Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Image

In an essay entitled ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual,’ Jonathan Z. Smith develops a version of the thesis that the sacred is not a substantive category but a relational, even a spatial, one.¹ The sacred is not a quality that can be present in things. Rather it is a manner of treatment of things that exist within a particular space, which marks them as significant and brimming with meaning in opposition to the ordinary (‘profane’) things belonging to the background.² In the space of the profane, ordinary things and events happen in an unremarkable way. By contrast, the space of the sacred is one in which everything that occurs is marked as significant and assimilated into the ritual pattern and thus guarded. Smith cites a passage from Kafka, which highlights the role of repetition that defines what is distinctive about the events of the sacred space: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes a part of the ceremony.’³ According to Eliade’s influential view of the sacred (or more precisely the ‘dialectic of the sacred’): a primordial event that is in some way vital (e.g., for the continued existence of the world) must be indefinitely repeated and guarded in its pristine quality by the ritual, which introduces the awesome power of the beginnings into the profane world and replenishes it.⁴ Kafka, on the other hand, intimates that anything is liable to become sacred through sheer repetition in a space marked off by ritual.

The things that occur in the space of the sacred are symbolic in the sense that they signify in one way or another something vitally important. By virtue of being within a space marked off by ritual, the perceptible procedure or object is treated as representing a truth and embodying the power of that truth. In the profane space things and events are not treated in this way. They are what they appear to be or, in any case, do not point to anything beyond the world of appearances. The inclusion of things in the sacred time-space marks them for the special treatment just described: without it everything would be banal (unmarked). On the other hand, if everything were marked as if it carried (symbolic) significance we would be quickly led to madness; caught in the impossible situation of feeling, for example, the compulsion to decipher the meaning supposed to be communicated. The difference that these spaces define therefore does not just mark the sacred; the contrast in expectations and modes of engagement that they establish also sets out different patterns of human behaviour in the respective spaces.5 This point can be elucidated by the need to exclude accidents from the space of the sacred. Anything that occurs in ritual has the potential to become symbolic of the sacred because it is not the thing itself that is ‘sacred’ but the space where it occurs that marks them as such. Thus accidental things that occur in the space of the sacred can potentially become assimilated into the ritual simply as a result of having occurred in that space. Kafka’s leopards form a reliable habit of satisfying their thirst, thus becoming a part of the ritual. Smith also cites Plutarch’s account of how the priestess of Athene Polias refused the thirsty mule drivers who had brought the sacred vessels to the temple a drink: ‘No’ she said, ‘for I fear it will get into the ritual.’⁶ The capacity for the ritual assimilation of the routine is, Smith concludes, one of the core ‘building blocks of religion.’⁷

In this chapter, I would like to use this perspective of the relational determination of ‘noteworthy meaning’ to reconsider what Benjamin says about the differences between the symbol and the allegory in his early writing. It is well known that the symbol represents a ‘bad’ aesthetic for Benjamin and the allegory a ‘good’ one. Both symbol and allegory are ‘images’ in the sense that they are material forms with a power to signify something other than their perceptible form. Thus whether the sensuous form of the image embodies what it signifies, in the case of the symbol, or points beyond what it embodies, as in the allegory—each form marks out a space of significance or meaning, which can be contrasted to merely ordinary things that do not so signify. The perspective that Smith outlines from the history of religions is not entirely foreign to Benjamin’s early approach to the topic of the image, which is understood as making a significant claim on attention against the factors of diffusion of meaning. However, it is the precise link that Benjamin develops in the ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay between the capacity of things to embody and signify meaning as ritual form that recommends reconsidering the terms of his famous opposition between allegory and symbol in the light of Smith’s thesis. It seems to me that this perspective also has relevance for analysing the antithetical poles around which different conceptions of the image are present in Benjamin’s later work: on the one hand, his writing denounces the phantasmagoric effect of images in a commodity culture, but on the other, he maintains that the cracks in totalising forms of meaning become perceptible in the experience of certain sensible forms, such as the dialectical image.⁸ In his Arcades Project, for instance, he indicates that it is the image that has the capacity to fracture semblance when he claims that ‘[h]istory decays into images, not into stories.’⁹ Similarly, against the tone of some of his early essays in which he talks in highly derogatory terms about the undisciplined Goethean notion of the ur-phenomenon, the project of the Arcades seems to confirm Arendt’s view that this Goethean notion had a positive impact on Benjamin’s later thinking, and this can be seen in the way that Benjamin sought in the experience of single, miniature things a truthful perspective on the whole.10 If we follow Smith’s relational perspective and accept that the physical form of a thing is not sufficient to make of it an ‘image’ that expresses noteworthy meaning beyond this sensuous form, we may ask what is the space that, in Benjamin’s writing, determines the revelatory power and insight that can be attached to certain perceptible forms?

This question can be used to highlight some of the major fault lines that traverse Benjamin’s thought. It is clear that Benjamin’s late thinking relies on the idea that perceptible forms can carry revelatory power, and that this idea draws on his unique coordination of themes and perspectives from ‘historical materialism’ and ‘theology.’¹¹ In his late treatment of the commodity form or in his discussion of the iron and glass of the Paris arcades Benjamin contends that the experience of these things are ‘graphic’ ones in which the ‘perceptibility of history’ may be grasped.¹² Specifically, their glistening novelty carries with it the following revelation: novelty as a value requires perpetual change and hence capitalism as the unthinking drive to novelty is, in fact, the ‘eternity of Hell.’¹³ Even ‘before they have crumbled,’ he writes, ‘the monuments of the bourgeoisie’ can be recognised as ‘ruins.’¹⁴ The magnetic spell cast by the commodity fetish obscures such recognition. In Capital, Marx had described the commodity as ‘a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’¹⁵ He had linked the strange, quasi-religious power of the commodity to the debilitating and pacifying effect it exercised. In Benjamin’s account, the commodity fetish is tied to the forces of myth, and the dream-like state of the phantasmagoria. It casts a spell that places the individual under the power of false authority. For Benjamin, specific threshold states are crossed when otherwise everyday objects attract such intense attention. To be specific, it is ritual practices that mark out ‘objects of everyday use’ as items for ‘auratic perception.’ Such practices draw the ‘everyday’ objects into the ritual space that endows them with significance. In his 1939 essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ Benjamin describes ‘auratic perception’ as a feature of perception in dreams and in temples.¹⁶ Against Adorno’s criticisms, he had insisted that his conception of the dialectical image dissolved this auratic screen and presented an illuminated view of the commodity’s ‘truth.’¹⁷ A version of this group of themes also figures in his Artwork essay: the ‘image,’ he claims in this latter piece, is an auratic form, whose claim to authority the ‘reproductions’ of technologically produced art now displace.¹⁸

