The W. B. Collection (Experiment No. 1), 2023
193 × 138 cm, pigments, acrylic binder on canvas
193 × 138 cm, pigments, acrylic binder on canvas
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The W. B. Collection (Experiment No. 1), 2023 193 × 138 cm, pigments, acrylic binder on canvas |
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Through Experience of Warburg and Benjamin
MATTHEW RAMPLEY
.... As the visual imprint of such traumas, the visual symbol preserves their primary content, which as Dorothée Bauerle has emphasised, Warburg regards as an essentially collective experience.[239] This is stated most clearly in the Mnemosyne Introduction, where Warburg states, ‘In der Region der orgiastischen Massenergriffenheit ist das Prägewerk zu suchen, das dem Gedächtnis die Ausdrucksformen des maximalen inneren Ergriffenseins ... in solcher Intensität einhämmert, daß diese Engramme leidschaftlicher Erfahrung als gedächtnisbewahrtes Erbgut überleben …’[240] The question of collective memory occurs in many places in Warburg’s writing of the late 1920's. At times it is noted as an issue to be worked through,[241] at others it is presented more fully, as in a central fragment of the ‘Grundbegriffe’ in which he clearly bases the ability of primitive memories to survive on the intensity with which they imprint themselves on collective experience.[242] This emphasis is again repeated shortly after when Warburg writes that ‘Das Substrat wird durch Collektiverinnerung geformt aus zeitlich zurückliegenden oder präsenten Engrammen.’[243] ....
The equation of memory with collective experience is a perfectlyconsistent consequence of Warburg's general view of cognitive development. Although his emphasis tends towards the importance of the creation of an interval (‘Zwischenraum’) between subject and the objective world, implicit in his account is also the assumption of an internalisation of this ‘Denkraum’ leading to the construction of an interior reflective space. The ability of the subject to extricate itself from the Other is intimately bound up with the ability of the subject to view itself as an Other.[244] This also throws up an important parallel with Benjamin, who likewise contrasts the collective basis of primal intoxication with the isolation of the modern subject.[245] While it is concordant with Warburg's (and Benjamin's) general position to contrast collective mimetic experience with the birth of the modern individual, far more is invested in the difference to be accounted for by a concern for conceptual consistency, For Warburg it is individual artists, such as Ghirlandaio, Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli or Manet who carry out the task of cultural advancement, and who sublimate the primitive memories of antiquity into the ‘heliotropic’ visual representations of the Renaissance (or Impressionism). ‘Der Zwang zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Formenwelt vorgeprägter Ausdruckswerte ... bedeutet für jeden Künstler, der seine Eigenart durchsetzen will, die entscheidende Krisis …’[246] Warburg's political beliefs are influential here. He made no secret of his suspicion of the ‘pressure of the masses’ (‘Massendruck’) of contemporary democracy,[247] and one can also link this suspicion to Warburg's continuing interest in anti-semitism and the mass pogroms conducted against the Jews. Moreover he was also aware of the ways in which contemporary political issues impacted on historical scholarship. As he noted towards the end of his ‘Festwesen’ lecture, ‘das Kunstinteresse der Gebildeten ist nicht frei von [ .... Warburg's view of the Renaissance as a process of cultural remembrance rather than simply as the revival of a lost tradition constitutes his most original contribution to cultural historiography. In recasting the Renaissance in this way Warburg opens it up to an entirely novel set of questions; the classical tradition is no longer a monolithic entity whose presence was either acknowledged or neglected. Instead, everything hangs on its transformation through successive interpretative acts of remembering, and on what such remembering might consist of and how it might occur. Previous scholarship had left this process largely unanalysed. At the same time, however, it is probably the most problematic aspect of his thought, replete with contradictions, ambiguities and inconsistencies. At stake is the question of what is even meant by the notion of cultural memory, and an entry into this tangled web is provided by Warburg's reference to ‘Der Entdämonisierungsprozess der phobisch geprägten Eindruckserbmasse.’[250] As noted earlier, Warburg viewed primitive experience as essentially fearful, and the content of collective memory is thus composed of inherited fears and anxieties. Alongside this account is another version of collective memory, however, in which it is the values projected onto the legacy of the distant past that determines its character. In this version Warburg refers to the memories of the past as an ‘unpolarisiertes Contiguum’ and states, further, that ‘Das Erbbewußtsein von maximalen seelischen Eindrucksstempeln (Engramm) führt diese ohne Ansehung der Richtung der Gefühlsbetontheit qua energetisches Spannungserlebnis weiter.’