Clouds: Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image by Michael

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Clouds:

Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image

Michael Powers

B.A., New College of Florida, 2007

M.A., Brown University, 2011

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Department of German Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

This dissertation by Michael Powers is accepted in its present form by the Department of German Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Gerhard Richter, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Susan Bernstein, Reader

Date______Kevin McLaughlin, Reader

Date______Zachary Sng, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Michael Powers was born in 1985 in Miami, Florida. He graduated with a B.A. in

German Studies from New College of Florida in 2007. In 2008 he entered the graduate program in German Studies at Brown University and received his M.A. in 2011. In 2011-

2012 he was awarded a fellowship from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst

(DAAD) to conduct dissertation work in Berlin, Germany with an affiliation at the Freie

Universität. In the summer 2011, he received a fellowship from the Graduate School to participate in the Cornell University School of Criticism and Theory. While at Brown, he served as a primary instructor for a range of German-language courses, and also served as a teaching assistant for the Department of German Studies, working closely with

Professors Gerhard Richter, Susan Bernstein, and Zachary Sng. He has an article entitled

“Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Benjamin, Stieglitz and the Medium of Photography,” forthcoming in 2015 in German Quarterly. In 2014, Michael Powers was the recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Brown University Graduate

School.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this dissertation was made possible thanks to the kind support of several individuals. First, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Gerhard Richter, for his thoughtful guidance and attentive feedback throughout the entire dissertation-writing process. I benefitted greatly from his expertise, as well as from his steadfast encouragement, and I look forward to many more conversations with him as I continue to shape this project in the future. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee for their generous assistance in helping me to develop this project: Susan Bernstein, for her insightful input on the various chapters I shared with her along the way; Kevin McLaughlin, for always welcoming me to discuss my work with him, and for sharing numerous suggestions and ideas with me; and Zachary Sng, for the countless conversations and constant, unflagging confidence in my work. I am grateful to all of them for their invaluable guidance and support.

At Brown, I have also benefitted from many teachers, colleagues, and friends who have directly, or indirectly, contributed to the completion of this project: Benjamin Brand,

Eric Foster, Stephanie Galasso, Rebecca Haubrich, Dennis Johannssen, Silja Maehl, Kristina

Mendicino, Thomas Schestag, Jane Sokolosky, and Seth Thorn. I thank them all, including my friends in Germany, Philipp Marquardt and Philipp Staab, for exchanging their work, ideas, and excitement with me, and for the innumerable discussions that we have had in the past, and that I hope we will continue to have in the future.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support in all of my endeavors, academic or otherwise. I owe my love for language to my mother and father, and

I would like to especially thank my father for always acting as a role model for me and for constantly supporting me along the long journey that has taken me to this point. I also thank my sister and my brothers for their support over the last years, which rarely saw me at a family function without at least some seemingly pressing dissertation-related work that I thought I needed to direly return to. My final thanks go to Kathryn Sederberg, who has been an unmatched source of comfort, encouragement, and inspiration over the last seven years.

Without her generous help and untiring belief in my work, this dissertation would not have come to fruition. I dedicate my dissertation to her.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page iii

Curriculum Vitae iv

Acknowledgements v

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Cloudy Media: Walter Benjamin’s Colorful Language 19

Chapter 2: Photographic Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Stieglitz, Benjamin, Derrida 56

Chapter 3: Weather and Time: Benjamin and the Limits of the Utopic Imagination 114

Chapter 4: Wolkige Stellen: Kafka’s Disfigured Image-World 172

Bibliography 214

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1 Le Gray: “Le Brick,” 1856

Figure 2.2 Alfred Stieglitz: “The Hand of Man,” 1902

Figure 2.3 Stieglitz: “Equivalent,” 1929

Figure 2.4 Stieglitz: “Equivalent,” 1926

Figure 2.5 Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schön (1928)

Figure 3.1 SDS Poster: “Alle reden vom Wetter”

Figure 4.1 El Greco, “View of Toledo”

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Introduction

Clouds: Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image

Perhaps the most trenchant convergence of vision and language in the work of Walter

Benjamin occurs in his posthumously published Arcades Project (1940). At the center of this tome stands the concept of the “dialectical image” (das dialektische Bild) or

“dialectics at a standstill.” Since the first moment of its appearance, this concept has become a touchstone for readers of Benjamin.1 In order to set the course for a larger investigation into the interrelation of vision and language in the variegated writings of

Benjamin, this introduction begins with a brief overview and analysis of this key

Benjaminian concept. Taking Benjamin’s description of the dialectical image as my point of departure, I aim to show how many of the core features at the heart of this concept are tied to an unorthodox, specifically Benjaminian re-thinking of both vision and language in terms of their mediality. The dialectical image, as Benjamin conceives it, marks one of several cases in which vision and language function not merely (nor even primarily) as

1 Although Benjamin coined the term, his friend Theodor W. Adorno was the first to use it in print in his 1933 Habilitationsschrift. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1933). This set of affairs eventually led to the uncanny situation of Adorno accusing Benjamin of misusing his own concept in the 1935 exposé of what was to become the Arcades Project. For a gloss of the various differences between Adorno and Benjamin surrounding the concept of the “dialectical image” and dialectics in general, see Sven Kramer, Walter Benjamin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2003), 124-30. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 136-84. Michael Grossheim, "Archaisches oder Dialektisches Bild?: zum Kontext einer Debatte zwischen Adorno und Benjamin," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 71(1997). 1 transparent media through which mediation occurs. Rather, in the dialectical image, as elsewhere, Benjamin treats these two spheres as media in a radical sense—as dynamic spheres of non-identity in which mediality itself – understood as a movement of constant splitting, taking-leave-of-oneself, and de-formation – occurs.

As I will demonstrate over the course of this dissertation, clouds occupy a privileged place within Benjamin’s theoretical and rhetorical storehouse precisely insofar as they allow exceptional insight into such a dynamic, dispersive structure of mediality in both its imagistic and linguistic modalities. As dynamic, immaterial, ungrounded modes of relation that hover between transparency and opacity, revelation and concealment, the spheres of vision and language are clouds. But to be a cloud does not mean to be anything substantial, as clouds refuse to remain settled and are defined by their constant shifting, moving away from themselves, becoming other at all times. As a figure of disfiguration—a radically disfigured and disfiguring figure—clouds disclose a structure of self-alterity and self-differentiation that defines not only Benjamin’s understanding of the media of vision and language, but also the relation between these two cloud-like spectrums, as one often seems to drift into and converge with the other (or is it the same?) throughout his thought.

Before returning to this notion of cloudy mediality, let us revisit the concept of the dialectical image as a paradigmatic example of the imago-linguistic in Benjamin’s thinking. In the analysis that follows, I emphasize the role of visual rhetoric in this concept in an attempt to illuminate the uniquely Benjaminian mode of thinking in the image.2

2 For a comprehensive reading of the Denkbild in the writings of Benjamin (and others associated with the Frankfurt School), see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from 2

The Dialectical Image

In contrast to Marx’s Hegelian model of history as a dialectical movement that proceeds teleologically in stages, Benjamin attempts in the Arcades Project to rethink historical materialism and its underlying concept of time (linear, progressive, continuous) from a fragmented, a-teleological perspective. History, as Benjamin views it, is not a direct, linear movement from past to present or present to past. As he argues in the closely- related essay “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (1940), history as a tale of progress—not only of temporal progression, but also constant societal and cultural improvement—is a myth perpetuated by history’s victors who construct the narrative that later generations take as quasi-natural truth.3 Criticizing the hegemonic control that the ruling classes and corresponding narratives exert over our perception of history, he draws our attention to the active role that the historiographer plays in (re-)constructing history. The naïve notion that historians merely reconstitute the past as it was overlooks not only all that civilization excludes from its historical meta-narrative, but also the way in which unique events are reduced to mere causal moments from the perspective of the historical gaze. In this way, the classical conception of time as a linear, progressive movement entails a certain synthetic violence, Benjamin suggests, insofar as it forces the discontinuous, heterogeneous, singular moments in time to blend together, becoming sublated into the

Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). For a useful reconstruction of the how the word “Denkbild” enters the German language and its etymological history, see Eberhard Wilhelm Schulz, "Zum Wort "Denkbild"," in Wort und Zeit: Aufsatze und Vortrage zur Literaturgeschichte (Neumünster: K. Wachholtz, 1968). 3 According to Benjamin, bourgeois historicism tends to assume the perspective of and empathize with the “Sieger” before which even “die Toten” are not safe (GS 1.2:695-96). Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989). Henceforth all subsequent references to the Gesammelte Schriften and Gesammelte Briefe will be abbreviated as GS or GB followed by volume and page number. Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 3 dialectical march of history. In his writings on history, Benjamin expresses the desire for a more dynamic, non-integrative model of history that would take into account and respect the singularity of each individual moment, while simultaneously seeking the relation between these individual points without reducing them to a homogenous continuum of historical time.

For the Benjamin of the 1930s, the dialectical image becomes the key term to describe such a radical revaluation of historical thinking. The Arcades Project, a study of the dispersed origins of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris, was to embody

Benjamin’s disjunctive mode of analysis by exploding history into an assortment of fragments. The unfinished text consists of an imposing collection of citations that

Benjamin gathered throughout the last decade of his life. Each citation, as a fragment or snippet of a larger diachronic narrative—the story or (con)text from which it was plucked—exemplifies the fragmented structure of time that concerns Benjamin. Placed into a montage-like structure, these moments of time exist independently and yet, paradoxically, in relation to one another, although not in the conventional sense of a causal, linear series of progressive events. In Konvolut N of the Arcades Project—the theoretical nucleus of the work in which the concept of the dialectical image is laid out—

Benjamin repeatedly employs optical imagery in order to describe this different model of historical analysis, which he says is ultimately rooted in language:

Nicht so ist es, daß das Vergangene sein Licht auf das Gegenwärtige oder das Gegenwärtige sein Licht auf das Vergangene wirft, sondern Bild ist dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt. Mit anderen Worten: Bild ist die Dialektik im Stillstand. Denn während die Beziehung der Gegenwart zur Vergangenheit eine rein zeitliche, kontinuierliche ist, ist die des Gewesnen zum Jetzt dialektisch: ist nicht Verlauf sondern Bild, sprunghaft. – Nur

dialektische Bilder sind echte (d.h.: nicht archaische) Bilder; und der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache.4

Benjamin outlines two opposing approaches towards history in this passage.5 In the first, he describes the perspective of conventional historiography. In this paradigm, the past

(Vergangene) and present (Gegenwärtige) appear to relate to one another directly as two points along a stable timeline. Whether looking at the past from the perspective of the present or approaching the present from the past, history is conceived of as a linear, uninterrupted movement, from point A to point B. Much as in the term enlightenment, in this conventional model of history, light functions as a metaphor for clarity and demystification. Past and present mutually illuminate one another, each shedding light

(“Licht…wirft”) on the other. The historian’s crucial role is to look at the past, to travel through time—here figured in the medium of light transparently and continuously connecting past and present—in order to reconstruct what he sees in writing. In this model, light is a metaphor not only for the structure of linear time, but also for the imagined gaze of the historian. Just as past and present look upon, shed light on one another, the historian who looks at the past does so as a subject looking at an object.

History is conceived here as dealing with dead objects of study. The historian deals with images in the conventional sense, as traces of bygone events that allow him to relate transitively to the past across an empty medium. In this scenario, he approaches the past as something that can be dissected, understood from a distance, reconstructed and, in short, brought to light.

4 GS 5.1:578. 5 For more on the opposition of these two models of history, see Krista R. Greffrath, Metaphorischer Materialismus: Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbegriff Walter Benjamins (München: W. Fink, 1981), 54- 61. 5

In the second model Benjamin puts forward, the one which represents his own revised conception of Marxist historical materialism, history is presented in decidedly more dynamic terms, namely through the prism of a “dialectical image.” The dialectical, imagistic relation of past and present occurs as the precarious union between a “now”

(Jetzt) and a “what-has-been” (Gewesene). The everyday diction (Jetzt, Gewesene) with which Benjamin depicts the dialectical image in contrast with their abstract, technical counterparts (Vergangene, Gegenwärtige) hints at the difference between these two models. In the dialectical image, we are not dealing with a detached, abstract conceptualization of history. Instead history is something much more lively, an experience of a “now” (Jetzt), a certain historical mode of being (at the root of Gewesene we find Wesen—being).6 The idea of a stable past (Vergangene) and present that

(Gegenwärtige) relate to each other across the seemingly empty space that light occupies—and the corresponding conception of time as a homogenous, linear vacuum— assumes that there is a stable, removed point from which to perceive (read, see) history.7

In the dialectical image, however, this assumption is supplanted by the conception of a historically-immanent, ungrounded “now” that is always fleeting and moving away even from itself.8

6 Detectable at the root of this more active, experiential understanding of history is Benjamin’s early, lingering desire to rehabilitate the concept of experience (Erfahrung) as found in Kant’s philosophy. For a an analysis which explores the impact of Benjamin’s early Kant studies on his historical thinking, see Michael W. Jennings, "Profane Illuminations: Benjamin's Theory of Experience and Philosophy of Language," in Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 7 In “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Benjamin argues that history is the object of construction not on the grounds of “homogene und leere Zeit,” but rather from time filled with “Jetztzeit.” Recalling the French revolution’s citation of ancient Rome as an example, he suggests that such a citational gesture explodes (“heraussprengte”) what was cited from the linear “continuum of history” and instead must be viewed as a “Tigersprung ins Vergangene,” a leap in time, which itself must be rethought as a broken, fissured, implicitly non-continuous continuum. GS 2.1:701. 8 In a note dating back to approximately 1929, Benjamin describes this fundamental aspect of the dialectical image as its structure of “Zeitdifferential.” For an useful reading of this concept of time always 6

Taking into account the very moment of historical interpretation and its position within history, Benjamin rethinks history in terms of an image which is neither transparent nor mimetic (secondary to what it represents). Light, in this model, is not thrown across empty space from one object towards another—the way that we conventionally speak of an image as being of something external to it; rather, moments in time come together lightning-like (blitzhaft) to form a constellation. 9 In the dialectical image, the medium of light connecting the disparate (imagistic) moments of history

(“Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten”) becomes visible as lightning.10

Light is no longer the invisible, a priori condition of possibility of a transitive mode of sight (between subject and object), connecting past and present, history and the detached historiographer. Instead, in the figure of lightning the supposedly empty medium of transmission, of historical perception comes into the foreground. The “now” (Jetzt) and the “what-has-been” (Gewesene) are not two points at opposing ends of a transparent medium, but rather two moments within a medium, whose connection is as striking as its recognizability is fleeting (blitzhaft).11 The lightning-like dialectical image signals a

departing, differentiating, and moving away from itself, see Ansgar Hillach, "Dialektisches Bild," in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 190-94. 9 In phenomenological terms, such images of without a clear object of orientation suggest a lack of intentionality and thus present a point of difficulty for phenomenological analysis. For recent treatments of Benjamin’s engagement with phenomenology, see Uwe Steiner, "Phänomenologie der Moderne: Benjamin und Husserl," in Benjamin-Studien I, ed. Daniel Weidner and Sigrid Weigel (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008); Peter D. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). On the question of intentionality, Steiner is especially useful in shedding light on Benjamin’s fascination with the topic as it extends from the epistemo-critical preface of the Habilitationsschrift to the “death of intention” that Benjamin considers characteristic of the dialectical image in the Arcades Project. 10 GS 5.1:596. 11 For Benjamin, the historical index of dialectical images—the potential for the historical materialist to perceive the past correctly—marks not only the time from which it came, but also the time in which it becomes legible (lesbar). 7 moment of dispersed convergence in the realm of history, a critical cut in the medium that simultaneously divides and unites.

The imagistic view of time forces us to rethink it in terms of a structure of non- causal relationality; as Samuel Weber has put it, the “image is construed by Benjamin as both disjunctive and medial in its structure.”12 The disjunctive mediality of the

Benjaminian image coincides with an erratic form of (temporal) movement that proceeds by leaps and bounds—“sprunghaft”—across fissured time.13 Along the same lines,

Benjamin suggests that language, too, must be viewed in terms of such imagistic, disjunctive convergence, and not, as he explains in his philosophy of language, as a continuous, transparent medium through which mediation occurs (“der Ort, an dem man sie antrifft, ist die Sprache”). A revaluation of historical thinking of the sort the dialectical image calls forward, therefore, seems to depend on relating to both vision and language in a decidedly non-instrumental manner. Neither is a medium through which the subject relates to objects or history, but in which history occurs as functions within the self-differentiating medium.

In his essay “Time and History,” Benjamin’s friend and fellow traveler Siegfried

Kracauer invokes the figure of the cloud in order to capture such a medial state of coalescence and dispersion as it expresses itself in Benjamin’s radicalized concept of history. Benjamin, Kracauer suggests, approaches history as though it were not a

12 Samuel Weber, Benjamin's -abilities (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 49. 13 Benjamin also describes this disjunctive mediality of the image elsewhere, for example, in his essay “Zum Bilde Prousts” (1929) Benjamin conceptualizes the “Bild” as a third place that both binds and separates two sides of a binary opposition (figured in the image of a rolled up sock—a container—and the unrolled sock—the contained). The movement between these two states, which fascinate the playful child, is described as an emptying out. Unseen and uncognizable between these two lies the “Bild,” which is only perceptible virtually, in an ability to arrest and dwell in the mediating (non-)space of transition. For an insightful reading of this essay, see Carol Jacobs, "Walter Benjamin: Image of Proust," in In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 8 chronological “process at all but a hodge-podge of kaleidoscopic changes – something like clouds that gather and disperse at random.”14 By deploying the figure of the cloud in this vivid analogy, Kracauer, probably unwittingly, strikes upon a key image that

Benjamin himself uses multiple times throughout his critical and literary writings in contemplating the disjunctive mediality that structures both vision and language (and by association, his view of the dialectical image). Color, the other sphere to which Kracauer alludes in describing Benjamin’s view of history as one of “kaleidoscopic changes”

(rather than chronological movement), in fact marks one of the very domains that

Benjamin connects to the cloud and thereby reinterprets along emphatically medial lines.

As numerous studies dedicated to clouds as aesthetic and conceptual phenomena have emphasized, clouds are profoundly ambiguous things.15 Hovering at the threshold of form and formlessness, transparency and opacity, the profane and the divine, clouds are notoriously difficult to contain, as anyone who has played the game of identifying figures in the shape-shifting sky can attest. Caught in a state of perpetual metamorphosis, clouds indicate a process of becoming other that challenges notions of sameness and identity.

Strangely, the cloud is most like itself precisely when it is at drift away from itself, becoming like something else, something other. This feature of the cloud makes it not only a suggestive and powerful metaphor for modes of dissolution or becoming, but even

14 Siegfried Kracauer, Werke, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Ingrid Belke, and Sabine Biebl, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 390. Although this specific quotation refers to Proust, Kracauer explicitly aligns the two through their shared devaluation of chronological time. According to Kracauer, Benjamin evinces an “undialectical approach” that emphasizes the “nonentity of chronological time” 387. “Time and History,” coincidentally, was written on the occasion of Adorno’s 60th birthday, another interlocutor of Benjamin’s who had difficulties with certain aspects of Benjamin’s revaluation of historical time (in particular his unmediated presentation of this concept in the fragments that make up the Arcades Project). 15 To name just two representative examples of the several studies dedicated to this ephemeral object that has continued to fascinate poets, artists, and critics alike: Johannes Stückelberger, Wolkenbilder: Deutungen des Himmels in der Moderne (München: Fink, 2010); Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: a tree, a rock, a cloud (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 9 more fundamentally renders it an image of the very analogical drift that structures all forms of representation, whether imagistic or linguistic. A contemporary theorist of the cloud, Hubert Damisch, suggests such a semiotic understanding in the very title of his book, A Theory of /Cloud/. By bracketing the word between slashes, Damisch underscores the function of the cloud as signifier par excellence, the point of representation that necessarily withdraws from sight in order to allow something else to appear.16 The something else, we should note is, however, nothing other than the cloud itself—nothing external to it, but merely another variation, a different shape or iteration of itself. The cloud marks that which is always different and always the same. It marks the convergence of sameness and difference, but a convergence based in difference, indeed, in the mode of differing that structures the cloud itself. We might therefore say that the cloud not only marks a state of disjunctive convergence, but does so always already as a remarking and reshaping. It remains the same in always repeating itself in different variations. This is what is remarkable about the cloud, as Benjamin suggests when he writes in a free-floating note in the Arcades Project of a certain alterity and alterability inscribed into the cloud: “Wolkenatmosphäre, Wolkenwandelbarkeit der

Dinge im Visionsraum.”17

In constantly splitting away from itself, not due to outside forces, but from within, immanently, the cloud comes to take on a privileged place within Benjamin’s figural

(bildliche) lexicon insofar as it stages a structure of self-alterity that defines the media of vision and language as non-self-identical spheres, always pointing away from themselves.

16 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 14-15. 17GS 5.2:1024. 10

It marks the zone of exchange and mutual interruption between the two, where language reveals its Bildcharakter and the image its Schriftcharakter. Like clouds, this principle of medial self-alterity assumes different forms throughout Benjamin’s writings, paradoxical de-formations that always hover and point to their own dissolution. From the early, ultimately abandoned project on play, color, and fantasy, through to his late work on

Kafka and in the Arcades Project, one repeatedly encounters such figures of self-alterity

(“Entstaltung,” “Unwetter,” “Entstellung”) tied to the figure of the cloud in explicitly visual or linguistic scenes, lending thought to a structure of negativity that defines both spheres in the way they constantly withdraw and turn away from themselves. This turning-away-from in the media of vision and language at times means a turn to the other medium, a blurring of the lines between these two modes of relation. By paying close attention to the way the cloud figure disperses itself across Benjamin’s oeuvre, indeed to the way that it drifts between the media of vision and language, the cloud offers us a unique vantage point into (or from within) Benjamin’s work.

Following the drift of the cloud(s) within Benjamin’s writing not only allows us to better understand the structure and stakes of such well-known concepts like the dialectical image and aura, but it also discloses the path to a new understanding of vision and language in general. Such a revaluation of these two categories, not only in themselves but in relation to one another, becomes especially poignant at those moments that Benjamin summons one medium to play the foil for the other, often in a gesture that seems as though it would lend validity or solidify the integrity of the one medium against the other. An exemplary case of such inter-mediality can be found in Benjamin’s description of the relation of a caption (Beschriftung) to a photograph. Instead of the

11 photograph grounding the caption, or the caption orienting what the viewer sees in the photograph, Benjamin gestures towards the mutual ungrounding of both media not only from external referents, but ultimately from one another. Both media, in such a case, converge in their difference not only to that to which they refer, but also from themselves as they seem to drift into and approximate the structure of the other medium, but without ever simply sublating into an identity with its counterpart. Neither can therefore act as a stable ground of reference or horizon of fulfillment for the other. Mutually unsettled, caption and image hover beside one another, each attached neither to itself nor to the other.

In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin once explained his lack of political affiliations as the desire to remain true to his maxim of acting “immer radikal, niemals konsequent in den wichtigsten Dingen.”18 Where the “most important things” are concerned, Benjamin always tried to remain consistently inconsistent. This peculiar stance—if we can even call it that—extends beyond Benjamin’s views of politics and his desire not to be confined to a predetermined political platform or ideology. In the consistently inconsistent cloud, a figure which hovers between figuration and disfiguration, we acquire an image of a non- or de-positioning movement that always seemed to fascinate Benjamin where important matters were at stake. A detailed analysis of the cloud figure as it recurs throughout his writings, therefore, will shed light on

Benjamin’s work as a whole.

Although numerous critics have taken note of various instances of clouds in

Benjamin’s writing, few have given this figure the sustained attention it deserves

18 GB 3:159. 12 considering its multi-faceted character. In particular, the relation between the optical and linguistic dimensions of the cloud figure in Benjamin’s writing has remained almost entirely unexplored, in that critics tend to privilege one over the other. To date, the most sustained analysis of the Benjaminian figure of the cloud is Werner Hamacher’s seminal essay “The Word Wolke—If It Is One.” There, Hamacher focuses on the image of the cloud as it recurs in Benjamin’s late, semi-autobiographical collection of vignettes

Berliner Kindheit um 1900.19 Drawing on Benjamin’s language-philosophical concept of nonsensuous similarity (“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit”), Hamacher explores the relation between the amorphous figure of the cloud and the way words seem to disperse and coalesce into different shapes throughout this text. Despite the careful attention paid to linguistic cloudiness—a mode of dispersive convergence—in this insightful essay,

Hamacher does not focus on the crucial visual dimension of this figure in Berliner

Kindheit and beyond. The arthistorian Heinz Brüggemann, by contrast, focuses explicitly on the connection Benjamin draws between clouds and vision in a short section of his book, Walter Benjamin: Über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie.20 Although Brüggemann, whose sole focus is the early color studies, offers a useful exegesis of the cloud figure not only within the color project, but also in relation to larger historical and aesthetic discourses, the deeper connection between the cloud as it emerges in this early project and Benjamin’s thinking of the self-differentiating medium does not receive the attention it deserves. In order fully to appreciate the complex mode of language, vision, and

19 Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke -- If it is One," in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). 20 Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 13 relation that Benjamin comes to associate with the cloud, one must, as I have suggested, begin with his early color studies.

My study, then, traces the several directions of the cloud’s drift across Benjamin’s work, from his early color studies and politics project, to his late essay on Kafka and his autobiographical writings. In my readings, I often follow this drift beyond Benjamin and towards the general horizon of imagistic and linguistic possibilities opened up the radically unstable figure of the cloud.

