Presence of Mind
“Presence of mind” operates as an intoxicantbecause it exteriorizes the mind, removing from the gambler’s perception of mind the notion of a centralized intention. In essence, the gameintoxicates the gambler by perforating (SEE DELEUZIAN NOTION OF HOLEY SPACE) his/her boundaries and exposing him/her, indeed making him/her, something other, extending his locus to the exterior conditions that dictate the outcomes of the game: namely, the rules. (COMPARE DERRIDA’S PHARMAKON AND THE HEALING/POISONING POWER OF LANGUAGE). The gambler becomes the rules by abiding by them, by allowing his actions to be transformed by the rules as he observes them, by allowing the structure to direct the flows of his movements. DEVELOP.
“The wager is a means of conferring shock value on events, of loosing them from the contexts of experience” (AP 513): One’s wager may vary in personal significance—though it must be significant to some degree, lest it not be a wager at all: a small stack of jettons,(sp?) a week’s pay, or perhaps the cataclysmic cost of self-undoing and irreconcilable debt. Regardless of the player’s intentions, whether he “steers toward absolute ruin” [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP] [THINK “ZERO” (DOSTOYEVSKY) AS GOAL in that complete ruin “causes the dice to fall back” (Deleuze) so that the singularity of the dice throw can start all over again] or aspires to “money—in other words, immediate infinite possibility” [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP], the winner’s prize is always the same: delight as it is defined by Edmund Burke: “the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger” (On the Sublime and Beautiful). PERHAPS ANOTHER DEFINITION Delight in this sense is in many ways comparable to the satisfaction of lust, in so far as lust may be regarded as the painful sensation brought forth by an extended and unrequited pursuit of a desired object—the objective of the game [THINK HUNTING and PURSUIT], which Benjamin notes in his chapter on Gambling and Prostitution: compares the elation of the winner “with the expression of love by a woman who has been truly satisfied by a man” (AP 298). It is no coincidence that he couples the type of the gambler with the type of the prostitute. For Benjamin, and for those he choses to include in his collection, The Arcades Project, gambling is erotic in nature: “‘The passion for gambling thus serves an autoerotic satisfaction, wherein betting is foreplay, winning is orgasm, and losing is ejaculation, defecation, and castration.’ Edmund Bergler, ‘Zur Psychologie des Hasardspielers,’ Imago, 22, no. 4 (1936), pp. 409-410.” (AP 510).
[INXS: only know limits by crossing them]
“The wager is a means of conferring shock value on events, of loosing them from the contexts of experience” (AP 513): One’s wager may vary in personal significance—though it must be significant to some degree, lest it not be a wager at all: a small stack of jettons,(sp?) a week’s pay, or perhaps the cataclysmic cost of self-undoing and irreconcilable debt. Regardless of the player’s intentions, whether he “steers toward absolute ruin” [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP] [THINK “ZERO” (DOSTOYEVSKY) AS GOAL in that complete ruin “causes the dice to fall back” (Deleuze) so that the singularity of the dice throw can start all over again] or aspires to “money—in other words, immediate infinite possibility” [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP], the winner’s prize is always the same: delight as it is defined by Edmund Burke: “the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger” (On the Sublime and Beautiful). PERHAPS ANOTHER DEFINITION Delight in this sense is in many ways comparable to the satisfaction of lust, in so far as lust may be regarded as the painful sensation brought forth by an extended and unrequited pursuit of a desired object—the objective of the game [THINK HUNTING and PURSUIT], which Benjamin notes in his chapter on Gambling and Prostitution: compares the elation of the winner “with the expression of love by a woman who has been truly satisfied by a man” (AP 298). It is no coincidence that he couples the type of the gambler with the type of the prostitute. For Benjamin, and for those he choses to include in his collection, The Arcades Project, gambling is erotic in nature: “‘The passion for gambling thus serves an autoerotic satisfaction, wherein betting is foreplay, winning is orgasm, and losing is ejaculation, defecation, and castration.’ Edmund Bergler, ‘Zur Psychologie des Hasardspielers,’ Imago, 22, no. 4 (1936), pp. 409-410.” (AP 510).
