#dialectical image

[minoracts]

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. — Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.

— Benjamin, “Awakening” (Arcades, 462; n2a, 3)

[stigmography]

διαλεκτική εικόνα Τις πέτρες που ενώθηκαν υψώνοντας τους τοίχους των πατρικών μας και τις λέξεις που αρθρώθηκαν ζωντανεύοντας τις εμπειρίες των παιχνιδιών μας, μόνο να τις κοιτάζουμε μπορούμε. Η κλειδωνιά της καγκελόπορτας παραμένει γεμάτη με αστρόχορτα και δεν αφήνει κανένα σκουριασμένο παραδείσιο κλειδί να τη γυρίσει. Ανήμποροι για ψηλαφήσεις και εκφράσεις, ρεμβάζουμε το παρελθόν. Και κάπως έτσι ωριμάζουμε. Κάθε φορά που το ενήλικο βλέμμα σταυρώνει με το εγκλωβισμένο παιδικό μας. Κάθε φορά που το τελευταίο σταματούσε το παιχνίδι για να κοιτάξει στο απέναντι πεζοδρόμιο το μέλλον.

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dialectical image Those stones that were joined to raise the walls of our patrimonial houses and those words that were articulated so to enliven our game experiences, we may only look at them. The door lock remains full of starry rogue leaves and no rusty paradise key can open it. While being impotent for palpitations and expressions, we just look to the past. Somehow we grow up. Every time our adult look is crossed with our caged childish gaze towards the opposite sidewalk, yearning for the future.

[walterbenja-memes-blog]

With a stroke of its magic wand, fashion...transformed the salon into an atrium, armchairs into curule seats, dresses with trains into tunics, drinking glasses into goblets, shoes into buskins, and guitars into lyres [...] Hence the following: “What is the height of embarrassment?” “When you bring a harp to a party and no one asks you to play it”

(Arcades, The Interior, The Trace, [I2a, 5], page 217)

[walterbenja-memes-blog]

Each gesture is an event -- one might even say, a drama -- in itself…. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco -- who was the patron saint of the Expressionists -- the gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.

(Illumination, “Kafka,” 121)

[walterbenja-memes-blog]

The gesture -- “it is concerned less with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring way, through thinking, from the conditions in which it lives

(Author as Producer, Second Volume of Selected Works, 779)  

[walterbenja-memes-blog]

Interruption “has the character not of a stimulant but of an organizing function. It arrests the action in its course, and thereby compels the listener to adopt an attitude vis-a-vis the process.

(Author as Producer, Second Volume of Selected Works, 778)

[jevoussaluespinelli]

If you transpose the dialectical image into consciousness as a 'dream' you not only take the magic out of the concept and render it sociable, but you also deprive it of that objective liberating power which could legitimize it in materialistic terms. The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather, it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. This means, however, that consciousness or unconsciousness cannot simply depict it as a dream, but responds to it in equal measure with desire and fear.

Theodor Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin (2 August 1935)

[adifferentmyth]

Pensky on Benjamin's Dialectical Images

After opening his chapter "Method and Time: Benjamin's Dialectical Images" in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Max Pensky makes this eloquent reading of the quote I just posted:

The breathtaking evocation of an alternative temporality that this quote contains in characteristically elliptical and compacted form, the glimpse at an entirely new conception of historiography that breaks with previous categories of interpretation, the notion of an image-based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation... But at the same time, one cannot avoid the feeling that this quote , and others like it in Benjamin's Arcades Project, is a theoretical promissory note that would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem (Pensky, 177).

Pensky here expresses a very definite difficulty with reading Benjamin; the eloquent brilliance of his voice and ideas, and the impossibility of the potentialities his writing and ideas propose. Yet it is this beautifully impossibility which makes his writing so captivating and desirable. There is an almost utopian tone to his writing, and it must be read, I believe, in such a way that adopts a kind of utopian reading strategy.

Following this observation, Pensky goes on to state some of the theoretical problems and questions posed by and that can be posed against Benjamin's dialectical image - and this question in particular struck me:

What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between past and "what-has-been," between the present and the "now?" (Pensky, 177).

Distinguishing the differences between two such similar and yet so different ways of understanding things that might not immediately seem different has always intrigued me. What strikes me here as the difference being distinguished is the descriptive from the experiential; I understand this distinction as being where the past and present are descriptive and the "what-has-been" and the "now" as experiential. Both descriptors are used to reference discrete temporal moments, but the tenor of what these two descriptors refer to marks an important difference regarding how time, images, moments, and history are made legible.

Pensky, Max. "Method and time: Benjamin's dialectical images." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.