Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Image

Alison Ross

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317608530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin's concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin's approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant's treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin's thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on 'Goethe's Elective Affinities, ' and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin's writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin's critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin's writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking. Above all, it shows the relevance of a critical consideration of Benjamin's writing on the image for scholarship in visual culture, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy more broadly.

1 Feeling

In the words of the editor who published Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ [Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften], the essay is ‘absolutely incomparable’ [schlechthin unvergleichlich].¹ The sentiment expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s assessment is widely shared. Nonetheless within the vast field of literature devoted to Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ has not received its due.

Many scholars mention the essay, note Benjamin’s own evaluation of its importance amongst the body of his early work, but then rarely attempt to give a comprehensive account of its labyrinthine circuitry.² Instead, the essay is received in a highly selective way, as interpreters mine it for material able to be cited to support their treatment of specific themes in Benjamin scholarship. The cumulative effect of this practice of reception is that a distorted picture of the essay’s contents now frames its reputation. If we consider, for instance, the two most prominent modes of its interpretation, that is, as a theory of art criticism and as a supporting text for studies of the ‘Critique of Violence,’ it is easy to see how these piecemeal references create a confusing picture both of the diction and topics dealt with in the essay.³

First of all, it is noticeable that the passages commentators tend to highlight for critical attention deal mainly with art criticism. The scholarship is replete with approving mentions of Benjamin’s opening remarks about the ‘truth content’ of the work of art that is grasped through ‘critique,’ which he distinguishes from the act of merely philological ‘commentary’ on the ‘material content.’ Similarly, there are a number of exegetical treatments of Benjamin’s concept of the ‘expressionless’ [das Ausdruckslose] as a category for art criticism, which, following Hölderlin, would mark out the ‘caesura’ or ‘counter-rhythm’ of the work. In the third section of the essay, Benjamin describes the expressionless in terms of its destructive effects on the semblance of the beautiful, which it ‘shatters into a thing of shards,’ a ‘torso of the symbol.’ Scholars have mobilised impressive rhetorical resources and ingenuity to unpack this section, which also includes Benjamin’s difficult account of beauty as, ‘neither the veil nor the veiled object but the object in its veil’ (SW I, 351).⁴ These efforts generally aim to contribute more detail to the Benjaminian approach to art and thereby glide past the real polemical target of the essay, which is the negative assessment of aesthetic form understood, as in the case of the symbol, as the material image of false totality. These kinds of commentaries do not have any purchase on the specific problem the essay poses: the pernicious, ambiguous meaning that is carried by sensible forms in the absence of any critical, external perspective on them. The romantic figure of the ‘symbol’ as the sensuous site evocative of a plenitude of ideas is Benjamin’s exemplary model of the ambiguities that stem from such ‘totalising’ sensible forms of meaning. Indeed the selective passages commentators tend to treat from the essay regarding the expressionless risk the misrepresentation of Benjamin’s general indictment of the demonic expressivity of sensuous form, even though that is also the intention of these cited passages. The mortification of semblance and the counterrhythm of the expressionless is a specific mode of countering the seductive effects of sensible form, which is a part of the armour Benjamin’s essay deploys against it.

The general position of the essay pivots on a polemic against the treatment of human life as if it were a work of art. One of the important correlates of this position, which comes through in the passages where Benjamin treats the effects of the waning force of tradition in modern bourgeois society, is the assertion of the inadequacy of a life lived with nothing other than aesthetic criteria to guide it. Such a life—and Benjamin uses the characters in Goethe’s novel as well as Goethe’s own life to make this point—is claimed by mythic forces and condemned to groping in vain for empty ritualistic forms of propitiation. For this reason, one needs to be cautious of those interpretations which effectively present the essay as if its primary concern were the provision of a theory of art, or of further gnomic, Benjaminian insights in art criticism. The readings that superimpose on Benjamin’s opening distinction between the ‘materiality’ and the ‘truth’ of the work of art, a theory of how the art critic draws out the potential of materiality to arrive at truth are especially obtuse in respect of the meaning of the essay. In fact, the essay displays such a consistently critical attitude to aesthetic form understood as the bearer of meaning, that, as Winfried Menninghaus writes, it can plausibly be understood as a defence of the value of the image-less-ness [das Bilderlosigkeit].⁵ And, I would add, to the extent that Benjamin adopts a critical perspective on the image, this must be understood as a critical perspective on the irresolvable ambiguity of the aesthetically framed sensible form.⁶ The paradox of the essay is that Benjamin uses aesthetic forms, like the image from Goethe’s novel of the shooting star or the figures of the novella lovers and their selfless actions, to communicate this perspective. Moreover, his use of such images and figures shows that it is not strictly the Bilderlosigkeit, as Menninghaus would have it, which the essay defends. Rather, it is the fundamental value of the Revelation, understood as a specific way of marking the significance and meaning of nature’s forms.