[INXS: only know limits by crossing them]
The end of the game is marked by the player’s catching up with the object of his pursuit, an object with two equally sought after faces: the affirmation of gain and negation of loss. However, in both states, the gambler receives an answer, which is itself always an affirmation of the game and his/her involvement in it. Winning ends the pain in a sensation of delight; losing ends it with sublime astonishment. In either case, the effect affirms the active life—the life that casts the die in the present moment—as opposed to the life that interprets or predicts the numbers that fall. Note the manner in which this passagefrom The Arcades Project sets the active life in opposition to the contemplative life:
“The artists of the Middle Ages depict those men who pursue an active life as bound to the wheel of fortune, ascending or descending according to the direction in which it turns, while the contemplative man remains immobile at the center.” P.-M. Schuhl, Machinism et philosophie (Paris 1938), p. 30. (AP 800)
This passage is from Convolute “m” [Idleness]. Stillness and centeredness are the qualities of the contemplative man, while the active man is tossed about by the events in which he is engaged, woven like fabric into the very structures of life (i.e.: the spokes of the wheel).
“The artists of the Middle Ages depict those men who pursue an active life as bound to the wheel of fortune, ascending or descending according to the direction in which it turns, while the contemplative man remains immobile at the center.” P.-M. Schuhl, Machinism et philosophie (Paris 1938), p. 30. (AP 800)
This passage is from Convolute “m” [Idleness]. Stillness and centeredness are the qualities of the contemplative man, while the active man is tossed about by the events in which he is engaged, woven like fabric into the very structures of life (i.e.: the spokes of the wheel).
CLOSE READ ABOVE PASSAGE So the interesting question becomes, which man should you be according to Benjamin? (Centers . . . Copernicus . . . Rhizome. . .), the life that stakes, takes risks, and bears the consequences of “fate”.
To gamble is to forfeit time’s role in the equation.
TRANSITION The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that time will even things out; the gambler’s intoxication is the delight brought forth by the removal of the painful pressure of tensing uncertainty stretched ever more tightly across a forever expanding temporal abyss. Gambler’s Fallacy as false pattern recognition:
“‘The basic principle . . . of gambling . . . consists in this: . . . that each round is independent of the one preceding. . . . Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions, all antecedents . . . pointing to previous actions; and that is what distinguishes it from work. Gambling rejects . . . this weighty past which is the mainstay of work, and which makes for seriousness of purpose, for attention to the long term, for right, and for power. . . . The idea of beginning again, . . . and of doing better, . . . occurs often to one for whom work is a struggle; but the idea is useless, . . . and one must stumble on with insufficient results.’ Alain <Emile-August Chartier>, Les Idees et les ages <Paris, 1927>, vol. 1, pp. 183-184 (‘Le Jeu’).” (AP 512)
To gamble is to forfeit time’s role in the equation.
