Body-and Image-Space

Re-Reading Walter Benjamin

Sigrid Weigel, Georgina Paul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134837519
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The last decade has seen a new wave of interest in philosophical and theoretical circles in the writings of Walter Benjamin. In Body-and Image-Space Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading feminist theorists and a renowned commentator on the work of Walter Benjamin, argues that the reception of his work has so far overlooked a crucial aspect of his thought - his use of images. Weigel shows that it is precisely his practice of thinking in images that holds the key to understanding the full complexity, richness and topicality of Benjamin's theory.

Memory and writing

‘Images that we never saw until we remembered them.’ To be past, to be no longer works passionately on things.’

8 From topography to writing: Benjamin’s concept of memory

THE SCENE OF MEMORY BETWEEN ARCHAEOLOGY AND WRITING

When in Benjamin’s last completed text, the thought-images (Denkbilder) ‘On the Concept of History’, historiography and recollection are presented as structurally analogous activities and the images of the has-been (das Gewesene) are described as mnemic images (Erinnerungsbilder), this marks the culmination of a long preoccupation with the concepts of memory (Gedächtnis) and recollection (Erinnerung), in the course of which Benjamin’s concept of images—or, more specifically, of their cognizability and readability—found a basis in a theory of memory. The text ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), and here above all the sections I to IV, marks the point in Benjamin’s writings at which he explicitly discusses different models of memory, whereby section III, in which he enters into a consideration of Freud’s concept of shock or impact (Chock), comes closest in character to a theoretical exposition. Yet the traces of his work on a concept of memory go much further back, attaining a particular concentration above all between the first phase of work on the Passagen (1927–29) and his resumption of the project from 1934 onwards. It could be said that those writings which Benjamin himself attributed to his ‘more recent physiognomy’ and which he saw as beginning with ‘One-Way Street’ (Benjamin 1978:416; see Benjamin 1995:293), following the completion of the ‘production complex on German literature’ and the break that he considered the ‘revolutionary turn’ in his thought (1978: 659), that those writings, then, which were composed under the sign of modernity and which were all more or less directly related to the Passagen project, are in large part concerned with problems of memory.

Many of the texts within the radius of the Passagen contain reflections or single thought-images on the complex of recollection and memory, and may be seen as testing out different models and possibilities for representing this complex. In them, Benjamin experiments with a variety of different registers—with notions from archaeology and from optics, for example, but above all with topographical representations—in order to illustrate the attitude of the subject towards the traces and images of history, an attitude which, in the course of the development of his theoretical reflections, takes on ever clearer profile in terms of a specific model of reading. Within this model, the reading of the traces and images of history is located in the scene (Schauplatz) of individual and collective memory (which are regarded as being analogous in structure) and understood as a perceptual activity on the threshold between receptivity and action, between revelation and historiography, between dreaming and philosophizing.

As his thoughts develop, a clear paradigm shift becomes evident from a topographical-spatial model of memory, such as is characteristic of the first phase of the Passagen project, to a scripto-topographical concept of memory, bearing the imprint of psychoanalytical thinking, such as structures the work of the 1930s on the Passagen. The notes and thought-images of ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) can be taken as the site in his writing (Schrift-Ort) in which this paradigm shift can be most clearly observed; it will then find a theoretical grounding with Benjamin’s psychoanalytical reformulation of his theory of language in the two short essays ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and ‘The Doctrine of the Similar’ of 1933 and with the category of ‘non-sensuous similitude’ (unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit) set out there.¹

In the ‘Berlin Chronicle’, the imagery of the section on memory derives, for example, from the register of archaeology; here Benjamin emphasizes the relevance of the place and precise spot (Ort und Stelle) in which things are recovered or found and which may have a significant bearing on their readability or on the relationship between traces (Spuren) and remains (Reste). The ‘attitude of genuine recollections’ (Haltung echter Erinnerungen) is described in this context in the image of excavation as an archaeological activity, in which it is not what is found, but rather the way in which the search is carried out that is of chief importance. And in that it says that recollection should not be afraid to ‘return again and again to the same matter [denselben Sachverhalt]’, the figure of a repetition is simultaneously inscribed into the activity of recollection, albeit a repetition which with the characterization ‘the same’ (‘the same matter’) has not yet identified its object, but so far only the point of departure for its movement:

For the matters themselves are only deposits, strata, which yield only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real assets [Werte] hidden within the earth: the images which, severed from all earlier contexts, stand as precious objects [Kostbarkeiten]— like ruins [Trümmer] or torsos in the collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.

(GS VI, 486; OWS 314, translation modified)

If the images severed from their earlier contexts are here at first, through the comparison with precious collector’s pieces, rated as coveted or cult objects of memory—as meaningful remains, so to speak—which the movement of the search is intended to bring to light, their value is relativized in what follows:

and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record [Niederschrift] merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place [Ort und Stelle] of the finding itself. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance [Erinnerung] must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever new places, and in the old ones delve to ever deeper layers.