Chapter One, “Cloudy Media: Walter Benjamin’s Colorful Language,” sets the course for the chapters that follow it by unpacking Benjamin’s first articulation of the dispersive self-differentiating, imagistic medium that he would come to emphasize throughout his writings. In his early color studies, Benjamin uncovers in the innocent way the child relates to color a mode of visual mediality in which neither subject nor object is grounded in anything but color, which itself hovers self-reflexively between subject and object alike. The medium of color is for Benjamin one of pure ocular interrelationality, a dynamic cloud-like spectrum that is often overlooked by the transitive gaze. Color is not, as the conventional view would have it, merely a secondary property, an attribute of an object to which it is bound. But rather color, he suggests, marks the very medium of seeing, a singular, motley medium of dispersive convergence: the color spectrum. In his repeated deployment of clouds in the color studies, Benjamin gives us an image of this self-differentiating medial realm. But in giving us an image of it, in the form of this figure, he repeats the very sort of gesture that color, viewed from the immanent perspective of its medial virtuality, unsettles. The cloud therefore, not only belongs to the formless, dispersive realm of color, but it also marks the possible place of

14 transition from a transitive mode of seeing and relating to the world (“Formsehen”), to an immanently medial mode of seeing in color (“Farbsehen”). As a form that verges on formlessness, in that it stages a perpetual movement of deformation (“Entstaltung”), the cloud figures forth the amorphous, dynamic medial conditions that allow form to emerge from formlessness but always as a precarious potential that can never be fully secured. In the final section of this chapter, I show how Benjamin begins to translate and de-form this notion of medial self-alterity in his late color studies, allowing it to take shape in the dispersive image of language. In his analysis of Shakespeare’s language, as well as in his staging of the child-like view of language in Berliner Kindheit, he makes the connection between color and language explicit. This is, for Benjamin, a connection based not only in the self-differential character that structures both media in themselves, but also their relation to one another: the cloud is both the zone of nebulous contact between language and vision as well as the internal spot of obscurity that renders each non-identical to itself.

Chapter Two, “Photographic Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Stieglitz, Benjamin, Derrida,” shifts our attention toward a different artistic practice, namely photography. Before turning to Benjamin, I provide a short genealogy of cloud photography, highlighting the oscillating emphases on the subjective (pictorialist) and objective (realist) sides of photographic representation that govern its aesthetics, leading up to Alfred Stieglitz’s horizonless cloud photographs in the 1920s. With Stieglitz, the medium of photography comes to the fore like never before. No longer assumed to be grounded in either the objective, material world, nor in the embodied subject, Stieglitz’s horizonless cloud images disclose the ungrounded, medial conditions of photography itself. Able to be

(re)positioned in any way due to the lack of a reference point internal to the photograph,

Stieglitz’s cloud images are themselves amorphous and cloud-like, in that they possess an inherent potential to always be other than themselves, a feature Benjamin draws attention to in another context in the term “Wolkenwandelbarkeit.” Placing Benjamin’s reflections on aura, as well as Derrida’s writings on photography and its linguistic structure, alongside Stieglitz’s cloud photographs, my reading explores the cloud-like structure of the photographic medium as it manifests itself in a number of ways – from the dispersive reproducibility embedded in the photographic negative, to the inability of the caption

(“Beschriftung”) to ground the image.

Chapter Three, “Weather and Time: Benjamin and the Limits of the Utopic

Imagination,” examines the pivotal place of weather in Benjamin’s temporal-political ruminations. At several moments in his oeuvre, Benjamin turns towards weather in order to think the possibility of an entirely other, utopian sphere. Focusing on such scenes, I explore the role that weather and in particular clouds play in opening the possibility of imagining utopia. The first section takes on this question as Benjamin presents it in connection with his concept of boredom in Convolute D of the Arcades Project. For

Benjamin, boredom marks a radically unoriented state, and as such, indicates something like endless possibility. In its “boring” character, the weather is intimately tied to such an unoriented mode of relation. The second section of the chapter builds on this notion of unoriented relationality by examining two texts in which weather plays a crucial role:

Alfred Kubin’s novel Die Andere Seite (1909), and Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio (1913).

In a fragment believed to belong to his lost project on politics (circa 1917-1920),

Benjamin places both of these texts into dialogue with one another through their shared

16 interest in weather. Utopia, Benjamin suggests, marks an absolutely weatherless, cosmic sphere, one that becomes visible (however dimly) by reading these two texts together—a task I undertake in this section. The chapter ends by exploring Benjamin’s strong identification of utopia and what he terms the “utopian image” with the non-instrumental, radically de-interiorized, non-human mode of being to which Scheerbart gives thought in his literary space novel.

Finally, in Chapter Four, entitled “Wolkige Stellen: Kafka’s Disfigured Image-

World,” I turn to perhaps the best known example of the cloud in Benjamin’s oeuvre, namely, the “wolkige Stelle” that he invokes in his essay on Kafka. My reading examines closely how Benjamin reads and interprets Kafka, and the ways in which the cloud plays a central role among the various figures that he deploys in order to represent Kafka’s literary mode—one that always seems to be teetering on the border between revelation and concealment. As readers of Kafka know, his texts resist interpretation. And yet, as

Benjamin emphasizes at several points in his reading, Kafka’s stories nonetheless demand to be viewed as parables—a decidedly instrumental, didactic genre. This seeming contradiction within Benjamin’s view stems from a tension that he identifies with Kafka’s work itself, a tension that is instructive for literary and other modes of representation as a whole. Constantly pointing away from themselves in a self-dispersive, other-directed aesthetic mode that Benjamin (drawing on Freud) terms “Entstellung,”

Kafka’s stories mimic the deictic gesture of the parable that transparently communicates a lesson or moral. But in contrast to the traditional parable, the Kafkan parable never delivers anything outside of itself; that is to say, it can never point beyond the horizon of its own non-self-identity. Following an examination of this cloud-like quality of Kafka’s

17 parables, I bring Benjamin’s work into dialogue with his interlocutors Bertolt Brecht and

Theodor W. Adorno in the second half of the chapter. Not content with Benjamin’s reading of the lack of a clear moral or “Lehre” in Kafka’s stories, their objections—in part directed towards Benjamin’s use of the cloud figure—illuminate the singularity of

Benjamin’s approach as a reader and critic.

Chapter 1

Cloudy Media: Walter Benjamin’s Colorful Language

The most complete and central documentation of Benjamin’s understanding of the cloudy medium of color is the rainbow dialogue—“Der Regenbogen: Gespräch über die

Phantasie” (1915-1916).1 At one point in this wide-ranging conversation that touches on topics concerning aesthetics, theology, and epistemology, Benjamin draws our attention to the separable verb “aussehen” to elucidate the unique character of the so-called colors of fantasy:

Ich sehe freilich, daß mit dem Gesicht eine besondere Region menschlicher Sinne anhebt, denen kein schöpferisches Vermögen entspricht: Farbwahrnehmung, Geruch und Geschmack. Sieh, wie deutlich und scharf das die Sprache bezeichnet. Von diesen Gegenständen sagt sie das gleiche, wie von der Tätigkeit der Sinne selbst: sie riechen und schmecken. Von ihrer Farbe aber: sie sehen aus. Denn so sagt man von Gegenständen niemals, um die reine Form an ihnen zu bezeichnen.2

In both English and German one normally uses the same verb to describe the act of sense perception and the quality sensuously perceived—for example: “She tastes object X,”

“object X tastes good,” or “he smells something,” “something smells delicious.”

However, this is not the case with vision in German: “er sieht den Baum,” but “der Baum

1 The rainbow dialogue, long thought to have been lost, was rediscovered in Rome by Giorgio Agamben in 1977. The dialogue represents the most complete document from Benjamin’s early, unfinished project on play, color, and fantasy. For the most comprehensive overview of this project, see Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 2 GS 7.1:22. 19

sieht grün aus.” Although Benjamin does not elaborate extensively on the distinction between sehen and aussehen, I wish to suggest two alternate readings that will allow us entry into Benjamin’s unique understanding of color as a realm of fantasy.3

First, as an act of distantiation, aussehen describes not how an object looks—the subject’s gaze never reaches the intended object—but rather how the object gives itself to perception from outside. Unlike with the other senses, where what is perceived is always

“nur als Eigenschaft einer Substanz [aufzunehmen],” one does not perceive an object and its qualities at once when dealing with the colors of fantasy. Color is not a property of, or attached to, underlying substances or phenomena. As Benjamin put its: “in nichts ist sie

Substanz oder bezieht sich auf sie.” Instead, color is “nur Eigenschaft,” a property or feature which paradoxically does not adhere to any object, but belongs only to itself.4

Accordingly, children and artists—the two groups who, according to Benjamin, are most attuned to the realm of fantasy—do not perceive color as a secondary characteristic, as a quality of primary phenomena. For children and artists color exists in a detached state, hovering above the objects which adults (i.e. those who lack fantasy) tend to ground them.5

3 The first, extended analysis of the color studies, which still remains a useful point of reference, is Howard Caygill’s Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). Caygill is especially useful in unpacking the relation between the color studies and Benjamin’s larger critique of experience, a connection which brings this project into relation with his early reception of Kant. 4 GS 7.1:23. This Eigenschaft, which is purely and properly its own—entirely onto itself—is tied to Benjamin’s language-philosophical conception of the proper name, the Eigenname, as the apotheosis of language, that is to say, the potential of full linguistic identity between word and thing; see “Über die Sprache überhaupt oder über die Sprache des Menschen,” GS 2.1:140-57. For a useful reading which touches on this crucial connection, see Peter D. Fenves, "Entering the Phenomenological School and Discovering the Color of Shame," in The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 5 In the rainbow dialogue and other texts from this period, the colors of fantasy are often depicted as winged and floating: “geflügelt immer über den Dingen schwebten.” GS 7.1:25. 20

In addition to describing a manner of visual experience which is not oriented towards formed objects, aussehen also hints at the peculiar mode of relation in which the subject finds itself when viewing the colors of fantasy. The detached, non-objective sphere in which the colors of fantasy reside require the subject who experiences them ecstatically to step into their orbit, which Benjamin describes as the “medium” of color.6

In a slight modification of Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy, Benjamin implicitly aligns this mode of vision with the Dionysian sphere of formlessness and ecstasy.7 The subject who steps beyond the borders of its subjectivity in experiencing the colors of fantasy enters the motley, formless spectrum of color and thus becomes something of a non-subject. Tinged by the medium it enters, the “ich,” insomuch as we can speak of a subject, becomes “nichts als Farbe,” “nichts als Sehen” in a state of

“Rausch.”8 The subject becomes not only nothing but seeing, but also nothing as seeing,

“nichts als Sehen.” The subject is no-thing and thus the subject is not. As thoroughly desubstantialized into the realm of fantasy as objects are through color, the subject-object binary and propositional adequation break down. Just as in the case of the colors detaching from the phenomena to which they are ostensibly attached, Benjamin describes the experience of ecstatic, motley perception as one of becoming weightless, “ich fühlte

6 Ibid.,24. 7 Meanwhile, Benjamin also locates the colors of fantasy’s Apollonian counterpart in the visual realm, namely in a black/white, uncolored form of perception (discussed below). In bifurcating the sense of sight along these lines instead of juxtaposing sight (in its conventional form-giving qualities) to other media that are traditionally viewed as less substantial (such as music), Benjamin presents a peculiar mode of ocularcentrism, positioning himself both against and with those who criticize the primacy of the visual as a reifying, hypostasizing gaze. For an illuminating discussion of the phenomenological experience of sight and the different philosophical and aesthetic discourses that this specific mode of experience engenders, see the ever-relevant essay: Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14, no. 4 (1954). For an overview of the sort of critique of ocularcentrism that Benjamin implicitly aligns himself with here (ahead of his time), see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David Michael Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 8 GS 7.1:19. 21

mich ganz leicht.”9 Detached from, or, one might even say, hovering above, the empirical, phenomenal world insubstantially, the medium of colors begins to resemble the ungrounded, hovering realm of clouds: “ich war selbst Eigenschaft der Welt und schwebte über ihr.”10

Succumbing to the intoxicating, ecstatic force of the fantastic medium of color, the eye dissolves and transports the I into a sphere of relation defined by pure differentiation and non-subjective seeing: the color spectrum.11 Underpinning the material, bodily act of looking at colors through our own colored eyes (“unser Auge ist farbig”), Benjamin emphasizes, is a medium that does not simply mediate between an interior self and outside world.12 The medium of color is for him one of pure ocular interrelationality, in which neither subject nor object is grounded in anything but color, which itself is radically ungrounded, hovering self-reflexively between subject and object alike:

“Die Farben sehen sich selbst, in ihnen ist das reine Sehen und sie sind sein Gegenstand und Organ zugleich.”13 Assuming the role of both “Organ” and “Gegenstand,” color becomes both the subject and object of sight, pointing to itself self-reflexively while simultaneously being directed elsewhere—to other colors from within the same color spectrum. From within the color spectrum, we look at colors as they simultaneously look back out (aussehen) at us.14

9 Ibid., 20. 10 Ibid. 11 For more on the act of ocular dis-embodiment in Benjamin, see Gerhard Richter, "Benjamin's Eye/I: Vision and the Scene of Writing in the Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). 12 GS 7.1:23. 13 Ibid. 14 Paul North makes a similar point about the reflective structure of vision in the color spectrum, which as he demonstrates, is also a paradigmatic model of Benjamin’s conception of distraction (Zerstreuung), see Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 150-55. 22

One might say that this type of vision does not give view to some external object, but stays within its own realm of visibility. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical point that such a visual realm—as a medium of fantasy—remains invisible to us. As Peter

Fenves has pointed out, we (as subjects) can only ever gain access to this neutral mode of fantastic perception indirectly, namely through non-subjects that experience color in an innocent, de-phenomenalized manner: children and artists. For Benjamin, children disclose the purest, truest relation to fantasy. But, importantly, one cannot regress back to childhood. In other words, this fantastic mode of cognition cannot be intentionally accessed (that, after all, would entail an act of subjective will and is thus anathema to non-subjective fantasy).15 In contrast to children, artists relate to fantasy from a less pure state insofar as they give it form through the artworks they construct. In a separate fragment, Benjamin captures these two differing relations by turning to the figure of the clouds: “das graue Elysium der Phantasie ist für den Künstler die Wolke in der er ausruht und die Wolkenwand seiner Gesichte. Den Kindern öffnet sie sich und buntere zeigen sich hinter ihr.”16 Pure fantasy is only accessible to children—“den Kindern öffnet sie sich.” Only they, Benjamin suggests, can experience color in its most saturated, colorful

(buntere) form because children relate to the world in a completely passive, ecstatic manner. Artists, on the other hand, having already become self-conscious subjects, can only access fantasy obliquely, namely by bringing it to a momentary rest (ausruht). By

15 Contextualizing the color studies within the ongoing phenomenological debates contemporary to Benjamin, Fenves suggests that precisely in this aspect of the color studies lies Benjamin’s indirect response to Husserlian (and implicitly Heideggerian) phenomenology. In preserving the concept of a completely reductive state in which the subject has been “bracketed” out, and yet maintaining that such a state of mere fantasy is unattainable but nonetheless thinkable, Benjamin offers a powerful revision of the phenomenological project, according to Fenves. See Peter D. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 16 GS 6.1:124. 23

giving the cloudy medium of color a determinate form, artists are able to convert fantasy—an ungrounded state of constant flux—into a static image, as figured by the cloud bank (Wolkenwand). The paradisal (pure, unformed) realm of fantasy is therefore not completely unknown to artists, but they can only ever render it indirectly, impurely.

As one of the characters states in the rainbow dialogue, fantasy is “die Seele des

Künstlers”; however, this does not make it the “Wesen der Kunst.”17 In artistic constructions we only gain a grey, formed version of the shapeless, fluid, motley clouds of fantasy.

The concept of an approximation or approach to fantasy through the clouds is given one of its most enigmatic formulations near the end of the rainbow dialogue:

Durch die Farbe sind die Wolken der Phantasie so nahe. Und der Regenbogen ist mir die reinste Erscheinung dieser Farbe, die die Natur durchgeistigt und beseelt, ihren Ursprung zurückführt in die Phantasie und sie zum stummen angeschauten Urbild der Kunst macht. Endlich versetzt die Religion ihr heiliges Reich in die Wolken und ihr seliges in das Paradies.18

The ambiguous grammatical case of the word “der” in the first line of this passage—

“Durch die Farbe sind die Wolken der Phantasie so nahe”—leaves open the possibility of two interpretations. On the one hand, we could read the indefinite article “der” as a genitive construction. Such a reading is offered in a recent English language translation:

“The clouds of fantasy are so near because of color.”19 This interpretation fits perfectly within the context of the line immediately preceding the passage—an enumeration of natural objects in which traces of the fantasy sphere are detectable: “[Phantasie] ist die

Farbe der Natur, der Berge, Bäume, Flüsse und Täler, aber vor allem der Blumen und

17 GS 7.1:20. 18 Ibid., 25. 19 Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, 252. 24

Schmetterlinge, des Meeres und der Wolken.”20 As the culmination of this list, the

“clouds of fantasy” signal merely one more example of fantasy expressing itself in nature. In the dialogue, nature is presented as the truest realm of fantasy because creation in nature occurs immediately, that is to say, without the formative intervention of human hands. As Benjamin puts it, “ganz aus Phantasie schaffen, hieße göttlich sein.”21

Another valid interpretation, which is supported not only grammatically, but may strike the German ear to be more intuitive, would be to read the “der” in the first line above as an instance of the dative. In this case, the clouds would be read as “so close” (so nahe) to fantasy, but not of it. This second interpretation highlights the special position that clouds hold in relation to fantasy. If the rainbow, due to its complete lack of form—

“nichts an ihm ist Form”—is the purest natural expression of fantasy, then the clouds appear to hover right beneath it. Not entirely formless, yet also having no solid form, the clouds approach fantasy without ever reaching it, standing both near and far from it at the same time.22

The pivotal position of the clouds in relation to fantasy is further explored in the remainder of the passage cited above. In these lines, Benjamin makes more explicit the underlying theological subtext of the structural analysis of form and formlessness we have been discussing by shifting the dialogue on fantasy into the province of religion. In what is tantamount to an anti-Bildverbot stance, Benjamin argues for the necessity of

20 GS 7.1:25. 21 Ibid., 24. 22 For another, related reading of this scene, which also bears attention to the murky, transitional status of the cloud here in the way it hovers between the holy (the theological) and the artistic (the constructed), see Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), 284-90. 25

representation in conveying the divine.23 Drawing implicitly on the double meaning of

Himmel in German to mean either sky or heaven, as well as on the traditional western representation of heaven lying in the clouds, Benjamin makes a distinction between the holy (heiliges) and the blissful (seliges) as they relate to the question of representation:

“Endlich versetzt die Religion ihr heiliges Reich in die Wolken und ihr seliges in das

Paradies.” For him, the relationship between clouds and paradise is of a different order than the more clear-cut binary of the profane and the divine. The “holy” and the

“blissful” may not be the same, but their difference lies in degrees, not in diametrical opposition. As a sign, clouds do not function as a metaphor for paradise—a substitute or replacement of one order with a different one. Rather, the difference between clouds and paradise is of a contiguous sort. Clouds relate to paradise through a lateral, metonymic mode of association. As a figure of disfiguration, clouds are intimately related to the formless sphere of paradise which they always seem to be drifting towards, approaching

(so nahe).

This concept of contiguous difference that marks both clouds and colors is captured in a key term Benjamin repeatedly refers to in describing the medium of fantasy:

“nuance.” In the rainbow dialogue, the medium of color is described as “monoton nüanciert ohne Licht- und Schattenübergänge,” and as playing itself out in “unzähligen

Nüancen.”24 Variation within the color spectrum as we move from slightly varying hues and shades of one color to another is so subtle it is almost imperceptible. What appears to us as different colors are in fact nothing more than slight variations, nuances of the same

23 For a discussioin of Benjamin’s complex relation to the Bildverbot, see Rebecca Comay, "Materialist Mutations of the Bildverbot," in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin (London; New York: Continuum, 2005). 24 GS 7.1:25. 26

monochromatic color of fantasy. The medial point at which the colors of fantasy gather and simultaneously drift apart is not held together or apart by delimiting transitions (“sie ist ohne Übergänge“), but rather—and this, I argue, is key to Benjamin’s concept of color as a medium—the operative principal of difference in this medium is color’s ability to nuance, to vary from itself by repeating itself in a slightly different form. The color of fantasy manifests itself in “unzähligen Nüancen,” countless iterations of the same medium of color. In nuancing, color remains itself precisely in departing from itself. In other words, in transforming into a different color or iteration of the single, monochromatic sphere of fantasy, color remains true to its own non-self-identical character as a medium. The nuanced structure of colorful difference is succinctly captured elsewhere in the text when Benjamin writes: “Bunt und doch einfarbig.”25

Benjamin’s choice of the word “nuance” to capture this sort of immanent movement of non-self-identity central to the medium of color is not without consequence.

Beyond meaning a “subtle or slight variation or difference,” the OED also offers the following definition: “a subtle shade of a basic color; a slight difference or variation in shade or tone.”26 This less common employment of the word “nuance” refers back to its original meaning coined in late 14th-century Middle French. If we trace the etymology of the word “nuance” even further, we find at its root the French word for “cloud” (nue), a derivative of the classical Latin nūbēs.

25 Ibid. 26 Oxford English Dictionary, "nuance, n." (Oxford University Press). In his reading of precisely this aspect of Benjamin’s description, Paul North overlooks the etymology of this term in making the following claim: “Children are at their best at being distracted: thinking nothing means that they need think no object, no form. And yet the mental correlate of the infinite nuances of color’s phantasmagoria is not a cloud; a child’s thinking is not nebulous or vague—far from it.” North, The Problem of Distraction, 152. While North’s point is well taken, the cloudy aspect of colored vision lies less in a cloudy fuzziness, as it does in the self-differentiating structure of the color medium, the color spectrum—an aspect that Benjamin gestures towards in repeatedly invoking clouds throughout the color studies to describe color. 27

The medium of the color spectrum contains a range of possible colors, it can disperse into different color clouds (nuances), but none of these colors is more substantial, graspable or grounded than the rest. Grounded only in a difference that is self-immanent, the medium of color represents a sphere of pure alterity that is immaterial, insubstantial, non-fixed and yet remains a single, united sphere—a color cloud.

The Watershed of the Senses

Benjamin’s insistence that the medium of color is a visual one may seem somewhat perplexing, considering its cloudy, immaterial, non-substantial character. He maintains that vision, as a subjective, sensuous faculty, is involved in seeing the colors of fantasy.

But how do we get from the senses, which we conventionally think of as dealing explicitly with form and empirical objects, to the immaterial colors of fantasy? Whereas children relate to the realm of fantasy purely and immediately, this question becomes particularly pertinent in the realm of art, which deals with form but nonetheless has a mediated connection to fantasy. Drawing on his studies in anthropology from approximately the same period, Benjamin addresses this question with a model of aesthetics (in the original sense) in which the conditions of art and artistic production in general are mapped onto a typology of the senses.

In the middle of the rainbow dialogue, one of the characters poses the question whether fantasy, “die Gabe der reinen Empfängnis,” is exclusively tied to the “Wesen der

Farbe,” or if it can be found equally in other spheres, such as dance, singing, walking and language, namely in movement “die ganz rein, ganz selbstvergessen, in der Anschauung

gleichsam getan ist.”27 In other words, does the sight of color have a privileged connection to the realm of fantasy? To this question, the other figure responds that although fantasy is not exclusive to color, the latter remains the purest expression

(“reinste Ausdruck”) of it. The reason given for color’s privileged status is the lack of a creative human capacity, “schöpferisches Vermögen,” that corresponds to color. In other words, what makes color different is that we can sense, receive (empfangen) it, but our bodies do not have the inherent capacity to create it. In order to emphasize this point,

Benjamin offers a schematic overview of the human senses, dividing them into two categories organized around the poles of creativity and receptivity.

Although Benjamin first formulates the following typology in the rainbow dialogue, it should be noted that he returns to it several times throughout his work both implicitly and explicitly, even citing it almost verbatim as late as 1934 in an essay on

Jean Paul. The schema, however, acquires its most programmatic elaboration in a 1926 essay entitled “Aussicht ins Kinderbuch.” Near the end of this text devoted to children’s books (of which Benjamin was an avid collector), we find a detailed recapitulation of this typology, which forms the foundation of his color studies:

Im Farbensehen läßt die Phantasieanschauung im Gegensatz zur schöpferischen Einbildung sich als Urphänomen gewahren. Aller Form nämlich, allem Umriß, den der Mensch wahrnimmt, entspricht er selbst in dem Vermögen, ihn hervorzubringen. Der Körper selbst im Tanz, die Hand im Zeichen bildet ihn nach und eignet ihn sich an. Dieses Vermögen aber hat an der Welt der Farbe seine Grenze; der Menschenkörper kann die Farbe nicht erzeugen. Er entspricht ihr nicht schöpferisch, sondern empfangend: im farbig schimmernden Auge. (Auch ist ja, anthropologisch gesprochen, das Sehen die Wasserscheide der Sinne, weil es Form und Farbe zugleich auffaßt. Und so gehören ihm zu rechter Hand die Vermögen aktiver Korrespondenzen an: Formsehen und Bewegung, Gehör und Stimme, zur Linken aber die passiven: Farbsehen gehört zu den Sinnesbereichen von Riechen und Schmekken. Die Sprache selber faßt in

27 GS 7.1:22. 29

“[aus-]sehen,” “riechen,” “schmekken,” die vom Objekt [intransitiv] wie [transitiv] vom menschlichen Subjekte gelten, diese Gruppe zur Einheit zusammen.) Kurz: reine Farbe ist das Medium der Phantasie, die Wolkenheimat des verspielten Kindes, nicht der strenge Kanon des bauenden Künstlers.28

At the center of Benjamin’s typology of the senses stands vision. It is described as the

“Wasserscheide der Sinne,” a fluid border that simultaneously divides and unites the formative and receptive senses from one another.29 Unlike the other senses, vision does not fall entirely into the one category or the other. In its capacity to perceive form, vision is like the formative senses of hearing and touch. For these senses, sensation has a determinate, measurable shape, an outline (“Umriß”). Accordingly, these senses inherently lend themselves towards reproduction, towards the creation of forms that would correspond to them.30 Just a speaker can produce the form of a sound with his voice (“Gehör und Stimme”), or a sculptor the sense of touch with his hands,

(“Bewegung des Bildners”31), one can replicate the sight of form (Formsehen) through the practice of drawing (“die Hand im Zeichnen bildet ihn nach”).