TRANSITION The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that time will even things out; the gambler’s intoxication is the delight brought forth by the removal of the painful pressure of tensing uncertainty stretched ever more tightly across a forever expanding temporal abyss. Gambler’s Fallacy as false pattern recognition:
“‘The basic principle . . . of gambling . . . consists in this: . . . that each round is independent of the one preceding. . . . Gambling strenuously denies all acquired conditions, all antecedents . . . pointing to previous actions; and that is what distinguishes it from work. Gambling rejects . . . this weighty past which is the mainstay of work, and which makes for seriousness of purpose, for attention to the long term, for right, and for power. . . . The idea of beginning again, . . . and of doing better, . . . occurs often to one for whom work is a struggle; but the idea is useless, . . . and one must stumble on with insufficient results.’ Alain <Emile-August Chartier>, Les Idees et les ages <Paris, 1927>, vol. 1, pp. 183-184 (‘Le Jeu’).” (AP 512)
– connect to Gertrude Stein’s word games and the idea of beginning again and again. Language is not a closed system. [ANOTHER CHAPTER, PERHAPS] The problem with the gambler’s fallacy lies in the belief in some larger structure—a limitable, contained structure in which statistics and probabilistic models prove themselves, in the long run, to be true. In essence, the Gambler’s Fallacy is a belief in a Transcental Signified, a grand narrative in which all the numbers submit to probabilistic models, a world where math is truth; and perhaps that is why Fortuna is given the status of a god:
“It gives and takes away; its logic is not our logic. It is dumb and blind and deaf. It is almighty. It is a God. . . . It has its votaries and its saints, who love it for itself, not for what it promises, and who fall down in adoration when its blow strikes them. It strips them ruthlessly, and they lay the blame on themselves, not on their duty. ‘I played (AP 498) a bad game,’ they say. They find fault with themselves; they do not blaspheme their God.” Anatole France, Le Jardin d’Epicure (Paris), pp. 15-18” (AP 499)
Time is the great leveler of victories.
Consider Benjamin’s reference to Anatole France in The Arcades Project in his Konvolute on Prostitution and Gambling:
“It gives and takes away; its logic is not our logic. It is dumb and blind and deaf. It is almighty. It is a God. . . . It has its votaries and its saints, who love it for itself, not for what it promises, and who fall down in adoration when its blow strikes them. It strips them ruthlessly, and they lay the blame on themselves, not on their duty. ‘I played (AP 498) a bad game,’ they say. They find fault with themselves; they do not blaspheme their God.” Anatole France, Le Jardin d’Epicure (Paris), pp. 15-18” (AP 499)
Time is the great leveler of victories.
Consider Benjamin’s reference to Anatole France in The Arcades Project in his Konvolute on Prostitution and Gambling:
“Well, what is gambling, I should like to know, but the art of producing in a second the changes that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years, the art of collecting into a single instant the emotions dispersed throughout the slot-moving existence of ordinary men, the secret of living a whole lifetime in a few minutes—in a word, the genie’s ball of thread? Gambling is a hand-to-hand encounter with Fate. . . . “(AP 499).
“The fascination of danger is at the bottom of all great passions. There is no fullness of pleasure unless the precipice is near. It is the mingling of terror with delight that intoxicates. And what more terrifying than gambling?” (AP 499).
It is no surprise that a collector of books and literary fragments such as Benjamin (who wrote his thesis on Romanticism [find specific ref.] ) would choose for his prize collection of quotations, random thoughts, and aphorisms such “types” as the flâneur and the gambler when both figures are motivated by the same force: the same force that motivates himself: _______???______
(Threshold? The terror of crossing into a new zone, an unbeknownst until now territory—a smooth space) CLOSE READ ABOVE PASSAGE. To gamble is to step out of chronological time, (KAIROS) to disjoint oneself from the economic flow as it is perceived by those who see themselves partaking of a system that rewards hard work, patience, and frugality, a system that promises to pay off at life’s end [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP], if not in life, in the spoils of the afterlife awaiting the believer. Yet it is hard to say whether gambling as a phenomenon is an alternative to or intensification of the economic structure it appears to undermine.
In other words, the question in the case of the gambler, when he is considered in the context of some of Benjamin’s other types such as the flâneur, the collector, or the prostitute, concerns whether or not and if so to what degree and by what or whose hand the gambler been led astray? For the gambler must, according to Benjamin, always be present . . . but where he is present becomes the question:
13. The secret of success does not lie in the mind; it is revealed by language itself in the term ‘presence of mind.’ The question is not whether mind is present, or what form it takes, but only where it is. That it happens to be present here, at this very moment, is possible only if it enters into a person's intonation, his smile, his conversational pauses, his gaze, or his gestures. For only the body can generate presence of mind. And in the case of the highly successful person, the body keeps such a tight rein on the reserves of the mind that the latter seldom has the opportunity to let off fireworks. This explains why the success achieved by financial wizards in their careers is of the same kind as that of an Abbé Galiani in the salon. For nowadays, as Lenin has remarked, what must be overcome are not people, but things. This is the source of that dullness which so often characterizes the presence of mind of great captains of industry.”
