Punctum metro passes

The timing for this particular assignment comes at a rather uncanny point in my own Ph.D. application process. I can’t help but think of this notion of “collection” and “materiality” in my own relationship to presenting a sort of archive of my academic and personal life. I went to a book talk the other day with Kaja Silverman on her new book Flesh of my Flesh. I’ve only had a chance to glance through the introduction, but some of the more memorable moments of her talk centered on this notion of self and her own relationship as a theorist and spectator/participant to her work. In her own search through the Berkeley Art History archives, Silverman also opened up a very “real” approach in having a personal stake in the materials and artists she has come in contact with. It’s a seemingly simple concept. However, I am constantly reminded of my “place” within a theoretical investigation, and this element of the personal in creating a space for my academic development.


So, I know the personal is deeply “looked down” upon in the world of academia or near past of academia, and I try not to be too much of an offender, but I felt the homework assignment allows for this space- this collection or rather embodiment of the personal (that’s why we blog, right?). So, here I am theorizing the personal.


I lived in Prague for a year after finishing up my undergrad work. I took very few pictures during my time there. More so, my actual “documentation” consisted of a journal, postcards, and receipts of my public transportation travels throughout city. Evoking the language of photography from Roland Barthes, perhaps the resistance of my own personal picture taking lay in this impossibility in understanding this notion of “punctum.” Barthes is able to “prick” or rather, feel this prick of the picture from his viewing position in relation to the image as an object. In many ways, the image transforms the notion of inanimate objects, to something felt alive and “experienced” in the flesh of the viewer/participant. Kaja Silverman goes into more detail about this position and specificity of photography within her book. Barthes poses to himself and addresses his mother through an essential question: “Did I recognize her?” In essence, Barthes asks this question in relation to his own being or pre-history on earth (his ability/inability in recognizing his mother before his own existence). It’s a strange thing being in the present position of the picture taker and consumer/observer. I realize Barthes notion of the “punctum” is always after-the-fact in a sense of both capturing a moment, and giving (or feeling) the details of the image as a product. In personalizing this question, did I or could I in fact, recognize myself as the documenter- a spectre of myself? Did I even “want” to recognize myself in this act of documentation? As an expat and English teacher? In a strange sense, holding those travel receipts, marked in one-day and week-long passes continues to evoke this stranger, and a stronger sense of self in my experience of moving through the passages of a city- my body riding the escalator, rubbing shoulders with “strangers”, the act of traveling between teaching venues/schools, and the constant unraveling my own forgetting. It’s not even the dates on the passes that remind of particular moments (which I could never figure out where the Metro Police looked in determining if the pass had in fact “expired”). It’s a similar sense of remembering in looking through my various English-language lessons, notes, student’s written work and drawings. I feel a strong sense of my once present state in laboring over lesson plans- at one time a currency in my own employability as an English instructor.


I am curious about this need, or rather, obsession with documentation. In our readings for the week, this notion of the archive and its linguistic roots in “secrecy” and privacy as described by Rolena Adorno. Adorno is more interested in a scholarly relationship between the University and the royal archive, including a layering and collection of knowledge. As with Lucas Hilderbrand’s text surrounding Youtube and cultural memory, there is also an underlying theme in renegotiating the bounds of an accessible internet site, and looking more closely as how privacy is accessed through a public domain.


The element of language becomes even more important in borrowing from Derrida this “quasi-illiteracy” of images with a textual analysis. This “in-between” space emerges (as discussed throughout this semester) in categorizing within the archive (and being able to effectively “search” through it). So, coming back to my own ideas around the archive and my time spent in Prague, I could never fully “collect” myself while living there (not to overly romanticize). I remember my cousin came to visit me while I was there and ended up making a “photo album” on facebook of the experience. I never managed to download one of my own, though. At the time, I didn’t think about it. It’s funny looking at the pictures now- I recognize landmarks (the Prague castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town area, the streets surrounding my neighborhood in Andel). I see my cousin and I, posed like many similar tourist pictures, occupying a sense of Prague.


There are visual markers, cues that cause me to reflect upon my time there, in that moment. It is also this inability in recognizing myself positioned within Prague. In many ways, I think back on my “unofficial” status as an undocumented worker. My language school paid me in cash once a month. No receipts. No documentation of my 60 plus hour workweeks. In many ways, like I’ve attempted to address earlier in this ramble of a post, my presence never could be fully recognized by the Czech government, including my own positioning in the sub-culture of English teachers in Prague. I never “belonged” and not that I desired or refused this sense of connection, but perhaps I could sense this transitory existence, my own replacement in an endless crop of expat English teachers.


So, hear I am left with dozens of metro receipts, all in various increments of Czech crowns. I can’t seem to throw them out. It’s my collection. Maybe the closest thing to remembering myself three years ago.