The influence of Walter Benjamin has latterly been more broadly evidenced as he begins to be recognized for his larger projects and his theoretical work beyond "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Alan Clinton considers, in the following and through a form of poetry of his own, Benjamin's influence on the poet Carolyn Forché, particularly in terms of her "poetry of witness," evidenced in the suggestively titled The Angel of History (1994) and the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993).

Mechanical Angel: Carolyn Forché and the Material Projection of Messianic History [printable version]

Alan Clinton

<1> The work of Carolyn Forché has always retained a political edge, with works such as the exploration of her Czech background in Gathering the Tribes (1976) and her account of visits to El Salvador in The Country Between Us (1981). Forché has been one of the leading poets who, in her own words, has combatted the "self-censorship operative among American poets and writers that seemed to preclude writing about...historical events when those events were still unsafe" (qtd. in Stein 147). Her third book of poems The Angel of History (published 13 years later), however, represents a new turn for her work, one whose title and epigraph suggest the key role of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. While Forché has alluded to the influence of Benjamin in a Text and Performance Quarterly interview(65), the extent to which her work embodies the principles of Benjamin's messianic materialism remains unexplored. This engagement with Benjamin not only brings Forché's own poetry to a new level of historical complexity, but also makes The Angel of History one of the important poetic texts of the last decade.

<2> Benjamin's work has, for a good portion of the 20th century, held a marginal place in cultural studies. Due to his premature death and conflict with the "Cultural Studies Industry" of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin's radical version of historical materialism had to wait until after 1968 to begin its rise to the relative popularity it holds now. Still, today's publishing apparatus encourages work with Benjamin's groundbreaking ideas more than with his innovative forms. This discrepancy is somewhat ironic given Benjamin's interest in the new technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, for such technologies as photography and cinema radically changed the form in which people received information and perceived the world. Even with the rise of Benjamin's popularity in the context of poststructuralism and now hypertext, formal experimentation enjoys a much surer hold in creative writing than in critical work.

<3> For her part, Forché both explicitly and implicitly utilizes Benjamin's theories of historical materialism and the forms he believes such inquiry should take. With respect to the stylistic shift between The Country Between Us and The Angel of History, Forché states, "I began to feel that there was a certain kind of poem that I was writing, that my contemporaries were writing...some of us were very good at it; some would grow fatigued" (Ibid.). In Benjaminian terms, the workshop-inspired political poem had developed an aura. While other sorts of politically engaged poetry had been written (most notably by poets of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school), the primary sort of poetry published and taught in creative writing departments took the form of single-voiced testimony, and this training has had a lasting political effect: "I received a certain education, which included a Master of Fine Arts in poetry, and the particular aesthetic concerns of that institutionalized education became my own, unquestioned" (67). Forché's reading of Benjamin, I believe, helped her question her aesthetic concerns and ultimately transform her style of political poetry. That transformation in turn warrants a closer inspection of other auratic discourses such as the academic essay and the procedures of normal science.

<4> In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin defines the concept of "aura" as that illusory presence which traditionally makes the work of art both unique and authentic. But "the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual" (Illuminations 224), a fact that plays on two meanings of "ritual." First, the religious sense of the word suggests a superstitious attachment to the truth-value of a particular set of practices. Secondly, the concept of ritualistic behavior has come to mean a repetitive, even compulsive repetition of procedures. When combined, these two meanings tell the story of how a repetitive procedure can come to be associated with truth. For Forché, the single-voiced testimonial has attained this sort of status in American poetry, a fact reinforced by the aura of unified subjectivity which, despite over thirty years of deconstruction, still remains the dominant way of thinking and doing business.

<5> The Country Between Us, which extensively addresses oppression in El Salvador, begins her struggle for a form adequate to history. On the one hand, her ethical stance is reinforced by the fact that she actually traveled to El Salvador (at the insistence of a friend) to witness this oppression firsthand. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that seeing El Salvador will translate into an understanding of its political situation. When governments disguise their true intentions as a matter of course, the witness may be no different from a camera filming on a highly controlled movie set: "If we go on, we might stop/in the street in the very place/where someone disappeared" (9). The sense of an inescapable tourism, one controlled by nations hosting its "witnesses," sets the tone of the collection, making The Country Between Us as troubling in its interrogation of poetic efficacy as in its revelations of inhumanity. The poet who must witness what she writes of is not only limited by finite existence in space and time, but also limited to witnessing a manufactured representation of reality. The auratic selfhood of the voyeuristic poet leaves her no more able (and it is to Forché's credit that she points this out) to understand the politics of oppression than William Faulkner's Benjy is able to comprehend the game of golf by merely watching.

