One thing that stands out to me is the balance – or, really, the explicit lack of balance – between Benjamin’s “reflections” and citations (his original or synthesizing thoughts versus his quotations.)

I think the reason why this interests me returns to the tensions in the translator’s preface between Forschung and Darstellung, or research and application: there is, despite the fact that the project remained unfinished, some desire still remains to treat this more as a composition than a commonplace book. In the translators’ view, the quotations outweighing the commentaries makes this text distinctive from Benjamin’s other use of the montage, and they suggest at least the possibility of reading “this ostensible patchwork as, de facto, a determinate literary form, one that has effectively constructed itself” (xi).

I’m a bit resistant to this logic; it almost seems to confuse organization with composition. (Is Milton’s commonplace book a new literary form in the same way – having both quotations and reflections, though primarily quotations — or is it a private form of record-keeping? If Milton had been more interested in the montage in his explicitly literary pursuits, would that change the answer?) Of course, if the Arcades is an archive, in a way this answers (or at least sidesteps) the question: it organizes and revises for the sake of information management. “Why revise for a notebook?” (xi) Well, for no reason, if a notebook is just meant to be a short-term memory aid or a brainstorming technique – but if it’s meant to be a reference, even if just for one individual’s use, organization and clarification seem like a normal approach.

Clearly the intent (and, orthogonal to the intent, the actual purpose or usefulness to external readers) of the convolutes was what stuck with me, and I found myself interested in the proportion of reflections to citations; this might have been in large part due to the typographic distinction, which I was interested to learn didn’t come from Benjamin himself but from the German editor. I was interested in the English version’s preservation of these distinctions as well as curious about Tiedemann’s logic in deciding when a passage contained enough of Benjamin’s own analysis to become distinct from a quotation: there is some principle which makes [O3a,1] a reflection and [O7a, 1] a citation, and I am not sure what that is, although I wonder if in at least some cases the language of notation is the deciding factor.

Whatever the reason for my interest, I found that the ratios changed from section to section: I at first thought that section X, [Marx], was particularly dependent on pure quotation with not much ‘original’ reflection, and wondered whether this was due to the topic at hand or to the section being late in the book and therefore possibly less developed. (The sections thin out and are in fact often missing toward the end of the book, and I reasoned that the next step after a very thinned-out section might be a section with significant quotations but fewer original thoughts, positioned firmly within the realm of preliminary research.)

Then I wondered whether I was imagining the difference in general; J [Baudelaire] and N [On The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress] both seem to have significantly more of Benjamin’s own thoughts (in J it seems about even across the long section, while N is predominantly Benjamin’s thoughts). But P, [The Streets of Paris], seems to lean almost as heavily in the direction of quotations as X — though interestingly it did take me until the second read-through to notice this, and I’m not sure what to make of that experience. Why did the ratio strike me as off for X where a similar one didn’t for P? Another way of asking that question might be: was this a trick of my reading order (or my Marxist-saturated brain), or is there something about the subject of P that makes the sheer process of collecting and juxtaposing citations intuitively read (to me at least) as more…analytical, creative, compositional, a work-in-itself?

Of course, it may be a combination of all of these: because The Arcades Project is in the particular unfinished state it’s in, we can never be sure whether eventual work on the project would have smoothed out these differences or whether certain sections would have maintained noticeably different ratios. And even that statement preserves the idea of it as an archive rather than a draft or a literary text: I’m thinking about the possibility of Benjamin “completing” it by doing more work along this method or by signposting his information management in a clearer way, rather than by overwriting and displacing whatever we have here the moment he wrote “a syllable of the actual text” (xi, emphasis mine.)

I’m not sure whether it was nostalgia or convenience that led me to the BPL Rare Books Room – I’d hoped to branch out, but the transportation shutdown made that trickier to manage with my schedule – but it felt like falling into an old routine from last spring when I was in the Books, Manuscripts, Libraries seminar (and seeing my portion of the exhibit on the way in is always cool.)

I wonder a little whether I cheated myself, and a bit more whether I’m cheating on this assignment: there are finding aids and a private stack system like any archive, sure, but in the rare books reading room the collection is detailed at the item level and stacked in two long card catalogs: sorted by name on one side and by region and date on the other: so that I always feel tempted to — and this time I did — spend some time sorting through Ireland, Galway, 19th c. or Philadelphia, mid-18th c. and trying to look for genealogical hints. The latter proved more successful, since my mother’s great-great-etc.-grandfather was a Revolutionary War era painter: it’s not the first time there I’ve pulled Rembrandt Peale’s letter or two out of the archive and ran my hand (gently!) over the signature.

