No More Learning

Ibid.
114
Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man, and Secret Agency in the "Aesthetic State"
Tom Cohen
The picture opens with a scene at St. Moritz, in Switzerland, because that's where I spent my honeymoon with my wife. From our window I could see the skating rink. And it occurred to me that we might start the picture by showing an ice-skater tracing numbers--eight--six--zero--two--on the rink. An espionage code, of course. But I dropped the idea.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
(Teresa Wright) remembered, too, the endless series of word games and puns Hitchcock used to keep his cast and crew entertained.
--Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius
We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as color; in fact, there's no such thing as face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent.
--Hitchcock to Truffaut
There is a road that goes from this notion of Schein to the notion of materiality.
--de Man, "Kant and Schiller"
Why the perpetual motif of writing beneath surfaces in Hitchcock--as a tracing visible, perhaps, by certain spy agencies alone, of letters, carved in the ice? In The 39 Steps, the secret formula is all letters and numbers; we are barely into Shadow of a Doubt when the motifs of telegrams and telepathy interface with a little girl's automaton-like, compulsive reading; Hitchcock, in his first overt cameo in a "talkie" (Blackmail) is interrupted reading on a train--that is, interrupted with- in a stasis within the accelerated semiosis of a cinemallographic shuttle. 1
If these examples among numerous others indicate, point to something else (and such pointing is the blackmailer Tracey's last, accusatory, yet cutoff gesture--as it will be that still of the Hitchcock opus, the last image of Family Plot), they point to an alternate scene of writing that has nothing to do with "pictures of people talking," and everything to do with an attempt to indict, displace, and politically subvert the consumerist logic of mimesis to which the history of film--and for that matter, "film theory"--has been linked. 2 Interestingly, this puts Hitchcock in contact at once with a Benjaminian practice, since the lat- ter's argument that film begins with a divestiture of "aura" is to say that it takes place as the abolition of much of what film theory has striven to restore--logics of identification, primarily, but also Oedipal maps, and the relapse of cultural studies into mimetic codes. This essay will attempt to ask where a rethinking of the trope of "materiality" through the late, and in many ways still unread, work of de Man strikes a strange accord not only with this other Hitchcock--a Hitchcock for whom the mnemonics of inscription has a political import that is irreducible--but with a transformation in the very terms of the cul- ture's hermeneutic program: what is called materiality, to be sure, but also the aesthetic, the political, "light," memory, and so on. Hitchcock's work is traversed with secret agents, yet the term itself, as in the film with John Gielgud and Peter Lorre so named, seems for him to ques- tion an irreducibly material question: that is, in a medium dependent on the projected repetition of old prints and mnemonic inscription-- like film or, perhaps, ideology--what kind of reflexive agency can in ef- fect reach into its own prerecordings to intervene in or alter history, which is at once to say the past and virtual futures?
Careful readers of Hitchcock's Secret Agent--pointedly evoked in the telescope shot of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest--are not surprised that the turning point of the film is when Gielgud and Lorre end up at a Chocolate Factory in a multilingual Switzerland. The two ineffective and bumbling actants are tracking a "secret agent" tellingly named Marvin (Robert Young), tellingly since Hitchcock's ceaseless recurrence to the syllable Mar- in proper names draws atten- tion to an interrogation of marking that pervades this work. On the success of this disclosure of identity and reflexive chase, the film's nar- rative MacGuffin pretends, the outcome of the first world war will hang, which is to say, the fate of Britain, the "world," and so on. In fact, Marvin will have to be stopped on a train headed for Constantinople-- that is, a trope for Hitchcock of a certain cognitive realization echoed
Political Thrillers 115
116 Tom Cohen
elsewhere in names such as Conway, or Constance, or Conrad, or Victor Constantine (Family Plot). What is interesting is not that it is the American "college boy"--irritating, mock-flirtatious, and overlooked-- who is the deadly agent, but that the Chocolate Factory is itself so misleading. Deafening and machinal, gigantic in its "expressionistic" troping of Lang's Metropolis, the conveyor belts that turn out the "chocolate" also purvey letters, notes in code and transliterated script sent out to all the other spies. The deafening machinal Chocolate Factory with its white-coated mutlilingual Swiss attendants and ridicu- lous gigantic churning wheels is termed the "Spies' Post Office. " The deafening roar is not new to the film: it suggests the reduction of all languages to sheer sound, a kind of Benjaminian reine Sprache, sug- gested in the first murder in Langenthal Kirche (Fritz Lang, language), where again a deafening single organ note and then a giant bell obliter- ate speech and leave us with the close-up shot of an almost deaf ear being shouted into by the linguistically incoherently and obscurely (non)ethnic and many-named General (Lorre).
The chocolate in which spy messages are transposed--like the net- works of puns and repetitions sent out across all of Hitchcock's films, binding them in transformative systems of revision and commentary-- is not just something sweet and tasty, like the bonbon of film entertain- ment itself. We know from related "political thrillers" like the first Man Who Knew Too Much, that this semiotic and migratory black hole is also allied to an eclipsed sun (the skeet-shoot, the fake Temple of Sun Worshipers which parodies a movie house and is the assassin Abbott's front [again, Lorre]), to excrement,3 to little black dogs, and again, in Secret Agent, to obliterating sound, feet, letters, and so on. The "secret agency" pointed at in the title, in short, is a kind of mne- monic trace, neither living nor dead, void of semantic content yet that on which all switchboard relays or translation or even visibility (read- ing) seems to rest. As political thrillers go, the job of Gielgud and Lorre seems inverted: Britain will thrive, the course of the world or world war will be maintained, official history of a sort will seem secure, if Marvin is kept from Constantinople, if the mnemonic network of marking on which cinema and "life" depend is not disclosed, does not alter the material premises of cognition. "Britain," again, names not the good guys for the early Hitchcock, but a certain hermeneutic state of relapse or effacement with elaborate policial networks, much as Marvin in this scenario might well count for the "knowledge" of a critic such as de Man (or, clearly, Hitchcock). What is momentarily disclosed
is the dependency of all programmatized perception on mnemonic pre- recordings, like the record player resting on a toilet in Gielgud's hotel room against the backdrop of which Lorre throws a famous tantrum. And this state has long arms. With Gielgud unable to "act" (in any sense) and Lorre unable to stop acting or acting up (in every sense), and with Marvin speeding on his train (that is, cinema) to Constantinople, it is left for the British spymaster back in London to order an air strike of the train altogether--to brutally intervene in any narrative devel- opment and simply command the latter's total derailment by extra- cinematic means. Not surprisingly within this system of specular doubles on which aesthetic politics here resides--yet on which, in turn, the "world" depends--this is done by a letter, by "old man R," as the master agent is alone named (that is, like the "R" of Rebecca, insignia of a reclaiming repetition that Marvin would break with). The victory of Britain is nothing more or less than the pretended victory of an aes- thetic state over a knowledge of technicity identifiable with Hitchcock's posthuman project.
Thus, when Hitchcock repeats certain names and syllabic or even letteral patterns across his films, they appear to link up in active net- works or mnemonic constellations--not "thematic" motifs so much as trace-chains confirming alternative modes of sense and perception (which is to say, other techniques of reading) at utter variance with the mimeticism of the film commodity. Such repetitions isolate specific signifiers--individual letters or letteral clusters, sounds (often drawn attention to with the phrase "sounds like" inserted into dialogue), vi- sual "puns," and citations--which may operate like monadic and no- madic switchboards whose proliferation continues to alter the afterlife not only of the film texts themselves (their cumulative interpretive lit- erature, their reception), but the literary or cultural mnemonics that they have become embedded in. 4 This operation, in ways a virtual sabo- tage for Hitchcock of interiorist and oculist ideology (which is to say mimeticism tout court), has the added effect of supplanting, exterioriz- ing, transposing the very memory reserve that this oeuvre would have been framed by or staged within. Memory, temporality, will have been or come to be altered. This may be the materialistic and technical crossing that many "political" plots in Hitchcock's "thrillers" covertly point to, circle, and defer. Such a focus finds an unexpected parallel with the "late" essays of de Man as well, where there is a heightened focus on the problems of memory, materiality, and intervention. Of course, in making this connection, an obvious link would be Benjamin,
Political Thrillers 117
118 Tom Cohen
whose treatment of cinema parallels his own revision of allegory, on which de Man draws--and which, in fact, de Man may be seen as a penultimate technician or engineer of on the microtextual, micro- mnemonic level. I will suggest that the problem probed by the "late" de Man as a certain passage, shift, or direction which this project involves--an encounter with a formal aporia as the premise for such a "direction"--is at work in Hitchcock's cinematic project as well, and is purveyed as a political task (and task of translation), one represented by the "villain's" attempted crossing of political borders with a trans- formative and explosive secret that has the potential to alter the world (say, Mr. Memory--a transparent figure of a certain cinematic project-- in The 39 Steps, or the micro-film in North by Northwest). We will ask, in the process, what sort of politics is practiced here, why this en- tails an altered definition of the "aesthetic" itself, and why the statist enemy will be identified not with this or that political ideology (fascist, democratic, capitalist) but with an entire regime of cognition, interpre- tation, and experience governed by what de Man calls, more generally, the "aesthetic state. " Such questions frame, of course, the delayed pub- lication of Aesthetic Ideology,5 as well as the event or nonevent posed by its (impossible) reinsertion in today's alien critical registers.
