1
Dialectical Images
Derek Bunyard ()
King Alfred’s College, Winchester; Hants.
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Lille, 5-8 September 2001
Panel Presentation E385
(History of Education group)
Summary
Over the last thirty years, Walter Benjamin’s writings from the Nineteen Thirties and Forties have been vigorously examined and employed within cultural studies. However, in relation to the disciplines of history and education, there has been a more distanced reception of his ideas, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that Benjamin was obsessed with the relationship between the past and the present for both political and pedagogic reasons. Crucial to his hopes for a pedagogy based on historical materialism was the possibility that the conjunction of present experience with images of the past might lead to political praxis. It therefore seems appropriate to consider ways in which Benjamin’s work might kindle afresh our own historical and educational imaginations. This paper takes up that challenge and focuses on Benjamin’s ‘dialectical images’ – a unique form of historical and pedagogical representation. It compares several interpretations of this term and develops a reading that is principally constructed in relation to the concept of allegory.
Introduction
Before starting, it is as well to have in mind a particular caution. Contemporary enthusiasm for Benjamin’s work coincides with a period that Frederic Jameson, amongst others, has characterised as post-Modern[1]. An implication of this is that our representations of his project are likely to be inflected by whatever passes as the features of critical enquiry under post-Modernity. In this respect I have been principally guided by Jameson’s own critical project as presented in his book, The Political Unconscious, in which he argues for an ideological critique matched by the redemption of the Utopian impulse within ideology[2].
Demonstrably so in the case of Benjamin, arguably so in our own case, the role of allegory is central. Deciding, therefore, how best to disentangle present perceptions of this ‘allegorical impulse’ from Benjamin’s own extensive work on the subject presents a problem that is essentially ‘beyond us’[3]. However, a number of writers apart from Jameson have identified the principal characteristics of what they believe are our own critical predilections. Although these reports are necessarily interim in nature, one in particular will be referred to here because of its parallelism to Benjamin's own project.
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s own analysis builds around the Kantian conception of the sublime[4]. According to Kant, the sentiment of the sublime takes place when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. Lyotard paraphrases Kant:
We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate[5].
Lyotard locates the post-Modern within Modernity itself, arguing that if Modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, then the post-Modern consists of two possible responses:
The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, ... . The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its ‘inhumanity’ so to speak .... The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which results from the invention of new rules of the game[6].
Jameson’s argument for the rescue of the utopian within ideological critique is matched, not only by Lyotard’s two forms of response, but also by an equivalent ambivalence within Benjamin’s own writing. It is in trying to express this ambivalence within the self-understanding supposedly triggered by a Benjaminian dialectical image that I have been drawn to focus on allegory, and hence, on rhetoric. Hans Kellner exactly captures the spirit in which the following analysis has been conducted when he writes:
If one agrees with Huizinga that history is the way in which a culture deals with its own past, then historical understanding is a vital cultural enterprise, and the historical imagination an important, if neglected, human faculty. Because the sources of history include in a primary sense the fundamental human practice of rhetoric, we cannot forget that our ways of making sense of history must emphasise the making. To get the story crooked is to understand that the straightness of any story is a rhetorical invention and that the invention of stories is the most important part of human self-understanding and self-creation[7].
Reading Benjamin.
Benjamin’s dialectical images may seem to respond to both dimensions of Lyotard's analysis – the nostalgic and the jubilatory – but it will be argued here that for Benjamin the second is more significant than the first[8]. Given this intent, how best to cut through the thickets of post-Modern nostalgia? One of the principal authors to have written at length on the immediacy of the dialectical image is Susan Buck-Morss[9]. I will start the development of my own interpretation by citing an off-the-cuff definition that Buck-Morss made to me during a visit to Winchester Cathedral some two years ago[10]. The following is offered by way of scene setting:
Along both sides of the retroquire aisle in Winchester Cathedral there are two examples of Sixteenth Century mortuary art that attract many visitors, particularly when accompanied by children. Forming the lower sections of the chantry chapels of Bishops Fox and Gardiner, they show their respective incumbents as naked and desiccated corpses. Each clenches a gathering of shroud cloth in their right fist, pulling it across their sex in a final act of modesty before the viewers they leave on earth.
