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  • Modernity’s Regimes of Wonderment
  • Jonathan P. Eburne (bio) and Aaron Jaffe (bio)
Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred by David L. Martin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. xviii + 255 pages. $32.95 cloth.

When Walter Benjamin writes in Convolute N of the Arcades Project that he has “nothing to say, only to show,” does anyone really believe him?1 David L. Martin cites this well-known statement in the first pages of his excellent study Curious Visions of Modernity. He does so less to explain his own methods, however, than to invoke something of a modernist incantation. Indeed, Benjamin’s dictum echoes a line by Pablo Picasso borrowed by Jacques Lacan in Seminar 11: “I do not seek, I find.”2 Where we might expect to find a statement of method, Lacan instead presents us with findings. As Sigmund Freud said, “Wo es war, soll ich werden.” (Where it [the id] was, I [the ego] shall be.) What is curious, though, is that the claim itself—”I don’t seek, I find”—discloses the very methodological reflection it professes to withhold, albeit in the form of a borrowed line, a resonant fragment of historical discourse.

By the time Lacan gets to Seminar 24, moreover, even finding is off the table: “Long ago, I happened to say, imitating a famous painter, ‘I don’t seek, I find.’ At the point I’m at now, I don’t find as long as I don’t seek.”3 Of course, there’s more to such statements than merely the showy disavowal of method—how could there not be? Still, there’s something of the conjuring trick in these inscrutable mottos. Don’t find, don’t seek, don’t even tell: our eyes are directed [End Page 685] elsewhere, thereby sustaining the master’s sleight of hand. Such claims thus amount to something other than a hermeneutic (or an object-oriented ontology). Rather than inducing us to heed the call of things from within the tangle of discourse that enshrouds them, these utterances instead comprise the magic words of philosophical stagecraft, a theoretical version of welcome to the show, presto, hocus pocus, abracadabra. Reason supplies its own magic words: the terms saying, showing, seeking, finding, and telling all have ordinary meanings, yet they are no less caught up in the irrational constellation of terms in Martin’s subtitle—enchantment, magic, and the sacred. Insofar as these common participles also underwrite the formation of modern rationality of the scientific sort, they also have complex critical genealogies, which Martin’s book aims to trace.

In his three-part study of early modern cabinets of curiosity, anatomical specimens, and pictorial technologies, Martin examines the “stagecraft” that underpins the way modern science—not to mention philosophy—has been able to make inert matter speak (60). Michel Foucault, whose work underpins Martin’s study in profound ways, named his version of this stagecraft “archaeology.” Benjamin likens his own approach to montage. Martin’s is more akin to Industrial Light and Magic, full of stunning archival pyrotechnics, and appropriate to the “regime of wonderment” he wants to rescue. As Martin writes,

When the task of the scholar was to get objects to speak of the truth that was hidden within them, a truth that only the object itself fully “knew,” illumination came through an act of unpacking the microcosmic collection, of arranging the words of the text of creation so that one might interpret the signatures inscribed within all things. In this setting, the fake often pointed to higher truths.

(45)

Like Benjamin, Martin is interested in exhibiting telling fragments; he indicates by pointing out, illustrating, and illuminating. On this front, he offers a telling confession: “For many years,” he writes, “I have been something of an academic collector, watching out for fragments and broken pieces of early modern visual culture discarded and scattered by the vagaries of historical discourse” (xi). What he exhibits in Curious Visions are holdovers of early modern curiosity—”the fragment, the narrative, the excursion, the fleeting glance, the sympathy, and the resonance” (ix)—that animate the scientific practices he features in his book: the assembly of collections, the examination of human...

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