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‘Imagine no Metaphors:
the dialectical image of Walter
Benjamin’ by Anthony Auerbach, in Image
[&]
Narrative [e-journal],
18 (2007)
This special issue of Image
[&] Narrative,
edited by Hanneke Grootenboer,
gathered a group of essays under
the rubric ‘Thinking Pictures’.
The full text is provided below.
Can
the point at issue be more definitively
and incisively presented than
by Rimbaud himself in his personal copy of [Une
saison en enfer]? In the margin,
beside the passage “on
the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers,” he
later wrote, “There’s no such thing.” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 208)
 Maybe there is no such thing as a dialectical
image. Despite the insistence of Benjamin’s
claims, it is not at all clear whether such
an image belongs to material or to virtual reality;
whether it is something more like a picture
or a perception. Nor is it obvious how we should
distinguish the hypothetical dialectical image
from figures of speech such as metaphor, or
from literary forms such as the Denkbild (thought-image)
upon which Benjamin modelled his writing.
Benjamin’s projected magnum opus, known
as the Passagen-Werk or Arcades
Project, is arguably no more than an elaborately
woven net designed to catch a dialectical image.
Amounting to more than 1,300 pages in the version
assembled for publication by Rolf Tiedemann
more than forty years after Benjamin’s
death, the thirty-six “convolutes” and
various paralipomena nonetheless form an uncompleted
edifice, lacking the theoretical
design which would predict its definitive shape.
Benjamin’s
legacy presents an image in which
a construction site seems to merge with a ruin.
In the middle of the manuscript, as if at the
centre of its web, “Convolute N” preserves
a collection of reflections under the heading “Theory
of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”, among
which we can read some of Benjamin’s boldest
statements about how he envisaged his work and
constituted it as a task. In these notes, the
term “dialectical image” (which
apparently crystallised in conversations between
Benjamin and Theodor Wiesengrund [Adorno], Gretel
Karplus [Adorno], Max Horkheimer and Asja Lacis
at the end of the 1920s) makes a striking appearance.
More references to dialectical images can be
found in other unpublished texts, such as the
1935 “Exposé” of the Arcades entitled Paris,
the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, and in Benjamin’s correspondence.
Some of the formulations contained in “N” emerged,
more or less altered, in Benjamin’s last
work, “On the Concept of History”,
but the term “dialectical image” disappeared
from view.
*
The attempt to elucidate the notion of a dialectical
image comes to a fork, with the signs image
and narrative indicating two different paths.
On the one hand, image evokes the possibility
of a diagram or a set of diagrams which could
chart the position of the dialectical image
in a constellation of allied terms, partial
analogies and possible exemplars. This image
could be something like a Venn diagram displaying
the overlapping conceptual fields of the dialectical
image and other terms Benjamin used to describe
the objects and/or the objectives of his study:
concepts such as “idea” and “monad”,
which he carried beyond their traditional philosophical
meanings and associations, and terms such as “constellation” — with
its subsets Konstellation and Sternbild — and “crystal”,
which he invested with more than merely metaphorical
weight. Further, such a diagram might also suggest
the zones of interaction between these notions
and the domains of “phenomena”, “the
interior” and “the commodity as
fetish”.
Alternatively, the image of the dialectical
image might be something like a vector diagram
showing the resultant of the forces signified
by the claims of history, truth, material and
meaning; or perhaps something like a flow diagram
laying out and comparing the procedural steps
from component operations such as perception,
collection, combination, metaphor and mimesis,
towards synthetic constructions such as allegory,
montage, mosaic and treatise. Enough hints can
be found in Benjamin’s writing to justify
sketching diagrams such as Buck-Morss displays
in her book on the Arcades, as much to test
the possible coherence of the theory as to explain
it (Fig. 1 ).
A different image-model would go in the direction
of the possibilities suggested, on the other
hand, by narrative. A genealogical table or
family tree would be the visual code for the
investigation of what Benjamin would call the “forehistory
and after-history” of the dialectical
image (See Arcades, 470 [N7a, 1], 475 [N10,
3]). Such a narrative adventure could trace
the modalities of the term and its cognates,
highlighting the shifts in meaning in different
periods or passages and/or the inner consistency
of Benjamin’s thought, from his early
writings on language, through his intensive
study of German Trauerspiel, to his encounters
with Surrealism and finally, the archaeology
of the recent past. A narrative approach could,
moreover, probe the metaphors and devices of
the dialectical image for sedimented historical
meanings: a philological assay that might disclose
a philosophical ancestry and hence grounds for
suggesting how the dialectical image could be
related to ideas associated, for example, with
Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Schlegel, Goethe, Hegel
and Marx, to mention only some of most prominent
thinkers named by Benjamin and his critics.