Cinema, for Benjamin, is not a machine of mimetic reproduction so much as technical analogue of mnemonic orders that project and, im- plicitly, intervene in or alter the perceptual sensorium (which is al- ways already hermeneutically programmed and constituted): a virtual mnemotechnic. In "The Work of Art" essay, Benjamin links cinema to a technology associated with an alteration in the entire history and field of perception ("the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence" [222], "the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception" [235]): this "constitutes the shock effect of the film. . . . By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect" (238). Later again, we hear of "film with its shock effect" (240). Like "allego- ry," whose covert logic so-called cinema parallels in Benjamin, what is called cinema takes a traditional figure associated popularly with a logic of mimesis. It appears as one model in which the projection of inscriptions appears openly phenomenalized by way of a spectral prejection--one dependent on a naturalized technicity of light that countersigns and regenerates metaphoric premises of cognition (the Greek eidos). It, cinema, rewrites the dependency of consciousness on
the mechanics of memorization, marking "light" itself as a secondary, and not originary, effect. This material problematic informs the plot- ting of Hitchcock's work from The Lodger and The 39 Steps through Spellbound, The Birds, Marnie, and so on, and it is no surprise that Family Plot opens by likening this cinema to a faux se? ance (for which the medium-ghost will be named "Henry"); that is, precisely that hypnopoetic invocation of the putative dead by a putative "present" not for (mere) entertainment or even sham business (both are marked), but to redetermine the past as well as recast the future (Julia Rainbird's lost family progeny and heir, however disastrously). Foremost among these forms of subscripts and secret or unread agencies are bands of names and markers that assert the priority and materiality of a pre- letteral function, the prosthesis of the visible itself. Such include, in Hitchcock's oeuvre: the "bar-series" of slashes or syncopated spacing (the best example being the parallel lines of Spellbound), the chain of names with the syllable Mar- for marring and marking in it (Marnie, Marion, Mark, Martin, Marvin, Margo, and so on). 6 In Hitchcock's so-called political thrillers, what is generally conceived as "home," such as England in the early films, is always also being plotted against by an allegorical stand-in for Hitchcock's work or style. The assassin or saboteur, such as Verloc in Sabotage (who runs a movie theater, the Bijou), always also represents a failed project--let us call it, with the punning "con-" series in mind, or the title, The Man Who Knew Too Much, an epistemological critique of tropes--which is politically aimed at England, at the economy of the home, the hermeneutic state, and so on. We will call that the "aesthetic state"--a de Manian moniker we will return to--for now only noting the political and global histori- cal role given to these plots (in which, before this device was wholly taken over as a device and trivialized, a world-altering event hangs in the balance, such as the start of a "world" war, or the change of a war's outcome).
It is in fact the "villains" who are assaulting this state in the espio- nage films and they, not the "heroes," who represent the world-altering potential of Hitchcock's cinemallographic project--the ability to alter perception, reading, time, the "human. " In the terms of the narratives, such projects will always appear defeated by the "aesthetic state," England and its players or detectives. Mr. Memory (so clearly a mnemo- technic allied to cinema, like the "microfilm" in North by Northwest) will not quite cross the border in The 39 Steps, nor Marvin arrive at Constantinople, and so on. Yet in giving Hitchcock such an itinerary,
Political Thrillers 119
120 Tom Cohen
one presupposes a system of formalized signature-effects that, some- how, allows us to connect Hitchcock not only with what is meant by "allegory" in Benjamin but with what seems to have been implied by the material, the prefigural, the inscriptive in de Man. To suggest that this conjunction might profanely illuminate what links cinema with al- legory--"materialistic historiography" and the very prospect of historial intervention in Benjamin through a kind of sabotaging mnemo- technics--is to recall, in a way, that much of "film theory" has con- trived to reinstall what Benjamin saw cinema as (elaborately) terminat- ing or foreclosing; that is, what Benjamin calls aura, implying not only tropes of personification, mimesis, and identification, but implicitly much that had been attempted by a fetishizing use of "gaze" itself.
If much of "film theory" returns us to humanizing and subjectiviz- ing tropes, under the cover of psychoanalytic codes, it regresses to a pre-Benjaminian--which is to say, in his terms, precinematic--topos. 7 This accords in general with that "relapse" or "regression" that de Man finds in the Schillerian effacement and reinscription of the Kantian event viewed as "a materialism much more radical than what can be conveyed by such terms as 'realism' or 'empiricism'" (AI 121). Such appropriating interpretation--more or less systemic--is constitutive in de Man's sense not only of the institutions of "liberal education" but of the aesthetic state. This ghost state without temporal or geographi- cal borders, technically nonexistent, is linked to the institutional grids of mimeticism and historicism, yet it also creates and reconfirms the "human" as a closed interpretive system: such a spectral "state," though it does not exist (like a drug cartel), nonetheless determines referential codes, programs nervous systems and sensoria, enforces hermeneutical programs, and services archival politics that it itself has no means to read or determine. The "aesthetic state" appears struc- tured like Hamlet's Denmark, since its ideological machinery--variant forms of referentialism, pragmatism, empiricism, realism, historicism-- contradicts and is designed to efface a materiality of inscription the facticity of which generates antithetically each linguistic evasion. What would be effaced is the programming, the mnemotechnics, so as to af- firm a putative immediacy of the perceived, of facticity, and so on--yet just this mnemotechnic order is what would have to be assaulted, or al- tered, if the prerecordings of historicism, agency, or for that matter the sensorium were to be ex-posed or suspended.
