Sam Dolbear completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2018, where his work formed around a diagram of diasporic friendship, composed by Walter Benjamin in 1932: a representation of a generation fractured by various social, political and economic crises. He was then a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Language Research at the School of Advanced Study where he will continue this work through the examination of two figures on the diagram: the radio-producer, composer and poet Ernst Schoen (1884-1960) and the physician, sexologist and chiromancer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), both of whom settled in London after 1933. The project forms around questions of sensory disintegration in exiled life, through various strains of sonic and haptic modernisms. He is now at the ICI-Berlin working on a project on Wolff on palms and 'cosmic reduction'. With a number of others, he has also recently founded MayDay Radio, an audio collective based in London and maintains this blog: http://cheesedeutung.tumblr.com Address: London
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berla... more This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as it... more This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as its starting point to explore questions of friendship and generation in relation to history, as manifested through Benjamin’s work and biography. The diagram, drawn hastily in the corner of a notebook in 1932, includes 48 names connected by lines. I first transpose this diagram into a number of counter-forms to interrogate its potential significance: into the arborescent form of an ontogenetic/phylogenetic tree, a diagram of chemical bonds, a city map and an astral chart. Each chapter then draws out a number of spatio-temporal constellations detectable on the diagram: from Benjamin’s exile in Switzerland from 1917 to his time in Naples/Capri in 1923–24 and, lastly, to his time in Paris around 1927. With each moment clusters of names and shared generational concerns emerge. With 1933 and the fracturing of the generation by political and social crisis, the diagram is surpassed by another document: an address book, used by Benjamin from 1933 until his death in 1940. The address book is a record of scattering: the dispersal of people, relationships, things in exile, as testament to repeated erasures. In order to ground the thesis in an account of experience, I contextualise each moment on the stage of Benjamin’s generational development. This is both collective (historical, phylogenetic) but also individual (historical, ontogenetic), from an account of adolescence to maturation into the 1920s. 1933 brings an account of degeneration and the thesis falls back into childhood in the conclusion: with an account of projected salvation. The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the work of Walter Benjamin within the context of his life, through his associations and within the currents of larger historical conjunctures; to examine questions of friendship and its relation to history and politics; to investigate the parallels of friendship and generation from the work of Benjamin alongside his contemporaries; to understand friendship’s relation to freedom and the redemption not just of life but the concept of friendship itself.
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the dema... more Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography-her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris-as a final instance of the line, as border.
It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned. Historical constructio... more It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless', wrote Walter Benjamin in 1939-40. Around eight years before, he had constructed a diagram of forty-eight names, formed into constellations via a network of lines. He named those on the diagram as 'primal acquaintances' (Urbekanntschaften): family relations, school comrades, mistaken identities and travel companions. Though most of those on the diagram have known or knowable lives, one has always evaded identification: Alice Weylorz, positioned in the top left of the diagram between Asja Lācis (below) and Erich Unger (above). This paper stages a number of possible figurations of Alice Weylorz: as a missing person, a mistaken identity, even an imaginary friend. It asks if the historical task should be devoted to the memory of the nameless, what of the memory of those for whom only a name remains? The video is here The transcript is here For more developments on see this substack
Paper given at the conference 'Sound Cultures in the Modern Age'
Queen Mary University of London ... more Paper given at the conference 'Sound Cultures in the Modern Age' Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. It is a reflection on The Arcades Audio Project, my attempt to convert Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project into a massive collection of audio files.
The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier is a key figure in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project... more The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier is a key figure in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. For Benjamin, one of the most significant aspects of Fourier’s utopian vision was its conceptualisation of work as a form of play. According to Fourier it would be possible to build a world around people’s inherent desires. In such a world work would be pleasurable and therefore free from exploitation. This paper explores and critiques Benjamin’s engagement with Fourier, arguing that he overlooked the persistence of domination in Fourier’s world. Here, however, Benjamin’s writings on the figure of the child suggest an alternative to Fourier’s ordered universe. Benjamin credited Fourier with ‘cracking open the natural teleology.’This article argues that although Fourier perpetuated a vision of natural progress and order that conformed with Enlightenment thinking, Benjamin’s writings on pedagogy imagine the child as capable of intervening in history and nature. Rather than imagining the child as a prototype adult, or play as a rehearsal for work, this paper will follow Benjamin in exploring the revolutionary potential of children’s unique perceptions, which pose a challenge to existing adult structures.