Not every sort of sensation that the human body passively receives, however, can be actively reproduced. Opposed to the formative senses stand the purely receptive senses

28 GS 4.2:613-14. 29 As Rainer Nägele has suggested referring to a different, but extremely related moment in Benjamin’s writing, this threshold—which Nägele, invoking the Kafka essay, suggestively describes as a minute “wolkige Stelle”—marks the place at which substance enters the medium of language as one of “unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit.” Rainer Nägele, "Das Beben des Barock in der Moderne: Walter Benjamins Monadologie," MLN 106, no. 3 (1991). This incisive connection demands further investigation. 30 Drawing implicitly on Kant’s conception of the faculty of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) in the Critique of Pure Reason, Benjamin locates this human productive capacity (Vermögen) in the imagination, Einbildung. At the root of Einbildung lies bilden, to give form to in the sense of constructing a form or image (Bild). Thus, in differentiating between imagination and fantasy, two terms that are often used synonymously, Benjamin highlights the other side of Einbildung, its receptive dimension, gesturing towards a certain partition, a watershed inherent in the concept of Einbildung itself. For a reading that bears particular attention to the role of the image (Bild) in Benjamin’s reception of Kant, see Kevin McLaughlin, "Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin," in Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 31 GS 7.1:22. 30

of taste, smell and the fantastic manner of seeing (in) color (Farbsehen). These sensual impressions lack a distinct shape and thus elude objective representation. In their diffuse, insubstantial character—as properties unattached from form—such sensations are linked to the paradisiacal sphere of fantasy. In the rainbow dialogue, Benjamin describes how at its purest, seeing color the way children do can connect one immediately (“unmittelbar”) to the spiritual realm of fantasy without having to assume a detour through form:“in der

Farbe ist das Auge rein dem Geistigen zugewandt, sie erspart den Weg des Schaffenden durch die Form in der Natur.”32

Vision is thus split between the two modalities of “Farbsehen” and “Formsehen,” reception and creation, formlessness and form. As the “Wasserscheide der Sinne,” sight represents the tottering center of Benjamin’s typology of the senses. Not firmly grounded to either sensuous pole, nor stably rooted to itself due to its dichotomous character, vision marks the innermost point of contact between these two spheres, the place where they come together even if in difference. For this reason, the possibility of transitioning between these two diametrically opposed modes of perception, of moving from form to fantasy or vice versa, becomes most acute in the sense of sight. We could add, in response to the question posed in the rainbow dialogue concerning the privileged relationship of color to fantasy, that what makes color such a powerful example of the medium of fantasy is its close proximity to form through their shared visual character.

The ability to shift one’s form-seeing eyes away from the realm of substantive, grounded phenomena and towards the liminal, labile “Wolkenheimat” of fantasy—in other words, the potential to bring form towards formlessness—is, for Benjamin, centered in vision.

32 Ibid., 23. 31

That form can never lead us completely into formlessness, that there is no returning to the child’s purely passive, receptive existence in fantasy is captured in the last line of the passage above: “reine Farbe ist das Medium der Phantasie, die

Wolkenheimat des verspielten Kindes, nicht der strenge Kanon des bauenden Künstlers.”

Differentiating once again between an entirely pure relationship to fantasy and the way artists relate to it through form, Benjamin contrasts the “Wolkenheimat” of children with the canon of building (bauenden) artists. Whereas children already dwell in the cloudy home of fantasy, artists attempt to build their way to it. The question remains, however, how precisely are we to imagine the paradoxical attempt of the artists to access the formless sphere of fantasy through form? What type of visual practices are necessary to lead us from the “Formsehen” to the “Farbsehen”? Indeed, is such a leap even possible?

On Color Clouds and Painting

In late August 1917, Scholem visited a modern art exhibit at the Sturm gallery in Berlin.

On display there at the time were paintings, watercolors and drawings by artists including

Braque, Chagall, Kadinsky, Kirchner, Marc, and Picasso, among others. Soon thereafter,

Scholem sent Benjamin—in Switzerland at the time—what the latter termed a so-called

“Brief über Kubismus.”33 Although this letter has since been lost, its contents can be deduced from Scholem’s diary in combination with Benjamin’s half of the exchange, which remains intact.34

33 For the letter in its entirety, see GB 1:388-96. 34 It is highly probable that Scholem’s diary entries served as a sort of draft for the letter he ultimately sent Benjamin, for in his reply to Scholem Benjamin cites key ideas and phrases that are found almost verbatim in Scholem’s diary (i.e. the “dismantling” of space and cubism’s tripartite structure). 32

Of the various artworks exhibited, Scholem singles out Picasso’s cubist paintings, in particular “Fraue mit Violine,” for its innovative formal use of verticals, horizontals, slants, and the semi-circle.35 Picasso’s distinct style centered on lines and shapes leads

Scholem to conclude that “Picasso befindet sich vielleicht auf dem Wege zur

Farblosigkeit”—what he considers to be cubism’s highest aim. For Scholem, Picasso exemplifies here the promise of cubism insofar this painting heralds a future, colorless mode of painting. He exclaims, “will ich Synthese zwischen Linie und Farbe, gehe ich zu

Rembrandt, dazu gehe ich nicht zu den Kubisten, ich verlange vollkommene Reinheit der

Sphäre”. According to Scholem, two essential formal categories that have always stood at the center of painting: line and color. Whereas Rembrandt exemplifies the conventional painterly union of these two opposed spheres, cubism, he suggests, intimates the possibility of a higher, purer form of painting rid of color and its “impurifying”

(verunreinigt) qualities.36 Saturated by shapes and symbols, painting would become a visual art of pure linearity. Arguing from his mathematically-informed perspective,

Scholem maintains that such linear painting would nonetheless remain formless: “das genial kubistische Bild muß farblos sein. Daß es formlos sein muß ist klar.”37 Despite the purported self-evidence of these claims, Scholem fails to persuade Benjamin of cubism’s

35 Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher: nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, and Friedrich Niewöhner, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995-2000), 31. 36 Ibid.,32. 37 As Scholem conceives of it, once painting is purified of color it would be able to achieve its greater purpose: the (mathemathical) dismantling of space: “das Wesen des Raumes durch Zerlegung auszudrücken.” Scholem, a student of math and philosophy at the time, describes color as “a- mathematisch” and as a distraction for the “symbolisch-mathematisch Sehende” Ibid., 31-32. For a reading of this passage that bears attention to the spatio-mathematical components of Scholem’s argument and Benjamin’s response, see Fenves, ""Existence Toward Space": Two "Rainbows" from Around 1916." 33

striving towards colorlessness and even more fundamentally of the correspondence between line and formlessness.

In his October 22 response, Benjamin takes issue with Scholem’s tripartite division of painting “in farblose (lineare) farbige und synthetische” and asks him to anticipate a more elaborated, if indirect, response in the form of the draft of an essay.38

The draft which emerged out of this exchange, and to which Benjamin refers, is entitled

“Über die Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal” (1917). In this text, as elsewhere in the project on play, color, and fantasy, we find what appears to be a strict dichotomy between two mutually exclusive visual modes: an uncolored, transitive mode of perception and a seeing in the medium of the colors of fantasy, as described above. Through an art-medial detour, “Zeichen und Mal” offers a glimpse into these two modalities of visual perception as they relate to concrete spheres of visual practice.39

Highly schematic in form, “Zeichen und Mal” is divided into two main sections, as the title suggests. Rather than focusing on a specific art movement, such as cubism,

Benjamin approaches painting more broadly by juxtaposing it to drawing (Zeichnen) in an attempt to find out the “wesenhaft übereinstimmende Merkmale” of painting in general.40 In contrast to Scholem, Benjamin insists that color, not the line, lies at the heart of painting. In fact, he completely separates line and color from one another into their own media: drawing and painting, respectively.

38 GB 1:394. 39 The connection between Benjamin’s color studies and specific art movements has been explored not only by Heinz Brüggemann and Sigrid Weigel, both mentioned above, but also Martin Jay. Whereas Brüggemann and Weigel explore the more explicit connections that Benjamin specifically draws on in the project (i.e. Grünewald, Goethe, etc.), Jay shifts angles to look at the relation between this project and German Expressionism, see his lecture (publically available online): Martin Jay, "Chromophilia: Der Blaue Reiter, Walter Benjamin and the Emancipation of Color," in Yale University Forum of Art, War and Science in the 20th Century(British Columbia2011). 40 GB 1:394. 34

According to Benjamin, at the center of graphic representation lies the line; it marks the axis point of the three-part structure of line, surface (Fläche) and background

(Untergrund) that forms the graphic image. This structure, Benjamin stresses, must not be confused with the empiricity of the drawing—the lines of ink and paper of which it consists. The surface and background describe aesthetic dimensions of the image, the structure that governs the mode of representation of graphic illustration. By way of the line, the graphic image creates the optical impression of the thing depicted coming forward in relief against a virtual backdrop. In separating and establishing this relation between foreground and background, the line brings the graphic image about. Among these three, inseparable components, Benjamin emphasizes that the background occupies perhaps the most indispensable position (unerläßliche Stelle) for the “Sinn der

Zeichnung,” for the various lines of a graphic image relate to one another through and in relation to the background which both extends between and connects them. “Zwei

Linien,” he states, can only determine their relation to one another “relativ zu ihrem

Untergrunde.”41 This relation between background and foreground central to the graphic image mirrors the conventional conception of space as an empty, a priori sphere in which objects are firmly grounded. One could argue that what goes unannounced, although perhaps implicitly understood, is that the graphic image demands a matching form of cognition, what we might call graphic vision. The subject that perceives such objects stably located in space does so in terms of form. Not distracted (zerstreut) by the intermediary medium of color, the subject perceives directly the outlines of objective

41 GS 2.2:604. 35

phenomena.42 In seeing the form of things, such cognition does not passively receive objects, but rather relates to them in a transitive, instrumental manner. Rather than dwelling within the visual medium, the subject appears to relate to the visual world from a position of ocular mastery, as a subject relating to objects.

Diametrically opposed to the realm of drawing and the graphic gaze stands the colorful, dynamic realm of painting. If drawing is defined by a transitive form of cognition between grounded subject and object, then painting reveals a radically different mode of perception that is tied to the medial spectrum of color. It is irrelevant, Benjamin writes, whether or not artists first sketch their paintings as drawings, for neither line nor background survive through to the end. In painting it is impossible to discern “ob eine

Farbe die untergründigste oder die vordergründigste ist,” for the whole of the canvas is covered by color.43 Thus form in painting cannot be attributed to the line and its corresponding construction of depth and dimension. Rather form, to the degree that we can even call it that, arises from the side-by-side juxtaposition of colors—a lateral movement within the color spectrum as a medium of nuanced differentiation. As

Benjamin puts it, painting consists of a “gegenseitige Begrenzung der Farbflächen.”44

Painting is all color, all surface (Farbflächen). In contrast to drawing, the painterly surface has no relation to any ground, but instead discloses radically intermediary, medial dimension at work in painting: the spectrum of color.

42 In the rainbow dialogue, the medium of color is described at one point as a “zerstreute, raumlose Unendlichkeit.” GS 7.1:25. For a useful gloss of this dimension of the color spectrum, see again North, The Problem of Distraction. 43 GS 2.2:606. 44 Ibid. 36

The strict opposition between drawing and painting, colorful and graphic representation seems clear. However, in the first half of “Zeichen und Mal,” Benjamin presents a scenario that has the potential to call this division into question. Because the graphic image depends on a structure of foreground and background, the drawing’s surface must allow the background to shine through as part of the image. Benjamin writes, “eine Zeichnung, die ihren Untergrund restlos bedecken würde, aufhören würde eine solche zu sein.”45 Such an image instead appears to verge on the domain of painting, which has “keinen Untergrund” and is all color surfaces (Farbflächen).46 These two alternatives—the pure surface of color found in painting and the depth of black and white perspectivism in drawing—seem to be intrinsically at odds with one another. In a remarkable passage that has been ignored by most critics of this text, however, Benjamin presents us with a case in which the colorless graphic image threatens to transform into its opposite, colorful painting:47

Die Identität, welche der Untergrund einer Zeichnung hat, ist eine ganz andere als die derjenigen weißen Papierfläche, auf der sie sich befindet und der sie sogar wahrscheinlich abzusprechen wäre, wollte man sie als ein Gewoge (eventuell mit bloßem Auge nicht unterscheidbarer) weißer Farbwellen auffassen. Die reine Zeichnung wird die graphisch sinngebende Funktion ihres Untergrundes nicht dadurch alterieren, daß sie ihn als weißer Farbgrund “ausspart”; daraus erhellt, daß unter Umständen die Darstellung von Wolken und Himmel auf Zeichnungen gefährlich und bisweilen Prüfstein der Reinheit ihres Stils sein könnte.48

The clouds invoked in this passage represent a critical, dangerous (gefährlich) point of convergence between two ostensibly opposed spheres: the graphic image and painting. In

45 Ibid., 604. 46 Ibid., 606. 47 One critic who does broach this passage is Andrew Benjamin. In his reading, however, he pays little attention to the image of the cloud in this scene. See Andrew E. Benjamin, "Framing Pictures, Transcending Marks: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Paintings, or Signs and Marks’," in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: Re.press, 2009). 48 GS 2.2:604. 37

the first part of the passage, Benjamin reemphasizes the difference between the graphic image as a mode of representation and the material substrate on which it is found. The background of the graphic image has a different identity (“Identität”) than that of the white sheet of paper (“weißen Papierfläche”). Indeed, the identity of the graphic image seems to depend on the ability to separate the image from the paper in viewing it.

Benjamin writes of the possibility of denying (absprechen) and omitting (aussparen) the paper in viewing the graphic image. One could exclude the paper if one were to think of it as a surge of seeming invisible white waves, “Farbwellen,” for example. A pivotal precondition for the purity of the graphic image, “die reine Zeichnung,” lies in the possibility to separate these two spheres. By falling away from view, the material substrate allows for the graphic image to emerge.49

A problem emerges when one starts to perceive the whiteness of the paper, when one’s eyes are drawn to the purportedly blank canvas, to the “weißer Farbwellen” that the conventional, naked eye (“mit bloßem Auge”) overlooks in order to see the graphic image. What renders the graphic representation of clouds dangerous in this scene is not the threat of the empirical substrate itself distracting us from the graphic image, but the color conventionally viewed as a secondary property attached to said substrate entering and occluding the ground of graphic vision. The graphic depiction of clouds opens the possibility for the spectator to see the whiteness of the paper as the whiteness of the drawn clouds. Thus, in this striking example Benjamin presents us with a concrete case in which Formsehen carries the potential of transforming into Farbsehen as the whiteness of the paper is lifted from the material substrate and becomes unbound and ungrounded, like

49 For an examination of paper in its medial functions, see Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 38

very clouds depicted. The bare, colorless eye of graphic vision that necessarily omits the

“weißer Farbgrund” of the paper in order to preserve the “graphisch sinngebende

Funktion” would be converted into a colored eye in such a scenario, bringing the subject and object of perception into the same medial, color sphere, as described in the rainbow dialogue, “unser Auge ist farbig. Sehen ist aus dem Sehen erzeugt und färbt das reine

Sehen.”50 This potential transformation of Formsehen into Farbsehen unsettles the presupposed antithesis between these two perceptual modalities as the “surge”

(“Gewoge”) of Farbwellen threatens to wash over the metaphorical “Wasserscheide” of the senses, rendering graphic vision colorful. Benjamin’s warning that “eine Zeichnung, die ihren Untergrund restlos bedecken würde, aufhören würde eine solche zu sein” begins to come to fruition in this case, as the graphic image becomes potentially covered up

(bedecken) by color, threatened by the overcast (bedeckt) color clouds of fantasy that define the medium of painting.51

Hovering between colorless and colorful representation, between the graphic image and painting, the cloud intimates a tension-laden juncture between two categories that at first sight seemed to be absolute antitheses. As such, the cloud functions as a touchstone (“Prüfstein”) for the purity (“Reinheit”) of the graphic image, a testing site for the division of line and color. Referring back to Benjamin’s inconclusive title, “Über die

Malerei oder Zeichen und Mal,” one could describe this tension-fraught, cloudy space as the state of Zeichen und Mal, a state of disjunctive conjunction that hovers above (über) or beyond painting and drawing, the impure place from which these two purportedly

“pure” spheres depart from one another.

50 GS 7.1:23. 51 GS 2.2:604. 39

This threshold space of the cloud between color and colorlessness is not a synthetic blending of two categories, but something radically different. If we recall,

Benjamin rejects Scholem’s trichotomy of painting into “farblose (lineare) farbige und synthetische.”52 Instead, he suggests in the same letter to Scholem that the problem of cubism “liegt von einer Seite her gesehen in der Möglichkeit einer, nicht notwendig farblosen, aber radikal unfarbigen Malerei, in der lineare Gebilde das Bild beherrschen – ohne daß der Kubismus aufhörte Malerei zu sein und zur Graphik würde.”53 If the graphic is (supposedly) colorless (farblos) and painting colorful (farbig), then cubism’s potential does not lie in its striving towards colorlessness (the farblos), as Scholem suggests. Rather, the innovative use of shapes specific to cubism leads Benjamin to contemplate the possibility of an altogether different, “radically uncolored” (radikal unfarbig) sphere that is neither farblos nor farbig. Despite his refusal to expand on this possibility—Benjamin adds in a footnote, “dieser Unterschied müßte natürlich erst erklärt und klargestellt werden”—the cloud hints indirectly at such a third option on the far side of, but also intrinsically related to, the color-colorless binary.54

The distinction Benjamin makes between “farblos” and “radikal unfarbig” points back to the cloud scene above in that it challenges us to rethink the conventional division between color and the colorless.55 In challenging the purity of the division between colorless, linear representation and colorful painterly representation, the graphic depiction of the clouds gives thought to the untenability of this opposition and the more

52 GB 1:394. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 This difficult passage is also examined in more detail in Annie Bourneuf, ""Radically Uncolorful Painting": Walter Benjamin and the Problem of Cubism," Grey Room, no. 39 (2010). Borneuf is especially useful in situating Benjamin’s critique within the art-historical discourses of the time. 40

nuanced relation that obtains between these two categories. Graphic vision, as Benjamin describes it, depends on omitting or forgetting the a priori medial realm of color. The transitive, subjective gaze, in orienting itself towards substantive, stably grounded objects with a clear form, reduces the medium of color to its extreme poles of black and white, overlooking the fluid, dynamic space of “Farbwellen” in between. Reduced to these two ends of a spectrum with depth and difference, the colors of black and white become aligned with a so-called “colorless” way of seeing the world in “Licht- und

Schattenübergänge,” which forgets its own condition of possibility: the spectrum of color in which it sees even as it claims to look beyond it. “Colorless” vision, the example of graphic cloud therefore shows us, marks a specific modality of seeing in color that becomes blind to its own mediality, a manner of relation that thinks itself capable of looking beyond or through the very medium in which it makes its claims. The possibility of the “radikal unfarbig,” therefore, marks an invisible sphere, a mode of representation on the far-side of line and color, indeed, seemingly on the far-side of sight itself—the point at which color, as a visible modality of the pure, invisible, paradisiacal sphere of fantasy undoes itself, becomes formless to the radical, absolute degree that nothing appears. In undoing and unsettling the structure that props graphic vision, the cloud weakly intimates such a larger, radical undoing: the possibility of leaping from

Formsehen to Farbsehen in the purest sense, not just in its mitigated, painterly form.

Through its connection to the medium of color, painting contains a trace of pure fantasy, but this force finds itself always already deformed at the moment that it assumes a visible, determinate form. For this reason, if the visual practice of painting can lead to pure fantasy, then it does so only in part, indirectly, and impurely. To cross entirely into

the ecstatic state of “Farbsehen” from “Formsehen” would necessitate an absolute undoing of form. The cloud gestures toward such a possibility in the way it occludes and disperses graphic vision, lifting sight from the stably-rooted image in order to disclose the medium of color that (un)grounds it. And yet, this possibility remains only that, a potentiality, since in thinking this very leap one gives form to it, even if this form, like the figure of the cloud, is itself amorphous.

In a somewhat surprising move considering the self-explanatory focus on vision in “Zeichen und Mal,” Benjamin invokes at the end of the section on painting a different medium, which he suggests is intimately tied to the medium of color, as he views it: language. In the final years before he essentially abandoned the color project around 1921 only to return to it periodically in various texts, Benjamin gradually allotted increasingly more importance to language as a crucial category within his writings on color and fantasy. This turn to language is not a turn away from vision and the medium of color as much as a rethinking of it in another iteration, we might even say another nuance. The following section explores this turn, one which occurs from within Benjamin’s thinking of the medium in its visual and linguistic permutations.

“Etwas das es nicht selbst ist”: From Color to Language

Near the end of “Zeichen und Mal,” Benjamin suggests that at the heart of painting and thus the medium of color lies an invisible painterly language (“malerische Sprache”).56 In acquiring a name (becoming “benannt”), the image is drawn to, as Benjamin emphasizes,

“etwas das es nicht selbst ist,” but which is also not opposed to it: “das sprachliche

56 GS 2.2:607. 42

Wort.” As he puts it, painterly language resides neutrally in the medium of painting, in close proximity to the medium of color (“nicht feindlich, sondern verwandt,” “in ihrer

Neutralität verharrend”). And yet, despite this close association between the verbal word and the medium of painting, Benjamin also writes that this hidden existence of language embedded in the painting—its potential to acquire a name, “Benennbarkeit”—indicates a higher power, “der Eintritt einer höhern Macht in das Medium.”57 Benjamin’s at first sight peculiar invocation of language at this late juncture of “Zeichen und Mal” opens several questions as to how we should understand the relation between the media of vision and language presented here.

In the letter to Scholem in which Benjamin discusses “Zeichen und Mal,” he addresses the relation of language to painting, stating that they are in fact “the same”

(dasselbe), even if, as he states in “Zeichen und Mal,” language is something that color

“nicht selbst ist”: “künstlerischer Inhalt und geistige Mitteilung sind doch ganz genau dasselbe! Wie ich denn auch bei meinen Notizen das Problem der Malerei in das große

Gebiet der Sprache einmünden lasse, dessen Umfang ich schon in der Spracharbeit andeute.”58 In identifying within painting both the media of color and language—two spheres defined by their non-self-identity—and seemingly privileging language over the former as the “higher power,” Benjamin could be read as suggesting a hierarchy between language and (colorful) vision. In this view, the medium of color in its medial, pseudo- linguistic structure would indicate a lesser mode of language. However, as Benjamin states, language is not color’s enemy (nicht feindlich), but filially related (verwandt) to it.

Therefore, we must consider the claim about language’s “higher power” solely as a

57 Ibid. 58 GB 1:394. 43

question of force, of intensity, and not opposition between these two intrinsically related media. Although he again seems to subsume painting within the vast dimensions

(Umfang), what he terms the “große Gebiet der Sprache,” language for Benjamin extends beyond the narrow borders of what is conventionally gathered under this term. In the

“Spracharbeit” to which he refers Scholem, the 1916 unpublished essay “Über Sprache

überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Benjamin argues precisely this point about the broad scope of “language.” As the title of the essay suggests, human language

(die Sprache des Menschen) and language as such (Sprache überhaupt) are not equivalent. Language in the broader, Benjaminian sense extends beyond the confines of human “Geistesäußerung” to include “schlechthin alles.”59 He argues: “es gibt kein

Geschehen oder Ding weder in der belebten noch in der unbelebten Natur, das nicht in gewisser Weise an der Sprache teilhätte, denn es ist jedem Wesentlich, seinen geistigen

Inhalt mitzuteilen. Eine Metapher aber ist das Wort ‘Sprache’ in solchem Gebrauche durchaus nicht.”60 Events, things, animate and inanimate objects alike all take part in language in their potential to communicate, to impart (mit-teilen), and depart from themselves into the medium of language. Included in this list is the language of painting

(“Es gibt eine Sprache…der Malerei”61) and a certain pseudo-paradisal “Anschauen der

Dinge, in dem deren Sprache dem Menschen eingeht,”62 also described as an “Ansehen

59 GS 2.1:140. 60 Ibid., 140-141. 61 Ibid., 156. The full quotation reads: “Es gibt eine Sprache der Plastik, der Malerei, der Poesie. So wie die Sprache der Poesie in der Namensprache des Menschen, wenn nicht allein, so doch jedenfalls mit fundiert ist, ebenso ist es sehr wohl denkbar, daß die Sprache der Plastik oder Malerei etwa in gewissen Arten von Dingsprachen fundiert sei, daß in ihnen eine Übersetzung der Sprache der Dinge in eine unendlich viel höhere Sprache, aber doch vielleicht derselben Sphäre, vorliegt. Es handelt sich hier um namenlose, unakustische Sprachen, um Sprachen aus dem Material; dabei ist an die materiale Gemeinsamkeit der Dinge in ihrer Mitteilung zu denken.” 62 Ibid., 154. 44

der Natur im tiefsten.”63 The self-dispersive medium of color, I suggest, is precisely such a Benjaminian “language.” In its structure of disjunctive mediality, the medium of color is another example of language as such, that is to say, of a “linguistic” structure that does not communicate between subject and object, but approaches relation from within the medium.