This gives Hitchcock's kaleidoscriptic system of reading--where the site of machinal memory, imprinting, and projection is allied to
language--an affiliation to Benjamin's problematic of revolutionary action, to the inadequate metaphoric category (again) of "shock" (the bomb on the bus, say, of Sabotage), of which de Man is perhaps unrec- ognizedly the most patient mnemotechnician. In the latter's sense, the traditional category of the "aesthetic"--marginal, secondary, Schillerian "play"--is here constructed to neutralize the field of inscription, of the event: "as a logical conclusion of that, the concept in Schiller of an aes- thetic state . . . would be the political institution resulting from such a conception" (AI 150). De Man will link the "humanism" of Schiller (which stands in for the general hermeneutic regression, or relapse, from the material event, from inscription) to that aesthetic education which still defines "liberal education" today, the university surely, and the "aesthetic state. " The too-familiar scandal, of course, is that what thinks itself liberal, by playing to a hermeneutic evasion (and regres- sion from) the material and nonhuman historical event, the order of in- scription that bars a closed model of interiority, perception, semantics, or the "human" as such, constitutes itself as a coercive and exclusion- ary domain. Pretending to be originary, it represents a relapse (as Schiller to Kant); it values transparency and communication, and the pretense of "liberal humanism," while enforcing a statist system of ex- clusions and foreclosures deemed the nonhuman:
That is how the human is defined also. The human is defined as a cer- tain principle of closure which is no longer accessible to rational critical analysis. . . . To say that the human is a principle of closure, and that the ultimate word, the last word, belongs to man, to the human, is to as- sume a continuity between language and man, is to assume a control of man over language, which in all kinds of ways is exceedingly problem- atic. (AI 151)
The "aesthetic state"--and recall here the root of the term in the Greek aisthanumai, for perception, where the senses are programmed-- exiles the "aesthetic" as mere play, neutralizing dialectical forces, oc- cluding the site of inscription or materiality: "Play means, first of all, Spielraum, the play, the space that you need in order to prevent the dialectical encounter from taking place" (AI 151). It reminds us that the "materiality" of the terrestrial, today, is approaching numerous historical bottlenecks or aporias on the outcome of which the relative- ly short trajectory of the "human" may be determined. Dismantling the "aesthetic state" perhaps extends beyond the MacGuffinesque logics attributed to "capital" today, where much Marxian language is
Political Thrillers 121
122 Tom Cohen
still rooted in the ontological-referential epistemologies that the "aes- thetic state" ordains. Accordingly, perhaps the most irreducible agent in Hitchcock's signature-systems, the bar-series, a corrolary to what Benjamin calls "reine Sprache" or de Man aesthetic formalization, ap- pears a tool of disinscription, transforming allegory itself, disrupting every mimetic logic and the sensoria as such, deregulating temporality, however ghostly and officially nonexistent. In the manner of Benjamin's The Arcades Project, in which the word Konvolut names a type of folio, the anamorphic unfolding of sample or minimal texts, one may interrogate de Man's relation to Benjamin around the problematic of "cinema," then proceed to where this interfaces with Hitchcock's aesthetico-political or epistemo-political marking system. Each sus- pends historial trace-chains. As in Benjamin's Theses, the "enemy" linked even to fascism is an epistemo-critical regime of reference, of archivization: mimeticism or mimetic historicism. In addition, a re- configuration of anteriority, of inscription--which is also to say the human, perception, and the material--appears linked to the prospect of a certain passage, on which alternative pasts and futures hinge. When de Man speaks of an "irreversible" direction or passage to a theo- rization that depends on no individual--"there is a road that goes from this notion of Schein to the notion of materiality" (AI 152), "there is a single-directed movement" (AI 133), "pass from that con- ception of language to another conception of language" (AI 132), "the passage from trope . . . to the performative" (AI 132)--I will suggest that he has a particular direction in mind, what Hitchcock calls "north by northwest. "
I
There is a persistent interaction with, and frank attempt to cast off, Benjamin in the "late" de Man--often covert, as when the term aura recurs, or in direct evocations of Baudelaire and the logics of a self- destroying concept of allegory, but also in the plain address of Benjamin's "translation" essay in the only piece devoted to this precursor. 8 The en- tanglement reverts to the site where a certain invocation of materiality is conceived as mnemonic trace, from which in turn the phenomenali- zation of the sign configured as the "aesthetic" (perception or the sen- sorium) appears forgetfully generated. De Man dismisses the tropologi- cal gestures of his nonprecursor, precipitating an inversion: whereas it is Benjamin who will be generally perceived as tropologically open to history (while, in fact, warring with its mimetic-political premise inces-
santly), it is de Man who practically engages the problem of disinscrip- tion, exploring the mnemotechnic use of "materialistic" that Benjamin relies on more and more. De Man insinuates a spectral passage that at- tends this precession of aura, personification, or trope--it is a passage not from one intellectual system to another, but from a closed system of transformative if endless substitution allied to trope (eliciting Heidegger's identification of metaphor with metaphysics), toward a(n) (a)materiality inferred to be protogrammatic, allo-"human," mnemo- technic. What Derrida calls a "materiality without matter," it cannot be mapped referentially. There is "the entire transformational system of tropes" (AI 114) that sustains representation or mimetic ideologies, and there (already) is a "movement" that tries to locate itself in differ- ent indices--an interruption of "movement" as though by itself, like Hitchcock interrupted reading on a train--as if from trope to inscrip- tion, from representation to what precedes apostrophe or prosopopeia (and we will return to the problematic of face in Hitchcock), or in Hegel "from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law" (AI 115). It is the putative movement in or through the structure of an aporia, yet this prospect de Man appears not only to wager but to call "irreversible. "9 In Benjamin, the misleading figure of reine Sprache, "pure language" that is the sheer formalization of all (a)material elements generating linguistic memory, transformation, or effect, will emerge as a site by which an act of (literal) translation pre- cipitates transvaluation.
Why is Hitchcock's cinematic project connected, then, not only to (frustrated) scenes of border crossing--like the end of North by Northwest--but to epistemo-political subversion?
Eduardo Cadava, when commenting on the collusion in Benjamin of the snapshot with Benjamin's trope of shock (or mnemonic interven- tion), reminds us of a "convergence of photography and history, a con- vergence Benjamin often locates within the historiographical event," as well as of a "secret rapport between photography and philosophy. "10 It is in examining the purportedly sublime fiat lux in the Old Testament in Hegel's example that de Man questions what "light" itself functions as: "'Light' names the necessary phenomenality of any positing (set- zen)" (AI 113). Like the eidos ("The idea appears only as a written inscription" [110]), "light" conjures a phenomenality that is the dis- placed effect of signification ("the phenomenalization of the sign" [111]). Light, the aftereffect of a pulsion of shadows that demarcate, like measure or the bar-series, is stripped of its paternal and solar
Political Thrillers 123
124 Tom Cohen
promise. It is the effect of a certain techne ? . Light, already, differently, undoes the mimetic ideology--politically compromised through and through--which is built upon the ideology of "light" as its epistemo- logical and metaphorical premise. 11 At times in Hitchcock this appears as overt parody of the solar itself, which too is preceded by this paral- lel bar effect: the assassin Abbott in the first Man Who Knew Too Much takes as his front the false Temple of Sun Worshipers--at which the paying audience, so to speak, worships--or the shot in To Catch a Thief of "mother" putting out a cigarette in a sunny-side-up egg. 12 "Light," in the domain of what pre-cedes the premise of perception or face, like a series of bars or aural intervals, already implies a project of translation before and outside aura, the human, that is itself proto- linguistic, an effect of reine Sprache before vision or any eye itself. 13 This dispossession of "light"--which appears nonoriginary and itself a kind of marking effect--undoes, in its path, not only that logic which centralizes human cognition in an imaginary and naturalized sight but the metaphoric thread against which the promise of (the) "Enlighten- ment" rests. Again, this time on Kant, de Man speaks of a movement from representation to something else, "a passage . . . a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language" (89), from "the phenom- enality of the aesthetic . . . to the pure materiality of Augenschein, of aesthetic vision" (88). This site, at which Benjamin too locates the pos- sibility of epistemo-political intervention, is a translational site atten- dant from the first in Hitchcock's project. It is not incidental that all those scenes in the early spy thrillers occur in an Alpine setting, in the European Babel where English, French, Italian, and German conflict and overlap as sheer sound (as in the Secret Agent scene in the Langenthal church), mutingly regressing to marks and inscriptions. How does the fact, however, that Hitchcock knows this--knows too much, in fact-- alter the politics of his text?
II
If de Man burrows into a technical zone of mnemonic intervention-- of inscription and disinscription--which Benjamin metaphorizes under the rubric of Marxian and "theological" tropes, it is at a price. Of course, Benjamin all but drops the word allegory following the Trauerspiel. For him, it is obvious, the term cannot undergo the trans- lation it names and performs intact, cannot bear and contract the fundamental alteration in the signifying structure of anteriority, in the mnemonic sensorium, that it contrives to name under a literary-
historical figure that, traditionally, like cinema, was supposed to up- hold the precise mimetic or representational system under assault. In Benjamin's sense, allegory presumes a reflexive operation upon itself within a linguistico-epistemological structure. In Hitchcock, this for- malization and reflexive marking refines itself into the effects of a signature-system in general, whose most economic and nonhuman avatar is the bar-series. Here is how Rothman first identified this mark- ing, talking about a shot in The Lodger:
The view is through the bars of the bannister, and the frame is dominat- ed by the bars in the foreground. I call this pattern of parallel vertical lines Hitchcock's / / / / sign. It recurs at significant junctures in every one of his films. At one level, the / / / / serves as Hitchcock's signature: it is his mark on the frame, akin to his ritual cameo appearances. At another level, it signifies the confinement of the camera's subject; we might say that it stands for the barrier of the screen itself. 14
As a performative, this bizarre series appears like the knocking be- neath the table at a se? ance, or like (a)rhythm, measure (metron) as such, at one moment morphing into a precession of "light," seriality (as in the Avenger's murders in The Lodger), spacing, (a)materiality, at another citing repetition or sequential narration. Virus-like, it roams textual surfaces, and may even appear ciphered by letteral names like Lil, or turn up in words ("ill"), proper names (Judy Barton, Barlow Creek), and so on. What de Man posits in "The Rhetoric of Tempo- rality" as an impacting of sign on sign in dedefining "allegory" is de- scribed, in Benjamin, as a negating power of this operation at the very site of (dis)inscription. It partakes of a reflexive shift that Benjamin calls, in the translation essay, "to turn the symbolizing into the sym- bolized. " As Benjamin elaborates it in the Trauerspiel: "(Allegory) means precisely the non-existence of what it (re)presents [Und zwar bedeutet es genau das Nichtsein dessen, was es vorstellt]. "15 This leads to what is finally called "materialistic historiography. " Something emerges here which de Man calls inevitable and irreversible: "then certain linguistic elements will remain which the concept of trope can- not reach, and which then can be, for example--though there are other possibilities--performative. That process . . . is irreversible. That goes in that direction and you cannot get back from the one to the one before. "16
Nonetheless, he allows his attraction to the theoreme of "mod- ernism" to interfere with the unpacking of allegory, which he sees as
Political Thrillers 125
126 Tom Cohen
a reflexive and still referential function, supplanting for an abstract content an account of the work's own mode of production. He stops short of the implied "negation" that Benjamin names as the essence of allegory. 17 We have to restore to Benjaminian allegory the intervention- ist agency of "shock," in which that site of production can itself be re- ordered, altered, anteriority reengineered, out of which future "pres- ents" stand to be otherwise (re)produced. Allegory, where or if it exists, would already be dangerous as "an other conception of lan- guage," in its performativity, in which not only sensoria but tempo- rality is engaged otherwise--like a silent warplane formula that Mr. Memory would pass out of the "aesthetic state," sheer exteriority, un- readable letters and numbers.
