Tag Archives: Walter Benjamin

“Unpacking my Library”

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Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” offers a unique and personal look into the life of a book collector, prompting us to reconsider what it means to truly “own” a book and what it means to be a book “collector”. It is a wonderful final reading for this class. Benjamin begins by stating that “I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order” (Benjamin, 59). A chaotic scene for new discovery within one’s own archive is set. 

What struck me is how Benjamin distinguishes between collecting and a collection. He emphasizes that a true collector’s passion “borders on the chaos of memories” and that the act of collecting is tied to stories and histories rather than just utility or monetary value. A collector does not simply collect books for their content or value, but for the deeper meaning each item holds. Benjamin explains, “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (Benjamin, 60). Each book becomes a vessel of memory and discovery, as a way for the collector to see through objects into their unique past. Our midterm project, writing the biography of a book, taught us this, exhibiting how the materiality of books are more than vessels for written content, but artifacts with their own rich histories and stories to tell. Benjamin also highlights the unpredictability of acquiring and collecting books, where even catalogued items may offer surprise or new information. Benjamin recounts discovering a rare illustrated book he had never thought of owning, describing it as a freedom given to a lonely book. For him, the “true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves” (Benjamin, 64).  This resonated with me, especially after our studies of archives, where we have found how exciting it can be to discover unexpected connections, histories, and the unique lives of objects. 

In “Unpacking my Library”, Benjamin reminds us that collecting and creating one’s own archive is not passive, but an emotional and physical endeavor. Our collections are reflections of our passions and memories which can be found in the content of our books and the pages themselves. This class, and Benjamin’s reading, inspires me to explore deeper into my own archive of books to uncover, or rediscover, something new.

Week 13: Joy in My Messy Book Collection

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In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin reflects on the emotional and almost intimate relationship collectors have with their books. He explains that the true value of a collection lies not in reading the books but in the personal history surrounding them. As he writes, “every passion borders on the chaotic” and the passion of a book collector is marked by fond memory and affection more than utility or practicality (60). This idea resonates deeply with the way I relate to my own small but growing collection.

Like Benjamin, I don’t always acquire books because I intend to read them right away. Instead, I often pick one up because I’ve either heard great reviews, it’s been gifted to me, or simply because I liked the way the cover looked. Benjamin writes that collectors often have a relationship with books that is more about the story of acquisition than the text itself. He writes  “the thrill of acquisition” in collecting becomes a central feeling, as each book carries a unique experience and relationship between the book and its owner (60).

This is exactly how my own collection works. I store books away on a shelf, thinking that I’ll get to them later, and then I completely forget about them until I clean my room. When I rediscover them, I feel a sudden sense of joy not just because I’m finally about to read them, but because each book reminds me of where it came from. My books hold memories of past moments, people, and places. The joy I feel from stumbling upon my books relates to Benjamin’s argument that collections are biographies in object form. The books gifted to me especially hold emotional sentiment. Their value is not connected to the words on the page but rather to the person who gave them to me. My personal experience of book collecting is similar to Benjamin’s notion that a collection is an archive of one’s memories serving as a personal narrative or timeline. My shelves might be messy, and I haven’t read a lot of the books I own, but their value comes from what I experience in life.

Revisiting My Fascination with the Book

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This week’s readings, especially Bookishness have forced me, in many ways, to return to the very first blog post of the semester in which described my own relationship to the book. Books and bookshelves have long been a staple in my life, and I have lugged around the same collection of books from apartment to apartment to house to house and in six or so moves left and right across the country. I feel very much like the collector in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library.” I’ve been collecting first editions and rare books for a long time, and I’ve come to them in myriad ways. Often, it is books that somehow, bafflingly, garner “no interest, no bid, and the book was put aside,” but unlike Benjamin’s protagonist, I did not wait but leapt at the opportunity to find a book “in the secondhand department and [benefit] from the lack of interest” (65). I once found a 1929 first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms in an antique store for $12. On the free books shelf in the lounge in the Arts and Letters building I have found, rather recently, a first edition, dust jacketed copy of The Things They Carried, a first edition of Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead, and a few weeks ago in a thrift store in Idaho I found a signed (!!) first edition copy of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land for four bucks.

These things carry immense value to me beyond the monetary. In large part, this is due to the culture of bookishness and the time I was brought up in. For much of my adolescence the conversation surrounding print’s impending death was very loud and very present: “A history of normative values associated with literary media … transferred to a new site of conflict: print versus digital” (Pressman 16). As a young boy you naturally must choose a side in any argument or debate or conflict, and so I chose print. In the midst of this conversation, it is important to note that I grew up extremely rural and had dial-up internet until 2012, which very likely swayed things for my mother and I, making it impossible to quickly download files, play games online, watch YouTube, etc. We did not even get cell service at the house. You had to walk up to the top of the hill for to get bar or two.

Regardless, I became a staunch supporter of printed media. I begged my mother for a Sports Illustrated subscription in the misguided belief that I could be the one to stave off the demise of the printed magazine. “If they don’t print it, and only post it online, how will I read?” I remember lamenting.

“The history of the book is about power and politics,” as Dr Pressman writes in chapter one of Bookishness (33). And, at the time, only the powerful and the well-off and the urban could afford the kind of all-the-time connectivity we saw have such a rapid uptick in the aughts and 2010s. I was none of those, and so for me, printed media became a thing that I consumed because I was poor, because we could not afford then the fancy newfangled things that people were claiming would upend the world order. It is interesting that this has now flipped on its head, that many of the poorest in this nation and around the world have access to internet and the technologies that were once unobtainable. That now, following the “death” many in the news once warned us of, print is doing just fine. It is not the same as it was, and many magazines and publishing houses have shuttered, but there is still a market for these things I once feared would become obsolete.

