Walter Benjamin

The Colour of Experience

Howard Caygill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415089586
• eBook ISBN: 9781134878185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book analyses the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour.

1
The Programme of the Coming Philosophy

Past things have futurity.

Walter Benjamin, The Metaphysics of Youth, 1914

The concept of experience

All of Benjamin’s writings, whether dedicated to literature, art history or the study of urban culture, may be read as anticipations of a ‘coming philosophy’. At the heart of this new philosophy is a radical transformation of the concept of experience bequeathed by Kant’s critical philosophy. The matrix for this transformation is to be found in the few short published articles and numerous unpublished fragments surviving from the period between 1914 and 1921. These difficult, opaque and often unreadable texts are crucial to any interpretation of Benjamin’s thought. In them Benjamin distanced himself from the tradition of academic neo-Kantianism in which he had been trained at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich and Bern¹ and sought, in the words of a letter to Gerhard Scholem, dated 22 October 1917, to ‘comprehend [Kant] with the utmost reverence, looking on the least letter as a tradendum to be transmitted (however much it is necessary to recast him afterwards)’ (C, 97–8). The subsequent development of his thought may be understood in terms of such a ‘comprehension and recasting’ of Kant’s transcendental concept of experience into a speculative one.

The ‘philosophy of the future’ intimated by Benjamin and partially realised in his later works introduced the ‘absolute’ or ‘infinite’ into Kant’s deliberately finitist concept of experience. Benjamin pursued this course in a way which deliberately rejected both the direction and the implications of Hegel’s earlier speculative transformation of Kant’s philosophy in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The ‘coming philosophy’ is an anti-Hegelian speculative philosophy driven by the nihilistic refusal of any attempt to grasp or comprehend the absolute through finite categories.

The ambition to extend and transform Kant’s concept of experience is the thread which runs through Benjamin’s otherwise disparate early writings. Although the transformation of Kant’s transcendental into a speculative concept of experience is first declared programmatically in the 1917 fragment On Perception and the 1918 On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy,² intimations of it pervade the writings of this period. It informs and motivates Benjamin’s acknowledged contributions to linguistic, aesthetic and political philosophy³ as well as his less familiar work in the fields of mathematics, geometry, logic and the philosophy of colour.⁴ In these writings Benjamin questions not only the structure of Kant’s concept of experience, but also its basic assumptions that (a) there is a distinction between the subject and the object of experience and (b) that there can be no experience of the absolute.

Benjamin’s recasting of Kant’s concept of experience challenged not only the norms of Kant exegesis, but more significantly the very self-definition of philosophy. His extension of the bounds of experience to include ‘sooth-saying from coffee grounds’ threatened to dissolve the bounds of sense that were so carefully demarcated by Kant and policed by his philosophical heirs. For Kant, the parameters of possible experience are constituted by the faculties of intuition, understanding and reason anatomised in the Critique of Pure Reason. He assigns to intuition the pure forms of intuition (space and time), to understanding the twelve categories of the understanding (unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substance, causality, community, possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, necessity/contingency), and to reason the ideas of reason (God, World, Soul). In elaborating his concept of experience, Kant rigorously distinguishes between the contributions made by each faculty to experience. Nevertheless, the critical philosophy hinges on the conviction that it is possible to establish a relationship between intuition and understanding given the rigorously prescribed conditions of the subsumption of the material of sensibility intuited through space and time under the categories of the understanding. However, critical philosophy denies legitimacy to any supposed relationship between intuition/under-standing and the ideas of reason.

In his critique of Kant’s concept of experience, Benjamin not only extended the neo-Kantian attempt to dissolve the distinction between intuition and understanding, but went further in seeking a (expressly non-, if not anti-Hegelian) concept of ‘speculative experience’.⁵ This recast the distinction between intuition/understanding and reason into an avowed metaphysics of experience in which the absolute manifests itself in spatio-temporal experience, but indirectly in complex, tortuous and even violent forms. In this way Benjamin evades Kant’s exclusion of the absolute from all but moral experience without accepting the Hegelian view of a developmental history of spirit, or the continuous process of mediation between the absolute and spatio-temporal experience.

The proposal to break down the distinctions between intuition, understanding and reason has led historically either to a revival of pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics or to a form of Hegelianism. Benjamin, aware of both possibilities and of the traditional Kantian objections to them, nevertheless insists on a ‘transformation of the transcendental philosophy of experience into a transcendental but speculative philosophy.⁶ For this transformation not to lapse into a gesture of empty philosophical radicalism it was necessary to address the architectonic of Kant’s concept of experience. An essential preliminary to any speculative recasting of the distinctions between intuition, concept and idea is to show that the totality expressed by the ideas of reason appears in intuitions and concepts, and, by implication, that spatio-temporal experience contains elements of both categorical universality and rational totality.