Presence of mind is the effect of expanding the mind to include the body and its triggers as well as all of those things to which those triggers are linked. The gambler becomes the gameroom—the table, all the people in it, the chips, the odds, the rules, the cheaters. This is why Benjamin says that the true aim of the gambler or the primary force that motivates him is the:
“essentially narcissistic and aggressive desires for omnipotence. These, insofar as they are not immediately linked to directly erotic desires, are characterized by a greater temporal radius of extension. A direct desire for coitus may, through orgasm, be satisfied more rapidly than the narcissist-aggressive desire for omnipotence. The fact that genital sexuality, in even the most favorable cases, leaves a residue of dissatisfaction goes back, in turn, to three facts: not all pregenital desires, such as later are subsidiary to genitality, can be accommodated in coitus; and from the standpoint of the Oedipus complex, the object is always a surrogate. Together with these two . . . considerations goes . . . the fact that the impossibility of acting out large scale unconscious aggression contributes to the lack of satisfaction. The aggression abreacted in coitus is very much domesticated. . . . Thus it happens that the narcissistic and aggressive fiction of omnipotence becomes above all a cause of suffering (INTOXICATED/POSIONED BY IT): whoever on that account has experienced the mechanism of pleasure as abreacted in games of chance, and possessing, as it were, eternal value, succumbs the more readily to it in proportion as he is committed to the ‘neurotic pleasure in duration’ (Pfeifer); and, as a consequence of pregenital fixations, he is less able to assimilate such pleasure to normal sexuality. . . . It should also be borne in mind that, according to Freud, the sexuality of human beings bears the stamp of a function that dwindles, whereas this cannot in any way be predicated of the aggressive and narcissistic tendencies.’ Edmund Bergler, ‘Zur Psychologie des Hasardspielers,’ Imago, 22, no. 4 (1936), pp. 438-440.” (AP 510)
“The proscription of gambling could have its deepest roots in the fact that a natural gift of humanity, one which directed toward the highest objects, elevates the human being beyond himself, only drags him down when applied to one of the meanest objects: money. The gift in question is presence of mind. Its highest manifestation is the reading that in each case is divinatory.” (AP 513)
His intoxication is in the indiscernability from what the gambler believes to be his mind and the material world it filters: Heidegger’s BESTAND. It is in this way that arcades and gaming rooms are connected—call upon Canetti’s crowd stuff, Dostoevsky’s description of the crowd from The Gambler. Get into Deleuzian stuff. The figure of the gambler in relation to Deleuze’s rhizome and the concept of constellations—the “type” as being a constellation
(or superstitions: The capitalist whose fortune is tied up in stocks and bonds, which are subject to variations in market value and yield for which he does not understand the causes, is a professional gambler. The gambler, however, . . . . is a supremely superstitious being. The habitués of gambling casinos always possess magic formulas to conjure the Fates. One will mutter a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua or some other spirit of the heavens; another will place his bet only if a certain color has won; while a third holds a rabbit’s foot in his left hand; and so on. The inexplicable in society envelops the bourgeois, as the inexplicable in nature the savage.’ Paul Lafargu, “Die Ursachen des Gottesglaubens,” Die neue Zeit, 24, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1906), p.512.” (AP 497))
making device…types can both serve as a means of reducing complex characters into the bare essentials necessary to navigate between them—and as a mask or disguise that enables a person to have control of the type of feedback they are sure to encounter. Types as masks. Lily Bart
Benjamin in his essay “Notes of a Theory of Gambling” equates the gambler’s mindset with unadulterated innervation, unmediated by the sense of sight. It is the body that knows, not the intellect or the eye and the body is without limits when the superficial limits it is trained to perceive are discarded and it extends itself, the "prosthetizing" the world like a spider in its web. The reading that goes on at a gambling table is commensurate with telekinesis as opposed to telepathy:
Certain matters are clear. What is decisive is the level of motor innervation, and the more emancipated it is from optical perception, the more decisive it is. From this stems a principal commandment for gamblers: they must use their hands sparingly, in order to respond to the slightest innervations. The gambler’s basic approach must, so to speak, adumbrate the subtlest network of inhibitions, which lets only the most minute and unassuming innervations pass through its meshes. (From: Walter Benjamin’s “Notes of a Theory of Gambling” (Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol 2 1927-1934 297)
Benjamin writes in Konvolute “m”, “Idleness”,
“Whoever enjoys leisure [an opportunity--The state of having time at one's own disposal; time which one can spend as one pleases; free or unoccupied time] escapes Fortuna; whoever embraces idleness [The state or condition of being idle or unoccupied; want of occupation; habitual avoidance of work, inactivity, indolence; an instance of this] falls under her power” (AP 800).