And what I thought was going to be a tangent brings me to one of the points I’d like to bring up in passing: I feel really interested in the margins of an archive, which makes me, perhaps, more a dilettante than a proper researcher. It’s obviously more useful to find a complete set of papers or union records or letters, but I’ve always been interested in the odd pieces out — the one or two letters that a Philadelphia artist, say, wrote to a Boston historian, or that a great British writer wrote in passing to an acquaintance in America — the edge cases, let’s call them, of an archive that is otherwise slanted toward certain types of literature and documents.

The discovery process happens so often, then, at the card catalog level (rather than on the individual item level or higher up in a finding aid), and sometimes I think the effect of this organization is not so much one of discovery – the bag of seeds moment Farge describes, say, or the surprising letter sandwiched between two more generic documents, or the experience of rifling through boxes for surprises – but instead one of depth.

You know you’re asking for a letter written by Robert Browning, for example; you know the recipient; you may even get a brief one-sentence summary on the weathered index card, and know that he was responding to condolences on the death of his wife. All this you already know before filling out the small paper request slip and waiting for the material to be (slowly) found and pulled – a brief summary of your experience is already laid out for you —

What you experience instead then is the physicality of the object: in this case, the thick black of the ink, the flourish of the handwriting (an experience that always makes me want more paleographic training), and, most strikingly, the black border on the paper, part of the elaborate system of Victorian mourning custom for a widower.

(Farge was writing before the advent of smartphones and pocket cameras, and the preface does a good job preemptively defending the physical archives by talking about the errors of technological reproduction, but here I think for a second about recopying. If “the hand, by reproducing the written syllables, archaic words, and syntax of a century long past, could insert itself into that time more boldly than thoughtful notes ever could” (17), what about what the hand misses in direct transcription that the eye can catch?)

The experience of working with the details of an object which often escape transcription is one I’m interested in while doing archive work (or maybe this is better classed as “rare book work” or even “special collections work.”) Even more so than the unpredictability of sifting through a box, I like knowing exactly what I’m going to get — and then, it will always turn out, not knowing at all.

 

I’m particularly interested in the lack of distinction drawn between the library, the museum, and the archive in Manoff’s overview of the field – and the way in which the conflation of the museum and archive in particular heightens and crystallizes the issues of power and control that are the concerns of most of our readings today. As soon as the Elgin Marbles were mentioned, I began thinking about the British Museum and the British Library (which I group together because the latter was constructed from the collections of the former, in what their latest development plan calls a “courageous post-war vision.”)

Mbembe notes the imaginary function of “the rights of collective ownership” (21) that the archive makes us feel we possess; and in fact most archives seem to be collected and kept with the idea in mind that someone will have access to them: “the alchemy of the archive: it is supposed to belong to everyone.” (21) Who these someones may be varies pretty widely, of course, from archive to archive, but I’m particularly interested in the archives which claim some level of public access (the British Library, for example, but I could just as easily jump off of Catherine’s post to talk about NARA’s presidential libraries, or talk about the rare books archives at the Boston Public Library.)

The holdings of these institutions are all available to the public – although here I’m reminded of when Simon Armitage went to the British Library in the course of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and was turned away when he asked for the manuscript (“the lady on the desk seems torn between taking me seriously and sliding her hand towards the panic button.”) Nevertheless, there is at least a theoretical claim to public access at all of these places. The reality, though, is that a good portion of the 1.6 million yearly visitors to the British Library probably don’t pull a single piece from the collection – instead, they interact with it as a museum, a set of exhibitions that have already been curated and presented.

One of the functions this has is to foreground the issue of curation: seeing particular objects plucked from their larger archival context to be presented and arranged reminds us, ideally, of the invisible work (and the invisible biases) behind archival in general: that “archives are not neutral or innocent” (Manoff 14). If constructing the archive is an exercise of power, then presenting and displaying some of its most valuable objects is a trumpeting of that power: the galleries in the British Library are overwhelming, I’d argue intentionally so, with the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf, among other objects, on essentially permanent display in a few gallery rooms. The sense of time and geographical space covered in the arrangement of these particular objects is almost dizzying – it has the sweep of empire, a thousand years of English identity and a presence that acquires information and objects from across the world. (This is, assumably, meant to be impressive in a more positive light than many postcolonial scholars might view it, and of course the word acquires in my last sentence has a bit too much delicacy.)

I think a lot of what I’m getting at is an interest in the museum – or I should more properly say the museum exhibition — as something that heightens and almost dramatizes the features, functions, and concerns that can be applied to the larger archive which lurks behind it.