This is the project informing the early fragments in which Benjamin sought to comprehend the Kantian tripartite architectonic of experience (reason/understanding/intuition) as but one of a number of possible infinite but bounded surfaces of experience. To achieve this comprehension it was necessary for him to recast the Kantian topology, beginning with a reorientation of infinity and totality with respect to the forms of intuition (space and time). Such a reorientation put into question a further assumption of the critical philosophy, namely the distinction between the activity of reason and understanding and the passivity of intuition, as well as that between the visual (geometrical) axioms of intuition and the acroamatic (discursive/linguistic) categories of the understanding.

Benjamin’s elaboration of a non-Hegelian speculative experience provoked many false starts and unhelpful digressions, and may even in the end be judged as a cautionary failure. It left in its wake the ruins of a number of uncompleted/uncompletable projects, of which the Arcades Project is but the most striking instance. Even at the outset of his authorship, Benjamin’s texts are often fragments of uncompleted projects, while his correspondence is littered with the remains and traces of abandoned works. Two of the most significant early ruins are the projects dedicated to the study of ‘perception’ and to ‘fantasy and colour’. The surviving groups of fragments associated with these projects provide important evidence for Benjamin’s ambition to comprehend and recast Kant’s concept of experience and to chart a new philosophical space able to contain the experience of the absolute. They also establish the tension between visual, linguistic and rhythmical aspects of experience which spans the entirety of Benjamin’s oeuvre.

A point of entry into the complex philosophical matrix of Benjamin’s early thought is afforded by the enigmatic fragment from 1917 ‘On Perception In Itself’. This reads, in its entirety,

Perception is reading
Only that appearing in the surface is readable…
Surface that is configuration—absolute continuity.⁷

Although anything but perspicuous, this fragment contains the key for an entrance into the philosophical world of the early fragments. Unfortunately, as is often the case with Benjamin, the key itself has first to be deciphered. The train of thought moves from the proposition that perception is reading to a transcendental definition of the conditions of the possibility of legibility (namely, of what can qualify to be read, or which appears on a surface) and then to a speculative statement of the condition for the transcendental condition of legibility itself (namely, the configured character of the surface).

Inverting the order of the phrase allows us to see that a surface (Benjamin will use the example of a blank page) is a particular mode of configuring appearances for subsequent reading or perception. In this way Benjamin fulfils the condition of a Kantian transcendental argument by stating, however obliquely, the conditions of a possible experience and by specifying the object of such an experience in terms of appearance. What is not Kantian is the way he situates the particularity of the transcendental condition of experience within the speculative context of the infinite configuration of surfaces or ‘absolute composition’. The transcendental is thus a fold in the surface of speculative configuration, implying that perception is not the receptivity of impressions but the ‘reading’ of appearances that are themselves already organised. Even more significantly, experience as reading is not divided between an active ‘reader’ (subject of experience) and a passive ‘read’ (object of experience). The ‘read’ is by no means a passive datum but makes as active a contribution as the ‘reader’ to the accomplishment of ‘perception as reading’.

Benjamin’s speculative concept of experience situates Kant’s configuration of the conditions of experience first as a condition of legibility and then as one of a number of possible conditions. In terms of the fragment under discussion, the ‘transcendental’ is made up of the conditions of legibility afforded by a particular surface while the ‘speculative’ comprises the set of such possible surfaces of legibility. Benjamin explored both of these dimensions, first in his work on colour and configuration and then subsequently in his reflections on language and translation. Both areas of work traced the outline of a transcendental but speculative philosophy in which a transcendental account of the infinite readings (or perceptions) possible within a given surface of legibility (or set of conditions of possible experience) is supplemented by the speculative claim that these conditions are themselves but one of an infinite set of possible surfaces or conditions of experience. The speculative configuration is both folded into and exceeds the particular surface of legibility, allowing Benjamin to conceive of a double infinity: the transcendental infinity of possible marks on a given surface (or perceptions within a given framework of possible experience) and the speculative infinity of possible bounded but infinite surfaces or frameworks of experience. The transcendental infinity of possible legible marks on a given surface is framed and supplemented by the speculative infinity of possible surfaces for inscription and legibility. The exploration of the complex relationship between the two infinities provided the occasion and motivation for much of Benjamin’s subsequent work.