–TRANS, MAKE CONNECTION…--Thus, the game [An amusement, diversion, pastime] is always one of seduction—a conscious detour through a forbidden secondary structure.
The happiness of the winner: the winner’s highly remarkable feeling of elation, of being regarded by fate, of having seized control of destiny. Comparison with the expression of love by a woman who has been truly satisfied by a man. Money and property, normally the most massive and cumbersome things, here come directly from the hands of fate, as if they were the caressing response to a perfect embrace. –Furthermore, one should note the factor of danger, which is the most important factor in gambling, alongside pleasure (the pleasure of betting on the right number). It arises not so much from the threat of losing as from that of not winning. The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the fateful category of arriving ‘too late,’ of having ‘missed the opportunity.’ We could learn something from this about the character of the gambler as a type. –Last, the best that has thus far been written about gambling focuses on the factor of acceleration, acceleration and danger. What Anatole France has said on pages 14ff. of Le jardin d’Epicure [The Garden of Epicurus] must be combined with what has been noted here: gambling generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick process of stimulation at the moment of danger, the marginal case in which presence of mind becomes divination—that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments in life. (AP 298)
Benjamin's comparisson of gambling to lightning: find Nietzsche quote about lightening--find was it Longinus' def of the sublime that makes it a lightening bolt? Think frankenstein...can't remember ref. Shock, danger, divine inspiration, Zeuse, danger, chance encounter with ultimate destructive force of life and death.
“The ideal of the shock engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe. This becomes very clear in gambling: by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin.” (AP 515)
Steering toward absolute “ruin” à Romanticist trope – Benjamin’s diss/the “wreckage” of the past and temporally-signified materila à i.e. Deleuzian “Transcendental Materialism”. Tragedy as pre-designed "ruins".
“The fascination of danger is at the bottom of all great passions. There is no fullness of pleasure unless the precipice is near. It is the mingling of terror with delight that intoxicates. And what more terrifying than gambling?” (AP 499).
It is no surprise that a collector of books and literary fragments such as Benjamin (who wrote his thesis on Romanticism [find specific ref.] ) would choose for his prize collection of quotations, random thoughts, and aphorisms such “types” as the flâneur and the gambler when both figures are motivated by the same force: the same force that motivates himself: _______???______
(Threshold? The terror of crossing into a new zone, an unbeknownst until now territory—a smooth space) CLOSE READ ABOVE PASSAGE. To gamble is to step out of chronological time, (KAIROS) to disjoint oneself from the economic flow as it is perceived by those who see themselves partaking of a system that rewards hard work, patience, and frugality, a system that promises to pay off at life’s end [CHECK QUOTE—“G&P” in AP], if not in life, in the spoils of the afterlife awaiting the believer. Yet it is hard to say whether gambling as a phenomenon is an alternative to or intensification of the economic structure it appears to undermine.
