wasn’t a box of photographs that peaked my interest immediately. Rather it was the Flood and Hurricane Report from 1938 sponsored by the Department of Public Works that leap from the list. It was the only report of its kind in the holdings and at least the only document within the department of public works the dealt expressly with the massive category five hurricane that struck the Northeast in September 1938. The volume includes high-water data from the flood of 1936, as well as graphs and charts of the “storm-tide” resulting from the 1938 hurricane.

During this chance encounter with this report in the context of the state archive—which as the kind and extremely helpful archivist Jennifer Fauxsmith explained, was organized according to the structure of the state government bureaucracy, cementing (pun intended) the theoretical link between the archive and state power—I began to grasp the idea that I was reading something never meant for me (graduate student/poet) to read. Similar to how Farge characterizes the contents of judicial archives: “rough traces of lives that never asked to be told in the way that they were…” (6). And, precisely echoed by Steedman when she states, “[as] an archival historian, you nearly always read something that was not intended for your eyes (1177). The report enacts a surprising paradox, unique perhaps to the archive. As a volume it is its own collection of data, tables listing the high-water marks, graphs of the hurricane’s track, graphs and data on the “storm tide.” It displays order—the management of information, of an event (a destructive, sudden, and overwhelming event), and yet what the lists can and cannot contain in plain scientific language and empirical data is the rising of the water. The record which was commissioned by Public Works suggests a sense of control like a well-managed account, but it’s also the record of where and how the storm and the flood overwhelmed state infrastructures.

 

“…these reports indicate the flood peak progressed about 19 miles in 14 hours, unless during the night the water may have been at points above 26A.”

 

“While the waters along the southerly mainland shore of the state are almost completely guarded from direct exposure to the Atlantic ocean by the offshore islands of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeths, yet the general south westerly to north easterly direction of Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound coincided with the wind direction on the easterly perimeter of the hurricane. This coincidence resulted in a storm wave of unusual proportions at points far removed from the ocean.”

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Thinking about the destruction that this 1938 report does and does not record–the death toll from the 1938 hurricane was around 800 people in the North East–seems to me to be part of that larger idea which Steedman clarifies in the context of Derrida and Michelet, that the contents of an archive are the physical debris of life (death), and that the impossible search for an origin is in fact a movement towards death.  As I was reading Steedman I asked myself: what would an archive be like in a non-western culture? In a culture where death is not something which is generally entombed–maybe in a culture that believes in reincarnation? How would the archive change?