Such a narrative could further suggest whether
the notion of a dialectical image has proved
fertile for subsequent philosophical work such
as Adorno’s, Derrida’s or Agamben’s,
for comparative assessments of twentieth-century
thinking (in relation, perhaps, with Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, or Bataille), as well as for client
disciplines of philosophy such as art theory
and criticism.
The narrator of this possible genealogy is,
of course, first of all a reader and is therefore
confronted not only with the fragmentary state
of Benjamin’s writings, but with the admonitions
they contain against blithely stringing bits
of history together. “History decays into
images,” Benjamin insists, “not
into stories” (Arcades, 476 [N10a, 3]).
To avoid the double bind of flatly contradicting
the text or conforming with it to the point
of tautology, Benjamin’s academic narrators
have manoeuvred themselves into the position
of commentators. They settle into the gaps in
the text and tend either to underline, or to
attempt to repair the discontinuity Benjamin
believed was essential to the historical material
and to his own literary technique. Accounts
of the dialectical image, or touching on it,
have demonstrated its theoretical inconsistencies
and its ambiguities — its iridescence,
as Tiedemann calls it (“Dialectics at
a Standstill”, 942). The apparent circularity
of its logic has been pointed out with slightly
condescending claims that “Benjamin’s
intellectual existence had so much of the surreal
about it that one should not confront it with
facile demands for consistency” (Habermas,
92), or more deferential ones declaring the
dialectical image “sui generis” (Pensky,
195). Many commentators, it seems, have aimed
to close the gaps they themselves occupy by
supplying the links Benjamin apparently failed
to do, by stretching the concepts or by attempting
to reconcile the contradictions in which Benjamin
left the dialectical image suspended. These
efforts tend to reduce Benjamin’s proposition
to the familiar and the plausible, even when,
trying to avoid collapsing Benjamin’s
thought into its supposed religious or its supposed
political pole, they resort to “explanation
based on oxymoron”. Missac’s example: “the
Marxist rabbi” (212). Such is the allure
of paradoxical metaphors that one critic has
claimed that such figures, gleaned from Benjamin’s
own writing, constitute “the foundation
of his philosophy of history, upon which his
theory of experience is ultimately based” (Wolin,
212).
Arguably, these services explicate neither
Benjamin’s dialectics nor his images,
but instead neutralise — or, via paraphrase,
circumvent — the destructive, critical
moment which Benjamin appears to have anticipated.
*
Benjamin’s thought solicits the imagination.
His reputation — and the enduring challenge
of his work — rests not on the intricate
philosophical controversies in which it got
embroiled, but on the capacity of his writing
to startle the reader with images: figures which
suddenly throw off their camouflage to ambush
the nonchalant reader, like the citations Benjamin
cites as highway robbers (One-Way
Street, 481).
Benjamin writes figuratively. The most abstract
of his texts thus sometimes have the air of
parody, while his most important theoretical
propositions are frequently encrypted in parabolic
figures. Benjamin’s texts abound with
images, or more precisely, quasi-images: metaphors,
analogies, metonyms, similes and synecdoches:
the linguistic forms of correspondance (Fig.
2). The magical effects of language, however,
do not suffice for a critical project. Thus,
when Benjamin holds up an emblem, it is to examine
both sides of the shield on which it is emblazoned.
A characterisation of the physiognomy of a mask
does not suffice without an investigation of
what is imprinted on its interior. Benjamin
is the detective inspector who would decipher
the hieroglyphic script of superficial traces
and intentionless marks; who recognises the
tell-tale signs through which objects speak
and thus unmask history. Benjamin is also the
speculator who profits from the traffic between
the realm of things and the realms of allegory
and of phantasmagoria; the one for whom reflecting
(on) images increases his stock. Benjamin’s
images are not fished up from the depths of
the unconscious as Paul Klee memorably imagined
his pictures, even if Benjamin claimed his own
were snatched from the realm of madness (Arcades,
456 [N1, 4]) (Fig. 3). They are recovered from
the half-forgotten experiences of childhood
and of dreams, and from what Benjamin construed
as their collective counterparts encoded in
such stuff as outmoded consumer products, the
earliest applications of industrial technologies,
optical apparatus, popular spectacles and the
habits of urban life.
