The ‘Ruin of Detroit’ in Frankenstein’s Monster; or, The Post Industrial Prometheus.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?  Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?  (John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Ruins of Detroit

Victor Frankenstein’s creation, the Monster, is a symbol of abandonment.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley imagined the Monster in a dream while visiting Lord George Gordon Byron’s cabin in June 1816:

I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion … His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken … and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon in the cradle.” (Shelley, Introduction, 11)

The novel was first published in 1818, a science fiction, Victorian horror, or perhaps a prognostication of the industrial revolution as revealed in the allusion to the monstrosity generated from “some powerful engine” and then its maker “would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken.”  Shelley’s “Monster,” allegorically, is really then only a stone’s throw, I would argue, from Detroit’s abandoned spaces photographed by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.  The images capture the romantic and gothic imaginings of “a Monster” that similarly is caught in the  man-made urban wasteland that was once “the cradle” of the US Auto Industry:  “the desert mountains, the dreary glaciers are my refuge.  I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge.  These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-being.  If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction” (Shelley 126-7).

My entry begins, like the rest, with questions:  What compelled me to cast the subtle, yet seemingly unlikely parallel between Shelley’s Monster and the Motor City, and more intuitively, why do I conjure, within my own internal alchemy, a sympathy for the ruins of Detroit?  What is the physic affect of “the abandoned” that draws people to public spaces in ruin? Is it some unresolved remnant of unarticulated abandonment that the monster in novel and the exiled land somehow do articulate? What is it saying? Perhaps, as in the many themes that run through Shelley’s novel, as she references Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Goethe, there is a desire to stumble through the debris of capitalism to answer the question that has plagued philosophers for centuries: “what is justice?” or perhaps it is the counter discourse that “the ruined” unwittingly extols, a stubborn vitalism, in its very proximity to that which made it outcast?:  the potential revolutionary strength of the abject is not to be underestimated.

The handwritten first draft of Mary Shelley's, Frankenstein, has gone on display in Britain for the first time.

As William Godwin, Shelley’s father, asks in Political Justice, and Shelley implicitly weaves throughout her text: “After his fall, why did he still cherish the spirit of opposition … he bore his torment with fortitude because he disdained to be subdued by despotic power” (1: 323-25).  Godwin and Shelley’s intertextual use of the figure Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost places the Monster in a revolutionary, anti-hero opposition against the tyranny of God; it is here that I symbolically locate the decay of Detroit.  The fall of the Great American Motor City stands as a type of Pandæmonium, or High Capital of Hell, a rebelliousness and disdain for imperial inequity found in heaven and in Detroit’s unabated capitalism.

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

I suggest that in this landscape the voyeurism of urban paleontologists carve their paths, some for nostalgia, yes, but more to bear witness to the resilience that is imbued in what has been left behind, that which stills stands in opposition to the illusion and ideology of American progress – or maybe simply to cast its tenacious shadow of stark irony.  The gothic quiet of the Michigan Central Station is a mammoth concrete structure, a patterned grid of broken panes, a thousand eyes that parody the once exacting infrastructure of modernity, commuter energy, punctuality, the proof of labour capital, steady wages, the privilege of leisure, shiny steel, now a forfeited structure that is impervious to its own delinquency as it haunts the arched doors and windows smashed open by discontented rocks.

When I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I become fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.  Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity.” (Shelley 139)

Here, as in Milton’s portrayal of Eve in the Garden, not only is the monster’s outcast-self made known, but the alienation was also felt by Shelley who was abandoned by her mother, proto feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died ten days after giving birth to her.  The Monster embodies Shelley’s innate understanding of loss, mourning, and that which haunt us.  In the biology classroom at George W. Ferris School in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, a half dissected body stands among its own anatomical debris, organs strewn, large intestine exposed, left breast discarded, skin torn away, and the left hemisphere of the brain (central to speech control) is scattered among broken drywall and emptied drawers.

