benjamin understood it as the aura, that singular trembling of the authentic thing in its particular place and time, the jetzt of it, the hereness, and what he could not have anticipated, writing in the long shadow of fascism's aestheticization of politics, was that we would eventually aestheticize not politics but the self, would turn the apparatus of reproduction upon the irreproducible interior and find there, to our bewilderment, nothing that reproduced cleanly.

because the copy produces no aura at all. we knew this and yet we proceeded anyway.

ONE~ i am thinking about ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual thing, the way homer stops the iliad cold to describe achilles' shield, eighteen months of war suspended while the poet enumerates the scenes hammered into bronze. the dancing-floor, the city besieged, the cattle moving toward the river. the shield does not advance the plot. what moves us is the representation of a representation, a poem about a shield about a world. keats understood this same seduction differently, that the urn arrests its figures mid-pursuit precisely so the pursuit can be eternal. heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / are sweeter. the unrecorded moment was always theoretically the more perfect one.

and yet we recorded anyway.

now we hold the phone up at the concert. we watch the concert through the concert. the mediation is not incidental to the experience. it is the experience, or has become indistinguishable from it, which amounts to the same displacement.

"all that was once directly lived has moved away into a representation." — debord, the society of the spectacle, 1967

TWO~ rilke in the first elegy: wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der engel ordnungen?

who, if i cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels*?

we have not solved the problem of audience, but we have multiplied it into abstraction, scattered it across servers in nevada and singapore, made of the beloved listener a statistical distribution, a demographic, a reach. and yet it was never really about being heard. it was about the quality of attention, the act of crying out forced upon the crier. the elegy educates the elegist. the document documents the documenter.

debord called it the spectacle, not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images, and we have since turned it inward, become the society and the spectacle of ourselves simultaneously. this is not a critique. it is closer to a diagnosis, and even that word implies a physician standing somewhere outside the condition, which no one is.

"the photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno." — sontag, on photography, 1977

THREE~ there is a didi-huberman argument about the image, that it does not represent the past but haunts the present, the photograph less a capture than an apparition. the dead man in the daguerreotype is not so preserved, no he is returning. his gaze arrives fresh each viewing, his specific aliveness, so the cut of the collar, the uncertainty at the corner of the mouth, more present for being permanently stilled.

barthes called it the punctum. the wound. the detail that breaks the surface of the image and reaches for you uninvited, the way certain memories do. not the ones you tended, but the ones that come anyway.

what then of the selfie, a daguerreotype of the still-living? when we scroll back to the self of three octobers ago, she looks back from the wrong side of a lesser time. her gaze is not yet elegiac. she does not know what we know. this is not poignant in any simple way, it is more structural than that, more troubling, we have made ourselves into primary sources for a history we are still living, assembled the archive before the events have resolved into meaning.

the estate built before the death. the retrospective while the painter still has paint on her hands.

"the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory." — baudrillard, simulacra and simulation, 1981

FOUR~ woolf kept the diary with the obsessive fidelity of a naturalist logging a species that might not survive the season. what she understood, and recorded, and therefore partially undermined, was that the self is not a thing but a practice, a daily renewal, something that must be picked up each morning and reinhabited. what the camera cannot hold is the practice. it holds only the evidence, and evidence of a practice is not a practice.

but we are now a civilization that has confused the record for the event so thoroughly that the confusion is no longer clearly confusion. it has become post-post-structural. we live in the perpetual present tense of our own metadata, tagged by location, device, the algorithm's confident inference about our emotional register. baudrillard would have called it the hyperreal. he was not wrong. he was only early, and perhaps too French about it, too eager for the theoretical sublime of total simulation, when the actual texture of the thing is more banal. a woman photographing soup.

the soup is not the point.

the soup had only ever been the point the way baudrillard wanted.

"i am not sure that i exist, actually. i am all the writers that i have read, all the people that i have met, all the women that i have loved; all the cities i have visited." — borges

FIVE~ what we wanted was to be known. augustine wanted it, our heart is restless until it rests in thee, and the thee was not incidental, was precisely the one who already knew everything and went on anyway. levinas built an entire ethics on the face of the other as the site of infinite demand, the encounter with an alterity that cannot be reduced to use. i am not your mirror, the face says. i am not your content.

we have outsourced our conceptions of longing to infrastructure.

the infrastructure does not love us. this is its appeal and its poverty. the warmth of a heat lamp, adequate and consistent and nothing like a body.

what remains is the wanting itself, which is not a small thing, and not a new thing, and not, despite everything, a diminished one. the technology is new. the need is so old it precedes language, precedes the photograph, precedes even the cave wall and the hand pressed against it in ochre:

i was here.

the first sentence anyone ever wrote, appearing again, different, at the same frequency.

we have not changed what we are asking. we have only changed what we ask it of.

and the cattle move toward the river.

-N

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