If de Man will be dependent on a term, similarly to materiality, whose power to reinscribe itself in a flat literary-historical tradition he perhaps underestimates (allegory), he compels it to self-destruct, to turn its negative power on itself beyond the point where Benjamin abandons it or changes horses. The subject of allegory, it turns out, will be called a depersonalized grammar. It disinvests successive subjects, voids personification, precedes prosopopeia. At times, this will itself be viewed as a (mock epochal) shift in the installation of a (mock new) signifying order, that is, as the debris of a certain historial event: "Language as symbol is replaced by a new linguistic model, closer to that of the sign and of trope, yet distinct from both in a way that al- lows for a concatenation of semiotic and tropological features" (AI 116). The banality of this sublime implies the destruction of all models of interiority, including the very trope of the sublime: "The spatial metaphor of exteriority (Au? sserlichkeit) is not adequate to describe the knowledge that follows from the experience of the sublime. The sub- lime, it turns out, is self-destroying in a manner without precedent" (116). In a characterization that has general application, it is said of Hegel that "[a]llegory functions . . . like the defective cornerstone of the entire system" (104). Moreover, it first absorbs the very site of per- sonification (or aura) and interiority:
Allegory . . . is primarily a personification. . . . But this I, which is the subject of allegory, is oddly constructed. Since it has to be devoid of any individuality or human specificity, it has to be as general as can be, so much so that it can be called a "grammatical subject. " Allegories are al- legories of the most distinctively linguistic (as opposed to phenomenal) of categories, namely, grammar. (104)
As emerges in the essay on Pascal, de Man's invocation of allegory at the price of its inapplicability performs a double gesture--at once defining its pragmatic or material operation outside of any mere utility (which is renounced): "To say then, as we are actually saying, that alle- gory (as sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero) is to say something that is true enough but not intelli- gible, which also implies that it cannot be put to work as a device of textual analysis" (61). No use then?
This problem takes on a different political import within an early British film of Hitchcock in which a persistent war on an installed mimetic regime or "aesthetic state" (then called "England") is mobi- lized as a "political thriller"--Sabotage. Here the target of Verloc's sabotage is at one point called the "center of the world" (in London, Picadilly). His front as a spy, however, is running a film house: cinema, in its prefigural logic, is the locus of this politicized assault on the sen- sorium, light, memory, the animal (we will see), and "Britain. " Where "allegory" appears in Benjamin not a mimetic genre but rather a techne ? of historial intervention, the term photo-graphesis suggests a graphics precedent to the eye, or "light" itself. This is the site where film is marked, banally enough, as an endlessly reprojected imprint by an artificial light. One might speak of an allographics or cinemallo- graphics that posits, echoed as the MacGuffin of the plot, the debris of an engineered interaction in which anteriority is exposed as prosthetic and stands to be transformed (one point of Vertigo). Hitchcock's poli- tics is not one of antithetical sides, between us and them, Britain and its (often unnamed) threats, America and its enemies, the "home" and its imaginary others (Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho). Hitchcock's politics--and the great wars, hot and cold, run throughout his films-- does not partake of the specular or fratricidal system of the enemy other, it is not left or right as such, it is already pre- and post-Cold War, regardless. Saboteur shows American industrialists as Nazis, the would-be propaganda short L'Aventure Malgache displays French racism and colonialism on Madagascar as parallel to the German. "Fascism" appears itself located not in a historical-political movement but in an epistemo-critical model and programming, Benjamin's "his- toricism," foundation of the "aesthetic state," the accord between lib- eral humanism and that mimetic ideology which "film" had been for- getfully made as if to itself police (the photograph as reproduction). 18
The exteriority of inscription that de Man associates with the mne- monic trace plays a particularly grammatical role in Hitchcock. The
Political Thrillers 127
128 Tom Cohen
"bar-series" that Rothman identified at once pursues and is pursued as the riddle and faux cause of a general amnesia in Spellbound--in rela- tion to which the exemplary subject, Gregory Peck here, appears a cipher or identityless zero or null figure. This complex at once marks and precedes (or even disowns) the pretext of (fratricidal) murder. The "spell" that would as if be broken by this pursuit, or that fails to be broken, is simultaneously that of a general hermeneutic regime (here, Green Manors, or "psychoanalysis" ostensibly), and inversely spelling itself, which demands sequence and grammar--which the "bar-series" virtually precedes as a marking from which all visibility proceeds (and sound, when that series is converted into sequential knocking). What de Man calls exteriority is irreducible in Hitchcock (and sometimes remarked in mocking "exit" signs). Among other things, a machinal logic of inscription bars any return to interiority, subjectivity, aura-- knowing that the hermeneutic impulses of the audience will, in a pre-scripted "relapse," precisely seek to impose such humanizing, closed systems on the text. As a marking motif that constructs, pre- cedes, and suspends visibility, light, or even sequence, the bar-series ap- pears affiliated with all agency, any intervention or disinscription-- that is, the premises of semiosis or "perception. " Without any mimetic function, it nonetheless guarantees the possibility of disinscription and reinscription--like the trope of reine Sprache, which seems aurally evoked (and woven into the plot) in the "Babel" scenes where simulta- neous spoken languages appear as sheer desemanticized sound in the first Man Who Knew Too Much, The Lady Vanishes, or Secret Agent. It is not accidental that, in The Lodger, face has so much difficulty coming into being. The "Avenger's" face is swathed, and when it strug- gles to emerge it has no individual focus, occurring first in relation to the relays of information, and more specifically to typography, the giant news presses and on the box face on the back of a news truck, or else it appears multiple, faces morphing into one another, linked to the telecommunications of the wireless.
This allographematic effect which subtends all imagery is also capable of dissolving any mimetic pretense into the play of lines, alternation, shadow, and from its fiat non-lux Hitchcock's cinemallography derives its usurpative (non)authority (and nonauteuriality). It mutes and assumes as banal and instan- taneous everything Benjamin would dramatize as "shock. " The cine- mallographic effect also registers a(n) (a)materiality precedent to any anthropomorphisms--as in the slashing movements of "mother's" knife. In de Man's terms, the bar-series stands not only as the remnant
of a marker that precedes "light" and constitutes a devastation in ad- vance of any aura--like the opening blackout of Sabotage. It is pre- historial. In the rendition of Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps as a music hall performer evocative of the muse Mnemosyne, Hitchcock not only allies his cinemallographics to the earliest "epical" tradition of poetics, but exposes the latter as itself forgetfully premised on the sort of me- chanical inscriptions it is openly theorizing--the secret memorized for- mula that would be smuggled across the borders, there threatening to be turned against the state, cites in advance the micro-film of North by Northwest.