“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous” (Shelley 126).  There are now small gardens springing up among the ruins.  Abandoned lives living in the communities are banding together to grow food and themselves even upon contaminated ground.  Victor Frankenstein’s refusal to take the material responsibility for his creation was exercised similarly by the American Auto Industry – instead, both transform their “creations” into a daemon.  Although the allegory to associate the complicated social ramifications lived by the citizens of Detroit to a fictionalized Monster is far too simplistic, the novel does offer a literary vantage point upon which to speculate the massive incarnations that occur when responsibility is not taken for that which is created,  a contemporary hubris, and its abandoned consequences.  Detroit is a Post Industrial Prometheus; the anti-hero who stole fire from the gods to feed the people and for his treason is chained to the land upon which the ravenous vultures feed.

Instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you.  I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?  You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me. (Shelley 169)

Shelley’s monster listens to the domestic lives of the cottagers from a secret hovel outside the house.  Volney’s The Ruins, or, Mediations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) is being read and a dream vision is recounted that includes the French Revolution,  as well as an overview of world history and religions (25).  Along with Volney’s accusations against domestic tyranny and imperialist aggression, listening to Volney’s writings reminds the Monster of “his earliest experience … and the description of the first human as “an orphan, abandoned by the unknown power which had produced him” and his subsequent ruin by an empire.

Detroit is, in a sense, a neo-gothic rupture, a dissonance against the once held propriety of the offices of Highland Park Police Station:  photographs of those who have passed through the system, awaiting justice, patient faces in piles of discarded bureaucracy. The vomit of incarceration, institutionalization, penal punishment, and civil discipline.

The dentist cabinet in the Broderick Tower: torn ceilings, equipment plugged in impotently, and the specter of procedure, an opened mouth wet with panic and spit, methods of extraction excavation surgery: an anesthetized patient.  A metaphor.

Detroit is, however, not a project of nostalgia but is a mourning play, a continuum of reconciliation, crack houses, squatters, crime, community gardens, growing vegetables, fear, flowers, broken homes, fires, laughter, foreclosures, spontaneous art, shootings, front porch gossip, weather, music, silence:  all negotiating within a spatial parameter of neglect.  A social negation into which we stand on our toes to peer into.  A bare life in a state of exception that is struggling.  It is not tragic.  Nor is it a myth. It is what we have made it to be and that which its inter-communities are trying to rebuild … against all odds.  It lives.

East Side Public Library’s shelves are laden with novels poetry history biographies maps geography philosophy science and only the light from a noonday sun browses these hard dusty covers until the night closes them.

The Spanish interior of the United Artist Theater in Detroit was built in 1928 and closed in 1974, a gothic cavern with unreachable ceilings in which light spills in as an audience would. The Romantic does not live here. Nor does nostalgia unless we permit it to invade as a ruse to cover the irresponsibility of just plain ignorant urban planning and racism and classism.  Ruins do breathe, if I am permitted to personify that which I do not understand, and inject it with a vitalism that is as organic as any tree.

“Who was I? What was I? Whence I came” What is my destination? (Shelley 153)

These questions remain with Shelley’s unnamed monster, and are pronounced in her novel as a cautionary tale to her “Dear Readers”:  to comprehend that we must know how “Monsters” come to be,  to admonish our arrogance when we create them, and to take responsibility for their living.

God, Gossip, and Jezebel: Living Beings and Agamben’s Apparatus

What happens when I read Giorgio Agamben and Jezebel On-line Gossip Zine simultaneously?

I finished reading Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? His argument stems from how “Living Beings” are captured by “The Apparatus,” a Foucauldian term that Foucault doesn’t really define, but that too is Foucauldian, right? Anyway, the origin of The Apparatus, according to Agamben, is from a handful of second century C.E. Fathers of the Church who brainstormed about how oikonomia (Greek for the administration of the home) could operate theologically.  Said another way, they were trying to figure out how the Church might control every non-being and every being in the world.  God, they surmised could be the CEO who would entrusts his Son with the economy of man (a Gnostic reference) while God would maintain a powerful unity in the management of Western human history.