In other words, the question in the case of the gambler, when he is considered in the context of some of Benjamin’s other types such as the flâneur, the collector, or the prostitute, concerns whether or not and if so to what degree and by what or whose hand the gambler been led astray? For the gambler must, according to Benjamin, always be present . . . but where he is present becomes the question:
13. The secret of success does not lie in the mind; it is revealed by language itself in the term ‘presence of mind.’ The question is not whether mind is present, or what form it takes, but only where it is. That it happens to be present here, at this very moment, is possible only if it enters into a person's intonation, his smile, his conversational pauses, his gaze, or his gestures. For only the body can generate presence of mind. And in the case of the highly successful person, the body keeps such a tight rein on the reserves of the mind that the latter seldom has the opportunity to let off fireworks. This explains why the success achieved by financial wizards in their careers is of the same kind as that of an Abbé Galiani in the salon. For nowadays, as Lenin has remarked, what must be overcome are not people, but things. This is the source of that dullness which so often characterizes the presence of mind of great captains of industry.”
Presence of mind is the effect of expanding the mind to include the body and its triggers as well as all of those things to which those triggers are linked. The gambler becomes the gameroom—the table, all the people in it, the chips, the odds, the rules, the cheaters. This is why Benjamin says that the true aim of the gambler or the primary force that motivates him is the:
“essentially narcissistic and aggressive desires for omnipotence. These, insofar as they are not immediately linked to directly erotic desires, are characterized by a greater temporal radius of extension. A direct desire for coitus may, through orgasm, be satisfied more rapidly than the narcissist-aggressive desire for omnipotence. The fact that genital sexuality, in even the most favorable cases, leaves a residue of dissatisfaction goes back, in turn, to three facts: not all pregenital desires, such as later are subsidiary to genitality, can be accommodated in coitus; and from the standpoint of the Oedipus complex, the object is always a surrogate. Together with these two . . . considerations goes . . . the fact that the impossibility of acting out large scale unconscious aggression contributes to the lack of satisfaction. The aggression abreacted in coitus is very much domesticated. . . . Thus it happens that the narcissistic and aggressive fiction of omnipotence becomes above all a cause of suffering (INTOXICATED/POSIONED BY IT): whoever on that account has experienced the mechanism of pleasure as abreacted in games of chance, and possessing, as it were, eternal value, succumbs the more readily to it in proportion as he is committed to the ‘neurotic pleasure in duration’ (Pfeifer); and, as a consequence of pregenital fixations, he is less able to assimilate such pleasure to normal sexuality. . . . It should also be borne in mind that, according to Freud, the sexuality of human beings bears the stamp of a function that dwindles, whereas this cannot in any way be predicated of the aggressive and narcissistic tendencies.’ Edmund Bergler, ‘Zur Psychologie des Hasardspielers,’ Imago, 22, no. 4 (1936), pp. 438-440.” (AP 510)
“The proscription of gambling could have its deepest roots in the fact that a natural gift of humanity, one which directed toward the highest objects, elevates the human being beyond himself, only drags him down when applied to one of the meanest objects: money. The gift in question is presence of mind. Its highest manifestation is the reading that in each case is divinatory.” (AP 513)
His intoxication is in the indiscernability from what the gambler believes to be his mind and the material world it filters: Heidegger’s BESTAND. It is in this way that arcades and gaming rooms are connected—call upon Canetti’s crowd stuff, Dostoevsky’s description of the crowd from The Gambler. Get into Deleuzian stuff. The figure of the gambler in relation to Deleuze’s rhizome and the concept of constellations—the “type” as being a constellation