If we critically consider the status of the image as meaning embodied in sensuous form, some of the complexities and implications of the perceptibility of the ‘hell’ of modern capitalism in bourgeois ‘ruins,’ or of the true meaning of nineteenth-century history in the fetish character of the commodity form can be brought to light. Benjamin maintains that there are perceptible objects or events that signify a meaning that, due to its very comprehensiveness and abstract nature, is not strictly ‘visible’ in these objects and events.19 Further, he believes that this invisible meaning is vitally important. In what ways, we might ask, can a sensuous, perceptible object signify a ‘meaning,’ and in what sense must this meaning be seen as ‘vital’?²⁰

This question needs to be placed against the general chronology of Benjamin’s thinking on the image as I have set it out so far. I have argued in the previous chapter that Benjamin condemns images as forms of demonic expressivity. Moreover, he explicitly connects the demonic form of the image to the perils of aesthetic represent-ability (Abbildbarkheit). However, the Trauerspiel study sets out the allegory as an aesthetic form that signifies in a different way than the symbol does. The self-mortification of sensuous form in allegory constitutes, for Benjamin, its most important quality. The allegory, we might say, earns its privileged position because it is an anti-aesthetic form within the aesthetic space. If Benjamin treats the allegorical form as representing a truth and embodying the power of that truth, it is important to consider precisely how the relational or spatial context in which the mortification of sensuous form that constitutes the allegorical truth is established. Certain features of this context, such as the written status of allegorical knowledge, have an important echo in Benjamin’s later formulations of the image, as we will see in chapter 4.

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first two compare Benjamin’s conception of the symbol as a degraded perceptual form in the Elective Affinities essay with his treatment of allegorical form in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. My focus in these sections falls on understanding the connection between the form of the (aesthetic) symbol and false ritualisation on the one hand, and the connection between the allegory and (antiaesthetic) knowledge, on the other. In the third section, I consider Benjamin’s staging of the contrast between the symbol and the allegory in the light of Kant’s definition of aesthetic space in the Critique of Judgment. Benjamin contends that the symbol and the allegory signify differently; nonetheless, they each belong to an aesthetic space in which sensuous forms signify more than their materiality. What are the consequences of Benjamin’s attempt to oppose the symbol and the allegory within the aesthetic space? Just as J. Z. Smith argues that the sacred is not substantive but a relational category marked out in a space by ritual, so, too, sensible forms win their signifying power in the ‘aesthetic space,’ where they become ‘images.’ The allegorical form as the ‘anti-aesthetic’ principle within the aesthetic space re-arranges the structure of attention. Aesthetic forms stand out against those forms that are merely ‘ordinary.’ In the category of allegorical form, however, Benjamin is not primarily concerned with the contrast between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘signifying,’ but with that of the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘anti-aesthetic.’ The polemic against the aesthetic consists in the false vitality of its meanings. There is an echo of this approach in Benjamin’s later work, too, although its parameters undergo a shift. In his 1929 essay on Surrealism, Benjamin draws attention to the vital political meanings that ordinary things communicate according to the surrealist idea of ‘profane illumination.’ Similarly, in his 1940 theses on ‘The Concept of History’ he articulates the notion of a ‘universal history’ that would be ‘citable in all its moments.’21 With this notion, Benjamin defends the idea that the detritus of ordinary life contains noteworthy meaning. The vital meaning that is communicated in prosaic forms, or pieces of historical detritus, is of a non-aesthetic origin; and it raises the problem of how such meaning is attached to these forms. I will look at this problem in detail in chapter 4. Smith’s perspective disallows sensible forms in the ordinary life the signifying power of the ‘image.’ Benjamin’s ‘profane illumination’ or ‘universal history,’ on the other hand, assimilates the ordinary to the ‘aesthetic space.’ When anything and everything enters into the space of signification, this space vanishes as the place where the objects are marked for vital attention. My main point in this chapter is that Benjamin’s early work has a way of dealing with this problem of indiscriminate significance: in the allegory he brings an anti-aesthetic antidote to the maddening proliferation of aesthetic forms. Allegorical knowledge cuts down the arbitrariness of form; and it does so by pointing to a meaning that is beyond aesthetic form. The allegory is significant, to use Smith’s typology, because it marks out a further space within the aesthetic space of the symbol.

The Notion of Ritual Form in Benjamin's 'Goethe's Elective Affinities' Essay

In the essay ‘The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond,’ Sigrid Weigel treats Benjamin’s interpretation of the crucial scene in Goethe’s novel in which the characters remove the gravestones from the churchyard in order to ‘beautify’ it. The friends attempt to substitute for tradition an aesthetic order: ‘See how Charlotte has beautified this funeral-ground,’ comments Eduard to Mittler in the first chapter of the novel.²² Weigel writes that the ‘freedom’ of these characters is exercised according to the mistaken belief that ‘[a]s educated, enlightened people, superior to the order of nature . . . they have outgrown the need for the ritual.’²³ Benjamin is interested in where the newfound freedom from tradition takes these characters; he points out that the characters walk over the burial ground ‘without scruple or consideration.’²⁴ Benjamin’s objection to their conduct, however, is not, as Weigel has it, that they believe themselves to have ‘outgrown the need for the ritual.’ Rather, it is that baseless practices of ritualisation ensue from the characters’ ‘liberation’ from tradition. What replaces the unquestioning relation to tradition is ritualisation. Ritual life is now ubiquitous. Its ubiquity, however, only produces anxiety. If anything could be an object of ritual care and obeisance, then nothing seems able to relieve the characters of their guilt. As we saw in the previous chapter, obeisance to mere form cannot provide adequate mechanisms of orientation and existential security, nor can it ward off the omnipresent threat that the mythic perspective on life unleashes. Instead the autonomy of such forms becomes an oppressive regime for human beings.²⁵