This was a paper I gave at Working Worlds, a conference in the UCL Art History Department in May ... more This was a paper I gave at Working Worlds, a conference in the UCL Art History Department in May 2015.
This paper was written for "Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought"... more This paper was written for "Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought", a conference and series of workshops held in Ramallah in December 2015. It represents as number of reflections on Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk, the artistic and philological work of my friend Patrizia Bach, and a recent project I have instigated to turn The Arcades Project into a mass of audio-files.
A recorded version/reworking of a talk given at HM in November 2014. It starts with Benjamin's Mo... more A recorded version/reworking of a talk given at HM in November 2014. It starts with Benjamin's Moscow Diary and goes from there.
Manchester-raised comedian Caroline Aherne dressed up as an 70 year-old woman and starred in a ch... more Manchester-raised comedian Caroline Aherne dressed up as an 70 year-old woman and starred in a chat show where she interviewed a particular type of British celebrity: the magician's assistant Debbie Mcgee, the sprinter and presenter Kriss Akabusi, the wine journalist Jilly Goolden, the daytime game show host Dale Winton, the pop star Boy George (pictured below). At various points in the episodes, she asks the studio audience, largely made up of 'pensioners' from the greater Manchester area, to contribute to the discussions. The result is an a ectionate and irreverent interplay between presenter and audience. In this paper, I want to explore the relation between age and drag, thinking through forms of drag that enact or perform gestures of intergenerational attachment, solidarity, suspicion, and subversion. I want to explore what work is being done through 'old drag' (a term I take from the artist Alex Margo Arden). Is the point to enact a fantasy of aging differently, to imagine a gender identity that shifts through di erent life stages, to construct different personas that might develop alternatively with age, to reconstruct alternative family relations and members, to simulate forms of sociality and sexuality otherwise unavailable? I will also explore this in relation to questions of race and coloniality. In one 1998 episode, the self-described 'racist comedian' Bernard Manning appeared as a guest. Aherne later discussed how the intention of the invitation was to undo him, to humiliate him, to ask him to change his ways. She later re ected on how the episode failed, given the (almost entirely white) audience weren't always on her side, that they were sometimes on his. In this moment, 'age drag' functions to enact a desire: for a elderly white woman to confront and humiliate a racist misogynist in public. It partially failed, not because age is synonymous with reactionarism, but perhaps more because structures of oppression persist within and beyond the studio. I will nish with Aherne's premature death in 2016 at the age of 52, and how Mrs Merton might be seen, in retrospect, as an enactment of an older age that she wasn't herself able to experience.
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berla... more This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as it... more This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as its starting point to explore questions of friendship and generation in relation to history, as manifested through Benjamin’s work and biography. The diagram, drawn hastily in the corner of a notebook in 1932, includes 48 names connected by lines. I first transpose this diagram into a number of counter-forms to interrogate its potential significance: into the arborescent form of an ontogenetic/phylogenetic tree, a diagram of chemical bonds, a city map and an astral chart. Each chapter then draws out a number of spatio-temporal constellations detectable on the diagram: from Benjamin’s exile in Switzerland from 1917 to his time in Naples/Capri in 1923–24 and, lastly, to his time in Paris around 1927. With each moment clusters of names and shared generational concerns emerge. With 1933 and the fracturing of the generation by political and social crisis, the diagram is surpassed by another document: an address book, used by Benjamin from 1933 until his death in 1940. The address book is a record of scattering: the dispersal of people, relationships, things in exile, as testament to repeated erasures. In order to ground the thesis in an account of experience, I contextualise each moment on the stage of Benjamin’s generational development. This is both collective (historical, phylogenetic) but also individual (historical, ontogenetic), from an account of adolescence to maturation into the 1920s. 1933 brings an account of degeneration and the thesis falls back into childhood in the conclusion: with an account of projected salvation. The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the work of Walter Benjamin within the context of his life, through his associations and within the currents of larger historical conjunctures; to examine questions of friendship and its relation to history and politics; to investigate the parallels of friendship and generation from the work of Benjamin alongside his contemporaries; to understand friendship’s relation to freedom and the redemption not just of life but the concept of friendship itself.
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the dema... more Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography-her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris-as a final instance of the line, as border.