Benjamin’s version of Denkbild (with
homage to Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, Kraus and
Kafka) suggests a product shaped by language
and things (See Adorno: “Introduction”,
9).
An inventory of the ways in which images appear,
are aligned and reflected in Benjamin’s
writings would likely amount to his collected
works and might not help us identify which among
the images thus assembled would qualify as “dialectical”.
As a connoisseur of dialectics, Adorno provided
his friend and mentor with a relentless critique
of the images which emerged from the Arcades.
In so doing, Adorno defended his share in the
inception of the dialectical image and claimed
from Benjamin the theory it demanded. The critique
preserved in the correspondence is illuminating
(despite being, in places, quite difficult to
follow) in so far as it seems to come closer
to a theory of dialectical images than Benjamin
himself ventured in writing. The exchange between
the two writers documented in the letters is
important for my assessment of the question
posed by this essay. However some tact is required
since Adorno’s letters were not meant
for us and the theory suggested there is not
Benjamin’s. It is not my intention to
mediate between Adorno and Benjamin, although
the following discussion might suggest how Benjamin
took Adorno’s critique to heart and subverted
it.
Adorno was particularly uneasy about Benjamin’s
notion of the dialectical image as a collective
dream- or wish image. In response to the “Exposé” of
the Arcades Project Benjamin delivered to the
Institute for Social Research in 1935, Adorno
rejected that idea which had appeared in Benjamin’s
text under the motto “Chaque époque
rêve la suivante” and again in the
Baudelaire section of the project outline: “Ambiguity
is the figurative appearance of the dialectic,
the law of the dialectic at a standstill. This
standstill is Utopia, and the dialectical image
therefore a dream image” (Arcades, 10,
this translation from Charles
Baudelaire, 171).
Such a notion, Adorno explained, was “undialectical” and
therefore precipitated a host of problems which
could put the whole project at risk (See Correspondence
1928–40, 104–114).
*
The purpose of this essay is to interrupt the
narrative which could be launched here by dwelling
on this question: What kind of wish-image is
a dialectical image? In other words, what hopes
and expectations were invested in the dialectical
image, and, if the notion was more than a theoretical
chimera, on what could such hopes have been
grounded? Even if, in the end, Benjamin did
not show his hand, the stakes he gambled on
it are on the table. It should therefore be
possible to examine the texts we have without
the onus of pulling a genuine dialectical image
out of the hat, or the risk of making a theoretical
overstatement of account.
My answer to the question would be, in short:
The dialectical image is the proper form of
the materialist presentation of history. The
dialectical image is thus the goal of materialist
historiography as Benjamin understood it, rather
than its method.
The burden of methodology falls on “constellation”,
an image Benjamin had already introduced in
the epistemological preface to his study of
seventeenth-century Trauerspiel, and which I
shall discuss in more detail below. According
to Benjamin, central to his book Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels was the exploration of “the
philosophical significance of a vanished and
misunderstood form of art: allegory” (“Curriculum
Vitae” [1928], 78). Raising the notion
of a “dialectical image” on what
was already in play with allegory sounds like
a terminological manoeuvre designed to align
the ambitions which mobilised Benjamin’s
approach to Trauerspiel as literary history
more closely with “dialectical materialism” as
it would be understood by Marxists. But a remark
in a letter to Max Rychner makes it clear that
neither the dialectical component nor the image
component was new: “[The Trauerspiel]
book,” Benjamin says, “was certainly
not materialistic, even if it was dialectical.” He
continued:
But what I did not know at the time I wrote
it, soon thereafter became increasingly clear
to me: namely, there is a bridge to the way
dialectical materialism looks at things from
the perspective of my particular stance on the
philosophy of language, however strained and
problematical that bridge may be. But there
is no bridge to the complacency of bourgeois
scholarship. (Correspondence
1910–40,
372 [7/3/31])
Still, Benjamin had no more illusion that his
approach to historical materialism would pass
muster in the Communist Party — or even
in the Institute for Social Research where he
had influential sympathisers — than he
had hope, after the Trauerspiel book was rejected
as a Habilitationsschrift, that his approach
to literary history would be welcome in the
university.
This already raises some more specific questions
which I would like to follow up (while still,
as it were, standing on one leg). It is curious
that the link to dialectical materialism extends
not from Benjamin’s political perspective,
but from his views on language. Despite Benjamin’s
occasional invocations of Marx and Engels, it
seems unlikely that what Benjamin meant by materialism
could be found in the canon of orthodox Marxism.