Through all this, I have held on to these books (and added many more), though their meaning has changed over the years, and, like Banjamin’s protagonist, these books have come to me by many avenues. There is a level of intellectual projection done by them. The crowd I often find myself surrounded by is frequently shocked that I read at all, let alone that I am a writer. There are memories in them. Many were passed down from my mother, who stole them from the LD Bell High School library in 1979. Her name is still on the card on the frontispiece. They have been gifts from friends, colleagues, family members. I have found them on the street. I have spent amounts I wouldn’t like to disclose on a few of them. I have stolen others from friends’ libraries. I have written some of them. My friends and my teachers have written others. I have come to them or they to me in many ways, but what is central is that these books remind me of a world into which I was born and which now seems as if it hardly exists at all.

The digital age has completed its ascent, and I latch on to the book out of nostalgia, familiarity, or fear. There is something comforting in looking at their many-colored spines as I write this. I could not have that same comfort on a device, no matter how they rearranged the front screen of the Books app. All of these varied feelings simply cannot be applied to a phone, to a screen, something that when we buy it, we know will someday soon become obsolete, because what the digital grants us in access it strips from us in permanence.

Will my grandchildren one day fire up my laptop and go through my files, watch some of the movies I have downloaded, play some of the computer games? Hell no. Let’s not lie to ourselves. But I do like to believe, if only because I have done it, that one day they might lift a book out from the shelf that was once in their grandfather’s collection, and open it and find his name and turn the same pages that my hands have turned. There is some kind of immortality in that, no?

Week 13: Collection, Capture, and Consent: Connecting Our Learnings with My Research

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Dr. Pressman (Bookishness) and Walter Benjamin (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, trans. Harry Zohn) each describe the fetishism of book ownership, in which symbolic value is attached to the book. I am considering the symbolic value of the book (and the bookish body) in the context of surveillance culture, and in particular relation to my research on sexual violence in fandom convention spaces. I use this post as an opportunity to connect some dots between this week’s bookish readings and my research, as I am presenting it at a conference in a few days.

Benjamin writes that, “for a collector, . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (67). “Ownership” as intimacy suggests a close spatial proximity between that which is collected and she who collects, a “nearness” which Dr. Pressman shows is remediated through digital book imagery (Bookishness 10, 35). Following Susan Sontag’s situation of U.S. photography traditions in the colonial pursuit of collecting (On Photography), I consider the practice of (often nonconsensual) convention photography to be a means of “collecting” bodies as datified archival “objects.” By this I mean that the nonconsensual photo documents not only the proximal relationship between the bodies of photographer and photographed subject, but also the photographer’s greater liberty to determine this proximity/nearness through the functions of camera technology. Where the body cannot be literally sexually possessed, the body can be remediated into a collectable visual representation of (forced, coerced, or consensual) compliance with being objectified through the act of being photographed.

For convention culture, this means that the visual archive of the convention overwrites the lived experiences which occur around and beyond the moment of photography / compliance / archival. I am using the convention archive as an entry-point into a larger argument about how surveillance and the “collection” of body-data shapes pop culture practices more broadly. As a class, we have found that the book is a body, and that the body is a book. To build from Nick Couldry’s framework in Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), I want to show how rituals of collecting and archiving serve to “categorize” each body as book or as reader – object or subject – and “naturalize” the book/body as representative of this power relationship. The book and the body are encoded with symbolic value. Dr. Pressman describes the use of the book as a status symbol in the U.S., where reading inherits historic conscription to that position which is “Western, Judeo-Christian, middle class or at least instilled with ideals of bourgeois mobility” (Bookishness 32). This status of reader/archiver is exclusive: the reader is made dominant by their potential to be able to read (they do not necessarily need to read, though this practice would do the ritual work of naturalizing inequality).

Dr. Amira Jarmakani’s Digital and Networked Feminisms course has been a rich complement to our Books class this semester, as each course has offered perspectives on these symbolic and political powers which networked actors produce. Readings on dataveillance have led me to consider the ways in which archival and “collection” practices necessarily datify identities and bodies, producing boundaries and value through containment. When used as a tool (to borrow Amber Rahman’s term) to reinforce violent institutional relationships, archival technologies might also act as technologies of surveillance. Birth certificates, state identification documents, and police drone footage – each what Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) call a “surveillance apparatus” –archive individuals as data units in value-encoded systems (“Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” 60). The “intimacy” or “thereness” of book collection is perhaps violently remediated through these surveillance practices, which datify people into readable data units that can be ‘opened’ for interrogation at any time. Surveillance is a violent form of archival and meaning production which can be understood as an extension of colonial reading and bookishness.

Benjamin describes that “[t]he most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). This containment takes on a grim cadence when we consider the collector as a colonial amasser and the archived “individual items” as humans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier more succinctly criticizes this colonial archival framework by critiquing the language of “capture” (Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature 7). My research is also moving towards grappling with collection as an extension of colonialism and surveillance (each key to collection’s obvious grounding in capitalism).

This leads me to my final project for our class, which will mediate the erasure of personhood that is produced when bodies are collected or captured through the colonial “surveillance apparatus” of the medical record. I am deliberating if my project will suggest resistance more obviously, or if its existence will itself serve as critique. Either way, I am inspired by the postcolonial archival critiques which Marlene Manoff describes in “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, where creators “reinterpret and recontextualize [colonial archival] information and thus call into question the colonial version of events” (16). I hope that my work on surveillance and sexual violence in the convention space can open up these conversations on the politics of materiality in fandom and pop culture studies more broadly.