Interestingly, when Jameson attempts to retheorize "allegory" with the Benjaminian legacy in mind, his example is Hitchcock ("Spatial Systems in North by Northwest"). And it is specifically when he re- turns to the bar-series effect he puzzled over inconclusively when earli- er reviewing Rothman's book. 19 Attempting to reclaim Benjamin's evis- ceration of the auratic, Jameson openly aims at "doing away with consciousness, 'character', and the anthropomorphic. "20 It would, that is, empty out the mimetic "contents" of auteurist interpretation tout court:
But [the pine wood scene] is not the only feature of the empty-field se- quence which 'rhymes' with scenes and spaces elsewhere in the film. We must also note the peculiar inscriptions, here, which streak both ver- sions of the empty surface of space--the expanse of the sky fully as much as the expanse of the empty land below. Both are furrowed with a set of parallel lines that is not without some distant affinity with the 'trauma' of Spellbound: the fateful ski tracks in the snow, reproduced by Gregory Peck's fork upon the white linen of the dining-table. The plane leaves its ephemeral traces on the sky fully as much as the empty fields retain the serrated grooves of tractor and plow. (64)
Something here precedes and dispossesses even what might be called the materiality of earth itself with what amounts to a marking system, even as it precedes face, or the giant faces of Mount Rushmore. Here-- but what "here" or America is at stake, what political borders or state? --an allographical trajectory bars any strategy of interiorization:
Here, far more abstractly, we confront the same grid of parallel lines, systematically carved into the rock surface like a strange Mayan pattern. Again, what is confirmed by this pattern, and scored into the space of the scene, is the primacy of surface itself: the earth as a surface upon which
Political Thrillers 129
130 Tom Cohen
the ant-like characters move and agitate, the sky as surface from which intermittently a mobile and deadly technological mechanism dips; and here finally the upending of the surface into the vertical monument, prodigious bas-relief which has no inside and cannot be penetrated. (64)
Jameson uses this bar-series to blast one's way out of the auratic and auteurial tradition--which has largely defined film theory and Hitchcock commentary. Yet this precedes not only face itself, it appears, but earth. If, for Benjamin, cinema can simulate that machine of inscrip- tion out of which the sensorium appears projected, Jameson would ex- ceed the "modernist" conception of allegory as an "autoreflexive" model that merely accounts for its own conditions of historical pro- duction (or consumption), which is to say, one that is still mimetically defined. Yet here the most mimetic of media--departing from the photograph--seems undone by a marked writing that precedes figura- tion, and the referential ideology of the state. Hitchcock's "political" thriller, again, has a decidedly epistemo-aesthetic determination. It is set against the "aesthetic state" as a doomed version of the prerecordings-- what the myriad black-flecks of birds attack in hitting the schoolhouse, place of imprinting, just as the children form a zombie chorus reciting memorized lines. 21 Moreover, to address this passage or translation effectively--which does not so much move from the "human" to some other, since the human, as a closed system or phantasm, as something put in place and enforced as a kind of hermeneutic relapse, never was the case--one must be poised between the two positions, in transit, "equally poised" but irreversibly: "So it is not a return to the notion of trope and to the notion of cognition; it is equally balanced between both, and equally poised between both, and as such is not a reversal, it's a relapse. And a relapse in that sense is not the same" (133). We might say that the site of the relapse is the mimetic image of the narra- tive, every logic of knowingly solicited identification or gestural com- modity, the MacGuffin, while the other interrupts that constructed narrative like the Waltzing Couples descending into Shadow of a Doubt--the order of mechanical memory, inscription, (a)materiality, projection evinced in the formalized dance of markers and choreo- graphed signature-effects, parabases and letteral or preletteral repeti- tions, a machinal prostheses of the visible that is itself marked, "allego- rized" in every narrative MacGuffin. In the opening of The 39 Steps, another precursor text to this, the neon letters spell out m-u-s-i on the way to "Music Hall. " Here letters are seen as points of phenomenali-
zation, or neon light, en route to the theorization of "memory" as a machinal Mnemonsyne whose secret "formula" will finally be dis- closed to us as unintelligible letters and numbers--as if to say, as the marking system that precedes all visibility on Hitchcock's screen. This, much as, in the credits to Vertigo, the Mo? bius-like graphics pre-inhabit the eye, seems implanted from the (speaking) lips as the shot tracks up the blonde's face, and a woman's eye at that--in preemptive contradic- tion of everything stored in a mock archive of the "male gaze" alone. 22
III
Hitchcock tells Truffaut: "We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there's no such thing as color; in fact, there's no such thing as face, be- cause until the light hits it, it is nonexistent. " Does this (a)materiality, which precedes light and face, leave earth intact? In Sabotage Hitch- cock links Verloc's fantasy of a time bomb exploding in Picadilly (the "center of the world")--a bomb later, again, associated with film can- isters, and the film title, Bartholomew the Strangler--to a tank of pre- mammalian fish at the zoo that, we hear a passerby note, includes fe- males that can change their gender. The viral import of a nonhuman semiosis that seems registered by the haunted bar-series, this sheer (a)materiality, recalls Benjamin Thesis XVIII, where "the history of or- ganic life on earth" is invoked to situate "the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens" as "something like two seconds at the close of a twenty- four-hour day," civilized mankind "one fifth of the last second of the last hour. " Like the steak knife turned on Verloc, which makes of him meat too, or the Disney animation in that film of bird-humans (Who Killed Cock Robin? ), this invocation of "natural" time displaces the "human"--which de Man identifies as in fact nonexistent: "there is, in a very radical sense, no such thing as the human. "23 The core myth of the aesthetic state determines the nonhuman as material or economic reserve, as slave, as means of consumption. This state perhaps does not exist but is entirely coercive in its effects, and linguistic controls (the professor in North by Northwest won't identify his agency as CIA or FBI except to reference letteration: "We're all in the same alphabet soup"). It keeps secrets, moreover, such as that about the nonexistence of the "human. " What can be assumed, perhaps, is that the idea of agency itself, indeed, of secret agency (as with the spies post office in the film Secret Agent), is linked by Hitchcock to this "alphabet soup" of letteral and preletteral markers, of numbers and signature-effects that dispossess any recuperative metaphorics of the visual, the "gaze,"
Political Thrillers 131
132 Tom Cohen
and so on: the agency sought acts, performs if it does, in the domain of the prefigural, as an altering of hieroglyphics, monumental faces.
Hitchcock's Cold War America never names its other as the Soviet Union, the unnamed place across a border at the end(s) of the Earth where Van Damm would go with his micro-film (that is, Hitchcock's cinemallographic project). So ironized is the setup that it is difficult indeed to see Van Damm as some sort of courier, a Moses figure by default marking the "passage" de Man theorizes. 24 This "America," which presents (and precedes) the patriarchal faces of its presidents in Egyptic fashion on Mount Rushmore, is also linked to the mnemonic and referential programming heard, first, in Thornhill's advertising jingles. It is, also, a linguistic state. So how can a "materiality" that is intangible and prephenomenal, such as what de Man places at the point where anteriority and material markers cross, be of any political import--even if it proposes itself as alone "preparatory" to an inter- vention in memory or programming itself? 25 The "circularity" that Hitchcock uses to void representation exceeds that of the double chase--the "villain" chasing those (police, villains) who are already hunting him in what is an invocation and evisceration of the "hunting" motif as a trope for the hermeneutic program's ability to place in memo- ry what "it" would then as if discover there. This double chase or void- ing circularity, which echoes in the "O" of Roger O. Thornhill, is hyperbolically rendered in To Catch a Thief (where Grant-Robie, "the cat" as ex-thief and simulacrum, is made to pursue, that is, copy, the copycat who is already copying his [then original? ] signature style, and so on), yet marked in the very trope of advertising--that manipulative use of language that anticipates a calculated response based on a fabri- cated referent, self, become fictional addressee. When Grant-Thornhill discovers that Kaplan is a signifier generated by a disinhabited hotel room (virtually "Grant's" own at the Plaza) together with clothes and messages, the "human" is itself exposed as choreographed by the effect of specific social rituals that have no referent (or necessary embodiment). In North by Northwest, the shift to the performative, or "event," must, as always, go by way of or exceed the mise en abi^me of performance or "acting like" (a favorite signal-phrase across Hitchcock), the thing one is supposed to represent (male or female, police, "actor," exec, "Cary Grant," and so on).
