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“Not to find one’s way in a city,” Benjamin writes in “A Berlin Chronicle,” is uninteresting, for all that is required is ignorance of the surroundings. But it is quite a different matter, Benjamin says, “to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a wood—that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, [End Page 1133] signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.” The reason why not finding one’s way within a city is uninteresting is that in fact one is not truly lost; for those attachments to the habits and habitations of self, to the supposed order of memories and reflections that abide in a sequential and composed form, and imbue the self with its identity are in no way broached. Having lost one’s way leads to a more rigid, intransigent assertion of those habits of self. One is not really lost until one has learned to lose the veneer of self, of self-ness or self-hood. What follows losing oneself (or one’s self) in this fashion is the opening of a different possibility for reading, in which the familiar signs of the city speak in an altogether other language. To read this other language is to read differently, in an un-schooled way. It is to read, both semantically and materially, out-of-bounds, beyond the acculturated frameworks and paradigms of schools, outside of and apart from the habits of regular (and regulated) comprehension. This loss-of-self, though, is itself a moment of reading, of reading-as-un-reading that disallows by discontinuing reading as an ordering together of disparate elements and signs into a coherent, and thus familiar and recognizable, pattern referable to the regimes of the human self. In the scene of “A Berlin Chronicle,” the gesture of reading the familiar signs of the city in this unschooled way is inaugurated by the sound of a crack or a breaking sound (“a cracking twig”), and what follows is a shrill cry (the cry of a bittern), and finally a sudden and startling apparition (a lily standing erect in a field). The image is startling because, between these two disparate registers—the city, a forest—there is no bridge, no semantic continuity that would allow for a translation from one register—or language, the language of the city, that of the forest—to the other. “Paris taught me this art of straying,” Benjamin continues, “it fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the blotting pages of my school exercise books.” We may linger here with the fact that Benjamin does not draw an analogical relation, or even one of translation between the city and the labyrinth on the blotter leaves, but instead suggests a kind of metamorphosis in which the leaves of the page are materialized in the city, where words and writing become the detour in which images—signs, and billboards, statues, and shops, breaking twigs, and birds—take on characteristics that defy the types of reading one might learn at school. To follow along these paths and byways, as he says, requires “a completely different schooling,” a different way of reading and hearing.

Tom Cohen’s provocative and daring new book, Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” After Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin is in every respect a continuation of precisely this style of reading. At the level of its presentation, it is an enactment of the transgressive, non-paradigmatic writing-practice inaugurated and pursued by Benjamin throughout his brief but prolific career. Like Benjamin, Cohen is engaged in an effort to unlearn the given, [End Page 1134] the ready-to-hand, habitual ways of framing and composing the past and present. For Cohen as for Benjamin, the composition of the text is not a matter of constructing a whole or unified stream of memory and fact. Rather, as Benjamin again writes in “A Berlin Chronicle,” the task of remembrance is a matter of “spaces, moments, and discontinuities.” A few pages later, commenting upon the labyrinth-like web created by these discontinuous moments or scenes of remembrance, Benjamin writes, “I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic center, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior.” Cohen begins his introduction with a similarly provocative declaration: “This volume explores several openings for what might be called a return to ‘theory’ within the contemporary critical scene—or, more specifically, to material technologies of reading irreducible to any representational schema” (p. 1). We live, though, in the epoch of reduction, in the age of what Nietzsche, in his prescience, termed the “last man,” the man “who shall make the world small” and legible, the man for whom nothing remains and who completes the world and the entirety of possibility with a mere shrug. The last man is man exhausted, man-become-God, though God with no longer any possibility; the last man is the death of God rendered from the perspective of God, the death of God as God would imagine it, or an infinite, impossible death. In Cohen’s words, the last man is the allohuman that “emerges from the ‘human’ not as temporal progression or evolutionary event but abruptly: it had in fact always been the case—the human was all along an invention . . . a parenthesis, a permanent detour tied to the figure of mimesis” (pp. 206–7). The last man, then, is the sudden and horrifying realization of the human-as-inhuman who reduces everything to brute legibility.

