Interruption

With the passage between each passage, we can't anticipate where Benjamin is going to land, what link he is going to make, what theme is going to be continued, expanded, or introduced. We are constantly re-presented with our own spectacle of great anticipation but also the spectacle of our own ignorance, our own basic need to re-imagine, a reading that is over and over an arrival in the world anew. So that reading is the fundamental experience of our own ignorance, and if reading then is the producer of knowledge, then it is this knowledge, of the experience of not knowing and what that brings forward in the mind, the fear, the possibility, the radical un-linking from pre-existing forms of knowledge that then crosses into the radically linked textual experience of the passages. We could even say the more thoroughly each passage is linked or leads out to multiple levels of meaning and connection, the more this contrary experience can then take center stage or enter into the dialectic. In the dialectical image there's certainly a passage through something like pure language, but there is as well this "external" dialectic happening between text and the absence of text, or citation and its opposite, non-citational being. Benjamin refers to this in "What Is Epic Theater?" when he writes, "interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context." Along these lines we need to look at the supposed absences created by digital text, the way in which it is, in many senses, backward-looking, a kind of angel of the present, a present that piles up at light speed but, and particularly if we look at the materiality of the digital and environmental devastation, only in reference to an "appearance of the disappearing" of the human.