For Benjamin, the symbol embodies existential meaning that is both potent and ambiguous. I sketched out some of the aspects of Benjamin’s presentation of myth as it pertains to the category of the symbol in the previous chapter. Benjamin, as we saw, takes the term ‘demonic’ from Goethe’s autobiography and uses it to depict the dominating effects of symbolic forms in Goethe’s novel and his life.26 When Benjamin labels the type of image that carries ambiguous, demonic meanings ‘symbolic,’ it is clear that he has in his sights Goethe’s view that ‘the symbol’ is a more significant and promising aesthetic category than ‘allegory,’ which had nearly universal currency amongst the early Romantics.27 In his essay on Elective Affinities Benjamin defines the symbolic as the sensible form ‘in which the indissoluble and necessary bonding of truth content to material content appears’ (SW I, 318). In the symbol, sensuous nature is elevated to the status of the ultimate source of existential meaning and closes in on itself in an absolute totality. In the symbolic, the world receives its full justification in complete indifference to truth. This false plenitude of meaning does not mean that humans find their reconciliation with the world, however. In fact, without the clarity of the moral decision ‘the human being petrifies in the chaos of symbols’ (SW I, 315). It is in the nature of the symbol that the supposed authoritative meaning it embodies is ever ambiguous. Benjamin uses the term ‘demonic’ to refer to the ‘experience of the incomprehensible ambivalence in nature,’ which blocks off the path to the transcendent by miring mythic humanity in the endless ritual cycle of transgression and expiation (SW I, 316). Just as in a wholly ritualised world even inanimate things take on superhuman powers, so, too, in the symbol everything becomes significant and is looked to as a sign or an oracle.²⁸ In Benjamin’s view ‘what is proper to the truly divine is the logos. The divine does not ground life without truth, nor does it ground the rite without theology’ (SW I, 326). (‘Dem wahrhaft Göttlichen eignet nämlich der Logos, es begründet das Leben nicht ohne die Wahrheit, den Ritus nichte ohne die Theologie’ [GS I, I, 163]). Things of the world have their true, unequivocal meaning only in the light of the Revelation, in the clarity of the logos. Hence the ‘muteness’ of Ottilie is the sign that she is absorbed by fate and that her path to reconciliation is ‘semblance like’: she ‘wants others to make their peace with one another and only in this way become reconciled with God’ (SW I, 342). In Benjamin’s essay the moral decision taken by the lovers in the novella is what allows them to attain the ‘true reconciliation’ that ‘exists only with God’ (SW I, 342). In the previous chapter I outlined the significance of this position in relation to the schema of oppositions organising Benjamin’s early thinking. Here I would like to consider the significance of the lovers’ moral decision in relation to Benjamin’s account of fate.

The novella lovers refuse practices of ritualisation. Benjamin argues this point in relation to the meaning that he ascribes to the girl’s death-defying leap. In diving into the dangerous currents, the lovers each make a moral decision. They win through this decision the peace that is futilely pursued in the novel through sacrifice. For Benjamin it is ‘the falsely conceived freedom’ from tradition that ushers the novel’s characters into the sphere of fate and sets off the vicious ritual cycle in which sacrifice is supposed to expiate guilt. The novella lovers, in contrast, want nothing to do with the calculations of sacrifice:

In citing the ‘bright’ and ‘sacred’ lucidity of the novella and the critical violence [die kritische Gewalt] of the expressionless, Benjamin establishes an alternative space of meaning to the type of uncertain and ambiguous meaning embodied in the chaos of symbolic forms in the novel. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama—written around the date of the publication of his essay on Elective Affinities in 1924/1925—Benjamin names another kind of image, the allegory, as the counter to the pernicious effects of the symbol. The allegorical form also bears a meaning that communicates beyond its perceptible form. However, allegory, as the anti-aesthetic form within the aesthetic space, escapes the terms of Benjamin’s repudiation of the symbol. It is worth considering how it achieves this.

Another Kind of Image? The Allegorical Form in Benjamin's Trauerspiel Book

The symbol is the sensuous form that is alive and brimming with meaning. Allegorical form, in contrast, indicates its own decay and deficiency in the way it points beyond itself. The kind of meaning that allegory presents is transcendent and its mechanism is the mortification of sensuous form.³¹ If the chaos of the symbol threatens to erase the sense of a distinction between different kinds of spaces—nature, dead things, social etiquette, and ceremony are all caught up in its sweep—the function of allegorical form is to mark out two contrasting spaces: the field of sensuous form and the transcendent meaning. In pointing beyond its sensuous form, allegory provides a secure point of orientation amongst the chaos of forms. It devalues and limits form. It discourages therefore the type of disorientating ritualisation that Benjamin associates with the symbol.

The potency of the symbol lay in its capacity to impose ambiguous, uncertain meaning on any setting. The identification of insuperable ambiguity in sensuous form is the core of Benjamin’s objection to the symbol as ‘embodied meaning.’ By contrast, allegory devalues sensuous form, and it draws attention to the almost indifferent relation between form and the meaning it can be made to carry. In allegory the relationship between the image and meaning as it exists in the symbol is thus reversed. But let us consider, beyond this general contrast with the symbol, Benjamin’s positive evaluation of the meaning of allegorical form. Benjamin’s treatment of allegory focuses on the explicit artificiality of the mechanism through which this form, on his conception, relays meaning.

The allegorical expression of man’s subjection to nature is distinctive because of the way that allegorical form separates ‘visual being from meaning’ (U, 165). Against the idealising movement of the symbol that transfigures nature into the embodiment of moral or aesthetic ideas, ‘in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape’ (U, 166). In this way the material form is not elevated and transfigured as it is in the case of the symbol, but flattened and compressed. ³³ Like the ‘critical violence’ of the expressionless in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ allegory petrifies the movement and shatters the harmony of form. But in the case of allegory this very separation between perceptible form and its ‘true’ meaning raises the problem of how the ‘meaning’ may be present in the form.