So what passage can be said to (have) occur(red)? First, "language" is (already) morphed into "another conception of language," perception is altered since it incorporates the theorization of its linguistic and pro-
grammatic nature. The mnemotechnicity that de Man circulates within assumes that what is anthropomorphized as "nature," and certainly the network of organic variants and life-forms, remains semio-aesthetic ef- fects. 26 "Human" assumptions about language's mimetic and referen- tial service--that it always pretends to fixed or transparent referents in the regulation of mnemonic imprints--appear remarkably stunted or primitive when compared to the semiotic systems of other organisms: that is, if we regard as virtual reading models the alloplastic mutations, chemical wars, predatory and cross-species camouflage, shape-shifting, instantaneous adoptions of colors or simulated organs, the changing of sex of some (fish) species, electromagnetic telepathies, and so forth of some rain-forest or coral creatures--modes of what might be called a proactive mimesis without model or copy, a simultaneous reading and morphing forward in accord with external environments without ref- erence back to the idealization of a fixed meaning or "property. " We may suggest, in a sense, that "materialistic historiography"--which de Man seems to present the most literal techniques for engaging, well be- yond Benjamin--drifts toward a model we might project onto non- human life-forms (including "us"), as zoographematic systems, sheer technicities. 27
In Blackmail, the trace--or the blackmailer, Tracey--operates like a perpetual witness in the form of a prehistorial reminder. Emerging first from the shadows in association with never-explained notes left in the mailroom of the artist Crewe, the final chase by Scotland Yard pursues this figure into the British Museum, around historical artifacts and the hieroglyphic origins of (pictorial-cinemallographic) writing. So pur- sued through the universal reading room of the museum, past all histo- rial artifacts in the Egyptian wing--including the giant Nefertiti--he will crash, index finger extended in a muted gesture of accusation and paraverbal pointing (or indication). 28 At the end, Trac(e)y--the name is spelled both ways, alternately, in the silent and the "talkie" print--is muted in falling through the dome of the same universal reading room, after virtually running through and hence preceding what may be called monumental history (preceding, even, the Egyptians). In North by Northwest, where Mount Rushmore cites Blackmail's giant head of Nefertiti, we learn that the trace is not particularly terrestrial, that the (a)materiality of the bar-series precedes that of "earth," invariably, dis- owns the conceit of earth as ground, as material or as maternal order. In Hitchcock, this dispossessing nonorigin is often called "mother" (for Derrida, it is perhaps called khora). De Man will draw attention to
Political Thrillers 133
134 Tom Cohen
where, as in Wordsworth, supposed "nature poet," the sky falls away (falls up) from the Earth ("the sky suddenly separates from the Earth and is no longer, in Wordsworth's terms, a sky of earth, we lose all feel- ing of stability and start to fall, so to speak, skyward, away from gravi- ty"). Gravity grounds the centrality of an Earth, and its annulment rewrites the Earth as unearthly, antigrav, as the effect of an alloterrestrial trace. Hitchcockian vertigo sometimes names this site of a fall without ground, like the trick track shot in Vertigo that goes up and down at once, or in To Catch a Thief 's seeming loss of gravity, everything rising to roof or mountaintops or being lifted in a moment of sheer formali- zation, as it is called in the last film (when Cary Grant, at the begin- ning, asks to change into something "more formal," a promise realized only in the closing costume gala). Indeed, the animated bird-humans on the Disney screen in Sabotage expose a precedence of this trace to animation, animation conceived as zoographematics, "earth" de- anthropomorphized, the "human" fashioned otherwise than as a blind and embattled hermeneutic closing off of its other(s) to conceal its own nonexistence as such. That a technicity inhabits the black-flecked birds in The Birds is underlined in the "final" scenes, where a machinal hum attends their gathering.
Sabotage marks for us how a signature that precedes figuration in- volves a subversive politics dependent on the recalibration of the "aes- thetic" (and material) itself. Sabotage departs from Conrad's Secret Agent. Coming right after Secret Agent and unable to use that title, it nonetheless returns more darkly and unrelievedly to the question that title posed. Here, of course, the saboteur Verloc operates out of a movie house--affiliating the last syllable of Verloc with Hitchcock. Yet his opening act of sabotage at and before the beginning of the film, co- incident almost with its titles, is the putting out of a lightbulb, of all "light," the electricity or "juice" of London, the generator. Aside from the fact that it interrupts or curtails the show, emptying that same movie theater into the street, it places another reflexive rupture within its narrative opening. It (the film itself) casually marks a caesura that inhabits and precedes (this) film. Marking Hitchcock's dilemma, the Londoners do not get it, but respond only with laughter (though a kind of explosively unhoused Homeric laughter will return, later, when Mrs. V watches the Disney bird cartoon following the death of Stevie by the ill-timed bomb Verloc gave him to transport). The laughing Londoners emerge from the Underground, moreover, which is a trope not only of cinema but of the afterlife of semiotic consciousness they
are already unknowing effects of ("the illusion of a life that is an after- life," says de Man). This caesura or blasting--the premise to any "sabo- tage" within the mnemonic order governing meaning, temporalization, relays, hence of any intervention as reinscription--is first marked in the dictionary definition of the word sabotage that opens the credit se- quence, thereby calling definition and words into question. It marks the rupture of the word by its aural parts: "Sa-botage, sa-bo-tarj. Wilful destruction of buildings or machinery with the object of alarming a group of persons or inspiring public uneasiness. Sa-bre (-er), n. & v. t. Cavalry sword with a curved blade (the s. , military . . . )" By breaking the word, phonetically, into sound, cutting it as with another (s)word, and offering an official (dictionary) definition of sabotage--what oc- curs in the theater, and as the emptying out of identificatory or meta- phoric viewing--the text, also "before" its opening, links the facticity of the letter and sound to a blackout from which the scene, or film it- self, will appear reflexively reconstituted, rebegun, or as if proceeding in the parenthesis this affords. The doubling in the word sabotage--a term marked by Hitchcock, reissued in the later Saboteur--not only inflects the French sabot, or shoe, picking up on the material figure of legs or feet or steps marked and associated with f(r)act(u)al mnemonics in The 39 Steps. 29 It again casts a black light on the problem of "alle- gorization without allegory" as such--how such a term, the film's po- litically subversive title (later associating a time bomb with film canis- ters), is not contained by the "official" or state definition, ruptured by the facticity of the letter, doubled. Thus the first reflexive or modernist notion of allegory, noted earlier in association with Jameson, that of reflecting on the text's own scene of production (or consumption), the movie house, Verloc's Bijou, is first marked then cut off as a front by Verloc's own secret and ineffectual "act" (as his handler complains, the citizens only laugh in the dark, as they had turned Hitchcock's defacing productions into mere entertainment), and it is supplanted by the sec- ond episode--that of, and as, the "film" itself, allegory as a destroying and world-altering, time and memory-altering material prospect-- involving the failed attempt to bomb Picadilly Square ("the center of the world"). 30
This problematic is echoed in the text's second "definition" of a word, that in the Detective Ted's tautological double-talk concerning the legal responsibility for the blackout: "As laid down in the Act of William IV, where an act is defined as an activity actuated by actual ac- tion. " We will note, here, two factors that frame this--recalling that
Political Thrillers 135
136 Tom Cohen
the disruption of the generator (or generation) involves, too, that of a "juice" that animates not only movement, (the) cinema, but any switchboard or relay system. First, Hitchcock names the problem of "allegory," of the other allegory that stands to the official one as the spectral or nonetheless letteral double of the dictionary definition of sabotage itself. The detective seeking out Verloc will be named Spenser, Ted or Edmund Spenser perhaps, the hoary agent of traditional allegory trying to track down his politically subversive and modernist spin-off or double. He is first met in disguise, as a fruit seller next to the Bijou, keeping the Bijou (and cinema) under surveillance, and yet intervenes on behalf of Mrs. Verloc ("Mrs. V") in the opening, only to lie, to ban- ter, to prevaricate about the "law" and about the definition of an "act. " And about what this piece of film, badly timed yet explosive, does or does not perform. That "act" (a word at stake in all its senses in the concealed title, Secret Agent, used, preemptively, in Hitchcock's preceding film) involves not only the definition of responsibility-- should Mrs. V, as she's called, give the patrons back their money? --but of any intercession, of the effect of the sabotage (of mere light). Which is also to say, of a certain passage from fiction into fact, say, or, in de Man's words, the "passage from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law" (AI 115). (Elsewhere we might ask why, in Hitchcock, such a sublime is written always and only as an allo- human and material instance, preletteral, mnemonic, banal, the mere "facts" memorized by Mr. Memory or, putatively, recorded by the camera in mock-mimetic ritual. ) Detective (T)Ed(mund) Spenser, set to apprehend and stop the sabotaging Verloc, is dragged out of literary history itself, the purest representative of classical "allegory," of what purports to be the mimetic model, aiming, essentially, to restrain or undo the deviant form not of a mere modernist reflexive model (the movie house, recall, is closed down at once, emptied of patrons) but of that other "allegory," that scene of generally (non)apocalyptic transla- tion without specific ideology (Verloc is essentially mercenary, or in it for pay). (Indeed, like Spenser, one thinks of Inspector Le Pic in To Catch a Thief--should we hear the name as le pic[ture], that is, as a mimetic figure hunting down the premimetic trace and simulacrum fig- ure of "the cat. ")31 The translation is not only that from Conrad to the screen, or from aesthetic play to devastation and historial intervention-- it involves another, material figure that disrupts the very model of in- scription or (mimetic) reference as such. Thus the tool of Verloc, the time bomb that the idiot boy Stevie will carry (and which goes off on a