The second prominent feature characterising this essay’s reception is its regular appearance as a footnote for discussions of Benjamin’s contemporaneous ‘Critique of Violence’ essay [Zur Kritik der Gewalt]. This use of the essay on Elective Affinities reinforces its marginal status. It is no exaggeration to state that since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 address on ‘The Force of Law’ at the Cardozo Law School, the somewhat oracular, revolutionary pronouncements of the Violence essay have captivated many in the field. However, the rescue of the latter essay from its erstwhile obscurity has had the undesirable side effect of eclipsing entirely the problems of interpretation raised by Benjamin’s more substantial essay on Goethe’s novel. In the obsessive attention given to the essay on Violence, Benjamin’s essay on Goethe appears merely as supporting evidence for one or another interpretation of ‘divine’ and ‘mythic’ violence in the former. This inverts what in my mind is the proper hermeneutic order of these works: for instance, the opposition between divine and mythic violence in the Violence essay, which Benjamin illustrates with his puzzling insistence on the qualitative difference between God’s destruction of the company of the Korah and the Greek gods’ punishment of Niobe, can really be understood only when placed within the series of oppositions from the essay on Elective Affinities. Benjamin distinguishes between the total annihilation of Korah and his company and Niobe’s punishment: whereas no blood is spilt in the former, and despite the absence of blood in Niobe’s petrifaction, the latter is ‘bloody’; the first expiates guilt, the second only punishes, according to Benjamin.⁷ These features that ostensibly serve to give substance to the distinction between divine and mythic violence, in fact, pertain to them by definition: the destruction of Korah and his followers is expiatory and bloodless because it is ‘divine violence,’ i.e., perpetrated by the god of the Revelation.⁸

The essay on Goethe’s novel is one of the most significant of his early writings, and, I think, one of the key works of his entire career. It is the touchstone against which subsequent alterations in Benjamin’s thinking can be measured, and, alongside the essay on Language, the source of elucidation for many obscurities of his early writing, not least those of the essay on Violence. Let me explain this point in further detail.

The conceptual frame of Benjamin’s early thinking rests on the absolute opposition between nature and the Word. His essay on Language identifies the creative word of God as the essence of nature’s forms available to man as knowledge in the naming language. In contrast, the demonic status of expressive nature refers to nature cut off from the transcendent, which Benjamin calls ‘myth.’⁹ This opposition is the prototype for the adjectives that collect around the contrast between ‘divine’ and ‘mythic’ violence in the essay on Violence, most notably those, respectively, of ‘bloodless’ and ‘bloody’ violence. In the essay on Elective Affinities Benjamin sets out the logic that organises this evaluative stance. In particular, the essay explains the significance of Benjamin’s claim that mythic violence leaves Niobe ‘mute.’ For Benjamin, ethical life breaks apart the ambiguity of selfsufficient sensible form, or myth. It does so through the articulated clarity of the spoken word.

