No More Learning

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
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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,"
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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
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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). The picture, of course, is all about simulacra in the absence of any "real thing": the jewel thief called "the cat," the actor Cary Grant who is a thief of iden- tification and projected emotions if not Being itself, is in pursuit of his own copy, a copycat--but the black cat is already, as thief, a figure of imitation. The original "cat" (an oxymoron) must anticipate, hence imitate, his own imitation in a ruptured circularity or "double chase. " In fact, undisclosed at the time, the two are together in a boat sequence early in the film (the "copycat," the "young" French girl Danielle, to whom Grant has given "language" lessons ["nouns," "adjectives"]). The name of the boat flashes before us briefly: Marquis Mouse. At once, an allusion to a marquee reflected in the credit sequence Travel Service window, a mouse evoked that contains the two "cats" that should be pursuing it (the container as contained), the allusion to Mickey Mouse citing, in fact, Steamboat Willy--the first animated fea- ture, precursor to animated film tout court.
Animation is what Robin Woods observes, in passing, may be the closest analogue to Hitchcock's cinema--itself a web of preplanned, entirely artificed markings and re- buses. At the "origin" of film, not representation but animation, troped in the Travel Service window itself, reflecting the other scene of a movie marquee across a street traversed (we can make out) by buses like that in Sabotage. The "Travel Service," of course, offers a theoreti- cal commentary on travel, tourism, transport, movement, acceleration, and cinema we need not go into, except to note the final placard in the window that promises transport to a place called "France. " It, too, is a cartoon, a Parisian-style sketch and solicitation with writing on it: if you love life, you will love France. Let us ignore again the name of
Grace Kelly's character, Francie, an American girl about whom the fig- ure of "love" will have to be artificed, compelled or trapped out of a resistant "cat" (Grant). We will only note the role that "life" plays, as a word, in this puzzling hypothesis (if you love life . . . ).
NOTES
1. Such "transport" as a precession--yet promise--or metaphoric "travel" is extensively developed as a deceptive trope for the movement heard in cinema in the "Travel Service" window opening To Catch a Thief 's credit sequence.
2. In the early British films, this political regime marks itself before the film credits by way of the prominently displayed governmental certificate of censorship. This, as seems never remarked, implicitly extends to the topos of what is called "England" in all of the "political thrillers" of that phase.
3. This association--that of chocolate (the black sun, the film bonbon) with excrement--is made all too plain in the first Man Who Knew Too Much, when Lawrence is held in the Temple of the Sun Worshipers by Abbott. The gun-toting cleaning woman, who does not want to be associated with holding the little girl, is made to take off her skirt to reveal black-stockinged legs so she won't leave. In a visual pun easy to miss but impossible to ignore, her handler reaches down to take a chocolate off of a shelf at the very level of her buttocks when bent over, then pops it in his mouth. The routine fits into a series of interrogations of representa- tion, death, "knowing," consumption, fake light, deception of the (film) audience, and so on.
4. Hitchcock has been approached as a figurative problematic with a system of marking, as by Gilles Deleuze: "Hitchcock produces original signs, in accordance with the two types of relations, natural and abstract. In accordance with the natu- ral relation, a term refers back to other terms in a customary series such that each can be 'interpreted' by the others: these are marks; but it is always possible for one of these terms to leap outside the web and suddenly appear in conditions which take it out of its series, or set it in contradiction with it, which we will refer to as the demark" (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 203). The latest of these may be Slavoj Z? iz? ek's notion of sinthoms ("Hitchcock's Sinthoms," in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Z? iz? ek [New York, Verso, 1992], 125-28), in each case only producing a random tropology to avoid theorizing the prefigural logics of the "mark" as such (as Hitchcock italicizes that through his series of "Mar-" names). Hitchcock has become one of the, if not the most "theorized" of film texts--in part in response to something that exceeds the critical models available to "film theory" as that has evolved in conjunction with cultural studies more and more. Even Z? iz? ek, who deems Hitchcock a "theoretical phenomenon" (Everything 2) generat- ing systems of thinking possible to juxtapose to Hegel and Lacan, blocks the lin- guistic theorization that is its basis--pleaing, instead, for a movement "beyond 'the wall of language'" that sustains this mimetic ("Cartesian") tradition. The stature "Hitchcock" has risen to as an agent of transformation is remarked indirectly by Godard: "I incorporate Hitchcock into the Histoire(s) [du cine? ma] because I believe
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that at a certain epoch he had absolute control over the world. More so than Hitler, or Napoleon. No one before him was ever in such control over the public. This was the control of poetry. Hitchcock was a poet on a universal scale, unlike Rilke. He was the only poe`te maudit to encounter immense success. What is quite surprising with Hitchcock is that you don't remember the plot of Notorious, nor why Janet Leigh goes to the Bates Motel. You remember the pair of glasses, or the windmill-- that is what millions and millions of people remember" (Jean-Luc Godard, inter- view with Jonathan Rosenbaum in "Bande-annonce pour les Histoire(s) du cine? ma de Godard," Trafic 21 [spring 1997]: 12). In the article in which this quote is cited, George Collins's "Incidence of Instant and Flux on Temporal and Pictorial Objects, Listeners and Spectators" (Tekhnema 4: 26-61), Nietzsche is linked to Hitchcock by addressing "Nietzsche's three throws at 'maintaining a sense' for 'God' in light of the will to power. " Collins: "Is the age of the spread of the American way of life inscribed on its films throughout the world the same age as Hitchcock's, or a subse- quent one, an underlying one? Might Hitchcock only be an epiphenomenon in the process of its ineluctable advance? " (28). Or its deconstruction? This association of Hitchcock with the thinking of technicity before a (Nietzschean) passage antici- pates a next reading of his text that would move beyond those programmed by mimetic "relapse" of culturalist hermeneutics, identity politics, neo-Lacanian codes.