<6> The other Benjy, Walter, counters an auratic selfhood in several ways. First, his espousal of mechanical reproduction denies the concept of originality in favor of replicated accessibility. Rather than a single artwork or self, there are infinite reproductions represented in technologies such as photography and film. Benjamin makes very clear that these technologies not only affect the auratic quality of art, but the aura of subjectivity itself: "They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery" (218). Forché seems to have taken a cue from this bold and humbling pronouncement, describing The Angel of History as an open wound and as "a gathering of utterances" whose primary strength comes from their taking on a life of their own [1]. For Benjamin, the automatism of the new technologies tends to disrupt cultural stereotypes (as embodied in the physiologies so popular in France during the 1840s [2]) by introducing a plethora of details previously invisible to the human eye. Photography, for instance, ultimately dislodges the aesthetic, idealized human subject in favor of the crime scene, a mosaic of traces to be scanned for evidence (226). Automatic devices thus come to the aid of a liberal humanism unable to adequately respond to the rise of fascism and the complexities of history.

<7> The Angel of History can in many ways be viewed as a continuation of Benjamin's life project as outlined in his writings of the 1930s. While Benjamin spent much of this decade coming to terms with the rise of fascism and the role of historical materialism in stopping it, most of The Angel of History focuses on the period of WWII, particularly the machinations of the Holocaust. The volume is also haunted by the formal preoccupations of Benjamin, namely his attempts to fuse technology, poetic method, and historical analysis.

Photo-Rhetoric

<8> Yet, at least in the case of photography, technology functions as a dialectical symptom in The Angel of History. Photographs haunt the title poem in the form of blank windows, suggesting how interventions in history depend on disguise as often as on revelation. The poem's third section concerns "forty-four...Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu...in view of the mountains" (5), a period in the war that would almost by definition not be photographed. Furthermore, it is an event that Forché can only experience in the mediated form of a memorial; the status most people are consigned to when experiencing most historical events. Thus, it is all the more important that memorials contain accurate information about history as mediated ideology. Shifting back and forth from WWII to the present, Forché notes in "every window a blank photograph of their internment" (5). Like an entire album overexposed to Enlightenment ideologies of transparent language, a "city with all its windows blank" suggests a crime scene coverup, a "memory through which one hasn't lived" (21) precisely because the memorials dedicated to such memories selectively and secretly erase important details. The frames that photography suggests function to wall out the truth as easily as they capture it:

snow fell all night over the little plaque which does not mention
that they were Jewish children....
The children were taken to Poland.
The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland
singing Vous n'aurez pas L'Alsace et la Lorraine.
In a farmhouse still standing in Izieu, le silence de Dieu
est Dieu. (5)

In this passage, the square, "little plaque" continues the image of the photograph introduced earlier in the same section. Though its frame is limited in size, omission of the Jewish context seems overdetermined. Forché, in discussing the children's fate, further suggests how important details can be edged out of the picture. The difference between "The children were taken to Poland" and "The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland" is all the difference in the world. The latter revelation informs us that their concealment was a limited victory ending in the cruelest month. This section of the poem thus uses photography, even as the word is an indexical referent for truth [3], as a marker of absence rather than an assurance of historical accuracy.

<9> Even if photographs are inherently revelatory, they are not inherently revolutionary. Just as a film still from a closed Hollywood set may reveal little subterranean information [4], a photograph may be little different from the "plaque which does not mention that they were Jewish children." Even the form of the Izieu section suggests the limitations of technology, for it sounds, at times, no different from someone narrating a family slide show: "This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon./This is is a farmhouse in Izieu." If an art form escapes fascist use, it may not so easily elude bourgeois co-option. The "this is" form also reminds us that language itself is merely indexical, merely pointing without any privileged relation to comprehension. Thus, it is very important that Forché begin her poem this way, for it not only foregrounds the limited means (of which photography is one of many) that various histories assume, but that history is as much constituted by its repressions as its revelations.