[251] According to this latter version ‘demonic’ antiquity is just as much a construction as the Olympian allegories of the Renaissance. Warburg's comments regarding the rediscovery of the Laocoon statue, namely, that the Renaissance would have invented one had it not actually been found, offers an exemplary case of this position. .... There is clearly a tension between these two versions. One possible explanation for this apparent contradiction might be that Warburg is concerned with the dialectic of the two, in other words, the confrontation between the recollection of the auratic values of the classical legacy and the projection of contemporary values onto that same legacy. The Renaissance would thus be held in the tension between these two forces. Unfortunately there is little indication in his writing that his field of inquiry is envisaged in precisely those terms. Moreover, even if this problem can perhaps be partly answered in this way, there is another question which Warburg's theory of memory raises, and it revolves around the question of symbolic meaning. .... In his study of the ‘internationale Massenvölkerwanderung der vorgeprägten Dynamogramme,’[252] Warburg seems to regard the multiple mediations of classical symbols after antiquity as detours. The Renaissance recollection of classical engrams consists of a process of stepping beyond them and reaching back toward the original coinage of antiquity. This is most evident in his study of the Palazzo Schifanoia in which the frescoes are part of a process of going past the degeneracy of the Middle Ages to the original classical sources of the mythic figures, and in which ‘Botticellis Venusbilder . .. der vom Mittel alter zweifach, mythographisch und astrologisch gefesselten Göttin die olympische Freiheit wieder[er]ringen wollen.‘[253] Warburg is therefore operating with a notion of originary meanings which are deflected in various ways. This is also confirmed by his frequent reference to notions of imprinting, stamping and minting. such vocabulary allows easy translation into the topos of memory as inscription. .... Two significant difficulties are raised by this motif. The first concerns the mechanism of such historical recollection. In particular, Warburg does not account for how the original meaning of a primitive-classical engram is recalled, or how the various detours of its subsequent transformations by-passed. The Florentine Renaissance grew out of a medieval tradition, whose understanding of antiquity was, on Warburg's own admission, quite different from the recalled antiquity of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio. And yet rather than the recent medieval past being passed on, it is the far more distant past of antiquity itself that is being remembered. Warburg does not explain how that original antiquity was recalled, what the trigger or mechanism might have been. one explanation is to suggest that the Renaissance arose out of a renewed direct acquaintance with the monuments of antiquity - and Warburg's interest in the role of, for example, classical sarcophagi, the sculpture of the Arch of Constantine or the rediscovery of the Laocoon indicates that this would be concordant with his general account. Warburg writes of the importance for social memory of the ‘stets erneute Berührung mit den Denkmälern der Vergangenheit.’[254] However, this is problematic inasmuch as it contradicts the notion of the Renaissance as a retrospective reconstruction of antiquity. In any case many of the monuments of Roman culture remained visible throughout the historical epoch - the Middle Ages - that seemed most insensitive to the mnemic content of such representations. Warburg creates further difficulties for himself inasmuch as he regards the circulation of classical symbols and images - astrology being a key example - as involving the degeneration of originary meaning, rather than as providing a vehicle of social memory. Here one can recall Wolfgang Kemp's comparison with the theory of collective memory of Maurice Halbwachs, at the core of whose thought is an emphasis on the socially mediated nature of memory.[255] A student of Durkheim and Bergson, Halbwachs's view of social memory accords with Warburg inasmuch as he places it at the level of collective experience, and this involves more than the mere aggregate of individual memories. At the same time, cultural memories are structured through social institutions and practices, and are prompted by encounters with objects, spaces, and ideas associated with the memory in question. As Halbwachs argues, .... Quand nous évoquons un souvenir ... nous le rattachons à ceux qui I'entourent: en réalité, c'est parce que d'autres souvenirs en rapport avec celui-ci subsistent autour de nous, dans les objets, dans les êtres au milieu desquels nous vivons, ou en nous-mêmes: points de repère dans l'espace et le temps …[256] .... Hence for Halbwachs, a memory is triggered indirectly - a position that recalls Proust's treatment of memory, Warburg undoubtedly recognised the importance of the various means whereby classical dynamograms were socially disseminated; the Plates of Mnemosyne include illustrations of woodcuts and engravings, photographs, stamps, posters, gem engravings, printed maps, and a variety of other visual resources. But these serve as examples of the detour of symbolic meaning, rather than of the material basis of the social memory of antiquity. In contrast to Benjamin, who saw such reproductive media as spelling an end to the oppressive aura of the cult object, Warburg saw them as heralding the degradation of meaning, the ‘cutting off of expressive values from the mint of life.’ And with this we come to the second major difficulty: the notion of originary meaning. .... Fundamental to Warburg's account of social memory is the idea that unmediated exposure to a dynamogram leads to a release of the original mnemic energies that went into its making. Such emphasis on the immediacy and directness of the impact of the symbol supports the reliance on empathy theory as a means of carrying over his interest in mimetic experience on to the understanding of visual imagery. There is a series of unchallenged assumptions in this view, however, which need to be unpacked. First, Warburg confuses here a specific kind of experience - the mimetic - with an objective characteristic of its visual symbolisation. The claim that an early stage of human perception was primarily mimetic is quite distinct from the notion that the meaning of mimetic symbols was also equally direct and unmediated. Furthermore, this is doubly untenable given that a central argument of Warburg is that modern European and American culture has lost the prelogical, mimetic, experience that would be the pre-requisite of such unmediated receptivity to the mnemic content of the monuments of antiquity. Underlying Warburg's theory of the mnemic function of the dynamogram is his stress on the determining role of the representation of human gesture - the pathos formula. In this he sees gesture as framed by a set of extremes, the meaning of which is historically invariable. The influence of Darwin's study of The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Men is evident here, for while gestures can serve as a vehicle of memory, warburg draws on Darwin's biological theory of gesture, in which all human gestures and expressions can be traced back to distant animal origins, with parallels in the more advanced of the primates.[257] .... Paradoxically, much of Warburg's own work contradicts this view, in particular, his distinction between the mannered and rather restricted gestures of medieval courtly society and the much more dynamic gestural language of classical antiquity. To this could be added the question of the meaning of the Laocoon group, for Warburg's criticism of Winckelmann's idea of antiquity focuses on the latter's ‘mis-reading’ of the gestures of the Laocoon group. Such a mis-reading should, following Warburg, not be possible. Finally, the format of the Mnemosyne Atlas, with its often noted parallels with contemporary avant-garde montage practices, also undercuts Warburg's own theory of memory. As Kurt Forster has suggested, the format of the atlas suggests the construction of meanings rather than the transmission of one originary meaning, and the interplay of the different images on each of the boards of the atlas minored Benjamin's interest in the productive function of the constellation of opposites and the mutability of meaning.[258] .... Had Warburg been less dismissive of his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud, his theory of social memory might have avoided the criticisms that can be levelled against it, many of which focus on problems arising from his continued attachment to the notion of an originary memory. In Die Traumdeutung Freud analyses the multiple mediations and detours necessary to the construction of the dream; the analysis of dreams is thus based on the assumption of a distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams.[259] The specific mechanisms outlined by Freud whereby such latent thoughts (‘Traumgedanken’) become manifest as the content of the dream (‘Trauminhalt’) are well known: condensation (‘Verdichtung’) and displacement (‘Verschiebung’). The process of displacement is twofold. First, ‘Der Traum ist gleichsam anders zentriert, sein Inhalt um andere Elemente als Mittelpunkt geordnet als die Traumgedanken.’[260] Second, the original thoughts are converted into a content that is capable of representation in the dream - they are rendered ‘darstellungsfähig,’ and for Freud the primary example of this is the conversion of abstract thoughts into concrete figures.[261] The dream is thus an enigmatic hieroglyph, and its semantic density is further added to by the fact that the symbolic vocabulary of the dream often draws on the stock of inherited cultural symbols from folklore, myths and legends. Freud's account anticipates Benjamin's notion of allegory, and the parallel is strengthened by Freud's recognition that the choice of cultural symbols can often appear random and inexplicable: ‘die Wahl des Symbols erscheint dann rätselhaft,’[262] a comment that echoes Benjamin's stress on the arbitrariness of allegorical figures. .... Although Freud continues to write of the latent dream thoughts, it becomes clear that they can never appear as such, but only through multiple processes of mediation, and this model is repeated in his paper of l9l5 on the unconscious.[263] Thus a repeated anxiety attack, resulting from the cathexis of an unconscious love-impulse, is mastered through a process of displacement, through ‘eine Ersatzvorstellung .,. die einerseits assoziativ mit der abgewiesenen Vorstellung zusammenhing, anderseits durch die Entfernung von ihr der Verdrängung entzogen war (‘Verschiebungsersatz’) und eine Rationalisierung der noch unhemmbaren Angstentwicklung gestattete.’[264] The experience of anxiety, which is itself already a mediated representation of the original unconscious idea, is only allowed into the preconscious through a second detour via an associated idea. ....In contrast to Freud, Warburg, influenced by Semon, assumes that the original dynamogram is an unmediated reflection of the primal emotive energies that went into its making. Although Freud shares with Warburg an interest in the origins of social and symbolic practices - and this is evident in his works on, for example, totemism or monotheism - the origins are always absent. In contrast, Warburg, although he recognises the semantic detours integral to the life of symbols, always imagines it possible to return to their point of origin, which, for Freud, never stands outside the economy of symbols. Perhaps the most concrete way in which this difference can be expressed is by reference to two metaphors of memory, the archive and the palimpsest. Warburg conceives of memory in terms of the archive, in which both the earliest and the latest documents are preserved in equal measure. While Freud was himself fascinated with the notion of the archive - the wax tablet of the ‘Wunderblock’ serving as a well-known model - his writing on dreams and the unconscious is far more amenable to the idea of the palimpsest as a model for the operations of social memory.