So, to avoid the trap of accepting a definition
(such as I encapsulated above) as if it were
an explanation, it will be necessary to examine
the aspirations Benjamin smuggled under the
cloak of materialism, and moreover, to look
into Benjamin’s theory of language and
his methodological models.
*
Benjamin anticipated “the realisation of the Marxist method” (my emphasis) — which
would suggest taking seriously Marx’s
famous thesis (on Feuerbach) that, while philosophers
have interpreted the world, the point is to
change it — “conjoined” with
a “heightened graphicness” — which
he seems to have associated with Surrealist
presentation (Arcades, 461 [N2, 6]). Surrealism
aroused hopes in Benjamin, which, although ultimately
disappointed, linger in the Arcades. Surrealism — which
Benjamin understood primarily as a literary
and urban phenomenon (rather than visual art) — suggested
one of the first prototypes of the dialectical
image. In the intoxicated, dream-consciousness
of Surrealist experience, Benjamin says, “Image
and language take precedence. ... Not only before
meaning. Also before the self” (“Surrealism”,
208). Despite the ambivalence of the Surrealists’ struggle
against religion and the risks they took with
narcotics, in Surrealist writing Benjamin perceived
preliminary lessons in what he called “profane
illumination, a materialistic, anthropological
inspiration” (Benjamin’s emphasis),
which would make possible “the true, creative
overcoming of religious illumination” (209).
Benjamin described the 1929 essay “Surrealism:
The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (from
where I got the motto for this piece) as a “screen
[Paravent] placed in front of the Paris
Arcades” (Correspondence
1910–40, 348 [15/3/29]). In the essay,
Benjamin attributes to (the leading Surrealist
writer) André Breton the discovery of
the “revolutionary energies which appear
in the ‘outmoded’”, that is:
the obsolete, neglected and slightly dilapidated
remains of a just-out-of-date material culture
(Benjamin goes on to list, more or less, the
table of contents of his own convolutes: “the
first iron constructions, the first factory
buildings, the earliest photos ... the dresses
of five years ago.” 210). Surrealism might
not have succeeded in overcoming its Romantic,
and, indeed, its Catholic parentage, but the
Surrealist effort “to win the energies
of intoxication for the revolution” (215–6)
demonstrated the possibility of the dialectical
transfiguration of the everyday. However, Benjamin
does not attribute this transfiguration to method,
as if it could be accomplished by dialectics,
or by psychoanalytic introspection. The Surrealists’ mastery
of things was more of a “trick” and
Benjamin ascribes the transfiguration to an
experience in which “things put on their
true — Surrealist — face” (Arcades,
464 [N3a, 3]). The trick “consists in
the substitution of a political for a historical
view of the past” (210) while reporting
the experience as if it were a dream. What Benjamin
claims from the oneiric is the power of the
eidetic. Highlighting the distinction between
image and metaphor drawn by Louis Aragon (in
Traité du style, 1928) Benjamin extends
it by identifying politics as the site of the
most drastic and irreconcilable collision between
image and metaphor (217). The revolutionary
impulse, he suggests, is the resolute expulsion
of metaphor. The programme of the bourgeois
parties, especially the “progressive” ones,
Benjamin points out, is nothing but a “bad
poem” dedicated to a future “as
if ...” “filled to bursting with
metaphors” (216). The revolutionary impulse,
moreover, discloses “in the space of political
action the one hundred percent image space.” Image
space, Benjamin asserts, “can no longer
be measured out by contemplation” (217),
a formulation for which he later enlisted the
support of Engels: “[The materialist]
presentation of history has as goal to pass,
as Engels puts it, ‘beyond the sphere
of thought’” (Arcades, 475 [N10a,
2], note written between 1937 and 1940) — by
implication (as the Surrealism essay makes clear),
into the sphere of image, body and political
action.
*
Adorno’s critique of the 1935 “Exposé” was
aimed at what appeared to be
Benjamin’s
excessive loyalty to Surrealism.
The “principle
of montage” which Benjamin imagined could
carry his project through clearly
owes something to Surrealist literary practice,
and might have been influenced by other media
such as collage and film (Arcades,
461 [N2, 6]). However, Benjamin’s
visual analogy is no exquisite
corpse. He cites, instead, the pinnacle of nineteenth-century
structural engineering (Fig.