5. The trope of the "aesthetic state" is developed in the previously unpublished talk, "Kant and Schiller," in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 129-62; hereafter AI.
6. A particularly inventive use of this is the name of the assassin-marksman Ramon in the first Man Who Knew Too Much: Ramon, which reverses as "No- Mar," also cites Amon Ra, laying down the faux thematic of Egyptic sun worship-- that is, the worship of imaginary light, of Schillerian relapse--that he too uses as a front: in the process, a breakdown of the name Ramon also links "repetition" (R[a]) to the proper, to property, to what is mine or "mon" (The 39 Steps' final show at the Palladium, for instance, being "Crazy Month," remarking Hannay's "Montreal" allusion in the music hall scene). I will return to the "bar-series," which William Rothman calls Hitchcock's "signature" and locates in every film.
7. Not only this, but more often than not it is this project that cites Benjamin, inversely, as one of the earliest "mourners" of this "loss of humanity" in today's "society"; the "aura" is mourned--the opposite of Benjamin's point--and this le- gitimizes numerous attempts to reinstate it. Film "theory" and the cultural studies' reading of film, despite the desires of each, adheres to a model of cinema that Benjamin declared closed with the advent, precisely, of cinema itself.
8. Paul de Man, "'Conclusions': Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Transla- tor,'" in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); hereafter RT.
9. Indeed, if he is caught in elaborating a nonterm, "allegory," which Benjamin dropped as unable to sustain the burden put on it--that of transforming the historial from within an epistemo-critical network of material and mnemonic traces, within monads, as he termed the sites of intervention--it is part of the gamble.
10. Eduardo Cadava, "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History," Diacritics 22:3-4 (fall-winter 1992): 86, 87. If I use this "rapport" to read Hitch-
cock, it is not that in shifting from a literary text to the sabotage of the cinemato- graphic pretense to mimesis we are engaging, simply, in a more "political," referen- tial event: the event reflexively theorized within every Hitchcock text (to which titles such as Secret Agent semiotically aver and disname) has to do, above all, with the way the aesthetic text transformatively theorizes its material, mnemonic, and allohuman role in the history of otherness for a hypothetical and inscribed "com- munity," as well as how (as with Benjamin) the cinematic apparatus is conceived as analogous to the site of inscription. Hitchcock apprehends the installation of a tex- tual system as working within the technical apparatus of cultural mnemonics in a manner that stands to divest and alter the very domain of face, memory, the visible: the cultural regime of mimetic-humanism, ideology of the "aesthetic state. "
11. When To Catch a Thief opens with the prefigural and mobile trace of the black cat signifying (Promethean) theft, or the first Man Who Knew Too Much with a skeet or marksman's shoot in which a black disk is shot down, a black sun, light is preceded--generated and eclipsed--by the mark. Implying a cinematic logic fre- quently theorized in Hitchcock's invocations of travel and tourism, de Man focuses in commenting on a passage in Locke on the idea of motion and its relation to metaphor: "motion is a passage [Locke says] and passage is a translation; transla- tion, once again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play of words that 'translate' is translated in German as u? bersetzen, which itself trans- lates the Greek meta phorein or metaphor" (AI 38). Passage, translate, motion, metaphor--the series collapses at the very point, we might say, where "light" does, where setzen (as the domain of positing, the event, inscription) itself passes into a hypermode, u? ber-setzen, into a mode of passage that cannot be affirmed within its own (representational) system, unless and except by passing outself of a system for which such passage must be projected.
