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At the beginning of his 1927 essay, "Photography" (Die Photographie),' German cultural critic and film historian Siegfried Kracauer juxtaposes two photographs: one, the radiant depiction of a 24 year-old film diva in front of the Lido's Hotel Excelsior taken from the cover of a contemporary illustrated magazine; the other, the picture of a grandmother, perhaps his, also at the age of 24, but taken over sixty years earlier in the studio of a court photographer. Unlike Roland Barthes, whose book-length meditation on the melancholic effects of photographic reproduction includes all but one of the images that inform it, Kracauer proceeds from memory; the actual photographs of the diva and the grandmother do not accompany the text that explores them. This absence is strategic: it allows Kracauer to reconstruct the photographs in a different medium –– language –– where they take on a new life and, as it were, survive in the imagination of the reader as a question. The necessity of this eclipse, of the images' revival via memory and their translation through writing, functions as a performative illustration of Kracauer's overall project in the "Photography" essay: to trace the effects of time on the meaning and function of a photographic image.

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Along with General Motors' decision to shift their world headquarters from its previous location in the midtown General Motors Build ing to the downtown Renaissance Center, and to move many of its operations in from outlying areas, real estate values have gone up abruptly in Detroit, reversing decades of stagnation. Housing values, particularly along the Woodward Corridor and the Downtown Grosse Pointe axis of East Jefferson, have exploded in anticipation of the relocation of management closer to the downtown area. Even so, a commute from nearby suburbs such as Huntington Woods and Grosse Pointe still involves, on a daily basis, a lesson in dystopia as the boundary with Detroit is crossed. Driving into downtown from Grosse Pointe Park, for instance, as Shoreline Drive turns into East Jefferson, one moves abruptly from an illusion of social cohesion embodied in substantial homes, wide boulevards, landscaping, and waterfront parks, to a burned-out postindustrial waste land of defunct businesses, depopulated neighborhoods, and vacant lots dominated by Chrysler's retooled, state-of-the-art East Jefferson assembly plant just after the city limits are crossed. 

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In Berlin, it was the spring of 1987, and several miles apart two seemingly distinct public art projects strikingly documented Ernst Bloch's epigrammatic motif for modernity –– the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

In Wedding, in the north of Berlin, reconstruction work was being undertaken to restore the memorial to Walther Rathenau and his father Emil that had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. When he was murdered by right-wing operatives on June 24, 1922, near his home in Grunewald, Walther Rathenau had been foreign minister of Germany since February of that year, the highest government office ever occupied by a Jew in Germany. Both at home and abroad the public denunciation of the assassination in late June and early July of 1922 was extraordinary. The outrage voiced in mass demonstrations in Berlin and elsewhere and by intellectual commentators from Thomas Mann to Leo Strauss suggested that a quick canonization of this very controversial figure would follow. Walther Rathenau had been active in public office since early in World War I and was indisputably one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany as heir to his father's leadership at the AEG –– the Allgemeine Elektrizituits Gesellschaft that had been founded by Emil Rathenau. Yet, as it turned out –– at least in Berlin itself –– Rathenau would have to wait seven years before even a simple plaque would be dedicated on the site of his assassination along the Königsallee. It was this plaque that was demonstrably maligned, vandalized, and finally destroyed after January, 1933.

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Foundation: cosmetologies

What if new poetry is just old poetry, stolen, stitched together, and given a make-over? Early modern lyric continues to be judged almost solely by the criteria of originality and authenticity. Even when it appears to be nothing more than a collection of conventions and clichés, a good poem must refer, we persist in believing, to some thing 'real,' 'true,' 'sincere'. But what if reference as such is itself a convention? Suppose we were to read lyric as a graft of prior passages, only thinly disguised: originality might then become a question of cosmetic changes. Perhaps Ronsard's last sonnet cycle, the Sonets pour Helene, can best be appreciated as a recycling of earlier poetic models. As one might expect in a work that adheres closely to the Petrarchan code, the addressee of the Sonets pour Helene is nowhere to be found. But perhaps the speaker does not wish to find her. Poetry, here, is not a way of recovering Helen, but of replacing her. The business of the Sonets pour Helene, I will argue, is not passion or praise but production: it functions in the manner of an industry, dedicated to the replication and dissemination of phantom or supplementary Helens (Helen, for example, as portrait, name, gaze, letter, character, dream, poem), pieced together out of premanufactured parts

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A review of Schorske, Carl E. Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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A review of Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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