Translating the same general structure from the 1915 rainbow dialogue into his

1916 essay on language, Benjamin presents a similarly bifurcated view of language divided between a conventional, bourgeoisie (“bürgerlich”) model—the concept of language as an arbitrary system of signs (“Zeichen”) through which communication occurs—and a more unorthodox conception of language that emphasizes its structure as a self-dispersing, self-departing (nuancing) sphere of communicability (Mitteilbarkeit).64

Echoing his description of color in the rainbow dialogue (1915) as a medium in which subject and object reside as part of the same, self-differentiating medium—“die Farben sehen sich selbst, in ihnen ist das reine Sehen und sie sind sein Gegenstand und Organ zugleich”65—Benjamin offers the following summary description of his radically medial understanding of language in the 1916 “Sprache Überhaupt” essay: “jede Sprache teilt sich selbst mit.”66 In this transposition, Benjamin effectually substitutes the medium of color with the medium of language. It should thus come as no surprise when he then reintroduces language into the orbit of color in the 1917 “Zeichen und Mal.” In so doing,

63 Ibid., 155. 64 Ibid., 142. 65 GS 7.1:23. 66 GS 2.1:142. Benjamin writes, “Es ist fundamental zu wissen, daß dieses geistige Wesen sich in der Sprache mitteilt und nicht durch die Sprache. Es gibt also keinen Sprecher der Sprachen, wenn man damit den meint, der durch diese Sprachen sich mitteilt.” On the same page, he adds another description that also bears a strong resemblance to his color theory: “jede Sprache teilt sich in sich selbst mit, sie ist im reinsten Sinne das ‘Medium’ der Mitteilung.” 45

Benjamin essentially performs a series of translational gymnastics in which color becomes language and only to return back to itself—each time the same and each time different—nuances of the same differentiating medium. In color’s relation to language, which Benjamin emphatically states in “Zeichen und Mal” is “etwas das es nicht selbst ist,” the medium of color is confronted not merely with a similar medium, but rather by its own innermost non-self-identity, a medial alterity that takes on the form of color and language in this phase of Benjamin’s thinking.

Although the fundamental interpenetration of vision and language as forms of disjunctive mediality does not disappear from Benjamin’s later thought—his writing on

Baroque emblems, Denkbilder, photographic captions, and the dialectical image prove quite the opposite—already at this early point he begins to bring these two categories together. In the rest of the color studies, Benjamin gradually develops the idea, adumbrated in “Zeichen und Mal,” that language is pivotal in its relation to fantasy insofar as it acts like the visual practice of seeing in color. From the initial assertion that language lies at the heart of painting as a related, albeit more powerful medium,

Benjamin eventually adopts the position that language is in fact the quintessential expression of fantasy in the formative realm.

In the short, unpublished fragment entitled “Phantasie” (1920-1921), Benjamin points towards language, particularly that of Shakespeare, as the truest expression that fantasy can assume through human hands:

In den Ausdruck des Werkes aber vermag allein die Sprache bisweilen die Phantasie aufzunehmen, den nur die kann im glücklichsten Falle die enstaltenden Mächte in ihrer Gewalt behalten. Jean Paul entglitten sie meist, Shakespeare ist – in seinen Komödien – ihr unvergleichlicher Gewalthaber.67

67 GS 6.1:116. 46

Re-appropriating language from the 1915-1916 rainbow dialogue in which he describes the need for the constructing artists to exhibit a certain “Walten der Phantasie” in order to give fantasy a semblance of form, by the early 1920s Benjamin has not only determined the sphere in which such “Walten” best occurs, but also the paradigmatic figure who deploys it at its greatest: Shakespeare.68 Although the possibility of language completely bringing the dynamic, disfigurative powers (Mächte) of fantasy under its control is couched by doubt—“bisweilen...im glücklichsten Falle”—Shakespeare evinces an unparalleled ability to give shape to fantasy in this form, he is the “unvergleichlicher

Gewalthaber” of fantasy.69

In an unpublished essay on Shakespeare’s As You Like It written approximately two years earlier, Benjamin offers a glimpse into what sets Shakespeare apart and more importantly, what it is about language that makes it the closest formative equivalent to the purely receptive colors of fantasy.70 Throughout the essay, Benjamin, who at the time had already begun working on his dissertation on the concept of criticism in early

German Romanticism—another place where he continues to unfold his concept of the medium71—anachronistically hails Shakespeare as “der größte Romantiker.”72 Based on what he views as Shakespeare’s deep-seated interest in the “infinite,” Benjamin touts

68 GS 7.1:22. 69 Difficult to ignore through the repetition of the word “Gewalt” in this passage is a clear echo of the concept of pure, non-transitive violence (Gewalt) Benjamin developed around this time in the essay “Kritik der Gewalt.” (1921). In his reading of this essay, Hamacher uncovers a mode of pure means that in many ways gestures towards the turn away from form central to pure perception of color. See Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike: Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence'," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000). 70 Although the exact date of this draft is unknown, it is believed to have been written sometime between 1918 and 1919. 71 For more on Benjamin’s notion of the Romantic “Reflexionsmedium,” see Samuel Weber, "From Reflection to Repetition: Medium, Reflexivity and the Economy of the Self," in Rutgers German Studies Occasional Papers (New Brunswick: Rutgers German Studies, 2010). 72 GS 2.2:610. 47

Shakespeare’s affinity to German Romanticism. Shakespeare, Benjamin claims, conquered the infinite, “die Unendlichkeit,” for the realm of poetry, “Poesie.” He warns, however, that not every infinite is the same, and “nicht jede Unendlichkeit ist romantisch.” The defining characteristic of the romantic conception of the infinite, of which Shakespeare’s writing is the paramount example, is that it has no carrier, “die

Unendlichkeit der Romantik hat keinen Träger.” In other words, the infinite is not bound or strapped to any substance or object, for the Romantics “kennen nichts Unendliches, sondern nur das Unendliche selbst.” This Romantic conception of the infinite extends over everything: “das Unendliche ist das Universum, es ist das Wesen aller Dinge.”73 The essence of everything is the infinite, but because the infinite is not tied down to any carrier, any concrete substance, the essence of things, of objects is ethereal, diffuse and essentially ungrounded. Benjamin captures this state of affairs through a concise comparison with a formative mode of vision:

Wo die Unendlichkeit das wahre Wesen der Welt ausmacht, ist nicht die Gestalt die Aufgabe der Dichtung, die doch gewöhnlich allein dafür gehalten wird. Der Gestalt entspricht die Schau. Der Romantiker ist nicht der schauende Dichter, und auch Shakespeare war es, jedenfalls in seinen Komödien, nicht. Die Dichtkunst der Romantik ist die Bewegung der Auflösung aller Erscheinungen ins Unendliche, in das absolut Freie und Religiöse; gerade in dieser Hinsicht läßt sich die Größe Shakespeares tausendfach verschieden und variiert erkennen.74

The conventional perception that form, “Gestalt,” is the task of poetry confounds poetry with a formative mode of visual intuition (Schau). The Romantic, however, is not a

“schauende Dichter.” This applies first and foremost to Shakespeare, who, in his comedies at least, dissolves all phenomena, all appearances (alle Erscheinungen) into the

73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 48

absolutely free infinite. A certain playfulness appears to inhere in Shakespeare’s comedies, a light-hearted humor that removes them from the gravitas of more “serious”

(i.e. adult) works that would ground his texts down to something substantial (see Chapter

Three for more on Benjamin’s interest in the intransitive element that resides in humor).

Shakespeare’s greatness, his magnitude (Größe) expresses itself in thousand-fold different and varied manners. Reflecting on the title of the play, Benjamin locates in the words As You Like It a call originating from the text for it to be perceived in infinite different ways, neither one more formed than the next: “‘Wie es Euch gefällt’ - denn für den Dichter ist das nur eine absolute geistige Träumerei, eine Auflösung, keine

Gestalt.”75 Much like in the color studies, Benjamin turns to a cloud to figure such fantastic dissolution: “Er meint, daß man diesem Stücke zusehen solle wie einer

Sommerwolke wenn sie im Blau sich auflöst und hinter deren symbolischen Gebilden allen die Auflösung ins Unendliche als Tiefstes und Anmutigstes zugleich steht.”

Dissolving the symbolic, form-giving structures of language (Gebilden), Shakespeare’s writing dissolves form in order to reveal a formless, infinite, dynamic sphere that

(un)grounds such constructs. Although Shakespeare is in this light not a “schauende,” a formative poet, he nonetheless emits a specific modality of vision according to Benjamin:

“Er ist der Dichter des bloßen Blicks aus bloßem Auge. So wie der geistig erhobene Blick auf das unendliche Blau des Himmels trifft und frei schweifend sich in ihm verliert, war der Blick Shakespeares.”76 The bare vision of Shakespeare, unlike that of the bare, colorless eye of graphic vision, is one that dissolves into color, the “unendliche Blau des himmels,” swaying and oscillating freely (frei schweifend), unbound and unoriented by

75 Ibid., 611. 76 Ibid. 49

any form. Shakespeare’s “Blick” is so clear (klar), Benjamin adds, “daß er die

Nüchternheit verlor.” Ecstatically absorbed by into his medium—recalling the loss of self into the spectrum of color—Shakespeare’s sight is so sober that it is intoxicated, so in tune with his medium of representation that he loses himself in his writing, detached from any external carriers (Träger). Shakespeare, Benjamin concludes, is “der Sinnlichste und der Umittelbarste” because his writing, it seems, discloses a completely medial sphere that does not mediate (un-mittelbar) between externalities, that is, set borders around itself, but allows itself in an endless sensuous sphere of color-like language.

“Entstaltung”: Cloudy Dis-figuration

In the “Phantasie” fragment, where Benjamin unveils the idea that language, in particular

Shakespeare’s, is the most apt medium to give form to fantasy—a fluid, amorphous state of medial flux—he coins an unusual term in order to give thought to such constructs, which attempt to bring fantasy into the realm of form: “Entstaltung.”77 As described above, fantasy at its absolute purest can never be directly perceived since it indicates an entirely non-affective, ecstatic state of pure receptivity. The ecstatic subject who loses him- or herself in such a state does not see anything, any object in the conventional sense.

Dispersed within the dynamic medium of color, vision in its form-seeking, transitive sense (sight oriented towards an object) is replaced by a state of unoriented drift within the self-differentiating medium of color. Painting and language, although they at times might give thought to or even trigger such an ecstatic, dispersed experience, can only ever offer us indirect, formed images of this unformed, purely receptive state. With the

77 GS 6:114-16. 50

peculiar neologism “Entstaltung,” itself a sort of de-formation of the words “Gestalt” and

“Entstellung,” Benjamin indicates this deformed form that fantasy necessarily assumes when it enters into an artistic construct. Rather than reducing fantasy to a hypostatized, completely static version of itself, however, Benjamin suggests something of a middle ground. An “Entstaltung” hovers at the limits of the constructive and the destructive.

Whereas Gestalt implies some sort of creative formation either through subjective agency or objective determinism, Phantasie, at its purest, is described as radically

“unkonstruktiv,” and “(vom Subjekt aus gesehen) rein negativ.”78 As an impure hybrid of these two modalities, “Entstaltung” oscillates between form and formlessness.

“Entstaltung” does not merely reduce the amorphous state to which it refers to something containable or knowable by giving it a name or form, but in its visibly disfigured, deformed shape it stages the very conflation of deformation and construction that it gives us to think. Indeed, as a grotesque hybrid of two common, well-established words—

Gestalt and Entstellung—it indicates a linguistic act of destruction and dismantling at the same time as it does a formation, one which almost seems to demand to be dismantled and picked apart.

Benjamin’s concept of “Entstaltung” itself becomes disfigured, taking on the more conventional form “Entstellung” in his writings of the 1930s. The latter term recurs several times, for example, in Berliner Kindheit um 1900, Benjamin’s late, semi- autobiographical collection of vignettes written from the perspective of a child. Perhaps more important than this term’s explicit appearance are the various scenes within the book in which disfiguration itself is staged, not only as a linguistic, but also a visual

78 GS 6:115. 51

phenomenon. In “The Word Wolke—If It Is One,” Hamacher analyzes several such scenes, focusing specifically on instances in which the figure of the cloud is deployed in connection with the disfigurative character of language. Drawing on Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Hamacher emphasizes the non-self-identical character of words in order to interpret the cloud as a figure of linguistic flux, as the “unsubstantial middle,” the dispersed, non-sensuous, “hovering center” of language.79 According to Hamacher, the cloud symbolizes a dynamic, fluid state of dis- and re-figuration at the heart not only of translation, but by extension, all language. Defined by a state of scattered, medial instability, dissolving and coming together at all times, clouds refuse to remain themselves—a fact Hamacher alludes to in his title “The Word Wolke—If it is One”

(emphasis added).

Despite the careful attention Hamacher pays to what we might term linguistic cloudiness in his insightful essay—one which adds to our understanding of what

Benjamin seemed to have in mind when he emphasizes the disfigurative force of

Shakespeare’s fantastic language—an integral parallel concern remains underexplored in

Hamacher’s study: the visual significance of the cloud in Berliner Kindheit, not to mention Benjamin’s thought as a whole. In several of the passages Hamacher examines from Berliner Kindheit, a book Benjamin refers to as a collection of images (Bilder), optical figures such as windows and color play a significant role.80 By and large these ocular moments remain either unaddressed or become the subject of valuable, but almost

79 Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke -- If it is One," in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 154-55. 80 In the preface of the last edition Benjamin compiled in 1938, Benjamin describes the process of writing and re-working Berliner Kindheit as one of inoculation in which precisely those childhood “images” (Bilder) most likely to stir feelings of homesickness are called forth and rendered harmless in order to shield from any such feelings in the case of forced emigration in impending years. GS 7.1:385. 52

solely linguistically-oriented analysis.81 Thus when Hamacher comments on a passage describing “a gloomy text clouded over, pregnant with colors” that are “always turning into a violet,” he focuses on the repetition of the word violet throughout Berliner

Kindheit in order to accentuate the semantic disjunction of this term whose permutations include “Walter, violation and Gewalt, theft, viol and vol.”82 The optical dimensions of the cloud, meanwhile, remains largely occluded.

By taking stock of the way Benjamin brings vision and language together in the numerous sections of Berliner Kindheit in which he deploys the figure of the cloud, we acquire a better sense for the fundamental relation that obtains between these two media on the basis of their cloud-like structures. In “Die Mummerehlen,” the text from which

Hamacher derives the title of his essay, the figure of clouds recurs five times, each time in association with a different instance of the child losing himself, ecstatically, within the world around him. The child not only enshrouds or disguises (mummen) himself in words, which Benjamin says are in fact clouds(“Worte, die eigentlich Wolken waren”), but also loses himself into other media, namely photography and watercolor. Benjamin’s equation of words with clouds, indeed his insistence that words are “actually” or

“properly” (“eigentlich”) clouds reveals much about what is at stake here, for as an embodiment of “Entstaltung,” the cloud marks precisely that which refuses to stand still, to remain proper onto itself, as it is always changing and transforming away from itself.

Like the colors of fantasy, words in their cloud-like character demarcate a medium

81 At one point near the end of his essay, Hamacher does briefly mention the image when he writes that “the word—cloud—is the becoming imageless and wordless of the word” (175). For Hamacher, the word, language, functions as the reference point from which to understand the cloud and the image, even as the cloud gestures towards the absolute withdrawal, the disappearance of the word itself. 82 Hamacher, "The Word Wolke -- If it is One," 151. 53

detached from that to which they are typically affixed in the conventional view of language that attaches words transparently to referents. For the child described in this scene, words that he has never heard before and which therefore are oriented towards nothing but themselves become the objects of linguistic wordplay in which he and the words reciprocally disfigure one another. Copper-engraving, “Kupferstichen,” becomes associated for the innocent child with an incident in which he stuck his head out (Kopf hervorstecken) from underneath a chair: “Kopf-verstich.” As a fluid, dynamic medium that can coalesce and fall apart in countless different ways, language marks a sphere in which the subject who gives himself over to its ungrounded movement disfigures along with and in language (“ich dabei mich und das Wort entstellte”).83

Such a fluid medium is also invoked at other points of Berliner Kindheit, for example, the child views watercolor as “zerfließendes Gewölk” that color him (“färbten mich”), before he has a chance to apply them on a “Zeichnung.”84 In another, longer scene, Benjamin retells a favorite story of his that makes vivid the medial mode that colors the child’s experience towards language and the world:

[Die Geschichte] stammt aus China und erzählt von einem alten Maler, der den Freunden sein neuestes Bild zu sehen gab. Ein Park war darauf dargestellt, ein schmaler Weg am Wasser und durch einen Baumschlag hin, der lief von einer kleinen Türe aus, die hinten in ein Häuschen Einlaß bot. Wie sich die Freunde aber nach dem Maler umsahen, war der fort und in dem Bild. Da wandelte er auf dem schmalen Weg zur Tür, stand vor ihr still, kehrte sich um, lächelte und verschwand in ihrem Spalt. So war auch ich bei meinen Näpfen und den Pinseln auf einmal ins Bild enstellt. Ich ähnelte dem Porzellan, in das ich mit einer Farbenwolke Einzug hielt.85

83 GS 4.1:261. 84 GS 4.1:262. 85 Ibid., 262-63. 54

Like the painter who enters into his own image in this striking story, the child of Berliner

Kindheit discloses a mode of dwelling in language and color that does not treat either word or image as something secondary to more primary phenomena. Rather, the medium in both cases has a certain depth; it marks a threshold, a gap (“Spalt”) that is not empty, but rather in which subject and object reside beside one another as part of the same fluid medium, a sphere of dispersive convergence. The painter is displaced (“entstellt”) into his image as the division between subject and object breaks down, and he loses himself in this magical scene of Formsehen giving itself over to Farbsehen. Walking towards the door (“wandeln”) the painter not only strolls (implicitly somewhat aimlessly), but dwells within a sphere in which direction and orientation are not pre-given from outside in a fashion that reduces sight or language to transparent, instrumental media between subject and object. Instead, movement or “wandeln” takes place within the cloud-like, shape- shifting medium itself, as one of immanent self-differentiation. The radically medial understanding of vision and language that Benjamin puts forward in his color studies and philosophy of language assumes different shapes, disfigures itself, across Benjamin’s oeuvre. Akin to the very clouds that he often calls upon in order to shed light on, or render murky, the media of vision and language, the relation between these two medial categories suggests something of a cloudy structure insofar as the visual, for Benjamin, often seems to drift into the realm of language, and vice versa.

Chapter 2

Photographic Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Stieglitz, Benjamin, Derrida

In his 1933 essay “Erfahrung und Armut,” Benjamin evokes the fractured character of modernity as well as the difficulty in communicating historical experience. In a particularly vivid image of soldiers returning from the trenches of WWI, he brings together these two themes through the figure of clouds: “Eine Generation, die noch mit der Pferdebahn zur Schule gefahren war, stand unter freiem Himmel in einer Landschaft, in der nichts unverändert geblieben war als die Wolken.”1 This remarkable scene—which also is evoked in the Storyteller essay—stages a dramatic contrast between the dynamic pace of the technological age, culminating in mass warfare, and the seemingly unchanging natural landscape. Yet whereas this passage appears to mobilize the cloud as a figure of consistency and static sameness, the nature of the cloud—caught between transparency and opacity, form and formlessness—calls this very consistency into question. After all, throughout his critical and literary works, Benjamin explores the nature of the cloud as a radically dynamic object caught in a process of perpetual transfiguration.

In this chapter, I explore precisely this more dynamic, dispersive, ungrounded character of the cloud as a figure that is not opposed to technology, but which rather

1 GS 2.1:214. 56

plays a central role in three fundamental reassessments of what we understand under the rubric of the photographic image and the structure of its medium: Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs and Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on photography, all of which offer us new and unexpected ways of thinking about photography in terms of a cloud-like structure of non-self-identity. By placing these three into dialogue through the figure of the cloud as it relates to their reflections on photography and visual perception, we gain insight into the structure of self-alterity and self-differentiation which conditions not only every photographic image, but the photographic medium as such. The cloud figure reveals this structure with particular luminosity because of its unique character as a figure of disfiguration insofar as it is caught in a perpetual drift away from itself, always splitting and dispersing in several possible directions at once. In order to grasp the implications of their way of thinking about the cloud-like structure of the image, I begin with a brief overview of the history of cloud photography, outlining the prevailing views which inform the development of this genre up to the early twentieth century.

Little History of Cloud Photography

Cloud photographs hold a special place within the transnational history of photography, reaching back to the first decades of the new technology’s existence.2 The central problem plaguing photography in its formative years and throughout most of the nineteenth century was the inability to capture moving objects in focus. Long exposure

2 For an overview of the cloud figure in the modern visual arts, including a comprehensive analysis of its place within the history of photography, see Johannes Stückelberger, Wolkenbilder: Deutungen des Himmels in der Moderne (München: Fink, 2010). 57

times made it difficult for the photographer to move beyond the still life. Early portraiture bears traces of these technical limits, as subjects were forced to sit still for relatively long stretches of time (approximately fifteen minutes for daguerreotypes and circa one hour for calotypes). Most early portraits therefore show immobilized, seemingly stern visages—a posture more easily held for long durations of time. One might assume that early cloud photography encountered similar challenges, for clouds, after all, cannot be forced to sit still in a photographic studio. Although movement (of the clouds) did play a factor for early photographers shooting the sky, the major difficulty surprisingly arose from the effects of the sky’s azure color on film.

The problem facing early landscape photography was the impossibility of capturing both earth and sky together in one image.3 While early photographic chemicals were relatively insensitive to everything below the horizon (necessitating the long exposure times described above), the same chemicals were highly sensitive to the sky above. If a photographer were to capture the sky properly lit, the earth beneath it would appear as an underexposed, opaque surface; conversely, if the earth were adequately captured, the sky would develop overexposed. This technical problem essentially forced early photographers to choose between capturing a landscape or a skyscape, but never a union of the two in one picture.4 In the early decades of photography, two competing methods arose to overcome this impasse. The first, less common practice was to retouch

3 The technical difficulties in photographing clouds were a much discussed topic in the nineteenth century and the subject of several books and articles. An overview of this literature can be found in Bernd Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (München: Fink, 2006), 172. 4 Bernd Stiegler suggestively describes this need to decide between sky and earth as a metaphysical dilemma: “Man hatte – welch eine gerade metaphysische Alternative! – zwischen Himmel und Erde zu wählen.” Randgänge der Photographie (München: Fink, 2012). The high stakes of this impasse are particularly striking in the German language, in which the word “Himmel” can mean both sky and heaven. 58

the image by adding clouds made of cotton onto the finished print.5 This provisional solution was cumbersome, aesthetically jarring and never gained widespread popularity.

The second method, which became the standard for handling the sky in landscape photographs into the early twentieth century, was a procedure developed by the Parisian

Gustave Le Gray in the mid-1850s, which is often cited as the oldest example of photomontage. Rather than trying to capture land and sky (or more typically in his particular case clouds and ocean) in one photographic shot, Le Gray spliced together the negatives of two separately taken photographs to render the illusion of a single image in the resulting print. He termed the ensuing prints of this ground-breaking technique

“composite” or “combination” images.6

Whereas photomontage today is often understood as a mode of optical illusion or photographic manipulation, Le Gray and the school of landscape photographers that followed his example did not tend to conceive of this process as a less authentic mode of photography.7 Instead, as a response to a particular technological problem, composite printing remained true to photography’s larger aim of accurate, realistic reproduction.

Images in which the sky or earth appeared in a distorted fashion were considered undesirable abnormalities. Combination printing, meanwhile, allowed the photographer to overcome this problem while adhering to the photographic ideal of complete mimetic

5 An account of this technique can be found in Ulrich Pohlmann, "Wolken und Wellen," in Eine neue Kunst? Eine andere Natur!: Fotografie und Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Pohlmann and Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern (München: Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, 2004), 172. 6 A more detailed description of Le Gray’s method of composite printing can be found in Eugenia Parry, The Photography of Gustave Le Gray (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago Press, 1987). 7 A recent special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts entitled “Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop,” highlighted this aspect of cloud-induced composite photographs, locating them at the beginning of a tradition of photographic manipulation extending into today. For more on this history on this context of composite imagery, see Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 59

representation, of transparently replicating the objective world that we perceive. Rather than abstract shots of solely the sky or the earth, which would unsettle conventional perspective, this method grounded and oriented both subject and object to one another by way of a horizontal fusing of sky and earth.

Le Gray’s 1856 “Le Brick” (The Brig), one of the oldest existing combination images, is a paradigmatic example of composite landscape photography (see Figure 2.1).

The seamless fusion of the sky and sea leaves no hint that this photograph was in

actuality made from two glass

negatives. By joining the clouds with

the sea, not to mention framing the

shoreline in the foreground of the

picture and the brig at the center

(which the title also highlights), the

photo offers both an object to Figure 2.1: Le Gray: “Le Brick,” 1856 behold—a landscape to which the clouds, the boat and the shore all belong—and a subjective position from which to see it.

The viewer of this scene, the implicit subjective vantage point we assume through the camera’s perspective, clearly stands on a ground opposite, detached by a distance from the scene onto which it looks. Located slightly above the shoreline in the immediate foreground, the position from which the photograph is taken is so conventional that it almost seems mundane. In other words, there is nothing de-familiarizing about the perspective of this photograph; on the contrary, the scene reenacts the common viewpoint of an embodied observer looking out onto the ocean. The horizon in this scene functions

as a stabilizing reference point, an orientating marker. Without the grounding sea in the bottom third of the image, it would be impossible to determine the approximate place of origin of the subjective line of vision. Thus the combination of sky and earth in the composite image not only solves a technological dilemma, but also has wider reaching aesthetic and epistemological implications.

By attaching the clouded sky to the earth, composite printing is able to imitate a

“natural” mode of perception. Facilitated by an invisible, transparent medium— ostensibly, photography—visual perception is staged as a movement that occurs between an embodied observer, an individual occupying a particular place and time, and an external object. In “Le Brick,” Le Gray captures and helps to reinforce this conventional conception of subject-object perception in the implicit interaction between the viewer on the shore and the seascape at a distance. Acting as a reference point that allows us to calculate the relation of the observer to the scene, the horizon plays the crucial function of orienting and grounding the relationship of subject and object to one another.