Tom Cohen’s book will likely be regarded as either a static disturbance easily rectified by just switching the dial, or simply an illegible mess. Both views would be mistaken in the extreme. Admittedly, Cohen’s book is nearly impossible to contain or pin down in the form of a thesis. Indeed, he delivers upon his promise to explore various openings for a “return to theory within the contemporary critical scene.” This he does by raising disparate sites or “scenes” of theoretical inquiry—de Man and his abjection at the hands of American populist academic professionals, cinema, travel narratives, the historical “sensorium” of Benjamin, the “narcotic” effect of the realism and mimetic practices of “cultural theory,” the politics of “culture,” and Nietzsche and the covert shadings of scientific discourse within cultural studies—though without imposing a facsimile of legibility or an easily digestible “sound bite.” Alternatively, one might say that Cohen’s thesis is in every way bound up with his method of presentation. The fragmentary, essayistic style of his book follows Benjamin’s stated method in the preface to the Trauerspielbuch: “Method is a digression [Umweg]. Representation [Darstellung] as digression.” Cohen indeed takes over Benjamin’s view that “the absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure” should be the primary characteristic of a truly [End Page 1135] critical writing and that critical writing should, at its core, be a resistance to the impositions, intended or not, of reading models and incorporating frames.

The present dominant reading model within academic circles is the trope of “culture,” the “cultural.” It seems that everything, be it a book, a poem (though we are rarely permitted to speak of these any longer), a style of dress or fashion, a figure of speech, a train ticket or a shopping list is deemed to have a cultural origin and a cultural significance. The circularity of this is obvious. And if, as is said so loosely today, “everything is cultural,” then we may infer that the word “culture” must itself also be “cultural.” But this is not all: as the word “culture” comes to function as the epistemic ground and source of all meanings and identities, no matter how diverse or divided, and insofar as any and every image is potentially referable to a culture, insofar as it is presumed that every image, every identity, every determination is culturally formed and grounded, then the word “culture” comes to be both absolute and arbitrary. In the common (all-too-common) uses, the word “culture” is both everything and nothing, a floating, infinitely malleable signifier designed to particularize any and every identification, and at the same time to draw what has been identified into a totalized frame of meaning and signification. Culture, or “culture,” then, has assumed the position of the transcendental signifier. Was it Nietzsche or the young Marx who said “I hate all Gods”?

This leads us to what is perhaps Cohen’s most polemical point: “Culture,” as it is used today across a wide and ever widening terrain of consideration, of discipline, is a virtual sign, and “cultural studies” a virtual practice that operates as a foreclosure of the possibility of anything outside of itself. It thus comes dangerously close to lapsing into a fascistic model of memory management, a totalitarianism of remembrance that takes as its primary imperative what Benjamin termed in One Way Street the “reproduction of its own sterility.” Accordingly, at the level of its logic, and in the putting into practice of this logic, “cultural studies” appears scarcely different from the omnivorous imperium of what Jean-Luc Nancy terms simply “the West.” Indeed, like Nancy’s conception of “the West,” “cultural studies” “appears as what has as its planetary, galactic, universal vocation limitlessly to extend its own delimitation. It opens the world to the closure that it is.” Here, in the most polemical form, is precisely the procedure of “cultural studies” as it celebrates itself as the travesty of completed meaning in the age of the last man. It is an extension of itself, an encompassing of everything, and the proffering of the promise—or threat—that what remains to be encompassed shall indeed eventually be encompassed.

To this there can be no resistance, for resistance is already incorporated into the extensive reach of “culture” in advance. Every resistance to the moniker of “culture,” every gesture of re-membrance will already be received as a marker of the “cultural” in the form of resistance, of “cultural resistance.” Is there a way out of this? Benjamin remarked in the Trauerspielbuch that what [End Page 1136] calls for the resistance to facsimiles of production, models of reading, and a kind of immediate legibility, is the very fact that thought “persistently . . . always begins anew; in a round-about way it goes back to the matter itself.” But what, we may ask, is the matter itself? For Cohen, the “matter itself,” at the risk of a certain reductiveness, is the inescapability of what he terms, following both Benjamin and de Man, “a certain ‘problematic of language’” (p. 31), a problematic that has been criticized by both the right and the left in the United States as “merely textualist (insufficiently exterior, worldly, political),” but which has nevertheless “never seemed entirely possible to escape” (p. 31). It is this “problematic of language” which both underlies, and ultimately undercuts, the totality of the “cultural,” for the “matter itself” is the materiality of language and remembrance, that excess of language which can never be reduced or incorporated into itself and negated as meaning, since it is the necessary vehicle of negation.