<10> Benjamin discusses these problems in "The Artist as Producer," a more sober exploration of the relationship between technology and critique. Because the bourgeoisie (fascists being a particularly virulent inflection of this class) are able to incorporate large amounts of revolutionary material into their apparatus, it now (in 1934) "goes without saying that photography is unable to say anything about a power station or a cable factory other than this: what a beautiful world!" (Reflections 230). The problem with photography in particular, and history generally, is a Brechtian one: one cannot merely introduce a new apparatus without changing the existing one(s). In turn, Benjamin provides a deceptively simple explanation--captions. Considering the limitations implied by the concept of the photograph, the notion of captions is a provocative one--they literally exist outside the photographic frame. Yet, not only must photographers write captions for their work, but writers must also take up photography: "In other words, only by transcending the specialization in the process of production that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order can one make this production politically useful" (230). For historical materialists, this call metonymically suggests the importance of activating all of a culture's technology and media.

<11> Looking towards the utopian evasion of a second world war, Benjamin thus imagines the revolutionary collaboration of textual and filmic rhetoric. Turning a more dystopian eye towards the past, Forché notes the blankness and erasure in all forms of rhetoric. Still, The Angel of History does represent an attempt to move from limiting poetic modes to liberating ones. Not only is the volume constructed more polyvocally, but its very appearance on the page strikes the reader as driven by the phrase rather than the poetic line. The margins are long (moving to the very end of the page) or short (even one word) based upon the content of the phrase rather than some predetermined syllabic length. In this context, a city filled with blank windows refers not only to the repressions of history itself, but also to the limit of past poetic forms used by Forché and others. In their columnar form, these former poems have retroactively come to represent skyscrapers or apartment highrises. If such poems are written and read with a predetermined set of expectations, they may ideologically translate in terms of blank windows. Rather than representing impenetrable buildings or arborescent developments of subject matter, the poems in The Angel of History more fully resemble the Exquisite Corpse game developed by the early Surrealists, pieced together in defiance of the organic models privileged by the New Criticism and the creative writing programs which represent its most important descendents.

<12> The Angel of History formulates these issues in Benjaminian terms, but in order to do so must also look from technology to theology. In "The Garden Shukkei-en," a poem about another WWII memorial [5], a survivor of Hiroshima "comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes" (70). As the image suggests, this move is a dialectical one, projecting a theology that never leaves its material origins. Conversely, one could say that viewing Benjamin solely in terms of his writings on technology reenacts the sort of bourgeois division he critiques and necessarily denies the fact of Benjamin's Jewish heritage: "My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked with it" (Arcades 471). Interestingly, Benjamin's very metaphor combines the concept of theology with the technology of writing. This combination of theology and writing also adheres to Forché's image of "paper cranes," a term that could equally apply to the Shinto practice of burning paper objects into the afterlife [6] or to Benjamin's own literary excavations as he "collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost, and discarded, and broken" (Arcades 349). The real question then becomes to what extent theology can be regarded as a form of technical writing, illuminating the angel of history's encounter with the "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet" (Illuminations 257). Yet dealing with history's disaster area does not exactly involve a reordering of the past, but instead a mapping of chaotic trajectory. Or as one voice requests in "The Angel of History," "describe again how I looked in the white dress that improbable morning/when my random life was caught in a net of purpose" (17).

Random Life

<13> While the word "random" is not synonymous with chaos, it does invoke the term. In doing so, it aligns itself against the word "life" in both its philosophical and literary senses. Philosophically, the term suggests an organic wholeness in stark opposition to the age of mechanical reproduction. As a literary form, the "life" has a (teleologically speaking) long history steeped in teleology. Aside from a handful of examples, such as Roland Barthes (1977) by Roland Barthes, there hardly seems anything in literature approaching a "random life." And yet the phrase, tantalizing enough to stop an essay in its tracks, refuses to be cast aside as a mere contradiction in terms. Its meaning "oscillates wildly," to use Peter Hitchcock's terminology, and thus may move into the service of "materialism's attempt to think through various theoretical aporias that are immanent to its critique" (170). This oscillation need not operate between discrete terms or possibilities, however, but can also inhabit individual concepts. As I have already suggested, the word "random" tends to magnetize around such diverse terms as "chaos" and "mechanical reproduction." It would be difficult to imagine two phenomena more different than the seemingly unpredictable turnings of the universe and their mechanical transformation, but a closer examination shows how these terms oscillate toward one another and apart from themselves.