12. This persists, of course, with the "birds" in that film blotting out of the very idea of the solar in a multiplicity of simulacra, of black holes, "(a)material," machi- nal animation; such interfaces with formal logics that emerge, for instance, where de Man in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" notes a coincidence of a con- cept of pure ocular vision with a totally nonsolar logic: "Not being part of trope or figuration, the purely aesthetic vision of the natural world is in no way solar. It is not the sudden discovery of a true world as an unveiling, as the a-letheia of Heidegger's Lichtung. It is not a solar world and we are explicitly told that we are not to think of the stars as 'suns moving in circles'" (AI 82).
13. De Man: "reine Sprache, a pure language, which does not exist except as a permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such, including and especial- ly the language one calls one's own" (RT 104).
14. William Rothman, Hitchcock--The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 33.
15. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 233; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 265.
16. De Man, "Kant and Schiller," in AI 133.
17. This Benjamin, covertly, appears to derive from too precise a reading of the material dimension of The Birth of Tragedy, upon which the Trauerspiel seems to be grafted. It is not surprising that de Man's seeming turn from tropological systems
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toward an implicit materiality (out of which trans-epochal ideological wars are marked), leads in his late essays to a seemingly ceaseless--if only occasionally marked--Auseinandersetzung with Benjamin, a recurrent pretext, moreover, of going "beyond" topoi one associates with the earlier critic, such as aura (or personi- fication), mourning, the reading of Baudelaire, allegory.
18. Benjamin concludes the "Work of Art" essay by addressing the state of hu- manity during overt war: "Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art" (in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968], 262-63). What Benjamin calls a "commu- nist" seems to be something like de Man ("communism responds by politicizing art"): this is the entire direction (that word is used) of the "Aesthetic Ideology" papers. What "politicizing art" means suggests locating where the techne ? of signs operates through mnemonic systems to program the sensoria and modes of meta- phoric "experience," and where the aesthetic is itself constituted as a ghost catego- ry to neutralize or manage this excess.
19. This review was first called "Reading Hitchcock" when it appeared in October, and later redubbed "Allegorizing Hitchcock" as a chapter in Signatures of the Visible: in each case, for reasons unnoted, retaining a clearly de Manian echo. See Fredric Jameson, "Allegorizing Hitchcock," in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 97-127.
20. Fredric Jameson, "Spatial Systems in North by Northwest," in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), 51. 21. Such memorization, which pretends to internalize, defines a moment of
sheer exteriorization which de Man reminds us Hegel terms auswendig lernen.
22. An analysis of this inversion might begin with Scottie's final accusation to Judy/Madeleine about what a good "pupil" she had been (technically, of Elstir--a name otherwise evocative of a Proustian motif in which mnemonics and the aes- thetic are reprogrammed). The references in North by Northwest to Hamlet suggest a "rotten" or paralyzed state. Such recalls the paralyzing contradiction between a knowledge of inscription (do not forget! ) and the order of phenomenalization that denies, inverts, "relapses" from or Schillerizes their import (Denmark's present court)--Iris Henderson's knowledge, in The Lady Vanishes, of Miss Froy, whose presence (like inscription) everyone denies on the train, yet who turns up, in Egyptian fashion, as a mummy (Miss Froy wrapped in bandages). "Iris's" Hamletian counterknowledge is structurally cited as that of the eye (iris) and tropology (color)--the knowledge of "perception" countered by a premimetic anteriority allied to the Egyptian. In Marnie, an office mate flirts appallingly: "Have I got a danish for you"--that is, an abysmal version of this Hamletian bind, troped as a
banality.