In order to escape this problematic the current drift of academic fashion away from the materiality of language toward what is deemed concrete, “real,” involves materially re-shaping the definitions of both “real” and politics. Paradoxically, though, as Cohen reminds us, this re-shaping takes place in language—as it must—even though this medium remains largely ignored. But to ignore, as Cohen repeatedly stresses, is not to overcome or surpass. In opposition to this, Cohen appeals to Benjamin and to the possibility that a different kind of “memory grid might be installed, a mode in which inherited narratives (historicisms) stand to be rewired” (p. 41). And further, pressing toward the active and even revolutionary effect of opening such an “undecidability,” Cohen writes: “‘Undecidability’ is not the paralysis of interpretation and action, but a tool for neutralizing a mechanical, learned, or inherited mode of arriving at a routine ‘choice’ or designation that could not be questioned or halted.” Evoking Nietzsche, Cohen goes on to remark that the point of “undecidability” is where “decision becomes, for the first time, possible” (p. 41). It becomes possible precisely because the inherited techniques of remembrance, the schooled and conditioned regimes of reading according to grammar and logic, are suspended. The “aura” of memory may be shattered, buried for good in the digging through the soil of remembrance that lays bear the multilayered scenes and contexts of memory and that slowly, gradually points toward the unfathomable dimensions of the medium—in Benjamin’s words, the “spade” with which one digs—within which we at once explore and compose remembrance and memory: language. “Memory,” Cohen writes, “is the ultimate preoriginary technology, exterior to itself, and it takes the form of writing, inscription, photographs” (p. 208).

Cohen’s text is a persistent questioning of the political agendas and stakes involved in the formation and composition of what is—and more importantly, what is not—political by way of a bracketing and subsequent jettisoning of “theory” and philosophy in favor of what today is viewed and valorized as a more “practical” turn. His question is this: what are the agendas at stake in [End Page 1137] maintaining a certain definition of the “political,” grounded in the supposedly self-evident status of practicality, as opposed to the assumed a-political “merely textualist,” or aesthetic approach? Cohen’s answer comes by way of a turn to the “return to history” practiced within “cultural studies.” “Cultural studies,” as Cohen views it, is in fact less a historical mode of inquiry than a historicism, a politics that is intimately and decisively invested in a model of history-as-description grounded in a mimetic logic of translation. As such, Cohen argues, this makes its coordinates almost impossible to establish (which is why “cultural studies” appears throughout the book, and in the title, between quotation marks. Though we may venture a further interpretation of these quotation marks: “Cultural studies” is, in itself, merely a quotation of history, and thus a de-scription, in the etymological sense of the word, a “writing-away”). This is a devastating implication as Cohen develops it; for, as the primary agent of historicism, it is politically impossible for “cultural studies” to “contrive or spectrally stage its event as a ‘state of emergency’ or emergence, because—failing to put into danger, or gamble, the very models of reference or mnemonic management out of which possible presents and futures are produced—it must return to the very systematic that would prematurely defer such rupture” (p. 104). In effect, then, “cultural studies” preempts the possibility of the production of futures and presents—in favor of an appeal to simply one present, one future, what is the here and now, the concrete—the real of mimesis. “Cultural studies,” then, is a conservatism of the highest order. It does not “happen” so much as it continues, extends, becomes in an incessant and infinite process of self-unfolding, and, as Cohen puts it, we’re left with the promise (again we may ask, a promise or a threat?) of “a ‘cultural studies’ to come” (ibid.).

To raise these concerns and make these remarks, as Professor Cohen notes—and this perhaps brings into relief a positive determination of “cultural studies” within Cohen’s book, albeit through a negative formulation—is indeed to risk being labeled “merely textualist (insufficiently exterior, worldly, political)” (p. 31). Indeed, one possible approach to Ideology and Inscription is to recognize that it is performing for us a kind of cultural study of “cultural studies” by way of an analysis of the epistemological and political conditions in which “cultural studies” has unfolded and has gained a seemingly intransigent ascendant position within the American academy. The contradiction and irony of this ascendant standing is that “cultural studies,” at least outwardly, has always professed its opposition to the academic establishment. However, in Cohen’s view, “cultural studies,” out of a need to legitimate itself, “often returns . . . to mimetic logics and epistemological models all too proximate to the archival establishment of the academy it had sought to displace” (p. 101). And, he continues, “the moments of ‘cultural studies’ I would address involve, clearly, both the politics of naming (or self-naming) and of taking or giving genealogies” (p. 101). This practice of naming and giving genealogies, so shamefully evident in the dominant constructions of race and gender from the enlightenment onward, is now no [End Page 1138] less shamefully rendered in the abjection-by-genealogy of the names de Man and Nietzsche and the discrediting of any who would dare to consider language.