4),
a rational, sober, transparent construction
brought to a point of hallucinatory clarity.
(“In the
same way, the historian today
has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding — a
philosophic structure — in order to draw
the most vital aspects of the past into his
net (Arcades,
459, [N1a, 1]).) Adorno, for
his part, demanded mediation by theory and complained
of motifs assembled without elaboration and
without theoretical interpretation (Correspondence
1910–40,
580 [10/11/38]). Adorno had the
highest expectations of Benjamin in this regard.
In his view, the Arcades
Project — and
central to it, the theory of dialectical images — promised
a philosophical work of “decisive significance” for
its material character (Correspondence
1928–40,
83 [20/5/35]). Adorno imagined
a whole range of philosophical disputes which
concerned him would be “settled once and
for all through the mere existence of [Benjamin’s]
Arcades book”. It was “indispensable
to [Adorno] ... that the concept of the dialectical
image should ... be expounded
with the greatest possible clarity.” He
urged Benjamin to “proceed
without qualms to realise every
part of the theological content and all the
literalness of its most extreme claims” (53
[6/11/34]). He told him the Arcades was “a
work which must at all costs be written, completed
and accomplished in all possible rigour and
precise articulation” and closed that
letter “with
the yearning mythological desire
to conjure up the conjurer!” (38–39
[5/4/34]).
The theory Adorno invokes — after he
read the “Exposé”, with a
tone as if Benjamin were withholding it from
him personally — is that which Adorno
himself was unable to provide for his own philosophical
programme when he set out “The Actuality
of Philosophy” (1931) as his inaugural
lecture at Frankfurt, a speech in which Adorno
attempted to ally the epistemological insights
of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel with dialectical
materialism, within the bounds of philosophy.
Against the dream, which remains subject to
the thrall, on the one hand, of the archaic,
and on the other hand, of the commodity, and
in contrast with the image which would unite
the two, undialectically, as metaphorical correlates,
Adorno suggested: “the dream should be
externalised through dialectical interpretation
and the immanence of consciousness itself [should
be] understood as a constellation [Konstellation]
of reality” (106 [2-4/8/35]). Benjamin
accepted the notion of constellation, which
was in any case a refraction of his own ideas,
but he defended the “dream forms” as “indispensable”,
because: “the dialectical image does not
copy the dream ... But, it seems to me, ...
contains the instances [of awakening], the places
where waking consciousness breaks through [Einbruchsstelle].
The figure of [the dialectical image] is first
produced [herstellen] out of these places [Stelle]
like a constellation [Sternbild] from luminous
points [Punkten] [16/8/35, my translation].
With this analogy, Benjamin affirms the sense
of constellation Adorno had picked up from the
Trauerspiel study, namely, Sternbild, a constellation
of fixed stars: that form which gathers the
discrete points presented by the starry sky
into a star-sign, and which mediates that sign’s
entry into tradition. In The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin had stated: “Ideas
are to objects as constellations [Sternbilder]
are to stars” (34). However, Benjamin’s
use of the term Konstellation — in the
Trauerspiel book and elsewhere — mobilises
the double meaning of the word. Like the English
constellation, Konstellation can be synonymous
with Sternbild, or it can denote the total configuration
of the heavens at a given moment in which the
conjunctions and oppositions of the planets
are measured against a sign-system of fixed
stars. The constellations of the Zodiac, for
instance, are better known today as signs than
as the conventionally perceived patterns of
fixed stars which got their names from the signs.
The twelve signs measure out the annual path
of the sun in the sky and hence calibrate the
motions of the planets, which patrol close to
the ecliptic. The Sternbild or fixed-star constellation
is static and implies duration. The horoscope,
however, is dynamic, but implies an instantaneous
interruption, the “snapshot”, for
example, at the moment of an individual’s
birth, which, according to the tradition, forms
a configuration capable of interpretation, if
not actually of determining power.
Benjamin had introduced the idea of “awakening” to
defend the dream forms in the letter quoted
above because he had left it out of the “Exposé”.
But it is present in “N” in a group
of notes which can be dated before Benjamin
composed the outline of the project for the
Institute.
Distancing himself from the Surrealist project,
Benjamin wrote: “whereas Aragon persists
within the realm of dream, here the concern
is to find the constellation
of awakening” (my
emphasis, Arcades, 458 [N1, 9]). And with reference
to Proust, Benjamin attempted to place awakening
in a classical dialectical structure:
Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream
consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness
(as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening
would be identical with the “now of knowability” in
which things put on their true — Surrealist — face.