Oikonomia, as Agamben asserts, merges with the notion of Providence and begins to indicate the redemptive governance of the world and human history. Now, what is the translation of this fundamental Greek term in the writings of the Latin Father? Dispositio. // The Latin term dispositif, or apparatus, derives, comes therefore to take on the complex semantic sphere of the theological oikonomia. The “dispositifs” about which Foucault speaks are somehow linked to this theological legacy (11).

But how does this go from blueprint to live?  Agamben contends that Living Beings are captured by The Apparatus  (which comprises education, prisons, governments, laws, language, religion, military, etc) and within this “capture” there is a continual struggle; it is through this struggle that the Living Being is processed as a subject; in other words, the subjectification of us.  Objects are used to create a continuum of desires to keep the Living Beings captured and serviced conveniently through capitalism and include everything from the internet, microwaves, forks, mortgages, porn, cars, Jersey Shore, pencils, sex, IMacs, music, Facebook, bathroom tiles, cars, hot dogs, soy milk, Ritalin, etc … you get the picture.  These objects of desire are the power of The Apparatus.  The subjectified subject then uses their acquired objects and never-ending desires to masquerade in an assumed “identity” and environment – or this is “I” (who then goes through another division but that’s for another blog).

20th century icon of the fathers of the first ecumenical council in Nicaea (325 CE). (courtesy: Orthodox Church in America)

So is it possible to escape a machine designed by well-bearded robed and haloed church patriarchs who wanted world domination and were basically afraid of sex?  Uhm, no.  However, Agamben does suggest a way to contend within this model:  “Profanation” … but this I’ll leave for another entry.

And this is where I stopped reading Agamben and opened the link to Jezebel, the on-line gossip website that has a tendency to subvert mainstream media and interrogate the very apparatus from which it sprung and through which it is maintained.  I wondered if I could apply Agamben to the “process” of subjectification in the discourse of gossip?  The etymology of “gossip” is from Old English godsibb or “godparent,” (God + sib relative) or the sponsor of a subject at their baptism.  Here, I quickly realized, the subjectification of a Living Being is clearly within The Apparatus’ blueprint and through time and mincing and dicing the word “gossip” became known as the “talk idly about the affairs of others with friends usually by women.”  In the very gendered etymology of gossip, the audience and conveyers are agents for “a God” infused Apparatus who enforce codes of morality.  Therefore if you gossip with moral indignation, with mean spiritedness, and with ill intentions you are a cog in the process of subjectifying Living Beings into something they are not in order to acquire your own denied desires to be used to construct your identity all of which is driven by capitalism.  There are, of course, “good” forms of gossip and anthropologists have also suggested that gossip is a method of survival to gain knowledge of others or for a subject to critically and constructively address their own subjectification; however; bottom-line, if the third party does not have an opportunity to speak, verify, and be understood the “gossip,” spoken over tea, takes its malicious course. Agamben writes about “friends,” how they are within the very word “philosophy,” and how, because friends share environments, is an entry point into politics.  More on this later …

Cool.

Gossip

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.  ~H.G. Wells

The Penny Press of the mid nineteenth century introduced gossip columns, educational agendas, pages for religion and advertising, human interest stories, etc to the mainstream media as an alternative to papers with only political themes that were running a bit dry. The low cost for Penny Press production and for consumers served a massive demographic that was experiencing a rise in literacy. Which brings me to Jezebel, a name/symbol that is not without a biblical reference.  The story of Jezebel is told in 1^st and 2^nd Kings and has been over-subjectified through gossip, rumour, defamation, religious codes of conduct, patriarchy, institutionalization of the domestic, categorizing public and private, to name a few. Jezebel is a symbol, a trope, cemented into a vernacular as a fallen woman, manipulator, controller, promiscuous, immoral, false prophet masquerading her identity as a servant to a God.  Of course Jezebel’s side of the story, in keeping with the process of gossip and subjectification, is never told, never heard – the Apparatus and its players are not interested because the creation of “the other” (as a form of subjectification) is a prerequisite in the fabrication of their “moral” identities.  Jezebel was thrown to the dogs.  No, really … she was thrown to the dogs.

