ABSTRACT

The title of this paper comes from a meeting of an interdisciplinary theory group at my university where one of the presenters, speaking of his “tentative engagement” with Walter Benjamin, said that he “drew the line at angels” in his inquiry into the construction of historical consciousness in fascist Italy.1 In contrast, Dick Hebdige (1988) argues “the multiple enablements of living on the line, toward more fluid categories” (p. 231). For Hebdige, living on the line is about being positioned between ways of thinking about language, meaning, and “the real” that no longer offer purchase on contemporary conditions and the “not yet” of new concepts. Here the task is to begin presenting such concepts in the cracks created by the loss of mastery of the old concepts.