23. In fact, like Benjamin's trope of "natural history"--which does not refer to
nature of (human) history--the collapse of temporal perspectives operates in paral- lel to a caesura inhabiting linguistic structures, which de Man might call, simply enough, "death. "
24. Interestingly, the crossing or passage that is of course blocked in The 39 Steps (Mr. Memory does not get "out" of the country, any more than Van Damm
will) can never "succeed" in the same representational logics. It is associated with Professor Jordan, that is, a site of Mosaic crossing as though "out" of the Egypt not of hieroglyphic cinema so much as the always already inverted desert of the aesthet- ic state and its police. While this is denoted as "England" in the British "thrillers," it is expanded to include the double system of Cold War others by North by Northwest (much as, during the world war period, it began to include "both" sides of the conflict, the democratic and the fascist West as specular others in the same systematics). Thus, in the later film Professor Jordan is split into Van Damm and "the professor"--chief of an American spy operation never identified as either CIA or FBI, any more than the enemy other is definitively identified or referenced as the Soviet Union. Many Hitchcockian political "thrillers" track and perform a failed usurpation or transformation that, at the same time, testifies to the latter's having already been the case technically. The specter of an (ana)Mosaic crossing, or pass- ing, which is also to say of aporia, is disseminated in Hitchcock by the syllable port-, heard both as door or passage and carrier, feet, material steps or signifiers (Portland Place, Constance Porter, Portland [Oregon]): this collusion, which re- turns us to the prefigural motif of transport (and translation), couples the transfor- mation of impasse to passage with a shift from signified to material carrier--what Benjamin calls "to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized" of allegorical and mnemotechnic praxis--from trope to performative: the nonexistent di-rection called "north by northwest. " (For an account of how the figure of "Annabella" Smith in The 39 Steps triggers an exploration of the Greek motif of the aesthetic and the materiality of steps--led through Hesiod, Mnemosyne, and Mr. Memory-- see the last chapter of my Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]. )
25. Today, perhaps, there is a distinct relation between how the "human" con- structs itself semantically--that is, as a closed system--and the impending devasta- tion of terrestrial systems and reserves we might want to call material, a relation be- tween models of reference and models of consumption. It is interesting that the problematic of this "materiality" returns at a time presented with the predicted human-governed impasses in the material environments and interlocking bio- systems of Earth, aporia that confront us in daily media simultaneously deferred and neutralized as information. De Man is interested in a kind of criminality, to know something about it, which we might hear in association with what Derrida, in The Politics of Friendship, calls "that crime in which . . . the political being of politics, the concept of politics in its most powerful tradition is constituted. " See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), ix.
26. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 233; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 265. In the context of noting that for Benjamin in the "Translation" essay "history is not human . . . it is not natural . . . it is not phe- nomenal . . . and it is not temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure" [92]), we hear that "we are to understand natural changes from the perspective of history, rather than understand history from the perspective of natural changes" (83). Like the concept of "natural history" in Benjamin, which has nothing to do with "nature" but much to do with a nonhuman
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figure of history, any trope of "nature" is to be understood in terms of semiotic ef- fects and systems.
27. Among ecocritics the connection between the evisceration of biosystems and language conventions that program human perception has not gone unre- marked--although it is typically mapped, along the phenomenological model, by inversion. That is the case, say, in David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous: Percep- tion and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996), which nonetheless mounts its critique from within the very program he would, without knowing it, disrupt: phenomenology is presented as the longed-for norm to be returned to, whereas alphabetic representation--the materiality of the letter-- marked the historical alienation of the human from nonhuman otherness and the senses. So the work of the prosaic, of the letter in de Man, here intervenes at the heart of the human escapade or parenthesis--it is an acceleration of attention to and use of this site, of allowing it to theorize its (a)materiality at the point where "perception" is phenomenalized or programmed, which ruptures the human semantic and perceptual closure Abram properly assaults. For if "materialistic historiography" departs from a suspension of historicist narrative and turns to where the trace accords with a movement of anteriority that belongs to significa- tion but is not explicitly human, it is not because the letter or mark resembles na- ture. The materiality of the letter jams any transparency of the aesthetic state, and in Abram's inverse reading it is the letter, in fact, that stands as a disruptive inter- vention of the material in the "human" epistemo-political systems--one that also leads to a deregulation of perceptual blinds, organic and empiricist borders, tempo- ralization, and programmatics of reserve, identity, and economy that rely on its oc- clusion. The eviscerations of terrestrial traces and nonhuman reserves, it seems, may be programmed by models of reference: it is into these systems and programs that de Man, and Hitchcock, differently intervene. The "shift" that de Man tracks posits a technicity that traverses the human and alternative life-forms jointly as effects--where, too, the figure of "life" (like death for de Man) occurs as a linguis- tic dilemma in a specific sense.
28. This includes an allusion to fingerprints that leads us back through a vertigi- nous meditation of the precedence of prints (including the alluded to detective film, Fingerprints, which Blackmail momentarily alludes to itself as within its narrative) and of artificed narrative to all pretense of documentation or fact.