bus, precisely a stationary figure of transport), is associated not only with birds singing (having been passed to Verloc by the professor, the bird-man nonetheless named Chatman--or cat-man--in a general bes- tiary that pervades the text, including its visit to the zoo and aquari- um), but with film. It is carried, again, with two film canisters, whose twisted remnants are discovered after the blast, tipping off Detective Spenser, who saw Stevie carrying them through the Lord Mayor's Day parade toward Picadilly. 32 The film's title, noted repeatedly as popular, is Bartholomew the Strangler--that is, a name containing the bar fig- ure or series as the material, mnemonic, or semiotic premise of the time bomb, of Hitchcockian writing or cinema, of what alone is or could be explosive, prefigural, like the exploding dictionary word. But if the text already performs the sabotaging of "light" that recurs to ruptured letteration and defaced quests for new definitions, it suspends in ad- vance of itself the reflexive model of allegory (mode of production, movie house) and places it under surveillance of an archaic icon of policing mimeticism (Spenser). Spenser is at once the "law" and an open dissimulator rehearsing a profoundly misapplied Oedipal script (his compromised and coercively empty and even blackmailing court- ship of too-letteral Mrs. V). The bar insignia that marks the cinematic time bomb, an alteration of "time" under the Benjaminian model of "cinema" and its "shock," operates erratically. It claims the life of its unwitting carrier on a bus (site of transit), the idiot brother Stevie, here a third or neuter figure within the already fictional family (he is not the Verlocs' progeny but Mrs. V's brother). 33
The bar-series appears the marker of irreducible (a)materiality, itself prefigural and a sort of reine Sprache surrogate. It dismantles any logic of signature applied to Hitchcock's case--the very logic of the cameo appearance, for instance, rather than securing an auteurial presence, dissolves all linear and mimetic logic by folding the external frame into diverse postal relays, in the process establishing virtual relay networks between all other signed texts (the Spies' Post Office), fragmenting the Hitchcockian body (the famous profile, the girth, the pouting lower lip) into textual markers that generate deposed Hitchcock-doubles across the texts much as the "body" itself appears from the first ab- stractly dismembered as feet, hands, teeth, and so on take on agency of their own (The 39 Steps is hardly unique in this). This "bar-series" is associated with a time bomb and a film canister in Sabotage for a pur- pose. It not only deregulates the premise of conventionally mapped time. Inspector Talbott, following the final bomb that decimates the
Political Thrillers 137
138 Tom Cohen
entire Bijou, sacrificing the very pretense of "movies," can't remember whether Mrs. V's remark came before or after the professor's auto- explosion itself. It deregulates sequence as well as pictorial or mimetic fictions. The sabotage that semiotically annotates the inaugural black- out (or caesura) is rewritten in Benjamin through tropes of blasting, "shock," and historial disinscription. This (a)correspondence between the bar-series and allohuman time is pointedly related to the problem- atic of the animal in Sabotage--evidenced in the proliferation of birds (the bomb is kept beneath a birdcage) and fish as well as figures of eat- ing and consumption (eating is also allied to the consumption dis- played by the filmgoers blocked, at first, from the Bijou). When Verloc is killed by Mrs. V's steak knife--or steps into it, is as if reflexively suicided--he is also marked as meat, a stripping of personification and the human in a film long complained of as without aura. 34 If Hitchcock's (non)"act" of sabotage aims at a passage from trope to performative, from mimesis to inscription in a Benjaminian fashion, and this be- cause--as the blackout performs--the very techne ? of cinema casts it at and before the (recurrent) simulation of the sensorium itself, the aes- thetic politics of this intervention, which casts the policial hermeneu- tics of mimetic-humanism with its techniques of identification and personification, depends, as in Benjamin and de Man, on a nonhuman history.
The explosive "bar-series" registers where the semiotic shock of this site reverberates, in Sabotage, across zootropic and zoographic zones--as when, in the Aquarium in the London Zoo, Verloc envi- sions the tank as a screen on which the buildings of Picadilly melt away. The mock-apocalyptic Abbauen of this scene,35 however, enlists a throwback to premammalian "life," a transitional reflection less dependent on a prehuman fantasy than a dislocation of the trope of life itself that the zoo marks--the afterlife of the screen, of conscious- ness, of any effect dependent on the bar-series against which mimetic ideologies emerge. One consequence of this is the denaturalization and dislocation of gender itself--italicized in the quips by a strolling couple about the fish that, after birthing millions of young, changes sexes, or the singing Mae West bird (a female female impersonator) of the cartoon sequence (where "animation" in general is conceived of as a material or semio-aesthetic effect). Thus one of the mystifications of Ted Spenser, which destructively drives the narrative, is his mind- less pursuit and imposition of an Oedipal fantasy that misreads the Verlocs' sexless family arrangement--a simulacrum family based on
the care of the idiot brother Stevie, which suspends the premise of natu- ral generation. 36
IV
Much depends here on how we read the passage on the passage, on translation as occurrence, on passing over, on "that direction (which) you cannot get back from," irreversible--which direction Hitchcock names "north by northwest. "37 It is a technically nonexistent and hence ghostly direction citing Hamlet's undecidable projection of a cer- tain madness (that he is mad but "north-northwest"). 38 For in that film text much depends on how we read travel, movement, or traffic, not to mention the material effort to transport what we only hear is a roll of microfilm whose "secrets" are never discussed, one concealed in a primitive-modernist art fetish that--with whatever information it purveys--is to be moved across the border, across all borders generally and one above the stone heads of the Earth, the limit of anthropomor- phism. The scene takes us to the edge of what is clearly viewed as an abyss beneath Mount Rushmore, a site of acceleration (Rapid City) converted into verticality and vertiginousness at the failed prosopopeia of an unearthly Earth. 39
One agency of "passage" appears recurrently marked by Hitchcock's use of the circular insignia associated with an aporia of (eternal) recur- rence. The letter "O," a ring, a wheel or zero--such ciphers attached to diverse markers void the premise of identity (like Peck's amnesia in Spellbound), as do the back-spinning wheel that opens Blackmail, the smoke rings of Uncle Charlie, the names Johnny-"O" Ferguson, or Roger "O. " Thornhill of whom, famously, the "O" in the anagram "ROT" (as in Hamlet's phrase "something is rotten") stands, we hear, for nothing. They are not symbols (signifying, for instance, that Cary Grant as advertising executive is a "nobody") but performatively wager an already active transvaluation of time, direction, memory, and circularity all too familiar as a banal technical dilemma associated with the film spool's repetition. Since it will often be tied to a name, or a chain of names, we might link it with how de Man presents the logic of the zero. The back-turning circle can imply, in advance of any narra- tive as such, reaching into the prestructure of memory or anteriority as well as closing out a received circuit of repetitions (which the film spool banally incarnates). It suggests in a faux Nietzschean register40 some of what is at stake in the border crossings--that is, in the tempo- ral, political, hermeneutic shifts, crossings in the definition of the eye,
Political Thrillers 139
140 Tom Cohen
of mnemonics, of repetition, of the human and nonhuman, a logic of sheer exteriority. The implied logic intersects with de Man's reading of number in Pascal:
The notion of language as sign is dependent on, and derived from, a dif- ferent notion in which language functions as rudderless signification and transforms what it denominates into the linguistic equivalence of the arithmetical zero. . . . There can be no one without zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero. The zero is always called a one, when the zero is actu- ally nameless, "innommable. " (AI 59)