(GS VI, 486; OWS 314)

Under the heading of memory as a scene, this attempt at representation, taking as its starting point a narrative structure (the repeated return to the same), and leading on from here to the movements of excavation which are on the trail of meaningful individual pieces, culminates in a catalogue of the places where the findings are made or even of the vain search. This catalogue—in that it is distinguished from the inventory of retrieved objects—appears as it were as a different form of written record (Niederschrift), in relation to which the movement of the search is now also described in terms of a different form of repetition: in ever new places and at ever deeper levels. Thus in this representation of the memory-scene—a thought-image par excellence—a model of writing is superimposed upon an archaeological allegory. And if the archaeological allegory introduces the association of a model of levels, the model of writing is like that proposed by Freud in his topographical concept of memory in which memory is described as a different, or other, scene (ein anderer Schauplatz).

The ‘Berlin Chronicle’, a preliminary study for Benjamin’s ‘Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ (composed from 1933 on), is the work of the author’s in which he works most intensively on his model for representing memory. Here he tests out a variety of different representational allegories, not only that of excavation, but also, for example, that of the family tree and the labyrinth. This undertaking, which was the result of a commission for a series of glosses on Berlin in ‘loosely subjective form’ (GS VI, 476; OWS 305), had been preceded by the first drafts and sketches for the Passagen project in which the Paris arcades were to be examined as paradigms of a ‘past become space’ (eine raumgewordene Vergangenheit) (GS V.2, 1041). In these initial sketches, the topography and architecture of the city are regarded as the memory-space (Gedächtnisraum) of the collective, so that already here we find a materialized memory-topography, in which the external topography, the city of modernity, and the topographical representation of memory in psychoanalysis converge. It is a mode of observation, however, that was only to take on a more differentiated form via the detour of the mnemic images of the ‘Berlin Childhood’ and other works composed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And the aim in what follows is to reconstruct the development of this Benjaminian model of memory.

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF DREAM AND WAKING

In the early sketches for the Passagen, Benjamin works at a dialectical mode of observation which he himself terms a ‘Copernican turning point in the perception of history’ (kopernikanische Wendung in der historischen Anschauung) (GS V.2, 1057) and which he discovers, in connection with the relation between dream and consciousness, in the constellation of awakening: on the threshold, then, between dream and waking. The turning point in the perception of history² of which Benjamin speaks here is to be understood thus: that awakening, characterized as the ‘exemplary case of recollection’ (exemplarischer Fall des Erinnerns) (GS V.2, 1057), gives access to a different kind of knowledge of things past, to ‘a not yet conscious knowledge of the has-been’ (GS V.2, 1014) or to the dream form of the past which has left its traces in the present, even if Benjamin does not yet use the term ‘trace’ (Spur) here:

There is an absolutely singular experience of dialectic. The compelling, the drastic experience, giving the lie to all ‘gradualness of becoming’ [Allgemach des Werdens] and revealing all apparent ‘development’ [Entwicklung] to be an eminent, highly sophisticated, sudden dialectical transformation [Umschlag], is that of awakening from a dream…And with this we present the new, the dialectical historical method: to go through the has-been with the intensity of a dream in order to experience the present as the waking world to which the dream is related! (And every dream is related to the waking world. Everything previous must be penetrated historically.)

(GS V.2, 1006)

It is not only in contradistinction to the conception of linear time and developmental models of history that the relationship between the has-been and the present is disallowed any kind of temporal status here. For it is thought of rather in terms of a relationship between dream and waking world and ultimately—since this in turn is represented in the topography of the city—seen as a spatial relationship. Yet the topography of the city does not serve to represent the dream-world and the world of waking consciousness in the way that Freud, for example, used the ‘mystic writing-pad’ (Wunderblock) as an allegory to represent the interplay of the two distinct systems of the psychic apparatus, perception-consciousness (Wahrnehmung-Bewuβtsein) on the one hand, and the unconscious (Unbewuβtes) on the other. It is rather the case that Benjamin compares certain phenomena, figures, and locations in the real topography of the city with dream and consciousness. He thus rediscovers the relationship between dream and consciousness in material form in the topography of the city—a mode of observation which anticipates the concept of ‘correspondences’ (Korrespondenzen), which he did not develop until rather later, and here describes correspondences between myth, the city, and the relationship between dream and waking:

In ancient Greece places [Stellen] were shown from which paths led down into the underworld. Our waking existence is also a country in which there are hidden places which lead down into the underworld, a country full of inconspicuous locations where dreams open out onto the world. During the day we go past them unsuspectingly, but scarcely are we asleep than we feel our way back to them with rapid hand-movements and lose ourselves in dark passageways. In bright daylight the labyrinth of houses in the city is like consciousness; during the day the arcades (these are the galleries which lead into [the city’s] past existence) open out unnoticed onto the street. But at night, beneath the dark mass of the houses, their more compact darkness leaps out terrifyingly; and the late passer-by hurries on past them, unless, that is, we have encouraged him to take a journey through that narrow passage.