Benjamin confronts this problem in two different ways. When he describes the baroque apotheosis as dialectical, he says that it is the ‘movement between extremes’ [‘Umschlagen von Extremen,’ GS I, 337] (U, 160) that accomplishes the ‘allegorical’ communication. In this respect, Benjamin addresses the communicative mode of allegory as such. Thus he claims that nature is subject to the power of death, and for that reason it ‘has always been allegorical’ (U, 166). The measure of time for the experience of allegory is history. And this measure is geared towards what Benjamin describes as the ‘fruition of significance and death’ (U, 166). There is an economy of proportion between meaning and the subjection of nature: ‘The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance’ (U, 166). Hence the suffering of the Passion of the Christ is cited as an instance of how the pain and violence of the world sets out the significance attached to mortal subjection (U, 182–183). It is the general definition of allegory as the presentation of the meaning of ‘history’ as ‘nature’ that the example of the Passion relays. Most notably, this example involves the historical dimension of the tale or story that is alien to the supposedly timeless form of the symbol.³⁴

The ambiguity of the symbol and its connection to fate was marked and is sustained, as we saw, by silence (Benjamin refers to nature’s mute, sensuous forms, or inanimate forms such as the house, and to the unarticulated bourgeois conformity to ceremony as well as Ottilie’s vegetative and mute decline, to make this point). Silence fosters a peculiar hermeneutic relation to form. This hermeneutic relation is not to be understood as a benign interpretative inquiry into different layers of meaning, but as an intense fixation on forms that are presumed to carry significant precepts, which, however, in their opaque materiality only yield irreducibly ambiguous meaning. In allegory, the emblem mortifies visual form. With the emblem, a new complexity is introduced into the way that allegory signifies its ‘invisible’ meaning.

Benjamin is clear that the meaning allegory confers is only subjective, by which he signals the double limitation of artificial mechanism and subjective intention. At the same time, the mortification of sensuous form in allegory places allegorical meaning in the field of ‘knowledge.’ The allegory, Benjamin insists, is as ‘a form of writing’ ‘a fixed schema: at one and the same time a fixed image and a fixing sign.’

The Aesthetic Space: Benjamin's Demonic Images and Kant's Image of Nature

A comparison between the critical position Benjamin articulates on ritual meaning and Kant’s conception of aesthetic significance can help to make the implications of this point clearer. In particular, the technicalities of Kant’s use of aesthetic space can be used to clarify the stakes of Benjamin’s way of opposing symbol and allegory as if they belonged to different spaces of signification. Like the sacred space of ritual, symbol and allegory are material forms whose expressive capacity is determined relationally against the prosaic. The question is: what is the threshold these forms cross, and what are the features of the space they have entered? Benjamin’s view is that the symbol’s expressivity belongs to an aesthetic space, and that allegory perforates this space by its artificiality and mortification of the sensuous form.

In Kant’s Critique of Judgment a conception of the aesthetic space of meaning is outlined and defended. To be sure, the phrase ‘aesthetic space’ is not Kant’s, but it can be used to indicate the functional shift that the aesthetic attitude effects as to how and what a material form signifies. Like the sacred space of ritual, in Kant’s aesthetic space perceptible forms signify meanings beyond their perceptible features. Indeed it is no exaggeration to state that when he discusses this space Kant entertains the idea that its main characteristic is that in this space the sensuous form is assumed to signify a non-sensuous meaning, to which the attention is drawn.

The contrast that Kant sets up between the beauties of nature and of art is especially relevant here. Hegel has Kant’s conception of the transfiguring effects on nature’s singular forms of aesthetic reflection in his sights when in his Aesthetics he dismisses nature’s beauties as ‘naïve’ and ‘self-centred’— they can exist and wither away, Hegel says, without anyone to appreciate them.39 In Kant’s view precisely this independence from the field of human concerns qualifies singular forms of nature as potentially more significant than works of art: in fact, for Kant, nature’s forms can be expressive vehicles able to attest in a unique way to the human moral vocation.⁴⁰ But to do so, such forms must be able to arrest our experience of them—both in the sense of standing out against a prosaic background, i.e., moving into an ‘aesthetic’ space of significance, and doing so in such a way as to occasion a morally satisfying experience of the sensuous form that, crucially, is not designed to provide such satisfaction.

Ritual patterns of repetition mark what occurs in the sacred space as significant. A similar determination of significance can be observed in Kant’s aesthetic space. What occurs in the aesthetic space depends for Kant on the suspension of our ordinary attitude to things (the ‘contingent accord’ that is ‘discovered’ by the faculties (CJ, §7, 31) has its meaning-effects due to this suspension). Hence when a flower has been displayed in a vase for decoration the features that made it aesthetically significant in nature are lost. Considered as a structure of engagement with nature’s forms, the practice of aesthetic judgment also performs a function akin to ritual repetition in the patterns of interaction it establishes with its environment. Aesthetic forms signify on account of the relation they have with a spectator who receives them aesthetically, i.e., who expects these forms to signify. This aesthetic reception of forms is an attitude that can be cultivated: what Kant terms the ‘intellectual interest of the beautiful’ (CJ, §42) establishes a pattern of interaction with form, which the moral significance he attaches to aesthetic reflection reinforces.⁴¹

Ultimately, it is a very specific kind of image of nature that authorises its expression of moral ideas. Under the expectations of the aesthetic attitude, nature becomes the second Book; it ‘winks’ at us (CJ, §42, 167); it speaks to us in its ‘cipher language’ (CJ, §42, 168); and it ‘symbolises’ moral ideas (CJ, §59). In all of these ways nature shows that, like the events that occur in the space of the ‘sacred,’ the flower that communicates with us does not do so by accident. The significance we ‘discover’ in certain natural forms do in fact belong to them.

The ‘expressive’ form of the flower thus points to highly specific features of the aesthetic space that allows it to signify moral ideas. The religious icon signifies by virtue of being in the space of a religious tradition. Benjamin makes a similar point regarding religious and aesthetic spaces of signification in his Artwork essay. In a footnote to the essay in which he contests the unidirectional nature of Hegel’s thesis of the impact of secularisation on the arts, he highlights instances in which works of art have oscillated between the enchanted space of aesthetic contemplation, and their religious veneration as objects of worship. He specifically identifies the complex functions within hierarchically organised spaces of ritual that can transform a painting from an object of aesthetic interest to a religious icon, thus inverting the normal order of ‘disenchantment.’42 In Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ the flower signifies because there is an expectation that singular natural forms communicate meaning to those who are morally tuned to receive such messages (thus Kant praises the moral feeling of the soul that turns away from museums to the appreciation of nature’s singular forms, CJ, §42, 166–167).

In the account Benjamin gives of ritual meaning in his essay on Goethe’s novel this attitude towards an autonomously expressive sensuous nature, which is greeted with the expectation that it is communicative, is described as demonic. The aesthetic disposition that looks for and expects meaning in sensuous forms leads directly to the ritualisation of experience. This is Benjamin’s objection to both the Goethe-cult and Goethe’s own symbolic attitude to nature.