<14> The study of chaos, for instance, otherwise known as chaos theory or chaology, automatically implies patterns that counteract the popular notion of the term. The very definition of "science," which is a mechanical transformation from its inception, requires it: "Marxism [for instance] is a science to the extent that it has developed forms of measurement (laws of motion) for the infinite chaos of socialization" (168). Hitchcock goes on to say that the very definition of "scientificity" implies "totalization." Scientists must seek explanations for everything, or disregarded phenomena threaten to drift into superstition. Thus, it would be categorically impossible to make a scientific analysis of chaos without attampting to find, to use Katherine Hayles' recontextualized phrase, "the figure in the carpet" (141). The study of chaos consequently takes the form of mechanical reproduction. This reproduction does not simulate the jerky movements of a sci-fi automaton, however, but the strange instruments of a science fiction soundtrack. As Peter Hitchcock has formulated it, "the eerie sound of the Theremin is a mark of our cognitive repositioning by the wonder of technology" (184). And in that instrument as well, perhaps one has an image of Benjamin's vexed relationship to technology.

<15> That the "net of purpose" referred to in Forché's poem resembles Hayles' image of the figure in the carpet does not occur by chance, but because its image of weaving stands in opposition to randomness. This net, which relates to the intricate embroidery of a wedding dress (that white dress) [7], may be extremely complex, but it ultimately forms a pattern. The concept is important to Forché because a utopian future can only be achieved by formulating the wreckage of the past: "Hurrying we find German war maps...as if there were a corpse in the armoire" (40). This image gives an urgent meaning to the "net of purpose," as the roads, rivers, and attack routes of the map resemble the net which Germany cast over Europe. Simplifying such a map would do little good; its complexity must be translated into a search for "the places where Hitler could have been stopped" (42). The map image further complicates the weaving metaphor, introducing technology, geography, and politics as elements that need to be incorporated as a viable intervention into chaos. And yet, the map itself must be complicated, as Forché recognizes the need for writing in "A language even paper would refuse" (42) and translating "the specular itinerary of exile" (43). While it may be impossible to completely delineate the methodology of these interventions, this does not justify positing a random life which defies inquiry. The "improbable morning" must be assigned probabilities so that its inhabitants survive into the improbable noon.

Conditions of Messianism

<16> It is in terms of chaos theory that I would like to discuss Benjamin's messianism not as anachronistic attachment to his Jewish past, but as a technology [8] that can add to the interpretation of Forché's project specifically, and that of cultural materialism generally. While the method of hermeneutic suspicion would require an ad hominem exploration of Benjamin's need for a messianic element in his materialism, I will sidestep that approach for a less antagonistic attempt at definition.

<17> Messianism may be inherently theological, but for Derrida it is soaked with revolutionary Marxism: "The messianic, including its revolutionary forms (and the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be), would be urgency, imminence but, irreducible paradox, a waiting without horizon of expectation" (168). The most important part of this statement involves the refusal of a predictive framework, and as such it bears a closer resemblance to Hitchcock's oscillation than the latter would probably care to admit. And both theorists (Hitchcock explicitly) owe a debt to chaos theory. For as chaologists look for their constantly changing version of the missing link in the "strange attractor," they paradoxically wait for patterns to appear in random phenomena (Çambel 69). Chaologists deal with four major categories of attractors, a term which can be applied to anything which tends to channel chaos into patterns: "if a system in a phase space is near an attractor, it tends to evolve towards the state represented by that attractor" (59). The first three types of attractors (fixed point attractors, limit cycles, and tori) are characterized by predictability, while "strange attractors exhibit unpredictable and bizarre motions" (60). Consequently, strange attractors provide a more fruitful metaphor for exploring messianism both in the broad 20th-century context where predictability occurs in capitalist terms as well as in the interwar periods where "everything was said to be under control/with the single phrase death traffic" (Forché 1994, 4). In both contexts, initial conditions have codified cultural movement into oppressive patterns. These patterns, if unquestioned, if children are "forbidden to ask about the years before they were born" (4), may literally encourage the traffic in death.