The importance of attaching and grounding the clouded sky to the earth (and thereby lending the viewer a stable, subjective point of perception), became a guiding principle of cloud photography persisting into the early twentieth century.8 Indeed,

8 The stereographic cloud studies of Eadweard Muybridge appear to be an exception; however, these pictures ultimately demonstrate a similar attempt to mimic ‘natural’ perception. In his 1869 “A Study of Clouds,” Muybridge collects photographs of clouds unattached to the earth through any horizon. The lack of a ground in the image, however, is made up for through the act of viewing these images through a stereoscope for which they were designed. The stereoscope was a popular 19th-century binocular instrument that rendered an illusion of three-dimensional space onto the stereographic pair of images placed in the viewfinder (two slightly unaligned shots of the same image). When looked at through a stereoscope, Muybridge’s clouds come to the fore of the image, standing against the back-ground of the sky. These pictures thus recreate the illusion of a space of perception in which subject and object relate to each other across a distance and against a background. Although Muybridge’s photographs contain no horizon, they thus also express a desire to mimic the perspective of embodied subjective perception and therefore follow the same general structure underlying composite photography. Muybridge’s early cloud studies are discussed in Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003). 61

already in the 1850s, as composite printing gained recognition, contemporary photographers such as Charles Marville, Roger Fenton, and Carlo Baldassare Simelli began to follow Le Gray’s example and create their own sky-earth composite images.9 In the realm of landscape photography, composite printing remained the dominant model for treating clouds even after the introduction of new solutions to the sky dilemma emerged.

The most important innovation occurred in 1884 with the invention of orthochromatic plates. The German photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel created an emulsion that redistributed light sensitivity across the plate more evenly, fixing the problem posed by the sky’s azure color. But as Vogel himself described seven years later, combination printing nonetheless remained the preferred method for dealing with clouds.

As he explains, “selten findet man einen schönen und passenden Himmel über eine

Landschaft. Bei Mangel eines solchen aber bleibt nichts übrig, als einen passend gestimmten Himmel abzuwarten und separat aufzunehmen und einzukopieren.”10 This statement demonstrates the changing views of cloud photography at the time and how people began to focus more on the artificiality inherently underlying realistic photographic representation.

By the late nineteenth century, composite printing no longer drew its main impetus from a technical difficulty, but from the artistic desire to match the earth with an

9 Le Gray’s new technique first gained widespread notoriety through the remarkable work of his contemporary Oscar Gustave Rejlander. Interestingly, although Le Gray and a certain school of photographers that would follow him tended to use composite photography as a way to render “realistic” images, Rejlander was more focused on constructing elaborate scenes and bringing the method to a constructivist extreme (even if the critics at the time had less qualms with the veracity of his images than with the content they displayed). Rejlander’s most famous, exemplary image is his 1857 “Two Ways of Modern Life,” a complex, carefully staged tableau vivant composited of over 30 negatives. The overt melding of styles—tableau vivant, photography and undeniable painterly flair—forms a stark contrast to Le Gray’s realism. 10 Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, Photographische Kunstlehre oder die künstlerischen Grundsätze der Lichtbildnerei. Für Fachmänner und Liebhaber (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1891), 193. 62

appropriate skyscape. Unlike factors such as lighting (which can be managed by the photographer by altering shutter speeds and aperture size, or the darkroom techniques of dodging and burning), the specific formation of the clouds above a landscape escapes the photographer’s control.11 Given our inability to predict or determine the shape and size of the clouds in any given scene, composite printing became a way of mastering the clouds in order to create the desired image. Into the early 1930s, composite printing remained the method prescribed in photography manuals for dealing with clouds, even if, as the photo-historian Timm Starl writes, fewer and fewer photographers followed such guides.12

The shift from the realistic aims of composite landscape printing in the early years of photography to the explicitly aesthetic use of this technique in the late nineteenth century can be attributed not only to technological improvements which began to make the technique obsolete, but also, more importantly, to a new emphasis on creating so- called “art photography.” In the 1890s, a series of smaller, more affordable cameras entered the market (primarily by Kodak). The greater accessibility to photographic equipment resulted in a fresh wave of amateurs entering a realm hitherto dominated by professionals. This influx precipitated a shift in the prevailing views of photography at the time. Inspired by the impressionist painters, these new picture-takers sought to raise photography to the level of the fine arts by supplanting the traditional goals of sharp, precise, realistic representation with a deliberately unfocused, fuzzy style, a sort of nebulous gaze. This influential movement was known as “pictorialism.”

11 Dodging and burning describe various technical methods of essentially underexposing and overexposing different portions of a photograph in the transfer from negative to print. 12Starl offers a comprehensive overview of cloud photography that can be accessed online: Timm Starl, "Kleine Geschichte der Wolkenphotographie," http://timm-starl.at/download/Starl_Wolken.pdf. 63

A prototypical example of pictorialist photography is found in the young

Stieglitz’s iconic “The Hand of Man” (Figure 2.2). In this crepuscular scene, whose composition mimics a conventional landscape with the sky and ground forming the two

horizontal halves of the image,

detail and sharpness give way to

dim obscurity, and the traditional

nature scene is replaced by an

industrial vista. The sharp steel

lines of the train tracks fade into

oblivion at a distance, the Figure 2.2: Stieglitz: “The Hand of Man,” 1902 silhouetted electricity pole on the left loses its form in the darkness surrounding its base, and perhaps the most distinct feature, the black smoke billowing from the locomotive, dissolves upwards into the clouded sky. Even the most pronounced details dissolve into indeterminacy. The cumulative effect is one of murkiness. The picture evokes more of a hazy atmosphere over any particular object that is captured in it. This particular image is also striking because its thematization of smoke and technology can be read as an allegory of pictorialism itself. The smoke that emerges from the train and fades into the sky functions as a metaphor for the dissolution of modern technology, with all of its photographic precision, into a nebulous mode of perception. No longer striving for the effect of transparent immediacy, this pictorialist picture self-reflectively makes its own artificiality, its constructedness into part of the image as the photographic gaze begins to cloud over. The mechanical sharpness of the photographic apparatus, with its promise of

transparent perception, is replaced by an aestheticizing gaze. In contrast to the neat alignment and sharp depiction of the clouds and sea in Le Gray’s composite images, cityscape and sky blend indistinctly into one another in the diffuse horizon of Stieglitz’s

“The Hand of Man.”13 Whereas composite landscape photographers aimed to accurately represent what they saw, to portray nature both as it “truly” is and in the form that it is

“naturally” perceived (from the perspective of grounded subjects looking out onto external objects), pictorialists begin to unsettle the conventions of such perception and representation by bringing the distant clouds so close that they metaphorically fog over the photographic gaze. Objective reality, pictorialist photographs suggest, is a murky projection of the subjective gaze, a construction filtered through an embodied observer who is anything but transparent.

Although the unfocused mode of sight represented by pictorialism begins to lend thought to what we could term the cloud-like medium of (photographic) vision, this concept, I wish to suggest, does not acquire its highest, most powerful articulation until

Stieglitz’s series of cloud studies years later. It is important to note, however, that the goal of scientific precision never completely disappeared from photography; in fact, it moved into other realms and fields. While pictorialism was reaching its apex around the turn of the century, a wide range of scientific fields started experimenting with the technology.14 A particularly ground-breaking study in the realm of cloud photography

13 It should be noted that Stieglitz’s title, “The Hand of Man,” draws further, explicit attention to the role of the artist and the medium involved in creating this image. 14 Perhaps the best-known scientific experiments performed during this period are Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic pictures of a horse in full gallop (1878). Alongside these pictures, which made visible the previously imperceptible moment in which all four legs of the animal are suspended in mid-air, photography was also adopted for other scientific pursuits and social practices, including in the fields of criminology, physiognomy and biology, where it presented a particularly useful technique for cataloguing and classificatory purposes. For an overview of this history of photography and the sciences, see Jennifer 65

came in 1896 with the publication of Albert Riggenbach’s three-volume cloud atlas. This atlas, which contained 14 colored pictures, was the first of its kind and marked a seminal moment in the emerging discipline of nephology (the branch of meteorology that studies clouds).15 Making full use of photography’s power to capture instantaneous, detailed snapshots of the sky, Riggenbach transformed not only the way meteorologists catalogued and studied cloud formations, but he also appeared to fulfill a centuries-old wish of capturing clouds to the fullest.

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, clouds had been a particular source of wonder for scientists and artists alike. Captivated by their elusive, ephemeral character and spurred by how little was generally known about them, for many Romantics clouds became an object of both natural and aesthetic contemplation.16 Luke Howard’s foundational “Essay on the Modification of Clouds” (1803) marked a watershed moment in this aesthetic-meteorological history.17 In this scientific treatise, Howard offers the first standardized typology of cloud formations and creates the four fundamental categories which have become the base of the classification system still in use today: cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus. This scientific achievement was also lauded as an artistic

Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 15 Herta Wolf has explored the history and aesthetics of the cloud atlas and its development in several texts: Herta Wolf, "Wie man Wolken beobachtet," in Wolkenbilder: die Erfindung des Himmels, ed. Stephan Kunz, Johannes Stückelberger, and Beat Wisner (Hirmer Verlag: München, 2005); "Wolken, Spiegel und Uhren. Eine Lektüre meteorologischer Fotografien," Fotogeschichte 48 (1993). 16 Clouds were an especially prevalent motif among both the German and the English Romantics. Some of the most prominent examples of the interest in clouds around this period include: Goethe’s meteorological cloud studies (discussed below), William Wordsworth’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s cloud poems (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and “The Cloud,” respectively), and John Constable’s painterly cloud studies. For an overview of this Romantic preoccupation, see Kurt Badt, Wolkenbilder und Wolkengedichte der Romantik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1960). 17 The importance and influence of Howards cloud system are sketched out in Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 66

achievement at the time. Shortly after discovering Howard’s classification system for himself in 1816, Goethe (who, it should be noted, had an avid interest in clouds and meteorology from an early age) completed a poem cycle dedicated to Howard and his typology.18

As a brief detour through Goethe’s cloud poem cycle will demonstrate, the two opposing goals of photography that we have looked at—the dream of precise, realistic observation shared by scientists and composite landscape photographers, and the question of aesthetic mediation explored by the pictorialists—both find an unexpected interlocutor in a medium that may at first seem far removed from photography: language. The language of Howard’s nomenclature, Goethe’s poem suggests, is both poetic and scientific, artistic and precise. Goethe’s poem cycle shows how the poles of poesis and knowledge are as deeply entangled as aesthetics is with epistemology. Allowing ourselves to jump ahead, we might say that although Goethe does not address photography directly in his cloud poems—the technology would still not be invented for several decades19—the performative poetic force he gives voice to adumbrates an understanding of photo-graphy as a mode of “light-writing” that would become crucial not only in Stieglitz’s cloud photographs, but also in the writings of Benjamin and

Derrida.

18 Goethe drew various seasonal cloud sketches during his youth (some examples are collected in Badt). This youthful interest can be traced to Goethe’s more mature period. In the sections of Goethe’s “Naturwissensschaftlichen Schriften” dedicated to meteorology, one finds several allusions to Howard’s typology, weather observations Goethe made using Howard’s terminology, as well as translations of Howard’s writings (including his autobiography) into German. Also of relevance are several descriptions of color clouds, a connection that ties back into the themes explored in Chapter One. 19 Although it should be stated that one could complicate the question of when photography, as the technology that we know today, was first invented. For a suggestive examination of alternative, earlier forms of photography as “light-writing,” see Peter Geimer, "Self-Generated Images," in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 67

In the first part of Goethe’s cloud cycle, under a section entitled “Howards

Ehrengedächtnis,” Goethe lauds Howard’s ability to bring clouds, which “schwankend wandelt…des eignen Bildens Kraft,” to a conceptual standstill:

Er aber, Howard, gibt mit reinem Sinn Uns neuer Lehre herrlichsten Gewinn: Was sich nicht halten, nicht erreichen läßt, Er faßt es an, er hält zuerst es fest, Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schränkt es ein, Benennt es treffend! – Sei die Ehre dein! –20

By naming the different cloud formations, comparing and dividing them from one another and gathering each group under a specific concept, Howard is able to capture and hold fast (“festhalten”) onto what had previously eluded us (“nicht erreichen läßt”) and determine the undetermined (“Bestimmt das Unbestimmte”). This power to classify and bring the various types of cloud formations to a halt is not merely an intellectual feat—a byproduct of proper, knowledgeable scientific observation—but is also importantly tied to the mode of representation through which such knowledge makes itself known: language. The capacity to identify and categorize is both mental and linguistic; it depends on categorizing and naming each cloud type properly—“Benennt es treffend”—but one can only classify the characteristics of each cloud correctly, if one knows or has the name into which to classify them. In other words, to order and systematize the clouds, Howard must first split the word or concept “cloud” into subcategories, or what one could similarly describe as four variations or states of the same material phenomenon.

Goethe enacts this very entanglement of the conceptual and the linguistic in the four main sections of his cloud cycle which follow the introductory “Ehrengedächtnis.”

20 This poem cycle was first written in 1817 and expanded in 1821. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Zur Naturwissenschaft, allgemeine Naturlehre 2, ed. Ludwig Gustav von Loeper, Erich Schmidt, and Paul Raabe, 133 vols., vol. 2.12, Goethes' Werke (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887-1919), 40-43. 68

Each of these four parts carries as its title one of the terms of Howard’s nomenclature: stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and nimbus. Drifting fluidly from one category of clouds to the next, interrupted only by the intermittent titles, Goethe offers poetic translations of

Howard’s dry descriptions (“Dann hebt sich’s wohl am Berge, sammelnd breit / An

Streife Streifen; so umdüstert’s weit”) and in the process highlights the rhetorical dimensions on which the scientific, conceptual gaze depends but is nonetheless privy to forget.21

In the last section of the poem cycle, Goethe begins by explicitly calling attention to the linguistic movement of differentiation, the diacritical operation which he has just performed by way of Howard’s terminology— “Und wenn wir unterschieden haben.”

Goethe seems to implore us to remember in the title above the final stanzas, “Wohl zu merken!” that the rhetorical, poetological dimension of language and its functional, descriptive capacity cannot be easily separated. “Merken,” remembering, which is also a taking notice or marking, is precisely what Howard’s nomenclature performs in its different capacities. Indeed, in giving us the words to designate the clouds, to capture them linguistically, we ourselves are able to notice and organize the sky and the different cloud formations by way of a marking, or re-marking, which is both visual and linguistic.

In the final lines of verse, Goethe brings these two spheres together in the figures of the poet and the painter, both of whom are equally capable of realizing the hidden artistic power offered by Howard’s typology:

21 The continuity between the stanzas and cloud types is emphasized at the beginning of each stanza, which directly reflects back on the cloud shifting shapes and forms throughout the poem, for example the stanza entitled “Stratus” begins with “Wenn von…” followed by a poetic description of the stratus cloud followed by a period at the end of the stanza. The next section, “Cumulus,” begins “Und wenn darauf…,” also ending in a full stop, then “Cirrus” followed by “Doch immer höher...” and then finally “Nimbus” which begins “Nun läßt auch...” The cumulative effect is one of a cloud-like drift between different forms or variations of a cloud re- and de-forming itself, assuming one shape only to dissolve into another. 69

So, der Maler, der Poet Mit Howards Sondrung wohl vertraut Des Morgens früh, am Abend spät Die Atmosphäre prüfend schaut Da läßt er den Charakter gelten; Doch ihm erteilen luftge Welten Das Übergängliche, das Milde, Daß er es fasse, fühle, bilde.

In organizing the clouds through a linguistic, discerning gaze, the scientist, painter and poet act similarly. For Goethe, the ability of Howard’s separating classificatory system

(“Howards Sondrung”) to enhance the way the poet or painter views the sky is intimately linked to the linguistic ability to separate a fluid (cloudy) spectrum into linguistic units, while simultaneously eschewing the subjective desire to impose an external order onto nature. It is crucial for Goethe that the artist maintain the character of what stands before him (Da läßt er den Charakter gelten), while at the same time giving what he captures

(fassen) an artistic form (bilden). Part of remaining true to the character of the cloud as an object of representation means capturing its fluid, evanescent character—the fact of its constant, dynamic movement (a feature Le Gray and, to a lesser degree, pictorialism underemphasize). Goethe performs the movement of the cloud as well as this Romantic concept of formation (Bildung) as a dynamic, dispersive process in the very structure of his poem cycle.22 Drifting through Howard’s nomenclature in the various stanzas of the poem, the reader receives the impression of a shape-shifting language cloud, forming and de-forming from one term or state to another.

22 For an incisive account of the concept of formation (Bildung) that Goethe invokes here as a processual movement that forms without a determinate example (Vorbild) while also not being a simple replication (Nachbild), see Chapters 2 and 3 in Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 70

Language, in the way Goethe stages Howard’s typology, assumes the role of a mode of observation, or we might even say a theoretical mode of viewing, that is not detached from that which it analyzes—the cloud—but instead attempts to approach it from within.23 Goethe captures such an approach elsewhere in terms of a “delicate empiricism”: “Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird.”24 In representing the cloud through the fluid, yet formative movement of Howard’s nomenclature, linguistic, poetic description reflects such a “zarte Empirie”—a form of theoretical viewing that remains intimately, inwardly identical (“innigst identisch”) with that which it represents. Rather than approaching the clouds externally, the flow of language both follows and reveals the continuous, transient movement of the cloud into a linguistic theory of itself: tropological language and the cloud are shown to be reflections of one another in their structure and dynamic, shape-shifting turning. For Goethe, language remains the most apt artistic medium, perhaps even the most “zarte Empirie,” to capture and represent such a delicate, ephemeral object as the cloud.

Near the end of the same century, however, with the publication of Riggenbach’s cloud atlas in 1896, a new medium emerges which seems even better suited to the task of staying close, becoming “innigst identisch,” as Goethe puts it, with the phenomenon which it represents: photography. Photographs seem to be better equipped than language to capture accurate and precise representations. As Riggenbach’s cloud atlas

23 The Greek word theoria indicates both the act of viewing or witnessing as spectator as well as the act of contemplation. This suggests that the modern identification of “theory” with purely abstract, detached and disembodied thought problematically excludes or marginalizes its roots in sense perception and empirical intuition. 24 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Zur Naturwissenschaft, allgemeine Naturlehre 1, ed. Ludwig Gustav von Loeper, Erich Schmidt, and Paul Raabe, 133 vols., vol. 2.11, Goethes' Werke (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887-1919), 128. 71

demonstrates, however, even with the rise of photography, language retains a key function in describing, organizing, and lending precision to what the exacting scientific gaze sees. Despite the supposed improvement in detail and verisimilitude between the lithographs Howard employed in his treatise and the photographs in Riggenbach’s cloud atlas, a look at the latter book makes clear that language, not photography, is primarily responsible for expanding the cloud typology to fourteen types at the time.25 Without the captions and extensive descriptions, the photographs remain illegible, practically unusable for the scientist. Photographic precision, in this case, acquires much of its force from the words accompanying the images.

In giving something to be seen in the photographs, we could say that language itself displays a visual, descriptive power that verges on the imagistic. In such cases the question becomes: does language illustrate something in the photograph, or does the photograph allow language to say (or see) something which it had previously overlooked? In other words, does one medium supplement the other? And, if so, which is the truer, more authentic medium? The conventional concept of photography as a more authentic, immediate medium, one that has an evidential, privileged relation to “reality” becomes unsettled when confronted with the medium of language. As Stieglitz’s cloud pictures dramatically illustrate, however, even prior to the complication introduced by an accompanying caption—a complication we will return to—the relation of the photograph to that to which it refers is neither as stable nor self-identical as is commonly conceived.

Rather than viewing the clouds as a distant, external object or interiorizing them into the

25 Today’s standard typology consists of 27 different categories and subcategories. 72

gaze of the viewing subject, Stieglitz’s cloud photographs illuminate the ungrounded, cloud-like structure of photography itself.

Stieglitz’s Cloud Series

From 1922 to 1931, Stieglitz printed approximately 400 cloud photographs. A large number of these photographs share an unusual feature: they have no horizon or any other objective point of reference, lending the photos an abstract, ethereal quality. These cloud photographs mark a shift in Stieglitz’s work.

A leading member of the Photo Secession movement at the turn of the century,

Stieglitz was a well-known advocate of pictorialism during the early part of his career (as seen above).26 Perhaps the greatest contribution of this movement was the alternative it offered to the transparent, “realistic” gaze of traditional photography. In rendering the photographic gaze murky, pictorialism drew attention away from the object which the camera had hitherto transparently conveyed and instead directed attention toward the role of the photographer and the camera in the finished image. By the time Stieglitz began photographing clouds, a project which consumed him for nearly an entire decade in the latter part of his life, he had already established himself as a prominent photographer and one of the most influential figures on the American art scene.27 His decision to begin shooting clouds, he writes in a 1923 letter, arose in large part from a wish to “find out

26 In the desire to raise the reputation of photography to that of the fine arts, pictorialists mimicked the subjective vantage point of impressionist painting by developing the unfocused gaze described above. Stieglitz himself was known to push the technological boundaries of photography in these pursuits, creating iconographic examples of pictorialism in snowy and nighttime conditions that resulted in images that were both technically and aesthetically innovative. See William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-garde (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977). 27 Stieglitz was not only the founder of an elite New York photo gallery, but was also the head editor of what are still considered the two most important photographic magazines of the early twentieth century: Camera Notes and Camera Work. 73

what I had learned in 40 years about photography.”28 Reflecting back on the origins of his photographic interests, Stieglitz explains one of the reasons for his fascination with clouds:

Thirty-five or more years ago I spent a few days in Murren (Switzerland), and I was experimenting with ortho plates. Clouds and their relationship to the rest of the world, and clouds for themselves, interested me, and clouds which were difficult to photograph—nearly impossible. Ever since then clouds have been in my mind, most powerfully at times, and I always knew I’d follow up the experiment made over 35 years ago. I always watched clouds. Studied them.29

When Stieglitz finally follows up his experiment in order to see what clouds can tell him

“about photography,” it is with an eye towards this double relation—the way they relate to other things (“their relationship to the rest of the world”) and the way they are in

“themselves.” Aware of the tradition of cloud photography which he inherits,30 Stieglitz breaks with the opposed traditions of composite photography and pictorialism to create a unique blend of self-reflective abstraction and sharply-focused external representation.31

Neither earth-bound nor unfocused, Stieglitz’s horizonless cloud photographs suggest a different path of thinking about photography that forgoes the standard oppositions surrounding photographic discourse—realism and abstraction, transparency and opacity, reality and art—and instead opens itself to a critical examination of the tension-laden origins of these dichotomies. In capturing the sky in detail but without any landscape

28 Alfred Stieglitz, "How I Came to Photograph Clouds," in Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes, ed. Richard Whelan and Sarah Greenough (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2000), 237. This essay, cited here and elsewhere under the same title, is in actuality a composite of excerpts from a letter Stieglitz wrote to R. Child Bayley, the editor of the London-based magazine the Amateur Photographer and Photography on September 19, 1923. 29 Ibid., 235. 30 Stieglitz, an American of German descent, spent many of his formative years in Germany, where he developed his initial interest in photography and coincidentally came under the tutelage of Hermann Vogel, the inventor of the orthochromatic plate mentioned above. 31 For a reading of this bridging, see Daniell Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography: Exhibition and Catalogue (Connecticut: Yale University Art Gallery, 1999). 74

from which to orient

oneself, Stieglitz

fundamentally

challenges the

conventional conception

that exact, precise

representation and

artistic abstraction are

antithetical to one Figure 2.3: Stieglitz: “Equivalent,” 1929 another. His cloud images are as abstract as they are precise, as descriptive as they are intangible.

In addition to this implicit intervention into the lineage of cloud photography that came before him, Stieglitz also offers a more explicit reason for turning to clouds in order to find out what he has learned “about photography”—their uniqueness as photographic material:

I have found that the use of clouds in my photographs has made people less aware of clouds as clouds in the pictures than when I have portrayed trees or houses or wood or any other object. In looking at my photographs of clouds, people seem freer to think about the relationships in the pictures than about the subject-matter for its own sake.32

Instead of viewing the “clouds as clouds,” that is to say, as self-identical objects, by capturing the clouds detached from the earth or any other sort of contextual reference, the cloud photographs allow viewers to take note of formal, medial issues, the “relationships in the pictures” in a radically different way. Elsewhere Stieglitz explains along the same

32 As cited in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1973), 161. 75

lines that the power of his photographs cannot be attributed to “the power of hypnotism,” despite precisely that charge by a recent critic. Instead, he writes, the cloud images demonstrate “that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges—clouds were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.”33

In a somewhat counterintuitive gesture, Stieglitz argues for his talents as a photographer by suggesting that the uniqueness of his images stems neither from some kind of mystic “hypnotism,” that is to say, from his subjective powers of control over objects photographed, nor from the object captured, the “subject matter.” In other words, the singularity of his photographs should not be attributed to any simple subject-object relationship. On the contrary, his cloud series attests to a larger photographic potentiality, a general capacity to which every photograph and photographer exists in relation.

According to Stieglitz, this photographic potential has both a spatial component, “there for everyone,” and, as he later notes in the same letter, a temporal aspect, “in the power of every photographer of all time.”34 Furthermore, we should add, this potential exists prior to any economy of exchange—“no tax as yet on them.” In the catalogue for a 1924 exhibition, Stieglitz extends these thoughts when he describes his cloud images as “direct revelations of a man’s world in the sky—documents of an eternal relationship—perhaps even a philosophy. ‘My’ camera means any camera – any camera into which his eye may look.”35

33 Stieglitz, "How I Came to Photograph Clouds," 237. 34 Ibid. 35 Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, 144-61. 76

The cloud photograph’s ability to reflect on an a priori mode of photographic relationality—the medial structure which forms the condition of possibility for a subject/object binary relationship stably located in a particular space and time that

photographs conventionally are conceived to

represent—is tied, I argue, to its freeing of

both subject and object from a grounding

horizon. The lack of a horizon or any other

point of reference from which to get one’s

bearings causes a feeling of radical

disorientation. Both the pictures themselves

and the viewing subject seem to exist in an

uprooted state: hovering, directionless, Figure 2.4: Stieglitz: “Equivalent,” 1926 vertiginous. Stieglitz explores this orientationless condition in a number of ways. Beginning in 1925, he would often print several of the same photographs next to one another using different sides of the image as the base, playing on the fact that it is impossible to tell what is up and what is down because of the lack of a grounding horizon.36 In 1927, Stieglitz went a bit further and began to hang some of his cloud images sideways or upside down from how they were originally displayed, even writing on the back mounting of several prints phrases such as: “All ways are ‘right,’” “all ways are up,” and “goes all ways.”37 Oriented in “all ways,” the distinction between one cardinal direction and another, between up and down, left and

36 See, for example, photographs 1109, 1110, and 1112-1115 in Sarah Greenough and Alfred Stieglitz, eds., Alfred Stieglitz, The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, 2 vols. (Washington: National Gallery of Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002). 37 Ibid. See photos: 1210, 1215 and 1225. 77

right is (un)grounded by the potential of the photograph to always be other than it is.38

The singularity of the photograph, the spatial and temporal specificity, the there and then that the photograph attests to, is haunted and unsettled by a potentiality which allows any single way of viewing or relating to the photograph to be “right.” Always “right,” and yet never decidedly, absolutely so, Stieglitz’s cloud images demonstrate a larger potentiality which forms the condition of possibility for any specific photographic iteration, the plural ground for the singularity of the photograph. Always oriented in “all ways,” the decision for any one “right” way of viewing the image is constantly undercut and simultaneously supported by the spatial and temporal heterogeneity which structures any one choice or mode of relation.