Jezebel, queen of Israel and priestess of Baal; King Ahab and the prophet Elijah

Gossip therefore has nothing really to do with the subject who is being scrutinized and subjectified whether it be Lohen in rehab, Lady Gaga’s footwear, Madonna’s take on masturbation, or the woman you don’t even know yet loathe, but has everything to do with one’s own struggle with power.  Jezebel, the woman, was constructed as a subject by religion and continually used as a figure in gossip, a symbol that is not only to be feared but perhaps the very figure you desire yourself to be. Demoralization, humiliation, slander, false accusations, and straight up lies toward “the other” become a means to reconstruct and uphold your own temporal “moral” identity, an elusive masquerade of an assumed self, who is manufactured because your Living Being is lost to you.

No wonder you’re so insecure.  I think that’s exactly what the second century beards had in mind.  Maybe you should think about whom you are actually working for the next time you gossip?

As Lisa, from The Simpsons, says:  No one even plays four square anymore, they just gossip.

“I won’t uncross my legs”: The ‘fluctuating centre’ of hysteria

“Augustine” is not her name:  she was named by the institution. At 15, Augustine was left at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in 1875 by her mother; she had already endured the brutality of sexual abuse throughout her young life. Augustine’s “hysterical attacks” had begun at the age of thirteen when, according to her testimony, she had been raped by her employer, a man who was also her mother’s lover.  When admitting her to Dr. Jean Martin Charcot’s “care,” Augustine stated that her perpetrator had threatened her with a razor (De Marneffe 88).

Musée de la civilisation, bibliothèque du Séminaire de Québec, fonds ancien.

I found Augustine in an essay by Elaine Showalter. She was mentioned briefly as an example of the cultural (re)production of the Shakespearean figure of Ophelia. Instead of reading through the passage, I paused to ask a simple, and as it turns out complex, question:  who are you?  Reading Augustine as a victim would have been possible; however, it would then not have allowed me to extend how I might begin to understand or hear what she might have been saying.  Her documented “hysterical” outbursts in her household were her objections to domestic violence, and her contained, managed and documented hysteria in response to the brutality and humilation she endured, along with 5,000 other girls and women, within another institution (the asylum),  I read as a discourse of resistance.

The project came to life as Tatiana and I walked home one winter’s night in Montreal:  we were talking about, oddly enough, hysteria.  We began to imagine, as the snow fell, three vertical frames that would be projected onto a wall and represent a figure’s response to Charcot’s violent reinvention of hysteria while he was director at the Salpêtrière asylum for  women in France. The figure inside each of the projected border-frames depicts the intra-activity, enfolding, and struggle with object, other, and self.

"Invention of Hysteria" by George Didi-Huberman

Our preoccupation with hysteria and how, as an ideology, it is associated with the body through varying forms of social and medical performances, could be combined through the disciplines of theatre and video art to explore the scenographic and the spatial, among others, and their relationships to power and agency.  What does hysteria mean?  How is it possible to represent hysteria when we have come to know it only through representations?  How can we translate the untranslatable? How could theatre provide a space to articulate the struggle held within these questions and potentially open “the word” for further inquiry?  These are the questions we continue to ask.

“The sign,” as Jacques Derrida asserts, “represents the present in its absence … .When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign ….The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence” (9).  In a similar way, Artaud speaks about the struggle of language when deciphering life:  “When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach” (13).  A young girl named Augustine, therefore, is both Derrida’s “deferred” and Artaud’s “fluctuating center.”  For the installation, we are exploring, in different ways, the language found in theatre or, as Artaud suggests, “that which is half-way between gesture and thought” (89). As an iconic image of hysteria, Augustine was entered into medical discourse through Shakespeare, theatre and images, and those symbols still feed into how we come understand the “signs” that detour us from that which can never be reached – the being of hysteria, resistance and ourselves.