Thus in Proust, the importance of staking an
entire life on life’s supremely dialectical
point of rupture: awakening. Proust[’s À la
recherche du temps perdu] begins with an evocation
of the space of someone waking up (Arcades,
463–464 [N3a, 3], modified translation)
The dialectical image appears only in the “now
of knowability”, “wherein what has
been comes together in a flash with the now
to form a constellation.” Benjamin continues:
In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.
For while the relation of the present to the
past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the
relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical:
is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. — Only
dialectical images are genuine images (that
is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters
them is language. (Arcades, 462 [N2a, 3])
Adorno possibly did not know quite “how
apt [his] definition of the dialectical image
as a ‘constellation’ [Konstellation]” seemed
to Benjamin when the latter responded obliquely
to his critique of the “Exposé” [16/8/35].
For it was the constellation which was to precipitate
this caesura, this flashing image, this sudden
crystallisation of thought, not to release the
significance of the past, but to signal a “Messianic
cessation [Stillstellung] of happening ... a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed
past” (“History”, 396 [XVII],
see also: [XVIII] and 397 [A]). This was perhaps
the moment Adorno was waiting for, on which
Benjamin “staked everything” (Adorno: “Introduction”,
3).
The constellation brought to light in the passage
from “N” (Fig. 5)— which,
in the variant formulation contained in “On
the Concept of History” (1940) eclipsed “dialectical
image” with the term “monad” (also
re-emerging from the Trauerspiel epistemology) — is
no metaphorical constellation of fixed stars:
it is more like a momentous conjunction. If
the “status quo” is regarded as
catastrophe (See: Arcades, 474 [N10, 2], it
is more a constellation against reality than
of reality as Adorno had suggested, although
this constellation insists no less than Adorno’s
on its material character.
*
“And the place where one encounters them
is language.” So are the dialectical images
not metaphors after all? This question could
not be decided from a reading of the remains
of the Arcades. A group of unpublished texts
Benjamin wrote around 1933, however, locates
the image which “flits by” and “flashes
up” (“History”, 390 [V]) in
Benjamin’s “particular stance on
the philosophy of language” and, moreover,
elaborates the idea of constellation in a quite
extraordinary way.
Benjamin opens the fragment “On Astrology” with
the call for “a view of astrology from
which the doctrine of magical ‘influences,’ of ‘radiant
energies,’ and so on has been excluded” (684).
This text is one of a group of overlapping drafts
of which the best known is “On the Mimetic
Faculty” (which appeared in English in
the collection Reflections, 1978). The mimetic
faculty is “man’s” share in
the “mimetic forces” of nature and
includes not only the perception of similarity,
but the power of imitation, the vestige of which
Benjamin sees exemplified by children’s
play. For the mimetic faculty has a history — “in
both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic sense” (“Mimetic
Faculty”, 720) — and we should not
assume that man’s perception of similarity
has remained constant throughout the ages. Benjamin
ventures the supposition, seemingly at odds
with his conception of materialist historiography,
that “a unified direction is perceptible
in the historical development of this faculty” (“The
Similar”, 695). “Thus, we must reckon
with the fact that, basically, even events in
the sky could be imitated by people in former
times” (“The Lamp”, 692).
The “development”, however is hardly
progress. The question Benjamin poses is, whether
we are dealing with the decay of the mimetic
faculty, or its migration.
The example, or limit case, of astrology is
vital for Benjamin’s argument because,
if the relationship of the human subject to
the “remotest things” is mimetic,
then astrology, normally assumed to be an analytical
practice codified by tradition and enmeshed
with the positivistic aspect of scientific astronomy
(if not simply dismissed out of hand), has an “experiential
character”. Astrology, moreover, draws
Benjamin’s attention to the decisive moment,
from which he derives two insights. Firstly
that the perception of similarity must be grasped
in an instant, “like the addition of a
third element — the astrologer — to
the conjunction of two stars.” Benjamin
describes the perception of similarity in identical
terms to those which characterised the dialectical
image: it is “in every case bound to a
flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be
won again, but cannot really be held fast as
can other perceptions. It offers itself to the
eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation
of stars [Gestirnkonstellation].” The
similarity between a constellation of stars
and a human being, which can hardly be imagined
by modern people, Benjamin says, is “nonsensuous
similarity”. The second insight Benjamin
draws from astrology’s decisive moment
is this: if “mimetic genius was really
a life-determining force for the ancients, then
we have little choice but to attribute full
possession of this gift ... to the new born” (“The
Similar”, 695–6). The mimetic behaviour
exhibited by children at play is evidence, in
Benjamin’s view, to support this notion.