(or superstitions: The capitalist whose fortune is tied up in stocks and bonds, which are subject to variations in market value and yield for which he does not understand the causes, is a professional gambler. The gambler, however, . . . . is a supremely superstitious being. The habitués of gambling casinos always possess magic formulas to conjure the Fates. One will mutter a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua or some other spirit of the heavens; another will place his bet only if a certain color has won; while a third holds a rabbit’s foot in his left hand; and so on. The inexplicable in society envelops the bourgeois, as the inexplicable in nature the savage.’ Paul Lafargu, “Die Ursachen des Gottesglaubens,” Die neue Zeit, 24, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1906), p.512.” (AP 497))
making device…types can both serve as a means of reducing complex characters into the bare essentials necessary to navigate between them—and as a mask or disguise that enables a person to have control of the type of feedback they are sure to encounter. Types as masks. Lily Bart
Benjamin in his essay “Notes of a Theory of Gambling” equates the gambler’s mindset with unadulterated innervation, unmediated by the sense of sight. It is the body that knows, not the intellect or the eye and the body is without limits when the superficial limits it is trained to perceive are discarded and it extends itself, the "prosthetizing" the world like a spider in its web. The reading that goes on at a gambling table is commensurate with telekinesis as opposed to telepathy:
Certain matters are clear. What is decisive is the level of motor innervation, and the more emancipated it is from optical perception, the more decisive it is. From this stems a principal commandment for gamblers: they must use their hands sparingly, in order to respond to the slightest innervations. The gambler’s basic approach must, so to speak, adumbrate the subtlest network of inhibitions, which lets only the most minute and unassuming innervations pass through its meshes. (From: Walter Benjamin’s “Notes of a Theory of Gambling” (Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol 2 1927-1934 297)
Benjamin writes in Konvolute “m”, “Idleness”,
“Whoever enjoys leisure [an opportunity--The state of having time at one's own disposal; time which one can spend as one pleases; free or unoccupied time] escapes Fortuna; whoever embraces idleness [The state or condition of being idle or unoccupied; want of occupation; habitual avoidance of work, inactivity, indolence; an instance of this] falls under her power” (AP 800).
–TRANS, MAKE CONNECTION…--Thus, the game [An amusement, diversion, pastime] is always one of seduction—a conscious detour through a forbidden secondary structure.
The happiness of the winner: the winner’s highly remarkable feeling of elation, of being regarded by fate, of having seized control of destiny. Comparison with the expression of love by a woman who has been truly satisfied by a man. Money and property, normally the most massive and cumbersome things, here come directly from the hands of fate, as if they were the caressing response to a perfect embrace. –Furthermore, one should note the factor of danger, which is the most important factor in gambling, alongside pleasure (the pleasure of betting on the right number). It arises not so much from the threat of losing as from that of not winning. The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the fateful category of arriving ‘too late,’ of having ‘missed the opportunity.’ We could learn something from this about the character of the gambler as a type. –Last, the best that has thus far been written about gambling focuses on the factor of acceleration, acceleration and danger. What Anatole France has said on pages 14ff. of Le jardin d’Epicure [The Garden of Epicurus] must be combined with what has been noted here: gambling generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick process of stimulation at the moment of danger, the marginal case in which presence of mind becomes divination—that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments in life. (AP 298)
Benjamin's comparisson of gambling to lightning: find Nietzsche quote about lightening--find was it Longinus' def of the sublime that makes it a lightening bolt? Think frankenstein...can't remember ref. Shock, danger, divine inspiration, Zeuse, danger, chance encounter with ultimate destructive force of life and death.
“The ideal of the shock engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe. This becomes very clear in gambling: by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin.” (AP 515)
Steering toward absolute “ruin” à Romanticist trope – Benjamin’s diss/the “wreckage” of the past and temporally-signified materila à i.e. Deleuzian “Transcendental Materialism”. Tragedy as pre-designed "ruins".