It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned. Historical constructio... more It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless', wrote Walter Benjamin in 1939-40. Around eight years before, he had constructed a diagram of forty-eight names, formed into constellations via a network of lines. He named those on the diagram as 'primal acquaintances' (Urbekanntschaften): family relations, school comrades, mistaken identities and travel companions. Though most of those on the diagram have known or knowable lives, one has always evaded identification: Alice Weylorz, positioned in the top left of the diagram between Asja Lācis (below) and Erich Unger (above). This paper stages a number of possible figurations of Alice Weylorz: as a missing person, a mistaken identity, even an imaginary friend. It asks if the historical task should be devoted to the memory of the nameless, what of the memory of those for whom only a name remains? The video is here The transcript is here For more developments on see this substack
Paper given at the conference 'Sound Cultures in the Modern Age'
Queen Mary University of London ... more Paper given at the conference 'Sound Cultures in the Modern Age' Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. It is a reflection on The Arcades Audio Project, my attempt to convert Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project into a massive collection of audio files.
The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier is a key figure in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project... more The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier is a key figure in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. For Benjamin, one of the most significant aspects of Fourier’s utopian vision was its conceptualisation of work as a form of play. According to Fourier it would be possible to build a world around people’s inherent desires. In such a world work would be pleasurable and therefore free from exploitation. This paper explores and critiques Benjamin’s engagement with Fourier, arguing that he overlooked the persistence of domination in Fourier’s world. Here, however, Benjamin’s writings on the figure of the child suggest an alternative to Fourier’s ordered universe. Benjamin credited Fourier with ‘cracking open the natural teleology.’This article argues that although Fourier perpetuated a vision of natural progress and order that conformed with Enlightenment thinking, Benjamin’s writings on pedagogy imagine the child as capable of intervening in history and nature. Rather than imagining the child as a prototype adult, or play as a rehearsal for work, this paper will follow Benjamin in exploring the revolutionary potential of children’s unique perceptions, which pose a challenge to existing adult structures.
This was a paper I gave at Working Worlds, a conference in the UCL Art History Department in May ... more This was a paper I gave at Working Worlds, a conference in the UCL Art History Department in May 2015.
This paper was written for "Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought"... more This paper was written for "Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought", a conference and series of workshops held in Ramallah in December 2015. It represents as number of reflections on Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk, the artistic and philological work of my friend Patrizia Bach, and a recent project I have instigated to turn The Arcades Project into a mass of audio-files.
A recorded version/reworking of a talk given at HM in November 2014. It starts with Benjamin's Mo... more A recorded version/reworking of a talk given at HM in November 2014. It starts with Benjamin's Moscow Diary and goes from there.
Manchester-raised comedian Caroline Aherne dressed up as an 70 year-old woman and starred in a ch... more Manchester-raised comedian Caroline Aherne dressed up as an 70 year-old woman and starred in a chat show where she interviewed a particular type of British celebrity: the magician's assistant Debbie Mcgee, the sprinter and presenter Kriss Akabusi, the wine journalist Jilly Goolden, the daytime game show host Dale Winton, the pop star Boy George (pictured below). At various points in the episodes, she asks the studio audience, largely made up of 'pensioners' from the greater Manchester area, to contribute to the discussions. The result is an a ectionate and irreverent interplay between presenter and audience. In this paper, I want to explore the relation between age and drag, thinking through forms of drag that enact or perform gestures of intergenerational attachment, solidarity, suspicion, and subversion. I want to explore what work is being done through 'old drag' (a term I take from the artist Alex Margo Arden). Is the point to enact a fantasy of aging differently, to imagine a gender identity that shifts through di erent life stages, to construct different personas that might develop alternatively with age, to reconstruct alternative family relations and members, to simulate forms of sociality and sexuality otherwise unavailable? I will also explore this in relation to questions of race and coloniality. In one 1998 episode, the self-described 'racist comedian' Bernard Manning appeared as a guest. Aherne later discussed how the intention of the invitation was to undo him, to humiliate him, to ask him to change his ways. She later re ected on how the episode failed, given the (almost entirely white) audience weren't always on her side, that they were sometimes on his. In this moment, 'age drag' functions to enact a desire: for a elderly white woman to confront and humiliate a racist misogynist in public. It partially failed, not because age is synonymous with reactionarism, but perhaps more because structures of oppression persist within and beyond the studio. I will nish with Aherne's premature death in 2016 at the age of 52, and how Mrs Merton might be seen, in retrospect, as an enactment of an older age that she wasn't herself able to experience.