[265] The palimpsest presents the interpreter with successive layers of writing, the original of which is masked by subsequent inscriptions; its traces are occasionally visible, but it is never visible in its entirety. And the question of the appropriate metaphor for memory also involves Benjamin. In the introduction to his essay on Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften Benjamin compares the critic to the palaeographer: ‘Man darf [den Kritiker] mit dem Paläographen vor einem Pergamente vergleichen, dessen verblichener Text überdeckt wird von den Zügen einer kräftigeren Schrift, die auf ihn sich bezieht. Wie der Paläograph mit dem Lesen der letzteren beginnen müßte, so der Kritiker mit dem Kommentieren.’[266] Important to this metaphor is the sense that access to the original is only possible through the mediations of subsequent inscription and commentary. Bringing this model to bear on to Warburg’s preoccupations with the detour of the symbol through its successive transformations, one can state that it is only ever possible to approach the original work through such ‘detours.’ ....Despite its many difficulties, however, Warburg’s theory of social memory can be remodelled so as to retain many of his most pressing concerns, and in such a way as to throw up again affinities between his thought and that of Benjamin, At the heart of Warburg’s concern with social memory is the question of how Europe's cultural inheritance was appropriated, and this appropriation is held in tension between two extremes. The one is an essentially conservative retention of the past - one might think in terms of a mimetic absorption in history - that preserves through repetition. The other is a transformative engagement with the past. Again we can perhaps turn to Freud to think through the significance of this difference. In his paper on mourning and melancholy, Freud draws a fundamental distinction between the two reactions to loss.[267] The work of mourning enables the subject to transfer their libidinal investment in the lost object to another. Melancholy is also motivated by loss, but this sense of loss manifests itself through excessive identification with the object: ‘Die Objektbesetzung ... wurde aufgehoben, aber die freie Libido nicht auf ein anderes Objekt verschoben, sondern ins Ich zurückgezogen. Dort fand sie aber nicht eine beliebige Verwendung, sondern diente dazu, eine Identifizierung des Ichs mit dem aufgehobenen Objekt herzustellen.’[268] There follows a loss of self (‘Ichverlust’). This sense of an identification of the subject with the object recalls both Warburg and Benjamin's notions of mimetic experience, but here it is regarded by Freud as a clinical condition, and the inability to turn to another object condemns the patient to a cycle of regressive repetition - a phenomenon that elsewhere Freud equated with the most primitive impulse of all - the death drive.[269] ....Warburg clearly valued those artists that rose above the simple repetition of history. The significance of artists such as Donatello, Botticelli and others lay in their turn to a model of classical culture (it would be misplaced to term it an ‘originary remembering’) which challenged the existing medieval one. The fact that it was not an unmediated response to the mnemic content of the monuments of antiquity is evident from the fact that this 'other' antiquity of the Renaissance was based on a vast body of humanist scholarship. At the same time Warburg was persistent in his belief that the ability to rise above the repetitive loss of self was fragile, its achievement tenuous. And here we see the parallel with Benjamin for whom capitalism, through the growth of commodity fetishism, was engaged in the process of reverting to a kind of primitive repetition. This is also clear from Benjamin's use of Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence as a description of the logic of capitalism. And yet while the consumerism of the nineteenth century attempted to produce a kind of timelessness through resorting to classical associations and symbolism, such symbols are never tied to suprahistorical meanings. Indeed, a continuing theme in the Passagen-Werk concerns the dissonance between the environment of Parisian modernity and the inadequacy of the inherited cultural images of the mid-nineteenth century France, including neo-classicism, itself not such a distant memory. In place of the constancy of meaning, Benjamin talks of disjunction, and fragmentation. Indeed this is the very heart of his vision, and what places him apart from Warburg. Both are agreed on the necessity of an intervention into history as a means of resisting a regression into the primitive mimetic past, or its dialectical opposite, the hypertrophy of technical-mathematical abstraction. Yet whereas Warburg believes this can be achieved by the community of reason, Benjamin argues for something far more revolutionary. Less concerned with maintaining the sovereignty of bourgeois reason, Benjamin regards the rescuing of culture possible only through a dialectical reawakening of primitive memory, a revolutionary and subversive re-appropriation of history – ‘das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen’[270] - that relies on the redemptive function of intoxication (‘Rausch’).[271] Such an idea would have been anathema to Warburg the bourgeois who, in his confession that he was ‘amburghese di cuore,’ perhaps revealed more about his intellectual identity than he might have anticipated.
* Matthew Rampley; The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin,
Notes:
Through Experience of Warburg and Benjamin |
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