29. The class warfare signaled by the sabot is kept in play by Hitchcock and, as in de Man's use of the "slave" trope, linked to the materiality of inscription. Thus, in To Catch a Thief, the motif of service, or "service compris," is tied to the lower- class kitchen help, ex-thieves connected to Bertani's restaurant and his new thieving operation (actually, as the denouement italicizes, a film-production unit, as the kitchen too is inflected to be): cinema's space of ironization is associated, as in Benjamin, with class struggle--though less with the idea of "liberation" than ex- posure, pure exteriorization, to which the semantics of class struggle too falls prey. For a more epistemo-political analysis of this problematic, see chapter 5 of my Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998).
30. In his own attempt to appropriate Jameson's trope for what becomes, in practice, a more generally mimetic or regressive hermeneutic (Hitchcock as pro-
grammatic exemplar of a certain interpretation of Lacanian mappings, one hinged on a posthumanist yet still occulist and auteurist trope of the "gaze"), Z? iz? ek at- tempts to summarize: "This modernist notion of allegory is, of course, opposed to the traditional one: within the traditional narrative space, the diegetic content func- tions as the allegory of some transcendental entity (flesh-and-blood individuals per- sonify transcendent principles: Love, temptation, Betrayal, etc. ; they procure exter- nal clothing for suprasensible Ideas), whereas in the modern space, the diegetic content is posited and conceived as the allegory of its own process of enun- ciation. . . . The classical Marxist reproach here would be, of course, that the ulti- mate function of such an allegorical procedure, by means of which the product re- flects its own formal process, is to render invisible its social mediation and thereby neutralize its sociocritical potential--as if, in order to fill out the void of social con- tent, the work turns to its own form. . . . Yet one is tempted to defend here the exact opposite of this line of argument: the strongest 'ideologico-critical' potential of Hitchcock's films is contained precisely in their allegorical nature" (Slavoj Z? iz? ek, "'In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,'" in Everything, 218-19).
31. The agency and figure of the black cat--thief, eclipsed sun, what precedes "light"--in the France of To Catch a Thief is linked directly, if covertly, to the French poet of cats, Baudelaire, and specifically the text "Correspondances," in readings of which Benjamin's (and de Man's) conception of "allegory" is elaborated. This becomes explicit during the drive to inspect villas with the "real-estate list. "
32. To assign Picadilly the moniker of "center of the world" is more than a de- scriptive exploitation, since it depends on the word itself. Like "Inspector Le Pic," the first syllable both tropes a mimetic pretense--picturation--yet ties it to a letter sequence, (d)ill(y), which abrupts and suspends that. Elsewhere in Hitchcock, the syllable Pi- will be linked to a destructive sublime ("What causes pips in poultry? " asks the frustrated interlocutor of Mr. Memory opening The 39 Steps, that is, a dis- ease that brings down flightless birds), but a numerical inscription, either 1 and 3 or 3 and 1, tied to a muting of the subject, a "death" that precedes human speech or coincides with its auto-dispossession. Thus Pi is incribed as the Pythagorean Pi-- 3. 14--in The Torn Curtain, much as the number thirteen haunts the entire Hitchcock opus (and names a lost early title directly, not to mention the auteur's birth date). Hence, "ill" less cites than performs a letteral variant of the bar-series-- / / / as i-l-l--which is verified, among other texts, in Marnie, both in the name Lil's troping of the erased pre-Edenic female (Lillith) and in the zombie children's choral: "Mother, mother I am ill, send for the doctor on the hill," and so on, where the word ill emerges directly in association with the bar-series--what returns us, as Marnie frequently does, to Spellbound.
33. He must be dismembered, erased, and sacrificed as a witness to the family's sexless fictitiousness and his own function as excess, as simulacrum. Stevie, in this, recalls the boy who interrupts Hitchcock reading on the train cameo of Blackmail.
34. One could say of Hitchcock's Sabotage--or its history of reception--what de Man says of a passage in Hegel on the Gesetz der A? usserlichkeit: "Completely devoid of aura or e? clat, it offers nothing to please anyone" (AI 116).
35. The term Abbauen is applicable particularly given the "construction" site, a digging in the street before the Bijou, a signal that the text conceives itself as a fun- damental reworking of the site of transport and of the "earth. "
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36. This is one reason for Mrs. V's excessive, "mad" Homeric laughter when watching the Disney cartoon after learning of Stevie's erasure: she disowns any mimetic ideology of film.
37. De Man's text reads: "this passage, if it is thus conceived, that is, the pas- sage from trope to performative--and I insist on the necessity of this, so the model is not the performative, the model is the passage from trope to performative--this passage occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope.