Earlier in the week, I was checking my email in my department's postgraduate common room when I noticed that an old built-in drawer in the room seemed slightly ajar. I opened it up further, and discovered that inside the unlocked drawer were various remains from European and Middle Eastern antiquity - tile fragments from Phrygian mosaics, Etruscan stoneware, a broken vase, the crumbled remains of a knitting nancy. All ruins, but how had I never noticed that they were here before? I was excited by what I had found, and told a senior academic in my department, who brought up the keys to the other (locked) drawers, and then discovered two more drawers of antiquities - one drawer containing beautiful Egyptian turquoise jewellery and figurines and even a carved scarab beetle. And wonderful hand-written letters written to the university from around 1913. It was amazing. They would have made a tidy sum on ebay, although my thoughts lay closer to: these items belong in a museum!
It turned out that the Classics department used to own the floor, and they had just never bothered to take away all their things when they moved out. Some other postgrads had known about the items for months and years, so it wasn't like I was the first to discover them, just the first to actually bother telling someone else about them. I think that the Classics department have taken the items back now, where no doubt they will be locked up and forgotten about in another chest of drawers!
It is fitting that I find these crumbled ruins as I continue to make ruins of my own through my writing (this article by Cornelia Vismann draws the connection between language and ruins, she writes that philology can be etymologically described as a "love of ruins"). As my thesis continues to take shape, it leaves behind even more remains that will hopefully be recycled back into the project at a later point. Here's the beginning of a chapter that no longer exists, a kind of a requiem for an introduction. It is on the discursive connection between cinema and tourism, using Benjamin writing about, well, ruins. I wrote it around a month ago:
It turned out that the Classics department used to own the floor, and they had just never bothered to take away all their things when they moved out. Some other postgrads had known about the items for months and years, so it wasn't like I was the first to discover them, just the first to actually bother telling someone else about them. I think that the Classics department have taken the items back now, where no doubt they will be locked up and forgotten about in another chest of drawers!
It is fitting that I find these crumbled ruins as I continue to make ruins of my own through my writing (this article by Cornelia Vismann draws the connection between language and ruins, she writes that philology can be etymologically described as a "love of ruins"). As my thesis continues to take shape, it leaves behind even more remains that will hopefully be recycled back into the project at a later point. Here's the beginning of a chapter that no longer exists, a kind of a requiem for an introduction. It is on the discursive connection between cinema and tourism, using Benjamin writing about, well, ruins. I wrote it around a month ago:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our
railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the
tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris,
we calmly and adventurously go travelling.1
In the passage above, Benjamin’s words, from his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” indicate the longevity of a discursive tradition in continental critical theory connecting travel with cinema. Here, Benjamin radically turns about the usual paradigm of the modern world as a milieu liberated from the temporal and spatial constraints of the ancien regime. Although the urban industrial world has been associated with imprisonment and monotony since Blake and his “satanic mills”, Benjamin also sees the urban architectural markers of the modern real world that are so often associated with speed, action and novelty – the taverns and the streets - representing stasis, quagmire, non-movement. In this imagining, even railroad travel does not take one where one would want to visit: he focusses on the station(ary) and enclosure rather than on the train itself.2 It is only cinema, a passive activity held in a darkened, enclosed interior space, that Benjamin privileges as the paradoxical apparatus enabling “adventurous” exploration, a way of escape for people from all levels of society. This phantasmagoria of the modern world may be constructed from destruction and loss, but this debris is effaced, unrecognised. In an example of the ambivalence that characterises so many of Benjamin’s thoughts about his era, the idea of travelling through “far flung ruins and debris” simultaneously evokes two images: in the first instance, with some sense of exigency, there is the image of those who unwittingly tread on what they cannot see (hence the “calmness” in the midst of this destruction); secondarily, it conjures up an almost Romantic vision of the original grand tourists in Europe who visited and traversed the crumbling buildings of the classical world for pleasure. Thus, travel and cinema are intrinsically connected: modern tourism begins with the love of ruins, and as Benjamin notes, the cinema cannot help but create new ruins of its own.3
1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999. p.229.
2. Given the subsequent events of World War II and the uses given to mass train transportation in Europe, these words seem tragically prescient.
3. Jacques Derrida writes on Benjamin’s ambivalence in a famous passage: “One could write, maybe with or following Benjamin, maybe against Benjamin, a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one’s own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one’s own ruin—which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? Where else would the right to love, even the love of law, come from?” See Derrida, J. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Cardozo Law Review, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. 11:5-6 (1990): pp.920-1045.
I cannot really use this paragraph any more because I decided against a specific theoretical chapter on "virtual tourism," choosing instead to incorporate sections of it into other chapters on actual, film-induced tourism. So, I demolish my work in the hope that it will provide the foundations for something far stronger in the future, although my fear is that it will become part of a mound of forgotten ideas that will need to be excavated in order to be of any value for me. You should see how many copies of earlier drafts lie waiting for me on my desk.