Editors'/translators' introduction to 'The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness', a collection of... more Editors'/translators' introduction to 'The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness', a collection of short texts by Walter Benjamin, edited and translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian Truskolaski, with illustrations by Paul Klee.
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
Edited by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor, and designed by Sophie Carapetian. Please see the docum... more Edited by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor, and designed by Sophie Carapetian. Please see the document for more details.
The Reading Scholem in Constellation reading group took place from October to November 2020 at Ho... more The Reading Scholem in Constellation reading group took place from October to November 2020 at Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin. It sought to place Gershom Scholem’s early writings on lament in dialogue with other cultural contexts, histories, crises, and tensions. It was an attempt to imagine Scholem in new contexts, springing from unexpected and contingent encounters with writings from Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, and Jalal Toufic. The resulting publication charts interdisciplinary responses from group participants, including poetry, essays, translations, and artistic projects.
To go to print we need to reach a certain number of pre-orders. To order, please visit: https://a... more To go to print we need to reach a certain number of pre-orders. To order, please visit: https://arcadematerials.bigcartel.com
If you would like to enquire about a discount for wholesale, please contact samdolbear@gmail.com
This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as it... more This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as its starting point to explore questions of friendship and generation in relation to history, as manifested through Benjamin’s work and biography. The diagram, drawn hastily in the corner of a notebook in 1932, includes 48 names connected by lines. I first transpose this diagram into a number of counter-forms to interrogate its potential significance: into the arborescent form of an ontogenetic/phylogenetic tree, a diagram of chemical bonds, a city map and an astral chart. Each chapter then draws out a number of spatio-temporal constellations detectable on the diagram: from Benjamin’s exile in Switzerland from 1917 to his time in Naples/Capri in 1923–24 and, lastly, to his time in Paris around 1927. With each moment clusters of names and shared generational concerns emerge. With 1933 and the fracturing of the generation by political and social crisis, the diagram is surpassed by another document: an address book, used by Benjamin from 1933 until his death in 1940. The address book is a record of scattering: the dispersal of people, relationships, things in exile, as testament to repeated erasures. In order to ground the thesis in an account of experience, I contextualise each moment on the stage of Benjamin’s generational development. This is both collective (historical, phylogenetic) but also individual (historical, ontogenetic), from an account of adolescence to maturation into the 1920s. 1933 brings an account of degeneration and the thesis falls back into childhood in the conclusion: with an account of projected salvation. The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the work of Walter Benjamin within the context of his life, through his associations and within the currents of larger historical conjunctures; to examine questions of friendship and its relation to history and politics; to investigate the parallels of friendship and generation from the work of Benjamin alongside his contemporaries; to understand friendship’s relation to freedom and the redemption not just of life but the concept of friendship itself.
Another Gaze: A Journal for Film and Feminism, 2021
A roundtable discussion on two films about hands, by Maria Lassnig and Ayesha Hameed
"Touching i... more A roundtable discussion on two films about hands, by Maria Lassnig and Ayesha Hameed
"Touching involves collapsing the distance between two people, while holding open a space for our own convictions and uncertain desires. In order for touching to yield intimacy, all parties connected by touch must give themselves over to the risks of this paradox...To be touched risks being altered. Lassnig shows how holding oneself open for intimacy can lead to annihilation. Yet it is a risk she chooses to take, insisting at the same time on self-preservation and expansion" —Rachel Aumiller
Uploads
Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. It is a reflection on The Arcades Audio Project, my attempt to convert Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project into a massive collection of audio files.
Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. It is a reflection on The Arcades Audio Project, my attempt to convert Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project into a massive collection of audio files.
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
If you would like to enquire about a discount for wholesale, please
contact samdolbear@gmail.com
"Touching involves collapsing the distance between two people, while holding open a space for our own convictions and uncertain desires. In order for touching to yield intimacy, all parties connected by touch must give themselves over to the risks of this paradox...To be touched risks being altered. Lassnig shows how holding oneself open for intimacy can lead to annihilation. Yet it is a risk she chooses to take, insisting at the same time on self-preservation and expansion" —Rachel Aumiller