Allegorical Inventories, Artifactual Narratives.

To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

—Wittgenstein

One only has to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired

—Benjamin

Within the magical scene of Walter Benjamin's library, the collection of old and new books becomes the privatized activity of the archivist subsequently transformed into the symbolic image of the historical materialist. This space of allegorical resonance, fashioned from the accumulation of object/fetishes—each inscribing its specific trajectory of historical memory for the collector—is organized or managed according to a system of unstable inventories. The convolutions of temporality, intrinsic to the (re)articulation of historical moments—or illuminations—are conflated into the textualized index of that particular episode. Benjamin's library is conceived of as the site in which the icons/devices of memory are culled into a symbolic space of historical recollection; yet this site can barely contain the potential eruptions of such melancholy illuminations. This overflow is not a spiritualistic rabble of nostalgia, but the (un)repressed dreams and nightmares of historical cognitions in the form of textual allegory. This archive is fraught with the contradictions contained within any anti-bureaucratic project concerned with the (re)inscription of the individualized voice within the master narrative, or teleology of History. His project is designed to apprehend the symbolic intersection of privatized reworkings of the textual slate of History, and the discursive formations of dominant ideological allegory. This latter conception transforms the complexity of History into the image of synchronous progression, dissolving the contradictions of periods into a synthetic master narrative. In contradistinction to this, the political hermeneutic—viewed as interpretive gesture towards the narrativization of History—becomes an act of demystification.

We would therefore propose the following revised formulation that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualtzatton, its narrativization in the political unconscious.'

It is such a conceptualization of history that informs the practice of Edward Allington, and which catalyzes the allegorical object-as-text in methodological terms for critical reflection. Allington's work from the past several years has addressed the problematic nature of reified history through the fragmented, residual 'product-effects' of that very process of ideological abstraction. These abstractions are indeed (re)writings or (re)textualizations of the history-narrative at specific nodal points—or periodizations—for various ideological effects. The product-icons that are found in Allington's allegorical inventory are often (re)appropriated from employed in the manner of language formations—tropes and idioms—culled from the discursive space of available historical reference, and restored to the order of the sign. If the articulation of historical memory is dependent upon the extraction of contents from the ebb and flow of fluxing discursive information, then Allington's method allows him to produce objectified 'models' of interpretive, reflective archival selection. In this fashion, his sculptures become indices of the collation of language-types—conventions for a 'loss' of synchronous historical memory.