A transcendental but speculative philosophy

For the fragment on perception to fulfil the requirements of a ‘transcendental but speculative philosophy’ capable of describing the conditions for the conditions of the possibility of experience, it was necessary for Benjamin to define more closely the emerging philosophical lexicon of terms such as surface, configuration and appearance. He does not do so in the writings of 1917 and 1918 since he had already established their usage in earlier writings. The basic thought informing the fragment ‘On perception in itself’ and other texts from the period is recalled by Scholem in The History of a Friendship. Evoking his conversations with Benjamin over the summer of 1918 in Bern, Scholem wrote ‘Even then he occupied himself with ideas about perception as a reading in the configurations of the surface—which is the way prehistoric man perceived the world around him, particularly the sky.’ He added ‘This was the genesis of the considerations which he employed many years later in his notes The Doctrine of the Similar.’⁸ The outline of the thought enveloped in Benjamin’s often obscure early fragments may be clarified by a brief anticipation of the later sketch.

The short essay from 1933, The Doctrine of the Similar and the revised version from later in the same year On the Mimetic Faculty both develop genealogies of perception as reading.⁹ This is expressed formulaically in the later version as: ‘“To read what was never written.” Such a reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances’ (1933b:162). Configuration is regarded as the condition of legibility: to be legible (i.e. to conform to the conditions of a possible reading or experience) is not the consequence of an intended meaning, but is rather the discovery of a‘non sensuous similarity’ between configured patterns. As the example of the dance suggests, these patterns are not exclusively spatial—for space itself is but a particular form of ‘non sensuous similarity’ or patterning—but can also be temporal, expressed in accent, metre and rhythm. Indeed, it is crucial for Benjamin’s argument that space and time (Kant’s forms of intuition) be regarded as modes of configuration whose plasticity, or openness to other forms of patterning, can ‘decay’ or be otherwise ‘transformed’. Space and time which feature as the givens of transcendental philosophy become modes of configuration which can be understood speculatively as providing the contours of but one among many possible configurations of experience.

The ‘decay’ or ‘transformation’ of a particular configuration of experience is a significant stage in the transition to a new form of reading associated with language and writing—or ‘the most perfect archive of non sensuous similarity’. The transition from reading ‘what was never written’ to writing proposed in both versions of the 1933 text effects a reduction in the complexity of configuration. Instead of patterns being read against each other in a complex space in which there is no foreground or background (the sphere of speculative experience), configurations are interpreted according to their relative position on a given uniform extended surface. Configuration is thus transformed into inscription, reducing the speculative reading of the similarity between patterns into the transcendental reading of graphically inscribed marks upon an infinite but bounded surface. In the later essays this transformation is regarded as a ‘reduction’ characteristic of ‘modern human beings’ whose perception or ‘experience’ is reduced to reading events within a plane of uniformly extended space and time. Within the given plane, those aspects of configuration excluded from the paradigm of inscription manifest themselves in distorted form, assuming portentous and even ridiculous shapes or otherwise registering their presence in violent spatial or temporal disturbance.¹⁰

Returning to the fragment from 1917, it is now possible to identify the ‘transcendental but speculative philosophy’ as the attempt to comprehend speculative configuration beyond its transcendental confinement within a particular surface of inscription. The latter, indeed, is exemplified by the Kantian structuring of experience in which objects appear in the uniform space and time of the forms of intuition, then to be read in terms of the universality of the categories. Totality is either excluded from the realm of experience, as in the case of the ideas of reason, or it is always yet to come in what Hegel described as the ‘bad infinity’.¹¹ In his attempts to develop a speculative (but, again, non-Hegelian) concept of experience, Benjamin effectively transforms inscription into a special case of the more inclusive, speculative domain of configuration.

At its most general, this transformation leads to an intensive metaphysics in which space and time are informed by an immanent totality. The implication of the immanent totality in spatio-temporal experience is understood by Benjamin in two inconsistent and even contradictory ways. The first stresses complexity, and looks to the ways in which an immanent totality may manifest itself in the complex patterns and distortions of spatio-temporal experience. The other dissolves space and time into totality, and threatens to collapse the complexity of spatio-temporal patterning into a closed ‘redemptive’ immanence. The latter would mark the advent of a speculative philosophy without transcendental supplement, one which dissolves all the conditions of possible experience into emanations of the absolute. The dissolution of spatio-temporal complexity into an absolute, immanent purity is on the whole successfully resisted in Benjamin’s writing, although it occasionally manifests itself in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface and acknowledgements
• References and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The programme of the coming philosophy
• 2 Speculative critique
• 3 The work of art
• 4 The experience of the city
• Afterword: the colour of experience
• Notes
• Biliography
• Index