In Cohen’s view “the cultural left has made a central error in assuming that ‘politics’ must be defined in mimetic or representational terms alone (a supposition that has led to the impasse of identity politics)” (p. 32). More to the point, the fallacies of de-scriptive “realism” and the vague, though ultimately questionable, adherence to a Marxist, or at the very least politically transformative, critical approach, overlooks what was in fact the radicality of Marx’s point; namely, that the active role philosophy and literary criticism, can and should take in changing the world is one that must be registered at the level of writing, of inscription. “It seems,” Cohen remarks, “that in order to effect the world (perhaps precisely in Marx’s sense), what is called for is not a return to a referential construction, but accelerating types of figuration that alter the politics and antique models of referentiality to begin with” (p. 209, emphasis mine). It is at this register, to return to the point from which we began, that Cohen invokes the writing of Benjamin, particularly with respect to the mnemotechnics enacted in Benjamin’s essays on Marseilles, and what he terms the “literary.” For Cohen, “if what is alluded to as the historical ‘sensorium’ is a hermeneutic programming of the senses, the disruption of a ‘natural’ processing of perception connects the drug prosthesis—its suspension of ‘experience’—to a political motive, and with that to a resistance to what might be termed the hypnologies of ‘normal’ consciousness, installed reference systems, received historicist narratives” (pp. 222–23). Clearly, what one might term “natural consciousness” is itself an effect of a certain kind of narcotic, a “hypnology of experience,” as Cohen terms it, and not a pre-ordained order or originary program. And yet, peculiarly, this is precisely the kind of ordering of experience and the past that “cultural studies” appeals to, as evidenced by its covert importations of a certain “scientific” language and an approach to the past, the past-as-object, as fixed. As a “discourse” concerned with the past, a past that is conceived and rendered as objective, fixed, given, “cultural studies,” Cohen remarks, “risks being another touristic way of distancing” the past, most pointedly at the register of its essential materiality—the “matter itself,” the inescapable “problematic of language.”

Here, then, we may introduce yet another dimension of Cohen’s analysis of “cultural studies”: not only are the various “theoretical” dispositions to the past and history excluded within its province, it also seeks to enact an “escape from the ‘literary’ according to the old humanist model” (p. 208). But like the high tradition of idealist philosophy, haunted and hectored continually by the specter of its other—namely, literature—“cultural studies” cannot altogether shake free of this (unless, of course, it is willing to align itself, however covertly, with the tradition of Hegelianism and speculative idealism). At best, as Cohen remarks, “cultural studies” can only confront literature as a historicized construction, and thus as a closed site. But literature does not go away so easily, precisely because it has never been as much as its historical [End Page 1139] determination would lead some to imagine. “Let us suppose,” Blanchot wrote in 1947, “that literature begins at the moment that literature becomes a question.” Under Blanchot’s pen, and to a certain extent under Cohen’s, literature can never be as much as the historicist version would make it out to be, because it in fact has never, and really can never, proceed beyond its own question. It lacks essence, and thus any basis upon which it might be submitted to reflection. Sartre’s question “what is literature” can only be given, as Blanchot says, meaningless answers because it is essentially a meaningless question. The question should not be “what is literature,” but rather “how is literature possible?” And the answer is brief: it is not possible. And yet it exists nonetheless, it is, and this is precisely the point at which literature intervenes within the history of Being by framing the strange paradox of existence without essence, of an existence in excess of Being. This is precisely the “problematic” of language, the “matter itself” which exceeds compression into a form of comprehension, which “cultural studies,” try as it may, cannot encompass or fathom.

Every image, as Blanchot reminds us, is an after-image. The image of the word, of any word, is the “object’s aftermath,” and so it is what allows us to keep the object at our command even when there is in fact nothing left. But the image, at the level of the word-image, is first and foremost the figure of death unleashed in the world, an impossible death, however. Paradoxically, then, the seemingly progressive gesture of speaking of multiple and various cultures and of their respective histories, of eliminating the idea (or ideal) of the univocal Historical Subject and replacing it with the lower case plural “histories” and “subjects” results not in emancipation or greater freedom, but rather in a more refined and tightly controlled field of experience and practice—“where did all these bodies come from,” Didi asks in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The assumption of a sphere of language, a style of writing and expression that can evade the constructed dimensions of culture and history, of the “literary,” and that can be translated with ease and clarity (we must remember that for Benjamin what was at stake in the translation of any text was precisely that dimension which was untranslatable) is to efface literature’s “right to death” in the image of the human. In “Ars Nova,” Blanchot wrote that what we term “culture . . . is based on the notion of humanism, the notion that man is naturally reflected in his works and never distinct from himself, that progress is continuous, an uninterruptible continuity which ensures the flow of past into present, since culture and accumulation go hand in hand.” What Cohen exposes is that this in fact is the secret, or not-so-secret, agenda of “cultural studies.”