Before further exploring this heterogeneous medial ground of photography, it should be emphasized that the poly-positionality of Stieglitz’s cloud photographs extends beyond the objective, exhibitive potential of the photograph and renders it impossible to determine the place of the subject viewing these images. There is no ground from which to coordinate the angle or place of origin of the photographer who took the image, nor to determine in which direction we are looking when we assume the place of the camera’s gaze. The missing reference point unfixes the subject’s location relative to both space and time. These photographs recreate the sensation of lying on one’s back under an open sky, mesmerized by the slowly passing and transforming clouds above. The seeing-self moves upwards, but also, importantly, in no specific direction at all, giving itself over to the

38 The disorientation of the cloud photograph, as Judy Annear remarks, captures something of the manner Stieglitz himself would have seen the sky through his camera: “Looking through his Graflex at the sky, the usual orientation of left and right, up and down was reversed. To a photographer of the time this was a normal aspect of the apparatus, but it is an aspect that Stieglitz chose to exploit.” Judy Annear, "Clouds to Rain - Stieglitz and the Equivalents," American Art 25, no. 1 (2011). 78

unpredictable dispersive movement of clouds. Unhinged from the earth and its material substrate, the viewer is transported into a diffuse, dynamic, scattered realm. As Stieglitz remarks in his comment about the universal availability of clouds (their “freeness”), taking clouds as his subject matter places not only him, but all of those who view these photographs into a cohort with all photographers, in all places, in all times.

The subject’s position as potentially everywhere yet nowhere in particular is accentuated in another aspect of Stieglitz’s cloud pictures: their seriality. Stieglitz always exhibited the cloud pictures in sets, often placing several prints made from the same negative alongside one another in different positions, as described above. Therefore, to view each of these individual, groundless photographs meant to also see them in connection with the chain of photographs to which they were linked. By replacing the external reference point of each singular cloud photograph with a metonymic chain of similar (and sometimes the same) cloud pictures, Stieglitz’s pictures demonstrate that underlying each singular image, each photographic iteration lies a structure of representability that cannot be reduced to any one correct, “right” way or position of viewing the image. The internal possibility of each cloud photograph being set in another way, or put differently, of acquiring a different context, another ground from which to view it, is further highlighted in the multiplicity of iterations alongside it. Rather than pointing to an external referent that would ground or give the image some sort of semantic meaning, a solid context or vantage point from which to read them, the cloud pictures only point outside of themselves by pointing to other cloud images. The context or frame of reference of the image becomes nothing more than a series of singular iterations that are similarly ungrounded. The lateral, serial movement of these singular

photographs indicates a more fundamental structure of repetition and difference immanent to the medium of photography itself.

By erasing the horizon from his cloudscapes and playing with what I have termed the poly-positional character of his images, Stieglitz discloses something “about photography” that extends beyond the subject matter captured in any one of his photographs. Stieglitz’s cloud pictures, we may say, suggest that underlying not only his cloud photographs, but by extension every single, unique photograph is a structure of non-self-identity, a heterogeneous condition of possibility which subtends every singular photographic relation. In other words, each one of Stieglitz’s cloud photographs stages the irresolvable impasse between its own necessary empirical singularity—the fact that it was taken at a particular place and time—and a more fundamental medial heterogeneity which forms the unstable condition of possibility for any singular photographic iteration.

In making visible this tension between singularity and multiplicity, Stieglitz’s photographs reflect the structure of the medium of photography itself, a medium that is always caught in a cloud-like drift away from itself.

Although neither Benjamin nor Derrida ever explicitly address Stieglitz’s photographs in their writings on photography, in what follows I wish to suggest how

Stieglitz anticipates and perhaps even already performs a gesture that will become crucial to both thinkers’ thinking of photography. By eliminating the horizon from his cloudscapes, Stieglitz “frees” (to use his own terminology) the photograph from a referential horizon and from all of its accompanying implications. For both Benjamin and

Derrida, the question of photographic non-self-identity—a central component of both

critics’ meditations on the medium—is similarly posed at key points in relation and opposition to a conventional mode of perception figured by the horizon.

Derrida: Light-Writing and the Retreat of the Horizon

In his seminal essay “Signature Event Context” (1972), Derrida invokes the figure of the horizon at several points in order to distinguish his own structural account of linguistic communication from its conventional understanding. According to Derrida, the prevailing concept that communication is a process of “controllable” transmission of a

“determinate content” from a stable addresser towards an intended addressee is flawed because it depends on a concept of presence—what Derrida terms a “logocentrism”—that language, as a semiotic sign system of re-presentation, fundamentally calls into question.39 Derrida debunks the idea that language (both spoken and written) can be controlled from an authoritative or authorial position, a writer or speaker whose presence might keep language on its course, oriented both towards a containable, referential content and on the path towards its intended addressee.

Derrida identifies such a logocentic conception of language in Edmund Husserl’s

Logical Investigations (1901), one of the texts in which Husserl describes his phenomenological method as an attempt to get directly to “the things themselves” (“zu den Sachen selbst”). Drawing on Husserl’s diction of the horizon—a term that would continue to play a crucial role in Husserl’s own work, as well as in his scholarly reception40—Derrida describes how Husserl’s phenomenological approach presumes the

39 Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1. 40 For a useful description of the horizon as the limit point of phenomenological potentiality, see paragraph 19, “Aktualität und Potentialität des intentionalen Lebens,” in Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische 81

possibility of a “logical,” transparent language with a “conscious relation to the object as cognitive object within a horizon of truth.”41 Contrary to Husserl’s views, Derrida argues that “every mark” can be “cut off” from its context, which he also calls its “horizon of semio-linguistic communication.”42 To “break with the horizon of communication as communication of consciousness or of presences,” means to reveal the structural non- self-presence of language, the inherent, necessary possibility of its detachment from an external referent, a determined meaning, and even the presence of an individual speaker or writer.43 Operating from a model that takes writing, not speech, as its “origin,” Derrida argues that absence is built into the structure of language as such. The word remains legible in the face of the disappearance of all of these horizons of orientation—the death of the author or addressee, the lack of a fixed reference point—because of what Derrida terms language’s fundamental “iterability.”

The legibility of any word depends on its ability to be iterated, repeated in different contexts, both temporally and spatially. Every reading is thus a re-reading, a repetition of the same word in a different situation, whose meaning is only constituted through a synchronic process of difference and a diachronic process of deferral (both of these are captured in Derrida’s concept of différance). An extreme example of this potential of “iterability” (which tears apart all the “semantic or hermeneutic horizons” as

Meditationen, ed. H. L. van Breda, Samuel Ijsseling, and Rudolf Boehm, 37 vols., vol. 1, Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1950). Husserl’s concept of the horizon as a limited potential orienting the act of intentional perception greatly influenced Hans-Georg Gadamer’s historical concept of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung), and remains a pertinent concept in the field of history through the work of Reinhard Koselleck, as well as a key component of reader reception theory through the work of Wolfgang Iser. 41 Derrida, "Signature Event Context," 12. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 8. 82

“horizons of meaning”) is captured in the signature.44 Derrida shows that as a sign, the singularity of the signature partakes of this structure of iterability, but at the same time, its very singularity depends on the possibility of it being repeated. It is only through such repetitive reaffirmation that the signature first (re)establishes itself as a legible singularity. In other words, the singular, the original, the unique can only first be read by a re-signing or re-tracing that retroactively validates, guarantees, and confirms the uniqueness of that which has already moved away from itself through a movement of representation, a concept which Derrida will also capture elsewhere in terms of the

“supplement” (that which supposedly comes second, in order to complete or fill a void, but which in fact first sets up our relation to the supposedly original, both revealing and concealing it simultaneously).

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Derrida carries this critique of a horizonal, logocentric model of language, as well as the semiotic structure of iterability, over into his late work on photography, itself a form of “light-writing” (photo-graphy).45

In “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (1981), Derrida emphasizes the necessity of

“suspending the Referent [not the reference], wherever it is found, including in

Photography, and of suspending a naïve conception of the Referent, one that has so often

44 Ibid., 9 45 In Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994)., the horizon also emerges as a logocentric counterfigure, in particular in the context of the gift (30), where it is associated with the movement of an economy of exchange, debt and reciprocation that Derrida also analyzes in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). In the Specters book, this concept of the horizon as pre-determined orientation or telos is also explicitly contrasted with a radically pure form of opening that Derrida describes as the “messianic without messianism” (81-82). The de-essentializing potentiality that Derrida alludes to in this concept of the “messianic” can be read both alongside the structure of iterability described above (an opening maintained through a repetitive process of deferral and difference), and also in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of a reductive mode of thinking in “isms” which would prematurely foreclose the political potentiality of the heteronomous. See especially: Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 43-46. 83

gone unquestioned.”46 Thinking with and against Roland Barthes Camera Lucida,

Derrida argues that if the “referent adheres” in the photograph—to use Barthes’ language—it does so only as a trace of itself, in a form of “haunting.”47 For Derrida, the referent is never truly present in the photograph: “it is no longer there (present, living, real),” but rather persists only as a specter of itself.48 This spectrality of the referent, however, does not mean that the external referent is retained in the photograph as a bygone presence or event that we can directly access through the photograph as reference. Rather, the photograph as re-presentation only ever allows us “first” hand evidence to the thing represented as an object that has already in the “original” photograph or experience moved away from itself. In other words, Derrida, like Stieglitz, gives us to think that the unique there and then of the photograph, its presence at a particular place and time, is always simultaneously supported and undercut by the very possibility of the singular reproducing itself in the form of the photograph. Not only could the picture have been taken at any time or place, or by any photographer, as

Stieglitz insists in the case of his cloud photographs, but the photograph as a sign, detached from an external referent or stable context, preserves the unicity of what is captured by carrying it forth into the future as a repetition, a re-presentation to be read and re-read now and here, again and again. In other words, by preserving and capturing the presence of the thing or the experience, its there and then, the photograph marks a separation of the present from itself, reaffirming its singularity while at the same time undermining it as it is re-contextualized, read against a different future, an

46 Jacques Derrida, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 279. 47 Ibid., 285 48 Ibid. 84

undeterminable horizon. The indeterminacy of such a horizon is what Derrida implicitly counterposes to the calculable, intentional horizon that he sees at work in Husserl.

The peculiar syntax of time that Derrida identifies in this backward-looking, radically open, future-oriented movement of the photograph—a fitting description of

Benjamin’s angel of history, we should mention—is the future perfect, an “it will have been.” By departing into the future, the presence of the unique event which the photograph is supposed to evince only does so retroactively, from a point in which its presence is already made past, in which it acquires presence only by departing from itself into a re-presentation. According to Derrida, the relation of repetition and singularity at work in this structure is not one of pure antithesis. Repetition does not destroy singularity or simply subsume it into its structure. Rather, the singularity of the unique (what Barthes describes as the punctum of the photograph) “induces” the metonymy, the force of its own repetition.49 From the outset, the iteration of the singular event in the photograph makes itself noticeable, legible by withdrawing and reaffirming itself in a form other than itself: as a photographic representation. In terms remarkably close to Stieglitz’s account of his cloud images, Derrida describes the ability and perhaps necessity of the singular, the unique in the photograph to re-present itself as a metonymic “force,” a

“dynamis…power, potentiality, virtuality” which lies latent, “completely in reserve,” in what is captured in the photograph.50 This dynamis of the ostensibly “irreplaceable singularity” to metonymically enter into the reproductive realm of re-presentation, a plural “network of substitutions,” indicates a structure of alterity and relational non-self- identity that defines the medium of photography as such—an as such that must be

49 Ibid., 288. 50 Ibid. 85

understood as already non-self-identical, for photography as a medium is always splitting away from itself, moving into the future without following a particular, predetermined path nor stably grounded to an external meaning or context.51 The metonymic drift that

Derrida describes as “virtuality” names the unpredictable movement of the photograph unfixed from the determinate horizons of meaning, reference and intentionality.

Stieglitz’s poly-positional clouds enact the dynamic potentiality set free by such a loss of horizon and re-write this loss in a serial repetition, a chain of cloud images that re-orient and dis-orient simultaneously.

The Dispersive Atmosphere of Aura

In 1931, as Stieglitz was completing the main phase of work on his cloud series,

Benjamin published his now canonical “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”—a text

Derrida cites alongside Barthes’ Camera Lucida as one of the two most “significant texts” on the “question of the Referent in the modern technical age.”52 This essay, alongside that of his friend and contemporary Kracauer, “Die Photographie” (1927), reflects a dramatic shift in the critical discourse surrounding photography at the time.

Rather than approaching the technology as ancillary to art or science, Benjamin belongs to the first generation of critics to treat photography seriously as an autonomous medium imbued with its own media-specific criteria. Eliding the normative, prescriptive tendencies of the dominant nineteenth-century debates concerning photography— captured near the end of Benjamin’s essay in the diametrically opposed positions of the pro-photography Antoine Wiertz and the famously anti-photography Charles

51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 269. 86

Baudelaire—Benjamin approaches the technology from a structurally-informed historical perspective.53 Keenly aware of the seemingly uncontainable proliferation of the photographic image in modern society (not to mention the numerous affiliated media it spawned throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Benjamin focuses on the broader epistemological, anthropological and aesthetic impact of this explosive multiplicity on the way we perceive the modern world in his “Kleine Geschichte der

Photographie,” as well as in the closely related essay, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1935-36).

Although Benjamin never explicitly mentions Stieglitz’s cloud photographs in this or any other context, a certain Stieglitzian nebulousness nevertheless traverses the very concept and structure of the photographic image that Benjamin presents. In order to better understand not only the imagistic mode of perception he attaches to the photograph, but also photography’s place within his broader investigation of the mediality of the image—a question which can be traced as far back to his early color studies and language essays (see chapter One)—I suggest that we examine the concept of

“aura” alongside the cryptic note from the Arcades Project, “Wolkenatmosphäre,

Wolkenwandelbarkeit der Dinge im Visionsraum.”54 In my reading, which draws implicit and explicit connections to Stieglitz’s and Derrida’s views on photography, I highlight how for Benjamin the medium of photography hovers between the poles of aura—an ostensibly singular, self-identical state—and a radically dynamic state of “cloud-

53 In contrast to Baudelaire, who Benjamin cites as arguing that photography should be relegated to and remain a servant (Dienerin) to the arts and sciences, the painter Wiertz argues that photography should not only be embraced as a high form of art, but also that it represents the consummation (Vollendung) of the desire for accurate, realistic mimesis that media such as painting can only strive for. GS 2.1:384-85. 54 GS 5.2:1024. 87

alterability.” This oscillatory ambiguity forms the unstable, imbalanced center of the medium of photography as a relation that only ever shows itself in departing from itself into particular iterations.

A central thesis presented in both the photography and the artwork essays is that the invention of photography signals a turning point in the history of technical modes of representation from “auratic” forms of art—singular and authentic, bearing the material traces of the craftsman or artist who produced them, as well as the time and space from which they originated—to a modern age of mechanical mass reproduction. Rather than a unique reproduction of an object or event which would retain a direct, seemingly lively link to that which it represents, mechanical reproduction is inherently dispersed and lifeless in character. Mechanical reproduction is tied to the industrial age, the machine and various modes of political, social and historical fragmentation. In the realm of representation, photography signals the dramatic entrance of mechanical mass reproduction into the sphere of art. The photographic negative epitomizes the potential of technological “reproducibility” (Reproduzierbarkeit), according to Benjamin, insofar as the question of a so-called “original print” (Originalaufnahme, a term he places in scare quotes) is rendered moot by the latent capacity for mass production that lies at the heart of the photographic process.55 From a single photographic negative, countless prints can be produced, none more “original” than the next.

Despite this inherent mechanical reproducibility, photography does not mark a complete break, an utter discontinuity with auratic representation. According to

55 GS 2.1:376. “Von der photographischen Platte z.B. ist eine Vielheit von Abzügen möglich; die Frage nach dem echten Abzug hat keinen Sinn.” This statement is found in the photography and artwork essays. GS 7.1:356-357. 88

Benjamin, much early photography still retains traces of aura. Photography, therefore, signals not merely the beginning of a new machine-driven era of mass reproduction and representation, but this historical turning point has a depth and history that plays itself out within the medium photography. As the pivotal sphere of transition, the liminal threshold in which auratic and mechanical reproduction both meet and depart from one another, photography marks a place of disjunctive convergence, the sphere of collision between the supposed antitheses of singularity and multiplicity. As we will see, however, this antinomy proves untenable, for the singularity of aura—or what in semiotic terms we might call the uniqueness of the photographic referent retained in the photograph—is no solid, self-identical object, but rather a nebulous fog that is always drifting away from itself like a cloud.56

Indeed, throughout the “Kleine Geschichte,” Benjamin repeatedly captures the loss of aura with meteorological, cloud-like rhetoric.57 This language bears resemblance to that of the French-German poet Ivan Goll, whose preface to Camille Recht’s Die alte

Photographie (1931) was one of Benjamin’s main sources for his photography essay.58 In

56 In “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida devises the term “referential” in order to denote this in- between space of the photographic sign between repetition and singularity, reference and referent. As Derrida writes, drawing on Barthes’ opposition between the singular irreducibility of the “punctum” and the general, codified field of the “studium,” we speak of the “unicity of the referential” in order “not to have to choose between reference and referent” (288). This “unicity,” however, should not be confused with the singularity of the external referent. As the “referential,” Derrida seeks to demarcate the singularity of a medial relation, say the moment and time that Stieglitz takes each one of his photographs, as a relation captured and conditioned in the image as a relational field that does not exist separately or outside of what it captures. For a suggestive reading of the “referential” and its relation to relation—the way it stages relationality itself—see Gerhard Richter, "Afterness and the Image (I): Unsettling Photography," in Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 57 For a recent reading which departs from precisely this point in investigating the eco-critical dimensions of this association, see Thomas H. Ford, "Aura in the Anthropocene," Symplokē 21, no. 1-2 (2013). 58 For an useful analysis of how the arguments of the photography books Benjamin consulted inform and circulate throughout his essay, see Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 37-61. 89

this preface, Goll writes of a pre-photographic state in which humans once populated the space of the unknown “mit herrlichen und mächtigen, bösen und unbegreiflichen

Göttern.”59 In a striking parallel to Benjamin’s conception of aura as originally having a religious, cultic value (Kultwert), Goll describes the disappearance of this pre- photographic mode of perception as an implicit variant of man’s fall from paradise:

“Aber langsam wurde des Menschen Auge schärfer und durchbohrte die Nebel […] so lernte der Mensch zwar genauer […] aber er gab dafür seine Himmel auf. Das wissende

Auge wurde immer schärfer, auf Kosten der mystischen Vision.”60 For Goll, the introduction of precise photographic mimetic representation means a gain in knowledge, a “knowing eye” (wissendes Auge), and, on the other hand, the loss of a mystic, nebulous mode of perception associated with the heavens and sky (Himmel). With machine-like precision, the “human eye” of photography bores through the fog (“durchbohrte die

Nebel”) of the heavens and the outmoded, implicitly unenlightened way of perceiving the world. In short, mystic, theological, hazy vision is replaced by a sharp, discerning, scientific gaze.

In his photography essay, Benjamin echoes many of Goll’s concerns with a remarkably similar diction—for example, he describes the aura of early photography as a

“Nebel,” as well as an “Atmosphäre,” a term which Goll also uses when describing “old photographs.”61 Although Benjamin in large part adopts Goll’s position that early photography, especially portraiture, contains an “atmosphere” or, for Benjamin, “aura”

59 Camille Recht, Die alte Photographie (Paris and Leipzig: Henri Jonqquieres, 1931), 11. 60 Ibid. 61 “Der Nebel, der über den Anfängen der Photographie liegt...” GS 2.1:368; “Er reinigt diese Atmosphäre…” Ibid., 378; According to Goll, old photographs are surrounded by their “own atmosphere” (“eigene Atmosphäre”). Recht, Die alte Photographie, 14. 90

surrounding it, Benjamin’s structural analysis of the medium pushes this image in a different direction (or perhaps even several directions), as the original, auratic atmosphere of early photography disperses into the reproductive medium of photography.

Pulled between the singular, atmospheric presence of aura and a seemingly uncontrollable, prolific capacity of reproduction inherent in every snapshot, Benjamin paints a picture of the photographic medium as oscillating between two seemingly discordant poles. Several questions arise at this point: What is auratic about early photography, and is this aura recuperable? How do these two modes of photography and representation relate to one another? And perhaps most importantly, what might these questions tell us about the medium of photography itself and its medial (cloudy) structure?

For Benjamin, early photography is not auratic simply because it stands at the beginning of a history of the medium. Nor is its aura reducible to the primitive state of the technology in its earlier stages. Rather, the aura which many early photographs contain can be traced back to a more fundamental aesthetic correspondence between early photographic technology and the object of representation:

Denn das bloße Erzeugnis einer primitiven Kamera ist jene Aura ja nicht. Vielmehr entsprechen sich in jener Frühzeit Objekt und Technik genau so scharf, wie sie in der anschließenden Verfallsperiode auseinandertreten. Bald nämlich verfügte eine fortgeschrittene Optik über Instrumente, die das Dunkel ganz überwanden und die Erscheinungen spiegelhaft aufzeichneten.62

There is an inverse relationship, these lines suggest, between exact, precise representation—the ability to capture objects with realistic, mirror-like (spiegelhaft) precision—and the subsistence of aura. Much like the mystic vision Goll alludes to in his

62 GS 2.1:376-77. 91

preface, the progress of photographic technology is directly tied to the fate of aura, which was at its strongest in the dark (Dunkel) period in which the technology and object corresponded so exactly (“genau so scharf”) that the images were often out of focus, fuzzy and diffuse. Such auratic images indicate a moment in which the technology has not yet completely superseded the object it represents, but rather still assumed a leveled, seemingly equal position to the object of representation. In such unfocused photographs, the imperfection, the material traces of the photographic medium are still visibly, opaquely legible on the photograph itself.

For Benjamin, this correspondence between the photograph and its referent begins unraveling with the development of artificial lighting.63 Such technology allows the photographer to overcome the natural darkness in which the object had previously resided, making it easier to capture a more perfect, mimetic (spiegelhaft) simulacrum of the object. That this more exact, mirror-like representation in fact entails more artifice is quickly forgotten because of the greater perceived accuracy and realism of the representation—a conundrum which recalls the composite prints of Le Gray (which

Benjamin would have had a chance to see).64 In contrast to such ideals of transparent, mimetic representation, which in actuality often contain more artifice than the “natural” eye can perceive, Benjamin’s concept of aura recalls the cloudy gaze associated with the pictorialist movement. Indeed, he himself makes this connection when describing the

63 Benjamin makes an important, if implicit link here to the introduction of electric lampposts and other forms of artificial lighting in the nineteenth century (one of the central topics of focus in the Arcades Project). 64 It is distinctly probable that Benjamin laid eyes on at least three of Le Gray’s composite prints in the photographic material he consulted for his photography essay, including the “Le Brick” photograph discussed above. See, photograph 160 in Helmuth Theodor Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann, eds., Aus der Frühzeit der Photographie, 1840-70: Ein Bildbuch nach 200 Originalen (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts- Verlag, 1930). And pages 109 and 111 in Recht, Die alte Photographie. 92

hazy style of the amateur art movement of the 1880s: “sie sahen es als ihre Aufgabe an, diese Aura durch alle Künste der Retusche, insbesondere jedoch durch sogenannte

Gummidrucke vorzutäuschen.”65 The failure of the pictorialists to recapture aura, however, indicates a problem constitutive of the very concept of aura: it only ever reveals itself in decline. Aura, in its unique singularity, only ever presents itself when it is not itself, not self-identical. That is to say, aura only ever appears in falling away from itself, determining itself through and in relation to the other: its identity is always in retreat.

Throughout the “Kleine Geschichte,” Benjamin repeatedly captures the necessary, structural withdrawal of aura through circuitous rhetorical and interpretational gestures.

A telling example is found in the midst of his description of a photograph of the young

Kafka, an image Benjamin also describes elsewhere66:

Dies Bild in seiner uferlosen Trauer ist ein Pendant der frühen Photographie, auf welcher die Menschen noch nicht abgesprengt und gottverloren in die Welt sahen wie hier der Knabe. Es war eine Aura um sie, ein Medium, das ihrem Blick, indem er es durchdringt, die Fülle und die Sicherheit gibt. Und wieder liegt das technische Äquivalent davon auf der Hand; es besteht in dem absolutem Kontinuum von hellstem Licht zu dunkelstem Schatten.67

The narrative of a fall or decline from aura is programmatically captured in these lines as a move from wholeness and unity—an implicitly theological, paradisal state of full presence—to a fractured, fragmented (“abgesprent”), godless state in which aura has vanished. Unlike Kafka, who looks out into the world with splintered, desolate eyes, people in early portraits still looked out into the world with a stable gaze saturated by

65 GS 2.1:377. 66 Eduardo Cadava offers an illuminating analysis of this passage and its recurrence elsewhere in Benjamin’s oeuvre, including the way Benjamin inserts and reads himself at times in the image of Kafka, in his remarkable study of Benjamin’s writings on photography: Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997). See especially pages 106-127. 67 GS 2.1:375-376. 93

aura, lending them a feeling of fullness and security.68 How Benjamin leads the reader in this passage to recognize such a state of fullness and certainty, however, says much not only about the standing of aura in the exploded state of mechanical reproduction in which we currently find ourselves, but also about the very possibility of aura as a particular mode of perception. It is only through a picture of Kafka’s desolate gaze, a sign of mourning of the loss of aura, aura’s “counterpart” (Pendant), that aura exhibits itself.69

The aura of early portrait photographs—a supposedly full, stable, self-identical mode of perception—only first comes into being, becomes legible in juxtaposition to the fractured state of Kafka’s gaze. The uncontainable loss evoked by Kafka’s way of looking (“in seiner uferlosen Trauer”) forms the flipside of a mode of perception that is fully present onto itself and self-contained. Whereas Kafka’s eyes, as Benjamin reads them, suggest what we might describe as an intransitive mode of seeing—one that in its mourning

(Trauer) has perhaps not found any other object (or aura) of cathexis, of visual orientation—the auratic gaze is full and self-assured of what it sees.