Initial Conditions

<18> Strange attractors thus differ from the other three categories with respect to initial conditions [9]. Specifically, fixed-point attractors and the like are not sensitive to initial conditions while "trajectories of chaotic [strange] attractors diverge, and they are sensitive to initial conditions" (70). This opposition sounds very much like the manner in which Carolyn Forché describes the contrast between her early career and the transformation she makes in The Angel of History. Of her initial approach to poetry, she states, "I think that I, during a period of time in my twenties, accepted on faith this idea that my work was to find my voice, and that this voice was somehow within me, that it needed only to mature" (Text and Performance Quarterly 67). In one sentence, Forché manages to indict her MFA training for its theology, logocentricism, auratic unity, and organicism. This method has little respect for initial conditions because it implicitly assumes a consistent subject approaching writing in a consistent manner (no matter what the object). Forché senses these problems in her first great project of political poetry, The Country Between Us, a volume whose very title alludes to barriers and separation: "To my country I ship poetry instead/of bread, so I cut through nothing" (12). These lines from "The Island" form a self-indictment of poetic efficacy even as they allude to the biblical maxim that one can not live on bread alone. Thus, it is not merely enough to eschew art for more "substantive" interventions. In The Country Between Us, Forché primarily critiques the poetic methods she has been taught and which, at that point, composed her arsenal of resistance. By The Angel of History, she has begun to implement major changes in these methods. These changes not only add more "substance" to poetry, but they also suggest how it would be unfair to single out MFA programs for critique. The concept of utilizing a standardized method to unlock the doors to any topic inhabits both normal science (in the scientific method) and academic writing (in thesis driven, deductive essays) as well.

<19> In his intense scrutiny of the politics adhering to various forms, Benjamin shows a converse sensitivity to initial conditions. The Arcades Project (1999), for instance, grants the wealth of quoted material dominance over the authorial voice, as if letting it gather to form strange attractors on its own. Not only do quotations compose the majority of the text, but authorial comment almost always comes after a quote, as if Benjamin is merely responding to it rather than using quotation to prove a thesis. And while the fragmented nature of The Arcades Project is well known, it is important to remember that most of Benjamin's essays are written in fragments of no more than a few pages each. If, as previously noted, the angel of history views the past as a pile of wreckage, it makes sense for Benjamin to organize his essays through a series of brief explorations. His sensitivity is not a form of positivism, however, for it merely responds to these conditions rather than utterly reflecting them in some form of induction. Benjamin instead is writing a program (in the algorithmic sense of the word) for malleability, a method that stands not at a crossroads [10], but which moves unpredictably from circuit to circuit.

<20> Forché's transformation shows a similar sensitivity. First, there is an awareness of the commodification of discourse, the disturbing proximity of testimonial, world suffering, wine, and lacrosse(63-4). Using the metaphor of paella in "The Memory of Elena," even as she asserts that "This is not paella" (13), Forché betrays her fears that her own tourism will only result in an even more mediated tourism for those who hear her. When knowing the horror stories of Amnesty International (an organization Forché is an active member of) becomes another form of cultural capital, political expression a form of catharsis, and empathy a form of helplessness, one has truly arrived at the dystopian inflections of The Angel of History. When Forché speaks of "graves the size of pillows" (42) in "The Notebook of Uprising," she makes not only an emotional comparison, but also a bitter allusion to the ways in which contemporary Americans can sleep through horrors of both the past and the present. Yet, Forché's transformation was more immediately precipitated by a change in apparatus. She confronted this change in what could only be termed a revision of her second book of poems The Country Between Us. While that work was a powerful, single-voiced account of her time in El Salvador, years later in New York Forché "collaborated on photographs and text for a book, El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers" (63). Thus, her turn to Benjamin (and towards chaos) occurred not only in relation to photography, but in attempting to write captions for the work of others.