What is elsewhere in Hitchcock denoted as a "ring"--and what, in the silent film of that title, seems already identified with explosive material signifiers or even sound, with a circular armband called a "bangle"-- affirms the rupture of a traditional back loop. Such might be termed the shift from mimetic model (Thornhill as advertising executive) to a proactive mimesis without model or copy (Thornhill assuming and in- venting himself as "Kaplan"), a break with historicist archivism that precedes, too, the anthropormorphism of Earth. The passage as if from trope to performative. For to a degree this is what "north by north- west" indicates: a direction that is also a nondirection, beginning in sheer traffic, citing Hamlet, and geared hopelessly toward its own de- ferred "event. " Grant or Thornhill begins as an advertising executive whose use of language is sheer mimetic manipulation, presented as hopelessly cliche? d jingles in dictation to his amanuensis, Maggie (that is, virtually, "Margaret"--another mar-name). The film's first ex- change involves the elevator man's saying that he and the wife "aren't talking. " This barring of communication involves, already, the installa- tion of a faux loop not only in the transparent messages Thornhill dic- tates but in the advertising jingle he tells Maggie to place on his own desk as an auto-mnemonic ("Think thin"), thus dictating a memory device to return to him from another's hand. No wonder Roger wants to contact "mother"--we are only one film from Psycho--not by phone but in writing, even if by telegraph, at her bridge game. And try- ing to do so in the Oak Room at the Plaza41 gets him abducted as that other linguistic fiction, or zero, George Kaplan, who nonetheless al- ready names the giant heads (Cap-) of Earth (Geo), permeating which are the barred lines Jameson rightly notes. "Think thin," which repeats the syllable "in," yields the "drink" (and "ink") of Van Damm's library,
the book room where Roger, as if on behalf of Hitchcock's cinema, is forced to drain the bourbon like liquefied books or print (the bottles located in the library shelving, as mother later quips). The direction that takes over the film's course beyond the crop-duster scene's attack by that prosthetic or mechanical sun mimes Roger's adoption of the fictional identity, now aping invention forward--which brings him to the abyss below the presidents' heads. "Here," non-place, at an Earth not only stripped of origin, stripped of personification, preceded by the bar-lines itself, an unearthly Earth. The specular opponents of the mimetic states, America and its nameless Cold War "other," are vaporized before the overriding mimetic politics of the Earth that the very cinematography evokes and participates in. Here a crossing of borders with (and as) the micro-film, of the aesthetic logic of the micro-film in the pre-Columbian fetish artwork (that is, all artwork), is both projected and barred, interrupted, stopped by the professor's agents, by the "aesthetic state. " The micro-film accords with the logic of shock, of "materialistic historiography"--like the canisters of Bartholomew the Strangler associated with the bomb on the bus--with an aesthetic materiality that entails "another conception of language. " Like de Man's project, it marks an "irreversible" movement, a positive "nihilism" preparatory to the possibility of an "event. " It entails the precession of metaphor, the deregulation of an interpretive and tem- poral program, the exposure of mimetic machines, the precession of mute stone "faces," the aesthetic materiality of the micro-film, the fall and the abyss of linguistic specularity--the "passage," in short, from one model of language (tropological, metaphorical, advertising media) to another ("material," performative, exceeding "mother" and earth). It projects a failed transformation of reading at the presidential site where reference and identificatory processes, mnemonic management and the nonhuman appear legislated. Its "irreversibility" is registered in the excess it maintains over all ocularist, auteurist, Oedipal, retro- Cartesian, mimetic, or identificatory "models. " This bar-series occu- pies what de Man perhaps calls the subject position of grammar in all allegory. As measure or rhythm, as what dispossesses and engenders "light" or perception, as the slashing knife of "mother" or the pretense of a serial narrative, as the signature of inscription's precedence to all description, the bar-series is the irreducible prosthesis of the visible, the guarantor (and betrayer) of exteriority--what can always dissolve the mimetic and metaphoric and auratic readings it nonetheless compels.
Political Thrillers 141
142 Tom Cohen
V
Well "before" the silent film The Ring, Hitchcock solicits a problemat- ic of the circle, of circularity and circuitry, that pervades still the comic nil-point of Roger "O. " Thornhill, "Johnny-O" Ferguson, and so on. If this ringlet or circle performatively invokes a mnemonic destructura- tion with a decidedly Zarathustran resonance, it signals a disruption at once of mimetic and temporal ideology. Like an inscription that pre- cipitates both phenomenalization and ideology, it turns back on and counters the logic of generation on behalf of another gamble or risked crossing. In North by Northwest--Hitchcock's name for what de Man calls an "irreversible" direction (and Benjamin, perhaps, a "one-way street")--this movement precedes face or prosopopeia (the visages of Mount Rushmore and the sheer traffic of tropes). It also precedes and evacuates a failed personification of Earth, echoed in the fictional name George Kaplan, one that opens upon a marking system repre- sented by the striation or bars that Jameson remarks; that is, what is not yet semaphoric, a "materiality without matter," neither capable of pathos nor narration nor metaphor nor the pretense of light.
It is not that one sees de Man as a Van Damm type strictly--a double agent, smooth and faintly accented, into "import-export" (the diapha- nous working of a membrane, or border, as we hear of Van Damm)-- but that, like Hamlet, a certain theorization of performance and act seems hyperbolically at stake in the text, one related to a fall that inhabits this direction, which itself ends up on the top of Mount Rushmore--a kind of acceleration-arrestation (like Rapid City), atop the prosopopeia of the Earth in the giant stone faces that Thornhill (Cary Grant) slips across. We might seem, with Van Damm, arrested before such borders are crossed with a micro-film, a material rewriting of the aesthetic that also represents the film we would then be viewing-- it implies a sheer formalism in the absence of any other, any faux interiority. The halted passage out of the "aesthetic state" (America, Denmark) is or would-be Mosaic in structure--devolving into a me- chanical stutter, like Moses', pointing to what the text itself cannot en- tirely pass to (or already has), an otherness that is not that of an other political fiction, an other history, or an other human. The hypnopoetic logic of Hitchcock's practice of reinscription, evoked in the first Man Who Knew Too Much with Uncle Clyde's momentary hypnosis by a black ball (or sun), recurs in the opening of Family Plot as a faux se? ance of sorts (crystal ball evoking a spool, the medium Blanche's mock evo-
cation of "Henry," her H-named helper, and so on)--on which, none- theless, both the dispositions of diverse "family" pasts and futures ap- pear to depend. Irony, as de Man uses it, does not suspend this game but is the predicate of its having consequence at all, and not merely re- peating, or being reinscribed in, the mnemonic system of the "aesthetic state. " In Frenzy's opening, by contrast, the female corpse floating in the river bearing the necktie, the serial destruction of women--and turning their bodies into admired corpses--is linked to the pollution and destruction of an Earth, as well as to the poetry (Wordsworth is being read) whose aesthetic pretexts are intricately complicitous with that evisceration. Hitchcock's assumption of the order of inscription-- the movement, in de Man, from trope to performative, from meta- phoric displacement or figuration to what precedes it--occurs, how- ever, with a deregulation of statist temporality and mappings as well. The circle spins back upon itself, like the agent Louis Bernard's reach- ing for the knife in his back of pure anteriority in the second Man Who Knew Too Much, and finds the originary memory a prosthesis or im- plant, as does the entire Madeleine episode in Vertigo. What is vertigi- nous, what loses ground or earth, is the disclosure that what is being repeated, or sought to return to, like "mother," was not even there the first time--resolves itself into a bar-series, a series of knocking sounds (those, in Marnie, on a window), into which inscriptions themselves appear dissolved. The blackmailer Tracey falling through monumental history at the British Museum, however, plummets from the glass dome into the universal reading room--what Hitchcock is "interrupt- ed" doing in his cameo on a train in the Underground. When the ante- rior ground of inscription is shaken or altered, the "direction" can no longer be mapped as before and after, up or down. The circle or ring figure, in short, like Roger's trajectory, mimes a shift from a mimesis of model and copy (the machine regulating time and reference for the "aesthetic state") to a proactive mimesis without model or copy. This replicates the logical intervention of Benjaminian allegory or "materi- alistic historiography"--which is predicated on a rupture of and with historicism and an intervention within the mnemonic site of inscription itself. Whatever is "Mosaic" about this cinemallographics passes through a zoographematics, much as it disperses the ocular-centrism of an entire epistemo-political history. When, in the opening music hall scene of The 39 Steps, Mr. Memory--the machine-man who, seeming like a camera, only records "facts"--references the Hesiodic muse Mnemosyne, the gesture does not say: modern cinema is the heir of the
Political Thrillers 143
144 Tom Cohen
novel, indeed, of epic poetry, to ennoble the former. It says rather: writ- ing, including the ancient epic sublime, was never anything but depen- dent on this utterly banal and machinal, indeed (a)material, work of inscription, work of sheer exteriority--and that even the ancient texts were nothing other than this apparatus which, if understood, barred the fantasy of a closed "human" system from before the "beginning. " That the entire tradition has been housed in this coerced hermeneutic relapse, in the policial regimes of the aesthetic state.
Perhaps this zoographematics--where "life" is the produced effect of movement, of speed (vif), departing from the programs of animation and the alternating bars or knocking of breath or spirit--is notched al- most in passing in a typically too quick citation in To Catch a Thief (for by now, it is clear, the Hitchcock shot operates like a network of citations preceding any pretext of representation).