In language strikingly similar to his description of the absolute, purely medial spectrum of color in his early project on color and fantasy, Benjamin suggestively describes aura as a unified “medium” whose “technical,” non-human equivalent can be found in the “absolute continuum” of the visible, ranging from the brightest light to the darkest shadow. Rather than a picture of uncontainable (uferlosen) loss, we have an absolute, unified medium. The wholeness of this medium, this spectrum of light and aura,

68 Again, here, Benjamin shows himself indebted to Goll. According to Goll, the atmosphere which people in early portraiture display also suggests such fullness: “In den Porträts stehen die Menschen mit einer Sicherheit im Raum, sie füllen ihn aus mit ihrer ganzen Persönlichkeit, sie machen ihn Ernst oder heiter, je nach ihrem eigenen Charakter.” Recht, Die alte Photographie, 14. 69 For a reading which focuses on this scene, see Michael G. Levine, "Of Big Ears and Bondage: Benjamin, Kafka, and the Static of the Sirens," The German Quarterly 87, no. 2 (Spring 2014). 94

however, is difficult to contain and maintain entirely separate from its counterpart of fragmentation. As a collection of a wide-range of values and intensities of light and dark, the fullness of the medium depends on gathering and holding together a disparate and differing visual field in a common, medial zone: the medium of light.70 In other words, aura depends on a prioritization of the singularity and the absoluteness of the medium of perception; the medium of transmission is conceived of as a unified, stable sphere of transmission situated between a self-identical subject and object. Aura is presented here as a continuous medium that bridges the brightest light and darkest shadows, as a mode of relation that privileges the wholeness of medial communication. But this structure of aura and the possibility of purely proper, absolutely continuous, auratic representation is slightly unsettled by the indirect, non-auratic path of difference—the splintered gaze of

Kafka—from which we read the possibility of aura. In this light, what Benjamin describes as the “Kultwert” of aura—its tie to a specific place and time—and the

“Ausstellungswert” of mechanical reproduction—its ability to be moved around, distributed and exhibited almost anywhere—are not mere oppositions, but intricately related modes of perception which negatively determine one another. Uncontainable, boundless, mechanical repetition and determinate, oriented, auratic representation form the two poles between which the medium of photography hovers.

In collecting a dispersed range of the visible into a single image, the photograph strains for representational fullness—the coincidence of the sign with its referent—from a

70 Along the same lines, at another point in the essay, Benjamin describes the auratic act of portraiture as one of collecting into static unity: “Geringere Lichtempfindlichkeit der frühen Platten machte eine lange Belichtung im Freien erforderlich. Diese wiederum ließ es wünschenswert scheinen, den Aufzunehmenden in möglichster Abgeschiedenheit an einem Orte unterzubringen, wo ruhiger Sammlung nichts im Wege stand” GS 2.1:373. The unity of aura depends on collecting the disparate together into one place, “an einem Orte.” 95

fractured state which simultaneously thwarts this striving for self-identity. That is to say, the possibility of absolute auratic unity depends on a concept of representation that assumes the ability to reproduce an absolutely singular moment in time that is not already at its origin fleeting from itself, fading into the past and moving into the future as a representation of an original, natural event or experience. Benjamin alludes to this dimension of presence and auratic vitality in the “circle of breath and mist” (Hauchkreis) which he identifies in early portraiture,71 as well as in a striking nature scene that he uses to describe aura both in the photography and the artwork essay:

Was ist eigentlich Aura? Ein sonderbares Gespinst von Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag. An einem Sommermittag ruhend einem Gebirgszug am Horizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der seinen Schatten auf den Betrachter wirft, bis der Augenblick oder die Stunde Teil an ihrer Erscheinung hat – das heißt die Aura diser Berge, dieses Zweiges atmen.72

Three aspects of this description are crucial for Benjamin’s understanding of aura. First, aura denotes a mode of natural perception between an embodied subject and a distant object. The structure of this type of perception is explicitly horizonal—it has both a telos, an object which the subject transitively views, and as such an orientating, guiding marker of sight: the “Gebirgszug am Horizont.” Second, aura is tied to a concept of representation of/as presence. It connotes the ability to “breathe” in the unique time and place captured in the representation, its context within a particular historical and spatial horizon from which it originates. To perceive aura thus means to access some sort of original event through the artwork which represents and gives its referent a certain afterlife. This is why aura is tied for Benjamin to a concept of history based on tradition.

71 “Es ist dieser Hauchkreis, der schön und sinnvoll bisweilen durch die nunmehr altmodische ovale Form des Bildausschnitts umschrieben wird.” GS 2.1:376. 72 Ibid., 378. 96

Aura maintains a legible, traceable link to a particular spatio-temporal moment that is transparently accessible for future generations.73 The third and arguably most important part of this description of aura, however, is Benjamin’s recourse to figural language at the precise moment that we are finally given a “direct” description of what aura is. What aura actually, properly (“eigentlich”) is, appears to hinge on the success of this poetic image of aura, an example which Benjamin cites verbatim, we might even say mechanically reproduces, in the artwork essay. Already in this gesture of repeating the definition of aura elsewhere, the division between auratic singularity and uncontainable reproduction begin to become entangled.

Focusing on this same textual scene, Samuel Weber points out that the subject’s position importantly implies a stably grounded perspective: “what holds the aura of originality in place, as it were, is the subject as its point of reference, just as, conversely and reciprocally, the subject is ensconced, embedded, held in place and at rest by the scene that it both observes and also ‘breathes in.’”74 Weber argues that the relation between subject and object is complicated by the shadow of the branch which falls over the viewing subject. The subject’s place is no longer one of transparent presence, but instead becomes an opaque position inscribed into the scene of aura itself. Rather than conceiving of the relation between the subject and the experience of aura as an event fully present onto itself, the position of the shadowy subject within this scene implies that already at the source, aura depends on a degree of separation and distance from itself—on

73 As Benjamin argues in the artwork essay, aura is intimately linked with the concept of tradition and historical inheritance. As the artwork passes through the generations, it retains a direct link to the “Hier und Jetzt” from which it originally stemmed: “Die Echtheit einer Sache ist der Inbegriff alles von Ursprung her an ihr Tradierbaren, von ihrer materiellen Dauer bis zu ihrer geschichtlichen Zeugenschaft.” GS 7.1:352-53. 74 Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 86. 97

secondary supplemental representation (a Platonic shadow)—in order to constitute itself.75 In other words, aura always already relies on a process of leave-taking that vouches for the very originality or presence of the source in question. Or to put it more simply, from its origin, aura is in withdrawal from itself.76

The fullness and security of the medium of auratic perception seen above acquires a new connotation when read alongside this scene. The stability of the medium, described as an “absolute continuum” ranging from the “hellstem Licht” to the “dunkelstem

Schatten,” is riven by the shadow that the branch throws on the observer—an instance of the object of perception splitting away from itself into a representation. Aura, it turns out, is not merely pure coincidence between the recording and what is recorded, but the very possibility of such coincidence already depends on the non-coincidence of the photographic image and its referent. The horizonal perception of aura, the supposedly stable line of sight between a grounded subject and self-identical object located within a teleologically fixed spatio-temporal context—the metaphorical “Gebirgszug am

Horizont” that the auratic gaze always orients itself towards—is destabilized at its origin as the object of perception branches out as a copy of itself into the photograph, already opening itself up to diverge in several different directions. This inherent potential of the referent and line of sight to diverge and move away from themselves and into representation already at their origin, is captured in Benjamin’s word choice for the object meant to solidify and stabilize the auratic gaze: “Gebirgszug am Horizont” (my emphasis). The mountain range, the horizon or point of reference constitutive of auratic

75 Alluding to this fact, Weber argues that “distance and separation are explicitly inscribed in the scene, or even the scenario of the aura, and that from its very inception.” Ibid., 87. 76 A similar concept of visual withdrawal is elucidated in Richter, "Afterness and the Image (II): Image Withdrawal." 98

vision, withdraws from itself (entzieht sich) by moving (ziehen) into the photograph, and simultaneously reaffirms its embeddedness and singularity precisely through such an act of departure. It is by tearing itself from its origin and opening itself up to new, unknown horizons through prolific reproduction that the horizon of aura realizes its original, necessary horizonal range.

This original heterogeneity inscribed into the scene of aura as one of nature and phenomena splitting away from themselves into the dispersive order of representation is also echoed elsewhere in Benjamin’s photography essay. A particularly suggestive example comes at the beginning of the text, a beginning which starts by repeating, retracing and reproducing another origin—the birth of photography:

Der Nebel, der über den Anfängen der Photographie liegt, ist nicht ganz so dicht wie jener, der über den Beginn des Buchdrucks sich lagert; kenntlicher vielleicht als für diesen ist, daß die Stunde für die Erfindung gekommen war und mehr von einem verspürt wurde; Männern, die unabhängig voneinander dem gleichen Ziele zustrebten: die Bilder in der camera obscura, die spätestens seit Leonardo bekannt waren, festzuhalten. Als das nach ungefähr fünfjährigen Bemühungen Niépce und Daguerre zu gleicher Zeit geglückt war, griff der Staat, begünstigt durch patentrechtliche Schwierigkeiten, auf die die Erfinder stießen, die Sache auf und machte sie unter deren Schadloshaltung zu einer öffentlichen.77

Although the facts surrounding photography’s invention are well-documented, its beginning, or, more precisely, multiple “beginnings” (“Anfängen”) obscure its precise point of origin.78 Owing its existence to more than one person or event, photography’s genealogy does not follow a straight line. From its moment of inception, photography shows itself indebted to more than one lineage, more than one father: Niépce, Daguerre

77 GS 2.1:368. 78 Cadava also alludes to this passage and suggests that this “inaugural haze […] spreads its mist throughout the essay” and “interrupts the dream of knowing and seeing that structures the history of photography […] even before it begins.” Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, 7. 99

and others.79 The “patentrechtliche Schwierigkeiten,” which Benjamin mentions, allude to this larger, dispersed origin of the technology and the resulting inability of any one

“originator” to make an authoritative, exclusive claim over the medium, a medium that subverts tradition and the conception of the authorial father from the outset. With no clear line of descent, photography is strangely misplaced and unsettled from its own history, pre-history and even own origin narrative, unsettling concepts such as originary creation, and innovative genius.80 Read alongside the hazy “atmosphere” of aura, the fog that

Benjamin identifies in the origins of photography suggests that aura was never completely itself from its very beginning(s), but rather a medium of alterity and non-self- identity in which auratic objects, if such things were ever present, drift away from themselves in the trans-formative (de- and re-formative) visual realm of photography:

“Wolkenatmosphäre, Wolkenwandelbarkeit der Dinge im Visionsraum.”

Equivalent(s): The Name and the Photograph

For Benjamin, Eugene Atget’s images of empty Parisian streets signal the apex of the disappearance of aura from the realm of photography; he was the first to “disinfect”

79 It should be noted that Benjamin slightly distorts the historical facts, for Niépce and Daguerre did not develop two different forms of photography at the same time separately from one another, but in actuality collaborated to create what ultimately became known as the daguerreotype. Despite this inaccuracy, Benjamin’s general account about the split origin(s) of the invention can be historically substantiated when one considers the several other inventors who developed photographic technologies at approximately the same time. To this list we might add Henry Fox Talbot in England and Hercules Florence in Brazil, two further “fathers” of photography who developed similar photographic processes as the former two in France. 80 In this sense, photography already here performs a gesture that Benjamin later affirms as crucial of reproductive technologies at the outset of the artwork essay, namely the need to counter concepts such as “Schöpfertum und Genialität,” which are readily utilizable by Fascism and other political doctrines, GS 7.1:350. For a reading of Benjamin’s political gesture as one of creating “unusable” concepts, see Gerhard Richter, "Toward a Politics of the Unusable," in Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000). 100

photography of its stifling, sticky atmosphere (“stickige Atmosphäre”).81 In photographing both well-known and unknown corners of Paris devoid of all people— pictures which often contain a mist-like quality due to the twilight lighting of the morning hours when he typically shot—Atget turns each one of his photographs into a “crime scene,” a “Tatort.”82 Rather than auratic portraiture (which Benjamin describes as the last vestige of aura in photography because of the human element), or Kafka’s desolate gaze

(which captures a lack of aura negatively), Atget eliminates the subject altogether from his images. In doing so, Atget not only erases aura, but, in Benjamin’s eyes, turns this very absence into the negative motif of his images. Playing with the polysemy of the term

“Tatort,” which can mean “crime scene,” but also more literally the place (Ort) of an event or occurrence (Tat), Benjamin describes how every spot (“jeder Fleck”) of the city becomes a Tatort, and every individual a potential perpetrator (Täter) under the lens of

Atget’s camera.83 In emptying the photograph of aura, Atget’s photographs empty out the medium of photography itself from an intentional object of perception and instead draw attention to the medium as an unstable vessel of transmission, whose orientation can always be redirected. Floating, ungrounded to any particular referent—referencing only their own lack of an external point of orientation—Atget’s images allegorize the empty mode of mechanical reproduction that Benjamin indentifies with the modern age: “Die

Entschälung des Gegenstands aus seiner Hülle, die Zertrümmerung der Aura ist die

Signatur einer Wahrnehmung, deren Sinn für alles Gleichartige auf der Welt so

81 “Als erster desinfiziert er die stickige Atmosphäre, ja bereinigt sie: er leitet die Befreiung des Objekts von der Aura ein, die das unbezweifelbarste Verdienst der jüngsten Photographenschule ist.” GS 2.1:378. 82 Ibid., 385. 83 One could read the event, Tat, here in line with Derrida’s use of the Event in “Signature Event Context,” namely as a singularity whose very particularity depends on a structure of iterability which moves and unsettles it away from itself while simultaneously preserving and re-affirming its singularity in the very same gesture. 101

gewachsen ist, daß sie es mittels der Reproduktion auch dem Einmaligen abgewinnt.”84

In attempting to reach the “original” event, the “Bild,” mechanical reproduction creates an “Abbild,” a copy which removes even the original from its stable situation within a particular place and time—its encasement or “Hülle.” In detaching container from contained in the form of an Ab-bild, the artwork enters the sphere of economic and cultural exchange; it becomes a good that can be possessed, that is “habhaft.”85 Atget’s pictures are not excluded from this economy of exchange, but in emptying them out of any immediately identifiable content for the transitive gaze to take hold of, they also self- reflectively make visible the very medial, photographic relation that underlies this form of seeing, and which also opens the possibility for an alternate mode of ocular relationality. The sense for homogeneity, for all-encompassing similarity, “Sinn für alles

Gleichartige,” which smoothes over differences in favor of more of the same, of the familiar, known and that which can be easily assimilated, used, appropriated or possessed, remains a key point of criticism for Frankfurt School thinkers beyond

Benjamin. Indeed, in the first pages of the Dialektik der Aufklärung, Horkheimer and

Adorno criticize precisely such a lust for sameness when describing statistics and other methods and modes of mediation that make the singular and unique comparable, calculable and determinable: “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft ist beherrscht vom

Äquivalent. Sie macht Ungleichnamiges komparabel, indem sie es auf abstrakte Größen reduziert.”86

84 Ibid., 379. 85 Ibid. 86 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969), 13. 102

In the photography essay, Benajmin locates the artistic counterpart to this bourgeois desire for equivalence, of making the distinct comparable and quantifiable, in the associative and journalistic (newspaper-like) approach to photography found in the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch and the school of Neue Sachlichkeit. According to

Benjamin, in the genre of newspaper journalism, as in Renger-Patzsch’s photo book, Die

Welt ist schön (1928), disparate images are brought together without relation to any underlying connections or contexts (Zusammenhängen), be they of a “physiognomic, political” or “scientific” character, as in the work of August Sander, Germaine Krull, and

Karl Blossfeldt, respectively.87 In place of such contextualization, Renger-Patzsch aestheticizes the world in Die Welt ist schön by drawing associative links between what are often strikingly oppositional images. Placing formally related, but thematically incongruent pictures aside one another in the opposing pages of this picture book—one which Benjamin criticizes only implicitly in the photography essay and then more explicitly elsewhere—Renger-Patzsch emphasizes an associative connection made through formal, abstract sameness that supersedes the individuality of the image or thing depicted, as well as its ties to a larger social, cultural and political context.88 The difficult- to-contain medium of photography as one of mechanical reproduction becomes the ground for a form of sameness and universal exchangeability that never arrives at pure, singular identity, but remains hovering in the non-self-identical, drawing similarities and links based on the merely formal attributes of what is seen.

87GS 2.1:383. 88 Ibid. In the photography essay, Benjamin does not refer to Renger Patzsch by name, although he does cite his book as the exemplary case of such a fashionable approach to photography. For a more direct critique of Renger Patzsch’s work and what Benjamin considers its conservative politics, see “Der Autor als Produzent” (1934). 103

The uncontainable, heterogeneous dispersion of the medium of the visible sets the stage for a different form of sameness that does not unite or make coincident (as aura ostensibly does), but simply draws similarities between the parts, types and kinds of the

same, the “Gleichartige.”89A paradigmatic

example of such abstract, aesthetic

formalization can be found on the book cover

of Die Welt ist schön, where we see a power

line, a cultural object, and a tree, a natural

object, aside one another. The three initials of

the photographer below, evenly distributed

along the ground of the drawing, accentuate the

symmetry we are supposed to perceive

between these two stylistically related objects. Figure 2.5: Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schön (1928) Comparable in height, shape and pattern— despite the clear differences between the slightly less perfect, but nonetheless as

“naturally” symmetrical form of the tree and the absolute symmetry of the human construction—the side-by-side placement is supposed to evoke a feeling of similarity above all else.

For Benjamin, such associative practices indicate a gaze characteristic of modern advertisement and newspaper writing. In “Der Autor als Produzent,” a speech Benjamin is thought by some to have given in April of 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism

89 One would have to explore further here the relation to Benjamin’s writings on the doctrine of the similar and Benjamin’s early essay on language as a medium in which objects and referents enter language only by splitting from themselves as linguistic content—parting from themselves (sich teilen) into the medium of language as one of Kantian impartability (Mitteilbarkeit). 104

in Paris,90 he links the newspaper and the Renger-Patzschian school of New Objectivity through their mutual, superficial mode of bringing the unrelated together through specious association (the newspaper indiscriminately collects the news, the information of the day, just as the associative photographer draws comparisons between things have no substantial relation to one another).91 In order to remedy such empty association,

Benjamin advocates in “Der Autor als Produzent” overcoming the oppositional qualities that condition such association by developing a new (political) relation to the technologies of production. In order to transform the media of (re)production (what

Benjamin in Marxist language describes in this essay as the “Produktionsapparat”), we must rid ourselves of those barriers (“jener Schranken”) that hold apart not only the different modes of production, but also the separation of photography from language, a separation which keeps photography from becoming political:

[Den Produktionsapparat] zu verändern hätte bedeutet, von neuem eine jener Schranken niederzulegen, einen jener Gegensätze zu überwinden, die die Produktion der Intelligenz in Fesseln legeri. In diesem Fall die Schranke zwischen Schrift und Bild. Was wir vom Photographen zu verlangen haben, das ist die Fähigkeit, seiner Aufnahme diejenige Beschriftung zu geben, die sie dem modischen Verschleiß entreißt und ihr den revolutionären Gebrauchswert verleiht. Diese Forderung werden wir aber am nachdrücklichsten stellen, wenn wir - die Schriftsteller - ans Photographieren gehen.92

This political call for writers to begin photographing in order to tear the image from its fashionable, fetishistic abuse in which it congregates with other equivalent,

90 See the editor’s note, GS 2.3:1460-64, for a description of the confusion surrounding the date of this text and whether it was ever held as a speech. 91 The fetishization of the “new” runs as a red thread connecting the newspaper and Benjamin’s critique of Renger Patzsch, a thread that becomes explicit in “Der Autor als Produzent” in the following lines: “Denn wenn es eine ökonomische Funktion der Photographie ist, Gehalte, welche früher dem Konsum der Massen sich entzogen – den Frühling, Prominente, fremde Länder – durch modische Verarbeitung ihnen zuzuführen, so ist es eine ihrer politischen, die Welt wie sie nun einmal ist von innen her – mit anderen Worten: modisch – zu erneuern.” Ibid., 693. 92 Ibid. 105

“Gleichartige” images echoes a sentiment expressed at the end of the photography essay.

There, Benjamin, drawing on Maholy-Nagy although without citing him by name, indicates the importance of being able to properly read the photograph in order to bring the “Assoziationsmechanismus” to a halt:

Immer kleiner wird die Kamera, immer mehr bereit, flüchtige und geheime Bilder festzuhalten, deren Chock imBetrachter den Assoziationsmechanismus zum Stehen bringt. An dieser Stelle hat die Beschriftung einzusetzen, welche die Photographie der Literarisierung aller Lebensverhältnisse einbegreift, und ohne die alle photographische Konstruktion im Ungefähren bleiben muß. [...] “Nicht der Schrift-, sondern der Photographieunkundige wird, so hat man gesagt, der Analphabet der Zukunft sein.” Aber muß nicht weniger als ein Analphabet ein Photograph gelten, der seine eigenen Bilder nicht lesen kann? Wird die Beschriftung nicht zum wesentlichsten Bestandteil der Aufnahme werden?93

Without the name, the caption, what Benjamin calls the “Beschriftung,” the photograph runs the danger of remaining vague, approximate, “im Ungefähren stecken bleiben.” It is the possibility of applying a label, giving the image an exact name, a “Beschriftung,” rather than merely describing (beschreiben) it indirectly that would make the photograph truly legible and tear it away from the associative, ungrounded realm of the fashionable and give it a revolutionary use-value, a “revolutionären Gebrauchswert,” as Benjamin expresses a few years later in the passage above. According to Benjamin in the photography essay, “die Weisungen, die in der Authenzität der Photographie liegen”—its authentic, auratic tie to a particular spatio-temporal context or horizon—sometimes require such supplemental “Beschriftung” in order set photography on course, or redirect it back on course, converting it into the “Literarisierung aller Lebensverhältnisse.”94 That such literarization and re-contextualization is to reattach the photograph to its proper place occurs through a “Beschriftung” and not a Beschreibung points beyond the greater

93 GS 2.1:385. 94 Ibid. 106

specificity attached to the former (as a form of label or naming versus circumlocutory description) also to a certain materiality of writing that the latter does not explicitly connote.

The Schrift in “Beschriftung” accentuates the materiality of the sign, its font, handwriting, typeface, in short the script which both lies in excess of and yet makes all writing legible. Schrift is not opposed to photography, as Maholy-Nagy claims in his juxtaposition of photographic and linguistic analphabetism. Rather, as a mode of light- writing, Schrift, in its literary materiality, forms a constitutive part of the medium of photography, but a materiality that should not be conceptualized as a simple empiricism, that is to say, as another base or substratum that would stably ground representation.

Viewed from the perspective of the material trace of the event, a Tat, the photograph is conventionally viewed as retaining a link of authenticity (an index in semiotic terms) towards the referent that it depicts. However, insofar as Beschriftung itself subtly indicates the place where the empirical drifts into the realm of language as a deictic

“Weisung,” it brings into focus a tension inherent in the photograph itself, namely the invisible link or rupture (for it must be both) between the sensible, empirical realm, and the supersensible realm of language, which Benjamin elsewhere describes as a sphere of

“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit.”95 The dream that Benjamin expresses, therefore, of the

Beschriftung establishing an absolute coincidence between image, word, and by extension referent, would only be possible on the basis of language—the very language and signs (photograph, caption, etc.) that spawn this dream—dissolving. The underlying

95 For two useful introductions to Benjamin’s philosophy of language, see Bettine Menke, Sprachfiguren: Name, Allegorie, Bild nach Benjamin (München: Fink, 1991); Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). 107

assumption (or ideology), would seem to be, that this would allow for a “truer,” empirical reality divorced from the misguiding marks and distortions that photography and language are as re-presentations of presence. The assumed separability of these two spheres underlying such a view, however, is not persuasive, as Paul de Man once suggested in his reappropriation of the term “materiality” as an articulation of a type of

“material vision,” a linguistic mode of sight, which is intimately tied to the “materiality of the letter.”96

Thus despite Benajmin’s appeal to “Beschriftung” in order to halt the associative, metonymic slide which photographic reproduction spurs, the ability of the word to ground such unsettling, unoriented movement remains questionable. This doubt is indeed expressed by Benjamin himself in the artwork essay, lending validity to the notion that his argument for the possible identity of word and photograph in the case above is an instance of ventriloquism, of representing without citation marks the conventional view of the caption as illuminating what is in the image. In the artwork essay, Benjamin, very aware of the non-identity between these two media, repeats this supposed need of the caption in decidedly less favorable terms:

Die photographischen Aufnahmen beginnen bei Atget Beweisstücke im historischen Prozeß zu werden. Das macht ihre verborgene politische Bedeutung aus. Sie fordern schon eine Rezeption in bestimmtem Sinne. Ihnen ist die freischwebende Kontemplation nicht mehr angemessen. Sie beunruhigen den Betrachter; er fühlt: zu ihnen muß er einen bestimmten Weg suchen. Wegweiser beginnen ihm gleichzeitig die illustrierten Zeitungen aufzustellen. Richtige oder falsche - gleichviel. In ihnen ist die Beschriftung zum ersten Mal obligat geworden.97

96 See especially pages 82-90 in Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 97 GS 7.1:361. 108

In their unsettling quality, Atget’s empty photographs propel the viewer to identify an appropriate approach, a determinate path (“bestimmten Weg”) of orientation towards them. In place of the horizon of aura, illustrated magazines fill this gap with orienting captions—“richtige oder falsche – gleichviel.” The possibility of the image acquiring a proper “Beschriftung,” one which would give it a revolutionary use-value

(Gebrauchswert)—a mode of political orientation aligned more with the horizon of aura and the Kultwert than the explosive exchangeability of the Ausstellungswert—is confronted here with the possibility that the “Beschriftung” one gives to the image might in fact be a false orientation. The “Beschriftung” may in fact disorient or lead the viewer down the wrong path, one path or another, each is deemed just as proper as the next—

“gleichviel.” Each path, each way, the many (viele) different options are equally (gleich) valid. How can one thus guarantee that the path suggested by the name, indeed by the relation between the “Beschriftung” and the image will lead one in the right direction, towards an authentic point, a place from which the image becomes absolutely legible, a sign which reveals completely without concealing? Aware of this dilemma, at an earlier point in the photography essay, Benjamin presents this difficulty of orienting oneself to and through the image by way of its relation to the caption by again returning to Atget.