This form of imagery was developed further in the more lavish and illustrative mortuary art of the Sixteenth Century devoted to the remembrance of the rich and famous. One particularly fine example of this is Maximillian Colt’s design for Robert Cecil’s tomb – eventually built in 1612 in Hatfield Church next to Cecil’s great house. The finished sarcophagus combines a peaceful representation of Jame’s advisor on the upper table with a carved skeleton beneath. The figuration unites two discourses – that of the life past, and the body’s literal futurity – with an unseen but implied third term, that of the spirit. The spatial division of the entablature implies not only the proximity of the world of the living with the world of the dead but also, through its vertical axis, the distillation of the spirit from the body. Rather than contenting himself with an easily forgotten assertion of Cecil’s status in Heaven, Colt's imagery suggests that the strength of Faith’s sutures can only be appreciated after the wounds of death have been exposed.
Buck-Morss’ initial comment was that the form of the Winchester sarcophagi approximated closely to what she understood Benjamin to have meant when he used the term ‘dialectical image’; these carvings were designed to shock[11]. I was surprised. Having automatically located them within a trajectory leading towards the more complete form adopted by designs such as Colt's, I had seen them as illustrative within a field of existing meaning. Buck-Morss accepted this, but drew my attention to two aspects of her own Benjaminian reading. Firstly, the sarcophagi provided a minatory reminder to non-believers as much as they worked to confirm the faith of the pious. Secondly, the supposed illustrative lack in the Winchester sarcophogi could be seen more positively. In her view, an essential aspect of. any dialectical image was its completion by the viewer.
This anecdote suggests the terms for subsequent analysis; and it implies two stages. Ultimately, priority will be given to the sense in which the dialectical image offers a striking summary which provokes reflection upon a present condition, i.e. the sarcophogi described above. But, prior to this, there is clearly a need to give some thought to the notion of shock itself; Buck-Morss is not alone in placing great weight on this. However, in so doing we run the risk of trying to produce an explanation purely in terms of causal consequences. In other words, the two stages/aspects need to be combined in any final analysis. Both unite in the exercise of a subversive intent, and hold, I think, a parasitic relationship to a contemporary 'text'[12].
In the popular literature on Benjamin, emphasis is often given to his interest in montage, and hence to the significance of ‘shock’ as an intrinsic quality of the dialectical image[13]. As we have seen, this is the view favoured by Buck-Morss herself, emphasising the image’s potential to attack the supposed stability of the everyday and its capacity to trigger a re-cognition of the present. This interpretation, however, consigns the dialectical image to that same cluster of aesthetico-political projects which flowed out of French and German Dada and into Surrealism – delineated by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde[14]. In Buck-Morss’ book, she reviews this account and is drawn to echo Bürger when making the point that within the bourgeois era it is the claim for art as an autonomous product that creates the grounds for a possible 'allegorical' response.
The term, allegory, is in this instance being used to characterise practices in which reality steals into the aesthetic domain and disrupts the division between the aesthetic and political/pragmatic realms, e.g. Duchamp’s infamous urinal[15]. Benjamin, on this reckoning, becomes an ‘allegorist’ of history. As the author of a recondite book on German Baroque drama this may seem unexceptionable – unless one is aware that within it Benjamin develops a rather different conception of allegory. In fact, Bürger's use of the term is so close to the conventional paratactical interpretation of collage that Buck-Morss' incorporation of this in her own book is misleading in its emphasis on a particular formulation of 'effect'.
An immediate problem is that it allows a short-circuit in interpretation that raises as many questions as it answers: Consider the following:
The insertion of reality fragments into the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. [... The parts] are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality[16].
For Bürger this confers a political potential to the work, and the possibility of an independent viewing for a public. Both of these aspirations are ones that readers of Benjamin will recognise, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the institutional framing of these art works will turn these same fragments back into signs[17]. Buck-Morss is clearly aware of the tangle of interpretations precipitated by running montage and allegory together when she suggests that what is at stake is a tension between the exercise of subjective control – giving autonomy to the parts of the work conceived as signs – and refraining from any such imposition 'so as to preserve the authority of the viewer’s response.'
This heterodox account of the dialectical image, as a form of historical collage – is one uncritically reproduced far too often. An overview of Benjamin’s work developed by Richard Wolin is helpful at this point[18]. According to Wolin, the entire Benjaminian oeuvre is dominated by a single aim, held from the time of his early engagement with the radical wing of the German Youth Movement to his death at the Spanish border in 1940. Crudely speaking, it amounts to identifying forms of resistance to the processes within modernity that would narrow and reduce the quality of experience. His intent is always to ‘rescue’ for contemporary life instances from the past where a broader conception of experience is articulated[19].