The proof of it is “the utmost mimetic
genius” which the infant displays in acquiring
language. There, Benjamin declares, is the “complete
prolegomenon of every rational astrology” (“On
Astrology”, 685).
The corollary of this is that, though the sky
might be a closed book to us now, we possess,
in language, an “archive of nonsensuous
similarities” (“The Similar”,
697), or a “canon according to which the
meaning of nonsensuous similarity can be partly
clarified” (“Mimetic Faculty”,
721). The notion this entails — that language
cannot be reduced to a system of arbitrary signs — recapitulates
the language theory which Benjamin advanced
as early as 1916, in which he attempted to steer
a path between “bourgeois” and “mystical” theories
of language (“On Language”, 69).
The essay, “On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man” introduced the idea
of the “language of things” which,
arguably, sustains Benjamin’s materialism.
Without attempting to do justice to the earlier
piece on language, it could be shown that the
later texts on astrology and on similarity return
to the themes elaborated before, indeed, to
the things, in so far as the lamp which, in
the earlier text, made an appearance “for
example” to “communicate ... the
language-lamp” (63) is likely the same
lamp which precipitated the memories of childhood
which interrupt Benjamin’s later draft
on the perception of similarity; the same lamp
whose glass globe clinking on its metal ring
could be heard when Benjamin placed the empty
seashell of the nineteenth century to his ear
in 1933 (“The Lamp”, 692) (Fig.
6).
The point Benjamin made in the earlier text
that, “The translation of the language
of things into that of man is not only a translation
of the mute into the sonic; it is also a translation
of the nameless into name” (“On
Language”, 70) may not be in exact agreement
with the later claim that nonsensuous similarity
runs through the whole of language and “establishes
the ties not only between the spoken and the
signified but also between the written and the
signified, and equally between the spoken and
the written.” But both imply the notion
of reading contained in the dialectical image.
That is, “‘To read what was never
written’”, as from entrails or the
stars. Language, Benjamin states, is the “medium
into which the earlier powers of mimetic production
and comprehension have passed without residue,
to the point where they have liquidated those
of magic” (“Mimetic Faculty”,
722).
*
My exploration of the hopes and expectations
invested in the notion of the dialectical image
does not diminish the ambiguity which resides
in it, nor the risks it involved. The “logic” of
the desire, however sympathetically explained,
does not compensate for the logical deficiencies
of the concept. The principle of hope is not
necessarily adequate to the task of “‘organising
pessimism’” (“Surrealism”,
216), nor is it equal to the “constellation
of dangers” against which, Benjamin insisted,
the materialist presentation of history “must
prove its presence of mind” and gather
its “destructive momentum” (Arcades,
475 [N10a, 2]). The “whetted axe of reason” with
which Benjamin entered the “primeval forest” of
the nineteenth century (Arcades, 456 [N1, 4])
strikes at the heart of the dialectic of enlightenment.
Constellation, perhaps more accurately a model
rather than a method, hardly seems to promise
an overcoming of the archaic allure of the forces
which came to threaten Benjamin’s own
existence. It is remarkable that Benjamin, who
was an adamant opponent of such fascination
in its intellectual and its popular manifestations,
should develop such an extravagant idea in the
face of increasing danger. It is constellation,
however, which triangulates the position of
the materialist historian and tests his or her
ability to grasp — in the present — a
fleeting (dialectical) image as a signal of
revolutionary potential or mundane redemption;
to seize the moment invariably missed.
The dialectical image and its disappearance
seem to place a seal on the doubt
whether Benjamin could accomplish his critique
of reason in any other mode than “an impermissable ‘poetic’ one” (Correspondence
1910–40, 506–507 [16/8/35]).
 ...
return: On theory
Works
Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “Introduction to Benjamin’s
Schriften.” [1955] On
Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections. Ed. Gary
Smith. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988. 2–17.
Adorno, Theodor W.
and Walter Benjamin. Complete
Correspondence 1928–1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz.
Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The
Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge,
MA and London: Belknap
Press/Harvard University Press, 1999.
---. “On Astrology.” [c. 1932]
Selected Writings 1927–1934. Eds. Michael
Jennings et al. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge,
MA and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 1999. 684–5.