<21> Forché's move away from the poetic perspective of a privileged, singular-voiced witness was also furthered, ironically, in her work on a book called Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Although Forché's groundbreaking anthology emphasizes the importance of the witness in "attempting to come to terms with the question of poetry and politics" (30), it also presents problems for her own work or, for that matter, the work of most North American poets. Since the criteria of her anthology require a poet to have personally experienced political or social extremity, technically her own work is disqualified. Even her experience in El Salvador is suspect since it would technically be a form of voyeurism, not witness, albeit a voyeurism in the name of human rights. Furthermore, the value of mere revelation is made even more suspect in light of the fact that the touristic episteme "is developing the capacity to organize both positive and negative social sentiments...'social problems' figure in the curiosity of tourists" (MacCannell 6-7). But rather than attempting to contrast authentic from inauthentic modes of witness, I would like to suggest that Against Forgetting represents Forché's own move from poet as witness to poet as historian, a move culminating in The Angel of History. In Benjaminian terms, Against Forgetting is as much Forché's own work as The Angel of History. For if anything, Benjamin's work has taught us that the author is as much an arranger as a producer. In selecting the poetic witnesses for her anthology, Forché uses quoted fragments in the same manner as Benjamin uses them in The Arcades Project. This method of working deconstructs the authentic/inauthentic dichotomy by placing the arranger in collaboration with various "witnesses," thereby implicating and enabling everyone in a chain of responsibility that does not disqualify anyone from social action, however mediated that action may be. Forché maintains the quotational style in The Angel of History, which she describes as a "gathering of utterances" (81). Through a form of poetic historicism, both works efface Forché's status as authentic witness in order to re-present the testimonies of others.

Chaography I

<22> Once the poet has decided to be an historian, however, she faces many difficulties. How does she negotiate the wreckage the angel of history sees? As Forché reminds us in Against Forgetting, this problem may be a practical as well as a theoretical one: "the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists as the sole trace of an occurrence" (31). If these traces were produced in extreme times, they may be difficult or impossible to restore. Forché begins her anthology, in fact, with the story of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti whose last ten poems were buried with him at the site of a mass execution. When the grave is exhumed, Radnóti is found with the poems in his backpocket, but they are soaked with bodily fluids. The poems are "cleaned and dried in the sun" (29) and now represented in Against Forgetting, yet their story represents the forces that threaten to make history impossible.

<23> Radnóti's wife, to whom his last poems are primarily addressed, was present at the exhumation and thus able to receive his last messages to her. In one of the poems, entitled "Picture Postcards," Radnóti affirms, "In this chaos of movement you're in me...like an angel" (371). This statement eerily links Benjamin's chaotic notion of history, the widow's role in his eventual exhumation, and the memory work performed by Forché. Considering the circumstances in which the poems were found, they also have a surprising frequency of reference to various fluids. The "Picture Postcards" work in particular describes how "Bloody saliva hangs on the mouths of every oxen./Blood shows in every man's urine" and how "On my ear, blood dried" (372). Radnóti obviously intended these poems to be a work of both public and personal history, and yet he wrote the poems with the awareness that he might never be alive to deliver them. Thus, poems such as "Picture Postcards" need to be read as comments on the possibility of transmitting histories in the grip of the "wild knots" which may entwine them [11]. Or, in a figuration of Radnóti's literal situation, how does the angel of history read and preserve lines that have been soaked with blood?

<24> In his book Applied Chaos Theory: A Paradigm for Complexity (1993), A.B. Çambel describes an experiment for the Hele-Shaw apparatus that involves "placing institutional paper towels (dry or wet) between two sheets of plastic and injecting fluids with different colors and viscosities" (220) in order to note the varying patterns they create. This experiment begs the question as to how one may introduce chaotic marks into institutional papers, for the aura surrounding the conventional poem also permeates the analytical essay, which in its premise of "scientific realism" and "transparent language" (Ray 9) may be unsuited to the form or mood that historicism (poetic or otherwise) must take in order to truly mount a resistance "against forgetting." More specifically, if The Angel of History represents a poetic history "which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration" (Forché 1994, 81), then the very mode of its explication should respond to these initial conditions of the work. An analysis which aims at restoration may participate in a false recovery from the history Forché addresses, for her citational strategy does not simply remind us of events that have been forgotten, but interrogates the ways in which things are remembered and the ways in which historical materialism can turn memory into activism.