If Wolin is correct in this estimate, one turns away from Buck-Morss' focus on effect and begins to see how evenly balanced Benjamin’s project may be with respect to the responses to post-Modernity identified by Lyotard, and how closely the project Jameson attempts to specify for a renewed Marxism is organised around it. Wolin's interpretation produces a single project articulated by three distinct periods in which Benjamin’s use of the term, ‘dialectical image’, is located in the central one of these.
An early Idealist and esoteric preoccupation with the disintegration of experience by manipulative rationality, coupled with the view that in certain aesthetic encounters there exists the possibility of glimpsing a vision of a redeemed pre-lapsarian condition, while still living within the boundaries of the empirical world;
A later Materialist and exoteric interest in shifting the prospect of redemption from the theological to the materialistic - analysing the profane continuum of historical existence and attempting to rescue images of fulfilment expressed in the hopes, fears, and fantasies of the past for the now-time of a contemporary collective;
A final ‘anthropological materialism’ in which there is no longer the assumption of any direct connection between aspects of cultural life and an economic ‘base’ - and in which the principal task of the critic is to identify those instances in which art works achieve a unity between the nature of contemporary experience, their own form, and the redemption of collective experience within Modernity.
Against the background of Marxism, the exoteric, the materialistic, and the dialectical are all intelligible aspects of Benjamin's work, but why did he then insist on imagery per se? Wolin’s own suggestion is that it is a by-product of his attempt to render philosophy surrealistic. Benjamin's aim is said to be to “reduce the discrepancy between philosophical thought and everyday life by incorporating elements of the latter directly”[20]. His disgust at conventional forms of historical explanation led him to attempt to construct historical representations in which every trace of subjective interference was obliterated. According to Wolin, this resulted in ‘sensuous-intuitive’ constructions that tried to “telescope the past through the present” i.e. form a configuration of the past with the present[21].
But for a writer, what might a ‘sensuous-intuitive’ presentation mean? If its origins lie within Surrealism, we have not advanced much further in our understanding of ‘shock’[22]. However, Sigrid Weigel offers a clear statement that pulls us back from the assumption of visuality that this seems to entail[23]. She writes,
... the dialectical image is a read image, an image in language, even if the material of representation can here be very various: from physiognomy via dream images, the world of objects, to architecture, ... [24].
If this alternative account is accepted, a ‘sensuous-intuitive’ presentation for Benjamin must involve something other than a pure visuality. In fact, the question becomes more focussed on the definition of any residual visual quality that remains. As Michael Jennings expresses it, “Benjamin’s sense of revolution has more in common with an act of inspired reading than it does with seizing railroads.”[25] Despite this uncertainty in Wolin's account, he provides two further citations which will allow us to make some progress. The first comes from Adorno’s review of Benjamin’s textual montage One-Way Street, and the other from Benjamin himself. Both insist on a specific form of visuality-inspired ‘readership’.
The fragments of Einbahnstrasse ... are picture puzzles, attempts to conjure through parables that which cannot be expressed in words. They aim not as much to give check to conceptual thinking as to shock by way of their enigmatic form and thereby to set thinking in motion; for in its traditional conceptual form, thinking grows obdurate, appears conventional and antiquated[26].
Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderon, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers, ‘enter, fleeing.’ The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of non-participating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter ‘fleeing’ takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with the expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of on-looking strangers[27].
Adorno's use of the word parable suggests that the issue can be reduced to a form of writing that will initiate a doubled reading of the familiar, i.e. through the application of an extended metaphor which may, indeed, suggest a new interpretation of ‘shock’. In semiotic terms the reading of a literary image as parable is signalled by a framing device which interrupts the syntagmatic flow of contents and initiates retrospectively (more rarely, prospectively) an overall paradigmatic shift of meaning, i.e., the imposition of a distinct symbolic mapping. However, Adorno's use of the phrase 'picture puzzles' reminds us of the often enigmatic content that is a feature of parable. This emphasis on the heterogeneous mixing of content in order to present new meaning pushes parable towards allegory, in that within allegory an assemblage of components is extracted – ‘rescued' – from a pre-existing symbolic system.