When our habitat is ‘a forest of symbols’ disorientation is the result.⁴³ Symbols signify, but their precise meaning is inscrutable. Benjamin uses allegory to mark out the proper focus of the aesthetic space. In a neat reversal of Kant’s preference for nature over art, it is the subjective artificiality of the mechanism of allegory that mortifies the image and undoes its Goethean function of captivation. Allegory points to a meaning freed from its ties with sensuous form (and all that this implies for Benjamin). In particular, it points to the transcendent beyond nature. Thus sensuous form and nature are both mortified.

I have argued in this chapter that Benjamin’s early writing maintains a fundamental difference between two kinds of images and two spaces of signification. The allegorical image that exposes and destroys (false) harmonies is opposed to the symbol, which enchants and reduces human life to a natural existence. We saw Benjamin’s pejorative view of the symbols that populate Goethe’s novel and entrance its characters in a ‘forest of symbols.’ The symbol signifies in the wrong way (it is described as the ‘demonic’ force that reduces humans to a state of impotence).⁴⁴ The sensuous presence of authoritative meaning in the symbol is a source of endless anxiety. Benjamin calls the space where this expectation is at home ‘mythic,’ which may be understood as a sector of the aesthetic space where the sensuous form has the power to signify something vital.

The allegory and the ‘expressionless,’ too, rely on the aesthetic space, albeit in order to destroy the integrity of the image.⁴⁵ Later, in his concept of ‘profane illumination’ or ‘universal history’ (a history that would be ‘quotable in all its moments’),⁴⁶ Benjamin seems to move in the direction of dismantling this privileged aesthetic space altogether.

Is for Benjamin the aesthetic space itself ‘demonic,’ where forms acquire the power to communicate meaning spontaneously? Or is it a particular form of signification that is so, since he thinks that the subjective pensiveness and the artificiality of the allegory dispel the power of the demonic? Benjamin must say: both. This is the paradox that determines his early treatment of the topic of the image.

In the next chapter I would like to consider the detail of Benjamin’s writing on similitude and the mimetic faculty. This vocabulary aims at an integral image, that is, an image in which the relation of the form and meaning is not artificial or even conventional. The opposition between symbol and allegory provides Benjamin with negative and positive markers of the image. Specifically, the theory of allegory is aimed at cutting down the false totality of the symbol. Similitude and mimesis are, in contrast, Benjamin’s positive conceptions of the integral image. They are meant to present an image of a ‘whole’ rather than a ‘totality.’ In this aspiration, I will argue, they present strong points of overlap with certain categories of religious meaning.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘The Problem of the Image: Sacred and Profane Spaces in Walter Benjamin’s Early Writing,’ Critical Horizons 14.3 (2013). 355–380.

2. Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual,’ Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1982), 53–66.

3. Smith, 53 cites Kafka’s ‘Reflections on Sin, Hope, and the True Way,’ The Great Wall of China (Penguin: New York, 1970), 165.

4. See M. Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of Eternal Return (Bollingen: New York, 1985).

5. In this broad sense, Niklas Luhmann points out a similar function of marked and unmarked space as the process of differentiation in which certain things are selected as meaningful against a relegated background—for Luhmann, this process of differentiation is the way that the focus necessary for action can be marked in a field of complexity. See N. Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1996).

6. J. Z. Smith, ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual,’ 53, cites Plutarch, Die vitiosi padore 534C.

7. J. Z. Smith, ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual,’ 54.

8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1999). Hereafter cited as A, followed by the page number and convolute reference. A 463, [N3, 1] and [N3, 4]. Hence he describes his project in the first of these passages as the dialectical ‘reading’ of images. I will discuss his selection of this phrasing in detail in chapter 4.

9. A 476, [N11, 4].

10. See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the point in her ‘Walter Benjamin: 1892– 1940,’ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books: New York, 1968), 1–59, 11–12. It should be noted that the positive impact of the Goethean notion is one that fundamentally alters its parameters. The fact of such alteration can be seen especially in the perspective that Benjamin takes on nature. As we saw in chapter 1, Benjamin is very critical of the Goethean idea of the ur-phenomenon in his major essay, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’ See also his comments in the Arcades, A 462, [N2a, 4] which are true to the tone and approach of this early essay: ‘In studying Simmel’s presentation of Goethe’s concept of truth, I came to see very clearly that my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel book is a rigorous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean concept from the domain of nature to that of history. Origin—it is, in effect, the concept of Ur-phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history.’ I will discuss this topic in further detail in my treatment of allegory below.

11. A number of prominent interpreters see in one or other of these anchor points a problem that needs to be managed, others value the rare insights that come from their combination. See for an example of each perspective the respective discussions of this point in Gershom Scholem and Jürgen Habermas. G. Scholem, The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York Review of Books: New York, 1981), 149–151; and J. Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?,’ On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, ed. G. Smith (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1991), 90–128, 92: ‘Benjamin belongs to those authors on whom it is not possible to gain a purchase, whose work is destined for disparate effective histories; we encounter these authors only in the sudden flash of “relevance” with which a thought achieves dominance for brief seconds of history.’ See also Habermas, 91: Amongst the different intellectual advocates for different aspects of Benjamin’s thought Habermas describes Scholem as the ‘totally inflexible advocate of the dimension in Benjamin that was captivated with the traditions of Jewish mysticism.’ Outside the field of Benjamin scholarship, Jacques Rancière has persuasively defended the functions of the ‘materialist-theology’ combination as the key to those insights of Benjamin’s writing that render it inassimilable to attempts to claim Benjamin for projects in ‘cultural history.’ See his ‘The Archaeomodern Turn,’ Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. M. P. Steinberg (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1996), 24–41.

12. ‘A central problem of historical materialism that ought to be seen in the end: Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: In what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of Marxist method?’ Benjamin, A, 461, [N2, 6]. See Max Pensky’s discussion of the tension between the new historiographical method and the alternative conception of time presupposed in Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image in ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,’ The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. D. S. Ferris (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), 177–198.

13. ‘What is at issue is not that “the same thing happens over and over,” and even less would it be a question here of eternal return. It is rather that precisely in that which is newest the face of the world never alters, that this newest remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of Hell.’ Benjamin, A, 544, [51, 5].

14. Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century. Exposé of 1935,’ A, 13.

15. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin Books: Middlesex, 1976), 163. Marx also refers to the commodity as a ‘hieroglyph,’ 167.

16. Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 339.