Charcot used patients like Augustine to represent hysteria to international audiences including physicians, writers, artists, scientists, and scholars.  All patient interviews were transcribed.  It is in Charcot’s transcriptions of Augustine, where he represents her in his “theatre of medicine” as Ophelia-like, that her uncontained silence reveals her explicit resistance to his scientific model of hysteria.  This is where I heard Augustine’s resistance: in her found monologue, a young woman resisting the institution of medicine:

"Je Suis Augustine" by Sorouja Moll and Tatiana Koroleva (actor: Myriam Suchet)

What do you know about medicine? … I don’t want to feel you near me!

Augustine’s hysteria was a disruption of a patriarchal and institutionalized force that unified a discoursive structure which continues to govern how the female body is represented.  The video installation is an attempt to open the opportunity to discuss how the intra-disciplinary practice of theatre and video art, as well as its historical and contemporary architecture could be disrupted to a/effect space, location, geography on character/actor/identity; how historical locations remains spatially present; how borders, borderlands, and liminality in theatre/performance is a process of resistance against the violence of institutional geography, history, religion, borders, and ultimately leads to, when recognized, the (re) construction of sovereign forces and engagement among the performing present absent body and space.

"Je Suis Augustine" by Sorouja Moll and Tatiana Koroleva (actor: Myriam Suchet)

I won’t uncross my legs! … Oh! You really did hurt me ….

No, you won’t manage! … Help! … Camel! Lout! Good-for-nothing! …

Pardon me!  Pardon me, Monsieur!  Leave me alone …. It’s impossible! …

(IPS, 11:146-146) [1]

"Je Suis Augustine" by Sorouja Moll and Tatiana Koroleva (actor: Myriam Suchet)

After years of being held against her will by Charcot and after her many attempts to escape the institution, one morning Augustine dressed herself as a man and walked out of the front doors of the asylum into the streets of Paris.

---

[1] Didi-Huberman, Georges. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere. Massachusetts: MIT, 1982. 83.

Tactics of Paper: Going Analogue in a Virtual World

On December 16th the activist group Anonymous set out to support Wikileaks and its anti censorship / whistle blowing campaign by encouraging the public to take to the streets and paper the protest. Aptly named Operation Paperstorm, the group is utilizing, as their spectacle’s banner, the ironic play on the Bush-era lingo that classified (to the point of absurdity) each military attack led by the US and the UK on Iraq: Operation Desert Storm, Operation FRICTION (the passive yet uppercased Canadian offering), Operation Shield, and a personal favourite, Operation Calm.

This alternative media tactic is hardly new yet remains an arguably radical intervention in a socially cyborgic milieu in which the virtues of the “the paperless” and “the virtual” are extolled. Plainly stated, alternative forms of media interrupt the familiar with the unfamiliar – here, a piece of paper. The language of “tactic” is rooted in a militaristic discourse and “is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.” In other words, the sovereign doesn’t see it coming (de Certeau, 169).

The work that Anonymous is tactically applying is recognized by Michel de Certeau in “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics”:

… they subverted them from within – not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that occurred as well), but by many different ways of using them in the service of rules, customs, or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape. They metaphorized the dominant order; they made it function in another register … they diverted without leaving it (165).

The BBC has indicated that Anonymous have not only been translating the papering effort into different languages, but will also do a “drop” of sorts when citizens will be at their consumptive best – the Christmas shopping frenzy.

The art of “pulling tricks” involves a sense of the opportunities afforded by a particular occasion. Through procedures that Freud makes explicit with reference to wit, a tactic bodily juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer (de Certeau, 169).

The group’s ID is not without meaning: the word “anonymous,” appearing in the early seventeenth century, is from Greek anonymos or “without a name” and the activists use its disenfranchisement from the authorized social bracket of “being named” to its advantage. When considering Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” or that which is outside of the law, Anonymous is asserting a counterforce as “bare life” against the sovereign militarist state with its public dissemination of classified information while remaining within its guileful ruse of anonymity. Nice one.

Power is indeed everywhere (Foucault, History of Sexuality).