Viewed in terms of the topography of his early thinking, the importance of the relation of nature to the Revelation is its function as an escape from totalising sensuous forms. In his essay on Goethe’s novel, this distinction is the basis for his polemic against the way that the George School styles Goethe aesthetically as a ‘hero.’ It is important to consider the details of Benjamin’s claim that Goethe is constructed ‘aesthetically’ as a ‘hero’ carefully not just because this claim bears on the topic of the existential dimensions of the aesthetic life, which is one of the main concerns of the essay, but also because the logic underpinning the essay’s series of oppositions depends on it. For instance, as many commentators have noted, Benjamin’s essay invokes a tripartite distinction between spoken language, silence, and chatter. Less often mentioned, however, is the way that this hierarchy of language use is partnered at its high end to the ethical life and at its low end to the pathology, which he ascribes to Goethe, of a paralysing ‘fear of responsibility’ (SW I, 319).¹⁰ Thus, he criticises members of the George School for their bombastic use of language, which falls into the category of chatter: Gundolf’s Goethe, ‘this ungainly pedestal for his own statuette,’ has the monstrous shape of an ‘esoteric doctrine’: ‘words swing themselves, like chattering monkeys, from branch to branch, from bombast to bombast, in order not to have to touch the ground which betrays the fact that they cannot stand: that is, the ground of logos, where they ought to stand and give an account of themselves. But they avoid this ground with so much show because in the face of every sort of mythic thinking . . . the question of truth comes to naught in it’ (SW I, 326–327).¹¹ This criticism builds on Benjamin’s earlier criticism of Goethe for deliberately misleading critics as to the meaning of his work by portraying it in ‘ambiguous sentences’ as if it were a ‘fable of renunciation’ in which morality somehow triumphs over the sensual.¹²

Benjamin notes that in ‘so many relations in [Goethe’s] life’ it was ‘not renunciation that was of the first importance . . . but rather his having neglected to do things [Versäumnis]. And when he recognized the irretrievability of what he had thus let slip, the irretrievability of what he had neglected, only then did renunciation offer itself to him, if only as a last attempt still to embrace in feeling what was lost’ (SW I, 313). If Goethe maintains that the struggle of morality with affection is, in his words, ‘“displaced behind the scenes”’ in the novel, since ‘“[m]oral struggles never lend themselves to aesthetic representation”’ (Cites Goethe, SW I, 312), Benjamin describes this position as an ‘evasion’ which is ‘obviously untenable in [its] exclusion of the inner ethical struggle as an object of poetical construction. Indeed, what else would remain of the drama, of the novel itself?’ (SW I, 312). Benjamin inveighs against the image of the novel propagated in Goethe’s statements on the matter. Goethe attempts to protect his pretence that negligence can be converted into ‘moral’ renunciation, and he does so by invoking what Benjamin describes as his ‘inadequate . . . opposition between the sensual and the moral.’ Benjamin argues against Goethe that in the novel the ‘ethical never lives triumphantly but lives only in defeat’ (SW I, 312). His explanation of this position provides another example of the schema in which the clarity of spoken language is related to ethical life. Conversely, in its degraded use in ambiguous chatter or deprivation in silence, ‘language’ comes to signal the ‘defeat’ of ethical life. Hence the characters of the novel are criticised for their ‘mute’ compliance to bourgeois custom. Bourgeois convention is described as ‘mute’ because the silences of the novel’s characters are ways of dissimulating their true feelings. Hence he criticises Eduard and Charlotte not for the dissolution of their marriage but because in their youth they silently entered into loveless, but socially advantageous matches with other partners despite their feelings for each other. In their ‘silences,’ these characters have lost the ethics of the articulated word that is grounded in the truth of the word. They are unfavourably compared to the figures of the lovers in the novella who risk everything for their love and stand on the ground of the logos when they ask for the blessing of their families. The purport of the references to language in the essay, therefore, needs to be understood in relation to the value Benjamin wants to give to the Revelation, understood as the ‘truth’ and clarity of logos, in its opposition to the ‘mysticism’ and ‘ambiguity’ of word use in ‘myth.’ And yet, we may well ask whether the names of the ‘Revelation’ and ‘myth’ that anchor Benjamin’s approach are only different ways of naming, partitioning and evaluating modes of the aesthetic organisation of sensuous forms?

In his essay, Benjamin uses the category of the aesthetic in a particularly negative sense. The aesthetic treatment of Goethe’s life as ‘Olympian’ by the George School is one dimension of this pejorative conception. In addition, aesthetic choices are generally understood and presented as groundless ways of organising the sensible form. The removal of the tombstones of the ancestors from the graveyard for the purposes of creating an aesthetically pleasing path to the church is for Benjamin a culpable disregard of tradition. Bourgeois ‘freedom’ is understood as a life...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Feeling
• 2 Form
• 3 Similitude
• 4 History
• 5 Image
• Conclusion
• Index