17. The correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno on the commodity form is another place in which the issue of how perceptual form carries meaning is pertinent. In Adorno’s dissatisfied view there is not enough ‘theoretical mediation’ of the commodities in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’ and he accuses Benjamin of merely assembling motifs without the requisite attention to their analysis and explanation [‘Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” SW IV, 99]. The dialectical image merely prolongs rather than corrects the phantasmagoria. Adorno’s criticisms are relevant for our discussion of the oppositional logic that structures the account of ritual form in Benjamin. As we have seen, this logic pits the falsely captivating semblance against the merely ordinary form. The language Adorno uses to describe Benjamin’s supposedly uncritical display of ‘auratic’ and ‘magical’ commodities are synonymous with the terms of Benjamin’s criticisms of the demonic hold of the symbol in his essay on Goethe’s novel (SW IV, 102). According to Adorno, the display of the commodity form is a type of demonic enchantment, which it is the role of ‘theory’ to dispel. His criticisms thus attribute to Benjamin’s draft material for the Arcades a version of the position that is the target of Benjamin’s polemic in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’ In Benjamin’s response to this letter he refers to the relevance of the approach he takes in the latter essay for the conception of his Arcades Project. He broadens the terms of Adorno’s criticisms of his ‘wide-eyed presentation of facticity’ (SW IV, 107) in naming their unstated target as the philological method: ‘If you recall other works of mine, you will find that the critique of the attitude of the philologist is an old concern, and in its innermost core identical to the critique of myth. . . . To use the language of elective affinities: it aims to open up the material content, from which the truth content can then be plucked off historically like petals’ (SW IV, 108). Earlier in the letter, he defends his ‘theory of empathy with the commodity’s soul,’ which Adorno had queried, as ‘a theory in the strict sense of the word’ (SW IV, 106). His claim that this theory of empathy with the commodity marks ‘the point . . . where theory comes into its own in an undistorted way’ is expressed in similar terms to his view of the illuminating significance of the novella in Goethe’s novel. Benjamin writes: ‘It’s like a single ray of light breaking into an artificially darkened room. But this ray, refracted through a prism, is enough to give an idea of the composition of the light that comes to a focus in the third part of the book’ (SW IV, 107). Compare this also with Arendt’s view, which is contrary to Benjamin’s rejection of Adorno’s analysis of the issue: ‘When Adorno criticized Benjamin’s “wide-eyed presentation of actualities”. . ., he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do.’ Arendt, Illuminations, 11.

18. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,’ SW IV, 255: ‘Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image [Bild], or better, in a facsimile [Abbild], a reproduction. And the reproduction [Reproduktion], as offered by illustrated magazines and newsreels, differs unmistakably from the image. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely entwined in the latter as are transitoriness and repeatability in the former.’

19. We can find in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on Proust some license for this distinction between the singular form of an image and the sources that are able, in contrast, to tell us about a whole. Benjamin compares the ‘weight’ of Proust’s ‘involuntary remembrance’ to the catch at the bottom of a fishing net: in this ‘stratum’ ‘the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way the weight of the fishing net tells a fisherman about his catch.’ Proust’s sentences are described as ‘the entire muscular activity’ that is required to raise this ‘catch’ (‘The Image of Proust,’ SW II, 1927–1934, 247, emphasis added). I discuss this essay in detail in chapter 3.

20. It is true that these are not the terms Benjamin uses and he would undoubtedly reject the reference to invisible meaning, nonetheless I think that his conception of perceptible historical forms and the meaning they carry warrants and is usefully repositioned with such terminology.

21. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 389–400, 390.

22. J. W. von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books: Middlesex, 1971), 33.

23. Sigrid Weigel, ‘The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond: On the Dialectic of Divine and Human Order in Walter Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,”’ Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, eds. B. Hanssen and A. Benjamin (Continuum: London, 2002), 197–206, 203.

24. SW I, 302.

25. It is important to note that the critical evocation of ‘ritual’ in Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s novel cannot be evenly transferred to the use of the term across his oeuvre. In fact, the meaning of the term in his discussion of Elective Affinities focuses specifically on the futile focus on forms as if they could orientate human life and thus presupposes an aggrandising role for ritual specifically in the context of the passing of the hold of traditional religious belief. In his essay on the artwork ritual is treated as a feature of first magical, and then religious practices (SW IV, 256). These features of ritual are preserved in the aura attached to the artwork in the secular age. Benjamin argues that ‘it is highly significant that the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function’ (SW IV, 256). Accordingly, the ‘whole social function of art is revolutionized’ when it is no longer ‘founded on ritual’ but on ‘politics,’ i.e., the politicisation of art that his essay advocates (SW IV, 257, his emphasis). In other essays, Benjamin refers to ritual for the discussion of his positively coded conception of experience, Erfahrung. In this context, ritual is the force that provides a ‘crisis-proof form’ of experience (‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 333). Still, although ritual is part of the positive evocation of ‘tradition’ in the Baudelaire essay, there is also a pejorative reference to the auratic form of ritual images in the same essay. Benjamin writes: ‘The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us. This ability corresponds to the data of mémoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally, are unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus, they lend support to a concept of the aura that involves the “unique apparition of a distance.” This formulation has the advantage of clarifying the ritual character of the phenomenon. The essentially distant is the unapproachable; and unapproachability is a primary quality of the ritual image.)’ (‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 338). With the citation, Benjamin refers the reader to Section III of his Artwork essay in which he defines the aura as: ‘the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ SW IV, 255). In the Artwork essay this definition is offered for the aura of ‘natural’ rather than ‘historical’ objects. In the Baudelaire essay the ‘realm of ritual’ seals experience in ‘crisis-proof form’. But when experience transcends this realm, ‘it presents itself as the beautiful. In the beautiful, ritual value appears as the value of art.’ (‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 333).

26. As we saw in the previous chapter, Benjamin’s essay gives a prominent place to Goethe’s own concept of the demonic in Poetry and Truth. He excises from his long citation of Goethe’s description of the demonic Goethe’s confession of the strategy he used to deal with it. Benjamin cites Goethe as follows: ‘This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called “daemonic”, after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar. I tried to save myself from this fearful thing’ (Cited, SW I, 316). Goethe’s final sentence continues: ‘by taking refuge, as usual, behind an Image.’ See J. W. von Goethe, From my Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts 1–3, trans. R. R. Heitner, eds. T. P. Saine and J. L. Sammons (Suhrkamp: New York, 1987), 597.