<25> If one does not restore a broken work to univocal meaning, then, what does he or she do with it? In "In Response To The Angel of History," Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley acknowledge the difficulty of responding to a work "where the writing itself is not only in response but concerned with inadequacies in responding" (103). They approach the task in the manner Benjamin would tackle a difficult problem, by writing in a series of short fragments. Such an approach not only allows the authors to discuss the work from many different angles, but allows them to do so without implying that the practical quandaries in The Angel of History can be reduced to a simple meaning. The essay thus shows a sympathy with the fragmented nature of the work it analyzes, a fact reinforced by the essay's dual authorship.

<26> The concept of double authorship is in itself an homage to both Benjamin and Forché. In writing historical texts that allow history to speak, both authors have allowed their work to be inhabited by multiple voices. While it is true, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, that "each of us [is already] several" (3), certain literary forms acknowledge this impure subjectivity more than others. Just as Against Forgetting is a work authored by Forché and the poets she anthologizes, The Angel of History is assembled by a poet marked with history and historical voices marked in turn by their own experiences. This hybridity emphasizes the emotional power of history as well as its inaccessibility, as symbolized by the voice of a man in "The Recording Angel" section of the book: "Don't say I was there. Always say I was never there" (57). The voice of repression thus exists within the recording abilities of the angel itself, creating interference which in turn is transmitted into grooves on an exhaustive gramophone recording [12]. The fact "that someone attempted to hide this is evidence enough" (46), but it is not explanation. Rather than a mere remembering, Forché participates in a psychoanalysis of the Holocaust. For obvious political reasons, such analysis should be an inexhaustible working through.

<27> The practice of psychoanalysis not only stands in direct opposition to the transparent solutions The Angel of History confounds, but it specializes in the repressions and elisions characteristic of traumatic history. Sigmund Freud provides a most instructive case for the limits of Enlightenment critique, for he was confronted with patients who would not get better when given an explanation for their mental illnesses. Instead, they required a narrative that would not only account for their fragmented states, but also help them see the rhizomic symptoms that ran throughout them. Consequently, Freud's case studies are labyrinthine experiences predictive of computer intensive hypertext writing. I am not suggesting that The Angel of History necessarily needs to be psychoanalyzed or converted into a hypertext, but instead that both of these practices hint in directions that may help navigate the chaos in the volume and the historical situations it addresses.

<28> The analyst, for instance, cannot give an explanation for a patient's illness any more than Forché feels she can write a poem that simply names or illustrates a political problem: "slowly I came to realize that poems were not about: they simply were. I began to try other prepositions. Poems were amid, or around, or near, or beyond certain subjects" (Text and Performance Quarterly 67). Here Forché forsakes poetry of naming or explanation for one of proximity, for any given politics is not a stance or designation, but a living (and hence chaotic) process that one must attempt to trace in order to further or dismantle it. The Angel of History, in turn, is a form of metonymic criticism in addition to the events it describes, not a metaphoric explanation standing in for them, and hence the final lines of the title poem leave room for response: "You see, I told Madame about my life./I told her everything./And what did she say?" (21). As such, the volume implicitly requires its own metonymic interventions. The critic should not ask, "What does The Angel of History mean?" but instead, "What can I do with it? What should the next response involve?"

Chaography II

<29> Thus, I propose considering The Angel of History as an experimental encounter with historical chaos. In order to explore one's particular relationship to this chaography (the graphing or writing of chaos), he or she may perform the Hele-Shaw experiment with an eye dropper full of ink, a move that supplements witnessing with writing. This experiment is unfaithful to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing represented by the ibis whose long beak appears to be inscribing a message in the sand as it picks for insects, for by introducing bubbles of ink (whose trajectory could only initially be curvilinearly graphed) onto a uniform surface, one may literally write without a point. Rather than outlining programmatic strategies for intervention, one follows expanding horizons of darkness, which may be likened to the horizonless expectation of messianism. Like psychoanalysis, this method directly opposes transparency, and the plastic in the Hele-Shaw experiment merely serves to prevent leakage onto countertops.