(GS V.2, 1046)

When Benjamin writes here of places (Stellen) where dreams open out onto waking existence or the arcades onto the street, he is already giving emphasis to location, as again in the archaeological image quoted from the ‘Berlin Chronicle’ above: not in this case the location where things are found or looked for, but the location of the transition point, the threshold which marks the access to the past. In another passage he characterizes the houses and the labyrinth they form as dream formations (Traumgebilde), that is, dreams of the ancients that have taken on shape and become stone; and these in turn have entered into language via the street-names:

The most concealed aspect of the big cities: this historical object of the modern city, with its uniform streets and incalculable rows of houses, has realized the architectural structures dreamt of by the ancients: the labyrinths…

What the city of the modern epoch has made of the ancient conception of the labyrinth. It has, through the street-names, raised it to the sphere of language, out of the network of streets into the (x) called (x) within language (x).³

(GS V, 1007)

This attention to the sphere of language gives an early hint at a perspective which will become more central in his subsequent investigations. For it is striking that, in this first phase of his work on the Passagen project, Benjamin does not yet make use of the term or the concept of the unconscious. Rather, he refers to the relationship between dream and waking or dream and consciousness, and projects this onto space. It is true that in doing so he makes explicit reference to psychoanalytical theory, albeit to the notion of a ‘fluctuating state of a consciousness divided at all times and in multiple ways between waking and sleeping’, a notion which he proposes to transfer from the individual to the collective (GS V, 1012). If, then, the topographical scene of memory which Benjamin discovers in the city of modernity is compared with the conception of memory in Freud, there are at this stage, at the end of the 1920s, both similarities and differences to be observed.

READING TRACES VERSUS SECURING CLUES

A reading of Freud’s topographical model of memory as set out in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1923) and the ‘Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’⁴ (1925) reveals several characteristics relevant to our considerations here. First, the distinction he draws between the two, in terms of the way they function, incompatible systems of the psychic apparatus, of which the unconscious (das Unbewuβte) serves the unlimited reception of permanent traces (Dauerspuren) and recorded excitations (aufgezeichnete Erregungen), whereas the system perception-consciousness or Pcpt.-Cs. (Wahrnehmung-Bewuβtsein or WBw) is ever ready to receive new stimuli (Reize) or perceptions (Wahrnehmungen), but also takes on the task of a protective shield (Reizschutz). Of fundamental significance is, however, secondly, the relation between the two systems, which may be described as dialectical in so far as Freud writes that ‘consciousness arises in place of a memory trace’ (Bewuβtsein entstehe an Stelle der Erinnerungsspur) (Freud 1969: III, 235) whereby ‘in place of (an Stelle) has the meaning ‘instead of’ as well as ‘at the site of ;⁵ this occurs in that consciousness flickers up (aufleuchtet) and passes away again in the moment that, as a result of discontinuous cathexis in the system, a connection is established between perception and permanent trace. In describing permanent traces as ‘the foundation of memory’ and linking their readability to certain preconditions, Freud here promotes the view that memory traces are a form of writing—albeit a form of writing which is never readable as such and in its entirety. For its readability is structured by the dialectic of consciousness and mnemic traces, and described in terms of a momentary flickering-up or becoming visible.

As far as the deciphering (Entzifferung) of this writing is concerned, one must turn to other texts of Freud’s: to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), for example, where he—bearing in mind ‘considerations of representability’ (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit)—examines the dream’s mode of represention as an image-writing (Bilderschrift) and takes as his premise that this writing corresponds to the form of a distorted representation. Thirdly, this aspect of distortion (Entstellung) is characteristic of the structure of the unconscious in Freud, and also becomes significant for other phenomena apart from the dream, for other languages of the unconscious—as when Freud sees the hysterical or corporeal symptom as a mnemic symbol, a bodily memory trace, then, which cannot be interpreted as an engram or imprint (Abdruck).

In semiotic terms, it is these three characteristics—the figuration ‘in place of in the relationship between consciousness and permanent traces, the readability bound to the momentary flickering-up or Aufleuchten, and the phenomenon of distorted representation in the visible or readable signs of the memory traces—which mark the specificity of Freud’s concept of memory. It is these, too, which distinguish his notion of traces (Spuren) from the evidential paradigm whose history Carlo Ginzburg has set out in his essay ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’ (Ginzburg 1990:96–125).⁶ It is true that the medical and criminological forms of deciphering clues, traces, and symptoms described by Ginzburg did indeed have a part in the prehistory and development of Freudian psychoanalysis, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Body-and image-space
• Warwick Studies in European Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Translator’s note
• Introduction: Distorted similitude—Benjamin as theorist
• Politics of images and body
• Other—gender—readings
• Memory and writing
• Notes
• Bibliography