27. The exceptions to this general rule included Friedrich Schlegel who did not oppose symbol and allegory as the other early romantics did but saw them as continuous figures of indeterminate meaning; and Solger who put allegorical rending ahead of symbolic harmony. Gadamer and Todorov each give detailed accounts of how §59 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the first text to set out the distinctively modern sense of the symbol. Goethe is amongst the figures loosely associated with ‘romanticism’ to build on Kant’s re-definition of the symbol to place symbol and allegory, rhetorical categories that had previously been considered in the continuum of rhetorical terms, in opposition to one another. Benjamin retains the idea of the opposition between these terms but he reverses Goethe’s evaluation. In Todorov’s account of the features at stake in this opposition he emphasises the ‘opacity’ of the symbol as against the ‘clarity’ of the ideas, which are the transitive reference of allegory: ‘in allegory there is an instantaneous passage through the signifying face of the sign toward knowledge of what is signified, whereas in the symbol this face retains its proper value, its opacity.’ The intransitivity of the symbol does not stop it signifying because its intransitivity ‘goes hand in hand with its syntheticism. Thus the symbol speaks to perception (along with intellection); the allegory in effect speaks to intellection alone.’ Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1982), 201. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes the symbol as ‘the coincidence of the sensible and the non-sensible’ and allegory as ‘the meaningful relation of the sensible to the non-sensible’ (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition (Crossroad: New York, NY, 1992), 74). This formulation encapsulates some of the main terms of the opposition between symbol and allegory, as Benjamin understands it, although there is the additional temporal dimension of ‘development’ that belongs to the symbol and ‘rending’ of time that is the work of allegory, which was first articulated in Creuzer and which stands against Goethe’s version of symbolic simultaneity of meaning (218). Crucially, Benjamin also understands the allegory to involve the self- mortification of sensuous form. Gadamer notes the transformation that occurs to the word ‘allegory’ when it is ‘transferred from the sphere of language to that of the plastic arts’ (74, Note 143). By the time of the eighteenth century this transference was entirely forgotten: ‘people always thought first of the plastic arts when speaking of allegories; and the liberation of poetry from allegory, as undertaken by Lessing, meant in the first place its liberation from the model of the plastic arts’ (74, Note 143). Again, Benjamin’s position is quite unusual here since he defines allegory as a form of expression ‘like speech and writing’ ( U, 162). The point has specific significance in the context of the original religious use of these terms, which are, according to Gadamer, re-functionalised in modern aesthetic discourse. For instance, in his discussion of the symbol Kant 'does justice to the theological truth that had found its scholastic form in the analogia entis and keeps human concepts separate from God' (Gadamer, 75). But in Goethe and romantic re-workings of the symbol, where the emphasis is on the inner unity of symbol and what is symbolised, the religious origin of the Greek symbolon, which continues in 'various religious denominations,' is marked: 'what fills the symbol with meaning is that the finite and the infinite genuinely belong together. Thus the religious form of the symbol corresponds exactly to the original nature of "symbolon", the dividing of what is one and reuniting it again' (Gadamer, 77-78). Friedrich Creuzer makes this explicit in his account of the symbolism of antiquity when he asserts that 'all symbolism' rests on the 'original connection between gods and men' (Gadamer 78). Gadamer's account is critical of the way that the difference in meanings between the symbol and allegory in modern aesthetics becomes a contrast in values 'under the influence of the concept of genius and the subjectivization of "expression"' (Gadamer, 74). According to this contrast in values 'The symbol (which can be interpreted inexhaustibly because it is indeterminate) is opposed to allegory (understood as standing in a more exact relation to meaning and exhausted by it) as art is opposed to non-art' (Gadamer, 75). This is a useful frame for understanding Benjamin's use of allegory as the anti-aesthetic. For Gadamer, the victory of the word and concept of the symbolic is also the triumph of Kant's critical philosophy and the aesthetics of the genius (Gadamer, 75).

28. The inanimate life of the symbol in the essay on Goethe's novel has its parallel too in Benjamin's later treatment of the spell that transforms the inanimate commodity into a living force of captivation. See Benjamin's response to Adorno, in which he objects to Adorno's 'impression' that 'the phantasmagoria was being merely described, not dissolved in the construction' ('Exchange with Adorno on "Paris of the Second Empire,"' SW IV, 110). He later describes Baudelaire and Flaubert, the latter in his La Tentation de Saint Antoine and the former in his Les Fleurs dtt trial, as the 'principal' witnesses for the thesis that: 'To self-observation or inner experience, empathy with the commodity presents itself as empathy with inorganic matter' (SWIV, 111) and 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (SW IV, 333). See also his comments on 'the process of empathy' as 'the method which historical materialism has broken with' ('On the Concept of History,' SW IV, 391).

29. SW I, 352.

30. 'Das Ausdruckslose ist die kritische Gewalt, welche Schein vom Wesen in der Kunst zwar zu trennen nicht vermag, aber ihnen verivehrt, sich zu mischen. Diese Gewalt hat es als moralisches Wort. Im Ausdruckslosen erscheint die erhabene Gewalt des Wahren, wie es nach Gesetzen der moralischen Welt die Sprache der wirklichen bestimmt. Dieses namlich zerschldgt was in Mem schonen Schein als die, Erbschaft des Chaos noch uberdauert: die falscbe, irrende Totalitdt—die absolute. Dieses erst vollendet das Werk, welches es zum Stiickwerk zerschldgt, zum Fragniente der wahren Welt, zuni Torso eines Symbols' [GS I, 181).

31. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Verso: London and New York, 2009). Cited in the text as 'U.' '[A]n appreciation of the transience, of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory' (U, 223).

32. A form of expression, he says, 'like speech and writing' (U, 162).

33. See Gilles Deleuze's discussion of this point in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley (Minnesota University Press: Minneapolis, 1993), 125.

34. 'The mystical instant [N«<] becomes the "now" [Jetzt] of contemporary actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical' [U, 183). The symbol 'remains persistently the same' whereas 'if it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways’ (U, 183).

35. He cites as well Hallmann’s exposition from his Leich-Reden: ‘For if we consider the innumerable corpses with which, partly, the ravages of the plague and, partly, weapons of war, have filled not only our Germany, but almost the whole of Europe, then we must admit that our roses have been transformed into thorns, our lilies into nettles, our paradises into cemeteries, indeed our whole being into an image of death. It is therefore my hope that it will not be held against me that in this general theatre of death I have not foreborne to set up my own paper graveyard’ (U, 231, Note †).