<30> The analysand's illness, by contrast, leaks not only onto the counter but over all the fetishistic utensils in his or her Dasein. That's why at one moment in time, the inkblot was so central to analysis. The inkblot is known as a "projective" test in that it assumes the patient will project certain ideas on to the picture that would normally be lost in defense mechanisms. This test does not remove defense mechanisms (which would be a utopian unveiling in the rhetoric of transparency), but transforms the total blockage of repression into the more allusive (and metonymic) mechanism of displacement. Criticisms of the inkblot text as highly idiosyncratic seem to miss the point, for not only is an inkblot the result of an exploded drop of ink, but its chaotic trajectory forms a complex, variegated field on which to hook the various idiosyncracies of the patient. The inkblot is chaos itself, and mental health could well be defined in terms of how one reacts to it. In Forché's case, by contrast, one may say that her "gathering of utterances that have lifted away from the earth and wrapped it in a weather of risen words" (Notes) behaves like a dark cloud specifically designed to garner idiosyncratic and manifold responses to the chaotic disasters of history. In this scheme of things, history itself is the manifest content of a collective unconscious accessed in brainstorms made from conduction between jagged texts and variegated readers.

<31> One such conduction, for instance, might involve contact between The Angel of History and the inkblot's chaographer Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) [13]. While I maintain that the "random life" is still a utopian concept, I will make use of a form inspired by Nietzsche [14], who suggested a biography of only three anecdotes.

Practical Applications, or the Cyclone Between Us

As I have already suggested, Forché's invocation of the angel of history stems from unresolved issues raised earlier in her career. For on the final page of The Country Between Us she stares into "a cyclone fence between/ourselves and the slaughter" (59). This fence separates one country from another, the histories she tells from those who would hear them, and political art from critical action. To cross it, one must presumably use the science that was first developed in attempts to understand weather patterns. To escape the cycles and clones, one must trace a chaotic path through the cyclone. Otherwise, insular, repetitive artifacts can't be heard through the storm. But, rather than merely oppose The Angel of History to Forché's early work, we can read the corpus as part of an ongoing interrogation of the poet's role in history. Each attempt at writing then becomes interesting not only for what it speaks, but also for how it negotiates with silence.

Notes

[1] See the notes at the end of the volume. [^]

[2] For an excellent description of the physiologies fad, see Richard Sieburth's article "Same Difference: The French Physiologies, 1840-1842" in Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, no. 1 (1984). [^]

[3] The single most important work on the contemporary ideologies of the photograph is still Susan Sontag's On Photography. [^]

[4] This does not mean that a close, photogenic analysis of Hollywood film does not prove fruitful, but even those who practice this sort of analysis would on the whole admit that the number of truly revelatory or subversive stills in any classic film are relatively small in comparison to the number which more than adequately serve the ends of invisible (both formally and ideologically) style. [^]

[5] "Shukkei-en is an ornamental garden in Hiroshima. It has been restored." -- Forché's note. [^]

[6] Japanese ancestor worship. A common Shinto practice involves making origami structures and burning them. It is believed that these objects enter into the afterlife fully formed and able to accompany one's ancestors. [^]

[7] And of course, the Latin root of the word "text" suggests "that which is woven, web, texture." [^]

[8] The very essay in which Benjamin presents the "angel of history" opens with the description of an "automaton" who enlists the services of theology in order to become a master of historical materialism. [^]

[9] Initial conditions include the spatial and temporal categories that change from system to system before a phenomenon enters into motion. [^]

[10] "your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell" -- Adorno in a letter to Walter Benjamin, see Jameson p. 129. [^]

[11] Another image from "Picture Postcards." [^]

[12] In his book Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler reminds us of the early "appearance of a writing angel in the trademark of a gramophone company" (298). The gramophone is hence associated with a supernatural (because unmotivated) ability to record everything. Conversely, the ability to be a "recording angel" must be associated with an attention to shifts in media technology. Yet, part of what must be recorded is the process of repression itself. [^]

[13] Nevid, Jeffrey S. et al. p. 110. [^]

[14] "In systems that have been refuted only the personal interests us, for that alone is irrefutable. It is possible to paint a man's portrait in three anecdotes" -- Second Preface. [^]

[15] Forché's name, coincidentally, sounds much like the French word for "unintentional." [^]

[16] For an explication of the differences between rhizomic and arborescent schemas, see pp 3-25 of Deleuze and Guattari. [^]

[17] Shatskich p. 76. [^]

[18] "Initiated modern experimental dynamics in the laboratory" (Çambel 65). [^]

[19] A fact pointed out to Çambel by his daughter, whose age he left unspecified. [^]

[20] Illuminations p. 257-8. [^]

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