I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

A Wake

381 A Wake I think or rather I dream of Walter Benjamin. —jacques derrida, Archive Fever Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed. —philip k. dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Exiting Kreuzlingen (a slight toss of the word salad gives you Kreuzigung or “crucifixion”) Warburg had determined to abandon art history and set out on a new path marked by totemism, allegory, and the technological relation. The technophobicity of the Serpent Ritual presentation belonged to the fever pitch for release. Judging by Warburg’s emphasis and by the reluctance on Binswanger’s part to let him go—since both moves reflect the scale of valuation Binswanger applied to delusional systems, according to which technological delusions occupied the incurable living end of psychosis—we get a good idea of how proximate Warburg’s break chance was to Schreber’s own endopsychic allegory. But during his asylum stay Warburg’s students had established an institute in his name, which was dedicated as research facility to serve the art-historical institution. During his student embodiment (which he could not not acknowledge as transferential gift) Warburg pursued his Mnemosyne Project (with which only Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk suggests compatibility). Consider the work of Panofsky as legacy of the student betrayal of Warburg’s commitment to a new field of study beyond the “border police” of art-historical scholarship in his day and to this day. While Warburg’s post-Kreuzlingen work addressed the edges of context as destabilized and 382 A Wake unassumable, Panofsky incorporated a context, which was at the same time a reception, whereby his scholarship proved exemplarily accessible without appearing compromised (the definition of “academic”). Panofsky taught art history at Harvard. His essay “Et in Arcadia Ego” is admirable also or in particular as a teaching tool. As context and frame of reception he incorporated your average Harvard undergraduate and with this inward turn the standard of what Jacob Taubes referred to as American “half Bildung.” The Harvard BA is the stopgap at the end of about two years of intensive culture training to which, on average, next to nothing is added in the time of his life. He also has little background (other than prep work) and none of that background that reaches back into childhood . He has no mother tongue. Made coterminous with American half Bildung already in Warburg’s lifetime, art history was far removed from the melancholic brooding that watched over its prehistory and even further removed—mediocrity always cements the irreconcilability between opposites that it itself is—from the new frontier Benjamin and Warburg reached via their Schreber pardons and which they (plus a few others) alone cathect or occupy. Can you see it? A way of theorizing here’s looking at you, kids, that must operate in the tight spot we are in with economies of sacrifice or inoculation. That the problem with the control-release of violence through shocks or shots of inoculation must lead, on the sidelines of its efficacy, its tracks record, to new autoimmunity crises, was addressed by a select relay of thinkers who raised (in place of the interdisciplinary exchange of the password “Death”) questions of or to the dead and undead. Consider, as Benjamin did, the surfeit of immunization that Karl Kraus foresaw as rendering impossible any encounter whatsoever with the reality shock of the new. As Benjamin underscored in his essay “Karl Kraus,” the artistic intervention that Kraus championed drew itself up and onward within a frame of archaic, overcome, illicit references: cannibalism, plagiarism, incorporation. It is in the accidental overlap between the sound shapes of the German words for “dream” and “trauma”—Traum and Trauma— that the span of intervention that Benjamin sought to administer can begin to be discerned. In “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (“Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”), Benjamin let roll four instances of identi- fication in a row. The examples of preanimistic primal man who identifies himself with and as animals and of the soothsayer who receives the perceptions of others as his own are on the level with his own coming philos- A Wake 383 ophy of media. While the madman who is said to identify with objects of his perception limps along inside philosophical anthropology—and is overtaken on the scale of madness by Benjamin’s next example...