36. There is a similarity here to Benjamin’s own later citations of textual images in the Arcades and his specific understanding of the dialectical image as a form that is encountered in language, or that his project is a ‘reading’ of images. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project: on the ‘place where one encounters [the dialectical image] is language’ A, [N2a, 3], 462, and on the legible ‘image that is read,’ A, [N3, 1], 463.

37. In his Introduction to the Trauerspiel book, George Steiner writes that the ending of the Ursprung ‘suggests, in a vein which is unmistakably personal, that only allegory, in that it makes substance totally significant, totally representative of ulterior meanings and, therefore, “unreal” in itself, can render bearable an authentic perception of the infernal. Through allegory, the Angel, who in Paul Klee’s depiction Angelus Novus, plays so obsessive a part in Benjamin’s inner existence, can look into the deeps’ (U, 20).

38. In Smith’s account access to sacred meaning occurs by virtue of being in a space that is marked as such by ritual. Similarly, we might say that there is nothing allegorical about the allegorical or symbolic about the symbol. They are in the mode of allegory and symbol by virtue of being placed in a certain kind of space.

39. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox. Vol. 1 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998), 71: Art ‘has the purpose of existing solely for our mind and spirit. For this reason alone are content and artistic form fashioned in conformity with one another. The purely sensuously concrete— external nature as such—does not have this purpose for the sole reason of its origin. The variegated richly coloured plumage of birds shines even when unseen, their song dies away unheard; the torch-thistle, which blooms for only one night, withers in the wilds of the southern forests without having been admired, and these forests, jungles themselves of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most sweet-smelling and aromatic perfumes, rot and decay equally unenjoyed. But the work of art is not so naïvely self-centred; it is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and the spirit.’

40. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1987). Hereafter referenced in the text as CJ.

41. For Kant, beauties of nature are more significant than those artefacts, which bear the interpretable marks of human intention. We can contrast in this respect the different prospects that a tool from a lost civilisation whose purpose is obscure to us furnishes for aesthetic reflection from the free beauty of a wild flower, the pleasure of whose form is entirely contingent for our understanding (CJ, §17, N. 60, 84 and §16). The flower is an organised form whose purpose is not evident and it thereby presents an analogical mirror for the structure of human freedom as a capacity whose ends are not determined. Kant’s flower belongs to an aesthetic space when it communicates the moral idea, whereas in Hegel’s view the wild flower is simply part of the field of the accidental. What is noteworthy about the aesthetic volubility of the wild flower in Kant is that it allows for an experience of the moral vocation that could not otherwise be had. The contrast between free singular natural beauties which comport moral significance and artefacts designed to please relies on a different kind of design and intention entering, as it were, by the back door, and securing a space in which the moral capacity is insulated from moral nihilism and understood as a vocation.

42. He describes the commissioning of Raphael’s Madonna for the ‘public lying-in-state of Pope Sixtus.’ After the mounting of the picture for primary ‘exhibition value,’ so that ‘the cloud-borne Madonna’ approaches the ‘papal coffin’ from the rear niche-like area of the chapel, it was subsequently moved to the Church of the Black Friars in Piacenza. It was exiled to Piacenza on account of ‘Roman Catholic doctrine, which stipulates that paintings exhibited at funeral services cannot be used as objects of worship on the high altar.’ Its place on the high altar in Piacenza was tacitly tolerated so that the Papal See could facilitate a ‘satisfactory price’ for the picture. Benjamin thus points to the reversal of the historical frame of Hegel’s account. For Hegel, the decisive shift in the significance of art is that it becomes an object of reflective, aesthetic contemplation rather than a religious icon that warrants veneration and worship (‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ SW IV, N. 15, 273–274). The oscillation that the Artwork essay describes between ritual worship and aesthetic contemplation might therefore be rephrased as the shorthand for threshold states that, like the commodity fetish, which Benjamin’s Arcades likens to the phantasmagoria of the dream, invests objects with false meanings. The dream space is like the ritual space of worship or the aesthetic space of contemplation: it is a mythic space that confers on ‘objects’ a depth of significance that they do not possess as a substantive property.

43. He cites the phrase ‘forest of symbols’ in his later essay, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’ The phrase is from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. It relates, says Benjamin, to the quality of perception that occurs in temples which is ‘of a piece with perception in dreams’ (‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 313–356, 339). In the Trauerspiel book he refers to the ‘wooded interior’ of the symbol (U, 165).

44. Kant also talks about cases in which ‘art’ and ‘nature’ compete for attention, which may be seen as analogous to Benjamin’s competing ‘symbol’ (aesthetic form) and ‘allegory’ (anti-aesthetic form). He cites the English philologist and ethnologist, William Marsden who spent a number of years living in Sumatra. Marsden ‘comments,’ Kant writes, ‘that the free beauties of nature there surround the beholder everywhere, so that there is little left in them to attract him; whereas, when in the midst of a forest he came upon a pepper garden, with the stakes that supported the climbing plants forming paths between them along parallel lines, it charmed him greatly. He concludes from this that we like wild and apparently rule-less beauty only as a change, when we have been satiated with the sight of regular beauty. And yet he need only have made the experiment of spending one day with his pepper garden to realize that, once regularity has [prompted] the understanding to put itself into attunement with order which it requires everywhere, the object ceases to entertain him and instead inflicts on his imagination an irksome constraint; whereas nature in those regions, extravagant in all its diversity to the point of opulence, subject to no constraint from artificial rules, can nourish his taste permanently’ ( CJ, ‘General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic,’ 94).

45. ‘In comparison to the symbol, the western conception of allegory is a late manifestation which has its basis in certain very fertile cultural conflicts [i.e, paganism and Christianity; the Renaissance and the Reformation—A.R.]. The allegorical maxim is comparable to the scrolls. . . . The Trauerspiel is therefore in no way characterized by immobility, nor indeed by slowness of action . . . but by the irregular rhythm of the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new rigidity’ (U, 197). It is noticeable in the references to irregular rhythms, pauses, and intervention in direction how close Benjamin’s description of allegory is to his earlier description of the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose] in his essay on the Elective Affinities.

46. In his 1940 ‘On the Concept of History,’ Benjamin writes: ‘The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments [my emphasis—A.R]. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment Day.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 389–400, 390.

47. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ SW II, 207–221, 210.

2 Form

The Notion of Ritual Form in Benjamin's 'Goethe's Elective Affinities' Essay

Another Kind of Image? The Allegorical Form in Benjamin's Trauerspiel Book

The Aesthetic Space: Benjamin's Demonic Images and Kant's Image of Nature

Notes

Works Cited