WHERE'S THE QUOTE that i'm talking about? What is interesting about this passage is that it appears beneath the heading “Prostitution, Gambling”, two seemingly unrelated practices that both find their charm in imagined outcomes, libidinal investments, and atemporal states of being or “zones”. While Benjamin’s treatment of prostitution is merely cursory when compared to his treatment of gambling, he does, on several occasions, locate the prostitute literally upon the thresholds of nineteenth-century buildings and in doing so equates her wares with the all too obvious door/vagina. –TRANSITION-- The profession of these women is identifiable through their location—[See p.500 for prostitute threshold.] not indoors where “good” women waste away their days couched away in the domestic sphere—but on the thresholds of buildings—interiors to be explored in the exterior world of the streets. Through their physical location, the nineteenth-century prostitute becomes part of the architecture, contrasting the coldness of iron, marble, and glass with the warmth promised by their available bodies—bodies identifiable as such because they are placed on the threshold and inside the arcades, a trade zone. As commodities, these women in their promenade, or from beneath a door sill, function in much the same way as numbers upon which the gambler places his bet:
Hasn’t his eternal vagabondage everywhere accustomed him to reinterpreting the image of the city? And doesn’t he transform the arcade into a casino, into a gambling den, where now and again he stakes the red, blue, yellow jetons of feeling on women, on a face that suddenly surfaces (will it return his look?), on a mute mouth (will it speak?)? What, on the baize cloth, looks out at the gambler from every number—luck, that is—here, from the bodies of all the woman, winks at him as the chimera of sexuality: as his type. This is nothing other than the number, the cipher, in which just at that moment luck will be called by name, in order to jump immediately to another number. His type—that’s the number that pays off thirty-six-fold, the one on which, without even trying, the eye of the voluptuary falls, as the ivory ball falls into the red or black compartment. He leaves the Palais-Royal with bulging pockets, calls to a whore, and once more celebrates in her arms the communion with number, in which money and riches, absolved from every earthen weight, have come to him from the fates like a joyous embrace returned to the full. For in gambling hall and bordello, it is the same supremely sinful delight: to challenge fate in pleasure. Let unsuspecting idealists imagine that sensual pleasure, of whatever stripe, could ever determine the theological concept of sin. The origin of true lechery is nothing else by this stealing of pleasure from out of the course of life with God, whose covenant with such life resides in the name. The name itself is the cry of naked lust. This sober thing, fateless in itself—the name—knows no other adversary than the fate that takes its place in whoring and that forges its arsenal in superstition. Thus in gambler and prostitute that superstition which arranges the figures of fate and (AP 489) fills all wanton behavior with fateful forwardness, fateful concupiscence, bringing even pleasure to kneel before its throne. (AP 490)
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Hasn’t his eternal vagabondage everywhere accustomed him to reinterpreting the image of the city? And doesn’t he transform the arcade into a casino, into a gambling den, where now and again he stakes the red, blue, yellow jetons of feeling on women, on a face that suddenly surfaces (will it return his look?), on a mute mouth (will it speak?)? What, on the baize cloth, looks out at the gambler from every number—luck, that is—here, from the bodies of all the woman, winks at him as the chimera of sexuality: as his type. This is nothing other than the number, the cipher, in which just at that moment luck will be called by name, in order to jump immediately to another number. His type—that’s the number that pays off thirty-six-fold, the one on which, without even trying, the eye of the voluptuary falls, as the ivory ball falls into the red or black compartment. He leaves the Palais-Royal with bulging pockets, calls to a whore, and once more celebrates in her arms the communion with number, in which money and riches, absolved from every earthen weight, have come to him from the fates like a joyous embrace returned to the full. For in gambling hall and bordello, it is the same supremely sinful delight: to challenge fate in pleasure. Let unsuspecting idealists imagine that sensual pleasure, of whatever stripe, could ever determine the theological concept of sin. The origin of true lechery is nothing else by this stealing of pleasure from out of the course of life with God, whose covenant with such life resides in the name. The name itself is the cry of naked lust. This sober thing, fateless in itself—the name—knows no other adversary than the fate that takes its place in whoring and that forges its arsenal in superstition. Thus in gambler and prostitute that superstition which arranges the figures of fate and (AP 489) fills all wanton behavior with fateful forwardness, fateful concupiscence, bringing even pleasure to kneel before its throne. (AP 490)
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