OED: from “acid jazz” to “zero tolerance” …

apple anagram arm animal aphid articulate ample analogy ace anamorphic 1884 marked the completion of the letter “A” of the Oxford English Dictionary otherwise fondly known by Scrabble players, crossword doers, spelling-challenged students as the “OED.” The “A” volume was published while researchers worked feverishly through “B.”

Bill Bryson, in 1990, commented that “no other language has anything even remotely approaching (the OED) in scope. Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.”

The commentary is interesting, especially when considering how “history” is filtered into a linguist container.  It is a process of seeking knowledge in the world, this naming of phenomena that would otherwise be unrecoginized. As Hegel notes in the Philosophy of the Mind: “This is that.” But what “this” gets left out of what “that”?

Only one word was ever actually lost during the 70 years it took to complete the First Edition, according to Simon Winchester: bondmaid, an old term to describe young female slaves. It had appeared in Johnson’s groundbreaking dictionary in the 1750s, but James Murray mislaid it among the millions of slips of paper that filled a crowded study he called his Scriptorium. The oversight wasn’t noticed until after the volume Battentlie – Bozzom had been published, and bondmaid had to wait decades until the rest of the dictionary was completed before editors could find a spot for it. The word finally showed up in the OED’s first supplement, printed in 1933. (CBC)

James Murray in his Scriptorium

Again, interesting and just to throw a wrench into the celebratory hoopla over “A”:  In the Faustian desire to control the order of things from “A” to “Z,” what and whose history gets “mislaid”? How, as Hayden White argues, “can we be sure that words really designate the things they are meant to signify?

But what “life,” “labour,” and “language” are is nothing but what the relationship presumed to exist between words and things permits them to appear to be in a given age (White, “Foucault Decoded” 257)

In the misplacing of the “bondmaid,” does it not metaphorically reflects the social negation of the lives of enslaved women and girls?

Latest OED edition includes:
browser channel surf click control freak dot com double click duh dumb down feelgood factor full monty functional food genetically modified home page hypertext link newsgroup pay-per-view quality time road rage search engine serial killer serial monogamist slacker snail mail spam urban myth video-on-demand webmeister acid jazz to … zero tolerance

nineteenthcenturygirl in 2010

… there is a clementine, a cup of green jasmine tea, two cats, and the word Trauerspiel. From this odd catalogue, I’d like to begin with the “mourning play” because, well, I think it is as good a place as any to begin.  In “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” Walter Benjamin describes Trauerspiel as being unlike Tragedy which is rooted in myth, and instead finds its difference by being grounded in history (16).  But what exactly is the work that needs to be done to separate the mythical out from the historical or the transcendental from the material?  This blog is not necessarily rooted in the 19th century, but it is a site of rupture from which oranges, tea, and the feral, as well as other possible tangents might emerge…

“The drama, more than any other literary form, needs a resonance of history” (48)

And don’t get me wrong, I agree that this would seem, at first glance,  a rather morose way to send off a blog on its initial voyage:  “go and play in sorrow and stuff!”  But of course there’s more going on here.  Benjamin insists that Tragedy is performed in silence whereas the Baroque Trauerspiel is anything but that : it’s rather noisy.  Tragedy does not need an audience.  Trauerspiel demands one.  What happens when the silence sewn up in Tragedy is ripped open to reveal all the historical threads?  More directly:  to hear them:  “For how justified are we in accepting that what people describe as tragic as tragic” (38). What happens to Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar when they are read through this Baroque lens, as Benjamin suggests? And further, what happens when these plays and their ubiquitous themes (power, betrayal, and love) are adapted into 19th century media, People magazine, in trial and state execution transcripts, and detention sites, etc; what happens when the sovereign and beast are no longer dichotomized but are one?  What does the Trauerspiel, in its very “primal leap” into being or Ursprung, give us access to?

Indeed this is where the task of the investigator begins, for [they] cannot regard such a fact as certain until its innermost structure appears to be so essential as to reveal it as an origin (46).

And for Benjamin, as for Foucault, Dilthey, Derrida, Spivak, and for all curious and questioning beings:  this is an endless task …