---. Charles
Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the Era of High
Capitalism. Trans. by Harry Zohn.
London: NLB, 1973.
---. “On the Concept of History.” [1940]
Selected Writings 1938–1940. Eds. Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Harry
Zohn. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press, 2003. 389–400.
---. The
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin
1910–1940. Eds. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Trans. Manfred
R. and Evelyn M. Jacobson. University of Chicago
Press, 1994.
---. “Curriculum Vitae.” [1928]
Selected Writings 1927–1934. Trans. Rodney
Livingstone. 77–9.
---. “Doctrine of the Similar.” [1933]
Selected Writings 1927–1934. Trans. Michael
Jennings. 694–8.
---. “The Lamp.” [1933] Selected
Writings 1927–1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.
691–3.
---. “On Language as Such and on the
Language of Man.” [1916] Selected
Writings 1913–1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael
W. Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge,
MA and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 1996. 62–74.
---. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” [1933]
Selected Writings 1927–1934. Trans. Edmund
Jephcott. 720–2.
---. “One-Way Street.” [1923–26,
published 1928] Selected
Writings 1913–1926.
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. 444–88.
---. The
Origin of German Tragic Drama. [published
1928] Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977.
---. “Surrealism: the last snapshot of
the European intelligentsia.” [1929] Selected
Writings 1927–1934. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.
207–221.
Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a standstill:
approaches to the Passagen-Werk.” Benjamin:
The Arcades Project. Trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevre.
930–945.
Hambermas, Jürgen. “Walter Benjamin:
consciousness raising or rescuing critique.” Smith:
On Walter Benjamin. 90–128.
Pensky, Max. “Method and Time: Benjamin’s
dialectical images.” The
Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris.
Cambridge University Press, 2004. 177–98.
Missac, Pierre. “Walter Benjamin: from
rupture to shipwreck.” Smith: On
Walter Benjamin. 210–23.
Wolin, Richard. “Experience and materialism
in Benjamin’s Passagenwerk.” Benjamin:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Ed. Gary Smith.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1989. 210–27.
Figures
- The invisible structure
of Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades
Project according
to Susan Buck-Morss. (The
Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1989. 211.) [back
to text]
- The confused
speech of nature according
to Charles Baudelaire: “Correspondances” from
Les Fleurs du Mal. (my translation,
c. 1988) [back
to text]
- Paul Klee: Le
Fou de l’abîme. [back
to text]
- Newspaper
cutting, c. 1990. “These
[i.e. the ‘minimal’,
the ‘little’, the ‘few’]
are dimensions that were well
established in technological
and architectural constructions
long before literature made
bold to adapt them. Fundamentally
it is a question of the earliest
manifestation of the principle
of montage. On building the
Eiffel Tower: ‘Thus the
plastic shaping power abdicates
here in favour of a colossal
span of spiritual energy, which
channels the inorganic material
energy into the smallest, most
efficient forms and conjoins
these forms in the most effective
manner ... Each of the twelve
thousand metal fittings, each
of the two and a half million
rivets, is machined to the
millimetre ... On this work
site, one hears no chiselblow
liberating form from stone;
here thought reigns over muscle
power, which it transmits via
cranes and secure scaffolding.’ A.
G. Mayer, Eisenbauten, p. 93.
[Precursors]” (Arcades,
160–161 [F4a, 2]) [back
to text]
- “The
immobilisation of thought is
as much a part of thinking
as its movement. When thought
comes to a standstill in a
constellation [Konstellation]
saturated with tensions, there
appears the dialectical image.
It is the caesura [Zäsur]
in the movement of thought.
Its place is certainly not
arbitrary. In a word, one must
seek out where the tension
between dialectical opposites
is the greatest. The object
thus constructed in the materialist
presentation of history is
therefore the dialectical image.
This is identical with the
historical object; it is the
justification of its being
blasted from the continuum
of history.” (Arcades,
475 [N10a, 3], modified translation,
cf. “History”,
396 [XVII]) [back
to text]
- “But what
I hear when I put the shell
up to my ear is something
else: it is the rattling
noise of the anthracite that
is emptied from the coal
scuttle into the furnace;
it is the dull pop with which
the flame lights up the gas
mantle; it is the jangling
of my mother’s
keys in her basket, the clatter
of the tube in its casing,
the clink of the glass globe
on its metal ring when the
lamp is carried from one
room to another.” (“The
Lamp”, 692) [back
to text]
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