What makes it particularly difficult to orient oneself in Atget’s photographs is his predilection for the “Verschollene und Verschlagene”—that which often escapes not only the photographic, but perhaps also the embodied gaze.98 It is this attention to that which falls outside of the conventional margins of the optical that turns Atget’s photographs against what Benjamin describes as the auratic, “exotischen, prunkenden, romantischen

98 Ibid. 109

Klang der Stadtnamen.”99 In a suggestive passage, Benjamin expands on this aspect of

Atget’s photographic gesture and its afterlife in the dissonance one sometimes perceives between a photograph and its title:

Wenn “Bifur” oder “Variété”, Zeitschriften der Avantgarde, unter der Beschriftung “Westminster”, “Lille”, “Antwerpen” oder “Breslau” nur Details bringen, einmal ein Stück von einer Balustrade, dann einen kahlen Wipfel, dessen Äste vielfältig eine Gaslaterne überschneiden, ein andermal eine Brandmauer oder einen Kandelaber mit einem Rettungsring, auf dem der Name der Stadt steht, so sind das nichts als literarische Pointierungen von Motiven, die Atget entdeckte.100

On a pragmatic level, city names inherently connote an idea of wholeness insofar as they coalesce a variegated topographical space consisting of different neighborhoods, streets and buildings under one name. As a sign used to convey and contain a disparate and sometimes diverging space, the city name describes a certain conceptual, synthesizing force in which borders are drawn around a dispersed, fragmented field, lending it a stable name or identity: Antwerpen, Lille or Breslau. Thus in attaching the name “Westminster” to a photograph of a fragmented detail from within the city, say a “Stück von einer

Balustrade” to use Benjamin’s example, the synecdochal incongruence between part and whole creates a jarring dissociation, emptying the name of its aura. The disparity between these minute, overlooked city details (the “Verschollene und Verschlagene”) and the city name creates what we might describe as a form of alienation.101 Alienated by the lack of harmonious symmetry between the name and the image, we are confronted with the constructedness not only of this relation of word and image, but also of their mutual

99 Ibid., 378. This passage can be read alongside of Benjamin’s concept of an “optical unconscious”—the ability of the photograph to retain and make visible, legible, that which the naked eye conventionally overlooks. Ibid., 371. 100 Ibid., 378. 101 Benjamin’s repeated references to Brecht throughout the essay can be read in this vein; in alienating the viewer from the medium of transmission, the possibility of rethinking our concept of what photograph is presents itself. 110

failure to represent reality. As Benjamin cites Brecht approvingly near the end of his photography essay, representations say less about reality today than ever.102 The incongruity between the name and the image destabilizes and calls attention to the relation between title and picture, and their mutual failure to both map neatly onto one another, as well as to perfectly reproduce an external referent. Both on a medial and an inter-medial level, mimesis fails. This is the ineluctable challenge that photography faces when it seeks to assume an orientation, be it in aesthetic, epistemological, or political terms. This slippage between image and text acquires a vivid form in Stieglitz’s cloud series, which also thematize the inability of the word and image to transparently illuminate one another in a sort of mutual, tautological supplementarity in relation to the referent.

In 1922, Stieglitz exhibited his first set of sky photographs under the title “Music:

A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs.” A year later, he retained a similar title when displaying a different series of cloud images, entitled “Songs of the Sky.” Considering the fluid, unsettling quality of his photographs, which dramatically illustrate the sort of

“freischwebende Kontemplation” Benjamin attributes to Atget, it should come as no surprise that Stieglitz links them to the medium of music in these early years. Indeed, in a

1923 letter Stieglitz states that he wants those who view his images to “hear music” when they see them.103 By 1925, however, Stieglitz stopped insisting on the cloud photographs’ relation to music and instead began to emphasize the specifically ocular character of the dynamic medium of photography. It is around this time that Stieglitz begins calling each one of his cloud images by the same name: “equivalent.” Each individual photograph, no

102 Ibid., 384. 103 Stieglitz, "How I Came to Photograph Clouds." 111

matter how different from the next, acquires the same, “equivalent” title. In naming each of his photographs “equivalent” rather than cloud or some other name or “Beschriftung” that might reference something particular about the photograph at hand, Stieglitz self- reflectively highlights the very ungrounded structure of his cloudscapes, photographs which remain radically open to orientation and whose valency remains always undetermined. Equally oriented in one direction or another, to paraphrase Benjamin, in one direction (Richtung) or its opposite, these photographs remain radically open to association and being moved into different contexts—“richtige oder falsche – gleichviel.”

Instead of naming the phenomenon in the photograph, Stieglitz names the relation conventionally thought to govern the relationship of the photograph to its object of reference and in the process draws attention to the failure of this inter-medial layering of word, image and external phenomenon. Alienating the photograph from a naïve concept of referential correspondence, of equivalence, the repeated name “equivalent” applied indiscriminately to every cloud image parodies the loss and inability to find true equivalence between word and image, or between the ocular and the linguistic spheres in relation to one another, as well as to objective phenomena.

Beginning in 1926, Stieglitz takes this dispersive explosion of the name and the structure of adequation one step further and begins to write on several single prints the plural word “equivalents.”104 The poly-positionality of Stieglitz’s photographs finds its dispersive match in this pluralization of the word “equivalent,” a proliferation which is already at work in the serial repetition of the word undersigning every cloud image, but which now becomes explicitly stamped, made visible in the word used to mark this

104 See photograph 1176, in Greenough and Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz, The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs. 112

uncontainable polyvalent, polysemy potentiality of the image. The inaudible difference between “equivalence” and “equivalents” obscures the distinction between the pluralized singular (equivalents) and the singularized plural (equivalence as a gathering of the disparate), a difference which only becomes legible in the light of writing (photo-graphy).

The minute difference in the grapheme, between the letters “ts” and “ce,” a difference both made retroactively legible and first constituted through the sight of writing, signals the tension-laden point at which plurality and singularity, sameness and difference converge in a medial state of dispersive convergence. It is from this place of difference, this non-self-identical sphere of light-writing whose borders refuse to stand still that the cloud images of Stieglitz drift into appearance. In Stieglitz’s clouds, the medium of photography as one of radical alterity, of cloud alterability (Wolkenwandelbarkeit), is given a concrete visual form as a series of images that thematize and compulsively repeat the disappearance of the horizon, pointing toward the singularity of aura and the referent through and in an unpredictable process of difference and deferral. The lack of an orientating horizon, an external reference point, transforms these pictures into a horizontal, contiguous, metonymic mode of relation that has no clear trajectory or telos and whose name is always changing (meto-nymy), especially when it professes itself to be the same: “equivalent.” Rather than extending transitively toward an (external) horizon or a predetermined limit point, we are given to think another mode of photographic relationality that occurs between and within the horizon, a movement of equivalence (un)grounded on equivalents—the dispersive cloud structure of the medium of photography.

113

Chapter 3

Weather and Time: Benjamin and the Limits of the Utopic Imagination

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Durch die Wolken gewinnt der Luftraum, in welchem sonst der Blick nichts mehr fände und mit den Ausmaßen die Teilnahme und Aufmerksamkeit verlöre, eine reiche Sichtbarkeit: er wird Fortsetzung der Erde. - Hermann Hesse

In a note from Convolute D of the Arcades Project, Benjamin recounts the story of an eccentric (spleenigen) Englishman, “der eines morgens aufwacht und sich erschießt, weil es regnet.”1 A more severe, disproportionate response to the sight of rain is hardly imaginable. And yet, for Benjamin, this droll anecdote exhibits something of a sobering quality. He calls it the “ironische Überwindung,” a sort of absurd counter-response to the more common effect elicited by the weather: boredom. Summoning this story and

Goethe’s meteorological studies in support, Benjamin identifies a different way of regarding the weather that would also consider its “wache[s], schaffende[s] Leben”—the dynamic, exciting side of weather that is often overlooked.2 This chapter attends to these two dimensions of weather—its lively, vibrant side and its dull tediousness—as they

1 GS 5.1:157. 2 Ibid. 114

come to play a key role in Benjamin’s cosmopolitical thought. I wish to suggest that by focusing on the place of weather along with the central figure of the cloud in Benjamin’s temporal-political ruminations, we gain insight into an aspect of Benjamin’s thinking of futurity that has hitherto received little attention: the possibility not only of a “messianic,” but an absolutely other, “alien” future to come as imagined via Paul Scheerbart’s depiction of utopia in his “asteroid novel” Lesabéndio (1913). Benjamin’s exploration of this possibility often dwells on the limits of our ability to prefigure or anticipate such a radically other, non-anthropocentric mode of being. My argument is that the figure of the cloud plays a crucial role in revealing the structure and extent of our capacity to imagine—create an image, a pre-figuration of—the absolutely unknowable, indeterminably other realm that is utopia.

To turn to Benjamin’s ruminations on weather in order to understand better his politically-inflected model of futurity at first might seem like a strange detour. But throughout Benjamin’s writings, the concepts of weather and time often dovetail in unexpected and instructive ways. Benjamin himself notes this convergence in the

Arcades Project, pointing to the French word temps and its double meaning of time and weather.3 The confluence of these two meanings is especially significant where

Benjamin’s reflections on the possibility of utopia are concerned. Thus the first section of this chapter briefly sketches the relation between time, weather, and the cosmos that

Benjamin puts forward through the concept of “boredom” (Langeweile) in Convolute D of the Arcades Project. I explore how Benjamin imagines the possibility of a completely other time to come—one perhaps located in a great cosmic “beyond”—through states of

3 In an incomplete sentence, as though avoiding syntactic closure while commenting on semantic indeterminacy, Benjamin writes: “Über die Doppelbedeutung von ‘temps’ im Französischen.” GS 5.1:162. 115

weather-induced boredom. The second section takes as its cener of focus two texts

Benjamin refers to in a fragment believed to belong to his lost project on politics (circa

1917-1920): Alfred Kubin’s novel Die Andere Seite (1909), and Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio.

Paying close attention to the central role of weather and clouds in these respective texts, this section investigates how Benjamin mobilizes the trope of the cloud in order to think through the possibility of relating to and reaching utopia. Also at stake is Benjamin’s aesthetic and strategic gesture of deploying the disfigurative figure of the cloud to imagine utopia from the perspective of what Benjamin in a related context calls nature’s

“destructive side.”4 And third, the final section explores Benjamin’s strong identification of utopia, and the “utopian image” with the non-instrumental, radically de-interiorized, non-human mode of being that Scheerbart depicts in his literary space novel.

In exploring the positive potential that lies latent in the act of destruction as a way of clearing the path for something “new” to emerge, Benjamin adopts a singular political stance that is unstable and undetermined, hovering in unformed potentiality. Many of the same things can be said about the diffuse, ungrounded character of clouds, and the media of vision and language. Perhaps for this reason, I suggest, Benjamin turns repeatedly to the cloud and cloudy weather when contemplating the possibility of utopia, and the limits of our ability to imagine or speak of what such an unfathomable place would look like, let alone construct our way towards it.

4 GS 2.3:1107. 116

On Boredom: Talking About the Weather

Few topics tend to generate less enthusiasm than the weather. The weather is typically regarded as banal or tedious, as a routine backdrop to everyday life hardly worth discussion. In 1968 the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund created what has become one of the most iconic images of this dismissive attitude towards the topic of weather. A campaign poster depicts the triumvirate of Marx, Engels, and Lenin sandwiched between the captions “Alle reden vom Wetter,” and in large, bold letters the rejoinder, “Wir nicht” (Figure 3.1). The implication is that talking about the weather is either beneath the lofty aspirations of this trio—and by association, the German Socialist

Student League—or in some manner a waste of their

time, a sort of distraction from a more serious political

agenda. An underlying assumption of the poster

appears to be that the weather is not only

uninteresting, but also apolitical. And yet, the strange,

seemingly incongruous pairing of weather and politics

in this image also allows for other plausible

interpretations. For instance, what if we were to read

Figure 3.1 this image not as a declamation against weather-talk, an injunction to redirect our attention to other, more vital concerns, but rather as a promise to do something about the weather, to place it in some way at the center of a politics? Paraphrasing Marx, not simply to talk about, to interpret the weather, but to change it? Perhaps even change it by changing the very way we interpret it?

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The contours of such a gesture can be found at various moments of Benjamin’s intellectual engagement with the weather, an engagement whose political dimensions are inextricably imbricated with hermeneutic and aesthetic concerns. Before shifting in the next section to examine the more overtly political aspect of the trope of weather in

Benjamin’s writings, let us first begin by looking at how Benjamin reevaluates the feeling of boredom that the weather tends to produce and how he identifies a latent positive potential within this condition. This potential stems from a different experience of time that the state of boredom awakens, a mode in which time is no longer regarded as a linear continuum of successive events, but rather in which time becomes amorphous and less determined.. Such an understanding of Benjamin’s reflections on the topic paves the way for a different way of relating to the future in a radically unoriented manner—an approach which Benjamin himself adopts in thinking the possibility of utopia.

In Convolute D of the Arcades Project, Benjamin dedicates several passages to the topic of weather and boredom, at times also exploring their interconnection.5

Boredom, for Benjamin, names not merely an affective state, but also one tied to a specific temporal relation, as suggested in the etymology of the word: Lange-weile, long- while. Boredom arises, he explains, when one lacks a definable telos in time towards which to orient oneself. “Langeweile,” he writes, “haben wir, wenn wir nicht wissen,

5 Two studies which offer a valuable analysis of Benjamin’s concept of boredom as presented in Convolute D are: Carlo Salzani, "The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Benjamin and Boredom," in Essays on Boredom and Modernity, ed. Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (Amsterdam, New York City: Rodopi, 2009); Andrew E. Benjamin, "Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity," in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005). Salzani valuably situates Benjamin’s reflections in Convolute D within his larger consideration of boredom and distraction in modernity by focusing on the connection of these categories to Benjamin’s key concepts of Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Andrew Benjamin, meanwhile, offers an insightful philosophical analysis of the concept of boredom that Benjamin develops especially in Convolute D. Although my own reading differs in the point of emphasis on the weather and the larger trajectory I trace in this chapter, many of the central ideas developed here find strong reverberations in Andrew Benjamin’s useful reading, to which I am deeply indebted. 118

worauf wir warten.”6 Unlike waiting, which assumes the existence of a goal or direction, the thing for which one waits (such as a bus), in boredom, according to Benjamin’s definition, we have no idea in which direction we should direct ourselves. There is no

“what.” As such, boredom marks a radicalized mode of waiting, a strange, open-ended mode of striving that has no predestined or predetermined end in sight. Boredom expresses what we, in somewhat paradoxical fashion, might describe as the sensation of an orienting or striving towards without orientation: a temporal state of pure means stripped of all ends.7

The open-endedness of this structure, Benjamin adds immediately following the above definition, extends deeper than simply not knowing what the next event or activity might be: “Daß wir es wissen oder zu wissen glauben, das ist fast immer nichts als der

Ausdruck unserer Seichtheit oder Zerfahrenheit.”8 Even when we think we know what it is that we are orienting ourselves towards, we might in fact be mistaken. Boredom, as

Benjamin describes it, uncovers a more profound mode of unpredictability attached to the future: a radical indeterminacy that extends beyond the immediate aims, superficial distractions or events in time towards which we normally orient ourselves. In this vein,

Benjamin concludes, “Langeweile ist die Schwelle zu großen Taten.”9 Boredom is the threshold to great deeds, deeds which seem to exceed common expectations, if not all expectation. As such, boredom reveals a way of relating to the future in which it is no

6 GS 5.1:161. 7 Much scholarship has been devoted to Benjamin’s difficult notion of “pure means.” Although I would suggest that different forms of this concept can be found throughout the different periods and texts of Benjamin’s variegated oeuvre, Benjamin’s most forceful, explicit formulation of this concept is located in his early essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (1921). For a recent exploration of this topic, see Sami R. Khatib, "Teleologie ohne Endzweck": Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen (Marburg: Tectum, 2013). 8 GS 5.1:161. 9 Ibid. 119

longer an object of projection, no longer something measurable or calculable that one can anticipate or expect in advance.10 The radical indeterminacy and unpredictability of what might take shape in the future—our inability to know in advance what might occur— unsettles and undermines any attempts to know in advance what it is that will take place, what will happen: the seemingly stable temporal aims towards which we conventionally orient ourselves in confidence (or in the belief thereof, “[d]aß wir es wissen oder zu wissen glauben,” emphasis added).

Because one cannot delimit or anticipate (produce an image in advance of) what the future will hold in all of its radical open-endedness, boredom reveals a way of relating to the future that contains elements of a certain Bildverbot. As Andrew Benjamin has commented in connection with this passage, the concept of boredom that Benjamin puts forward in Convolute D requires us to think “beyond a conception of the future that is already pictured,” for “an already present picture would mean that the future had already been given in advance by its conflation with a pre-existing and thus already identifiable image.”11 Picturing the future, giving it a pre-established shape or telos limits the future’s potentiality by predetermining it from the position of what already exists, from the status quo. At stake in Benjamin’s reading of boredom, therefore, is a way of relating to the future which preserves the open-ended possibilities that lie latent in this as-yet untransgressed sphere. Without a picture or any orientating guide, the possibilities of what “great deeds” might occur appear almost infinite.

10 For a reading which approaches this question of orienting oneself towards an incalculable future from the reverse side, from that of “afterness,” see Gerhard Richter, "Afterness and Experience (I): Can Hope Be Disappointed?," in Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 11 Benjamin, "Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity," 165. 120

While Benjamin’s understanding of boredom contains certain unmistakable messianic undertones—there is perhaps no more unanticipatable “great deed,” no grander possibility than the arrival of the messiah, an unpredictable telos which if realized would bring time itself to an end12—this more profound, radically unoriented way of relating towards time and the future acquires a more profane form in other passages from

Convolute D through its repeated association with the sphere of weather.13 Through the association between weather and boredom, Benjamin explores the possibilities and limits of our ability to imagine a completely other time, to orient ourselves (however weakly, dimly) towards a radically different future-to-come. Under certain weather conditions,

Benjamin suggests, time no longer appears as a linear, teleologically-oriented trajectory as the conventional view would have it. Rainy weather in particular, he reflects, tends to induce a different relation towards time:

Regen hält überall mehr verborgen, macht Tage nicht nur grau sondern ebenmäßig. Vom Morgen bis zum Abend kann man dann dasselbe tun, schachspielen, lesen, sich streiten, während Sonne, ganz anders, die Stunden schattiert und dem Träumer nicht wohl will.14

Under the cover of rain with its overcast sky, daytime appears to acquire a gray, monotonous, amorphous consistency in which each hour, each moment is perceived as equal to the next. From “Morgen bis zum Abend” time appears as “dasselbe,”

“ebenmäßig.” Whereas the sun, as Benjamin poetically phrases it, “die Stunden schattiert,” the overcast sky smoothes over difference. The lack of contrast between

12 As Benjamin writes in the “Theologisch-Politisches Fragment”: “Erst der Messias selbst vollendet alles historische Geschehen, und zwar in dem Sinne, daß er dessen Beziehung auf das Messianische selbst erst erlöst, vollendet, schafft.” GS 2.1:203. 13 For my discussion of the liminal place of weather and the figure of the cloud in Benjamin’s thinking of the relation between the profane and the divine, see Chapter One. 14 GS 5.1:159. 121

individual units of time, between the different moments of the day, makes time’s passing, as in the hours of a sundial, difficult to discern. The implications of this altered perception of time should not be taken lightly. In blurring the contours between one moment and the next, between what came first and what came second—or, using

Benjamin’s metaphor, one hour and its shadow—the overcast sky disturbs the conventional linear conception of time as a series of distinguishable successive events.

Possible aims, goals towards which we might orient ourselves lose their outlines and instead become diffuse and opaque. For the dreamer (Träumer) who makes this amorphous, cloudy state his home, time assumes a different shape in which events do not follow upon one another as in a causal chain. On the contrary, in boredom each moment is rendered as monotonously gray and even as the next (nicht nur grau sondern ebenmäßig) as time loses its linear trajectory and the delineable goals towards which one might orient oneself.

By aligning light with temporal progress and gray weather with a sense of temporal stagnation, Benjamin draws on an archetypical rhetoric reflected in terms such as “Enlightenment” in which progress and development are conventionally considered positives. In his analysis of boredom in Convolute D, however, Benjamin inverts the values of these traditional associations. As Benjamin sees it, a latent positive potential adheres within the dim state of boredom. By forcing us to confront the future in its shapelessness and nebulousness, boredom frees us from the constrictive, predetermined temporal horizon of an orientating goal. As such, boredom renders the future much more dynamic and malleable than before, opening the possibility of our relating towards the future as a state of unrealized potential. Standing at a threshold radically before any

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future events or possible disappointments—in giving time a telos every event inevitably dis-appoints by the mere fact of foreclosing other possibilities—boredom positions one on the precipice of unformed time, of a hazy future waiting to take shape.15 In revealing and highlighting the unrealized state of the future, boredom carries for Benjamin what

Carlo Salzani has aptly described as “revolutionary possibilities.”16 There is potential that something radical, perhaps even revolutionary may occur in the interval separating the present moment from the unknown future. In addition, Andrew Benjamin also notes a political dimension in Benjamin’s emphasis on our incapacity to predict or picture in advance what might fill the radically open future. According to Andrew Benjamin, the inability to picture the future forms a fundamental point of Benjamin’s “critique of a version of utopian thinking.”17 In contrast to a utopian politics which posits a specific image or plan of what utopia—an unknown non-space—would look like, in the case of boredom we gain a glimpse into a very different way of relating towards the future

(which would also form the basis for a very different utopian politics, as we will see in the next section). Instead of setting clear, pre-delineated goals, the state of boredom reveals the possibility of relating to future in a manner that would turn indeterminacy and

15 See again Richter, "Afterness and Experience (I): Can Hope Be Disappointed?," especially pages 164-68. As Richter indicates, according to Ernst Bloch’s view hope—a category intimately related to that of waiting discussed here—holds as its condition of possibility the ability to be disappointed: “hope can be what it is only because it is perpetually exposed to the radical danger of disappointment” (166). Unlike Bloch’s brand of hope which is based on a structure of transgression (167), however, the unanticipatable structure of time exposed by boredom does not hope or wait for anything in particular and thus seems to fall outside of the positive/negative judgments of completion or failure. If one does not know what one waits for, can waiting, as a purely threshold experience, be disappointed? 16 Salzani, "The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Benjamin and Boredom," 140. 17 Benjamin, "Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity," 166-67. Benjamin’s stance in large part mirrors Adorno’s own views, as presented in an interview with Ernst Bloch, concerning the inability to speak positively, to describe or “auszumalen” what utopia would look like. See Ernst Bloch, "Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing," in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1-17. "Etwas fehlt...: Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht; Ein Rundfunkgespräch mit Theodor W. Adorno," in Tendenz - Latenz - Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 350-68. 123

open-endedness into the operative principle of one’s future-directed (un)orientation.

Instead of expecting the unexpected (and thus reducing the unknown to a category of the known, that which is pre-established or given in advance), when bored one does not expect anything at all. Precisely for this reason, so the logic goes, there exists the possibility that something impossible, unexpected, revolutionary might occur.18

In order to access this glimmer of revolutionary hope that boredom makes

(however dimly) visible, it is important that one first learn to relate to and embrace boredom in a way that would make the radical incalculabililty of the future, the cloudiness and haziness which disallows us to give the future a predetermined shape or outline, into the very principle of one’s future-directed (un)orientation. Boredom can prompt a state of dream-like idleness, as Benjamin describes in the case of weather above, but it can also trigger other reactions. The lack of an immediate telos, a stabilizing horizon towards which to orient oneself in time is more unsettling for some than for others. In another passage from Convolute D, Benjamin explores this line of thought, differentiating between various ways of coping with boredom and the abyss in time upon which it opens. Departing from the colloquial phrase “die Zeit vertreiben” (to pass the time, to kill the time, or while away the time), he describes three standard responses towards boredom. According to Benjamin, one can treat time as a player or gambler

(Spieler), as a flâneur, or one can approach time from a state of waiting, as “der

Wartende”:

18 Andrew Benjamin captures this dimension of a necessary temporal break or rupture that boredom implies in the following passage: “What is the time of awaiting? Benjamin’s response to this question necessitates that this awaiting be distinguished from an awaiting in which the image of the future determines both what is to occur as well as its having occurred. What cannot be expected – even though it is too often expected – is victory to come through continuity.” Benjamin, "Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity," 166. 124

Man muß sich nicht die Zeit vertreiben – muß die Zeit zu sich einladen. Sich die Zeit vertreiben (sich die Zeit austreiben, abschlagen): der Spieler. Zeit spritzt ihm aus allen Poren. – Zeit laden, wie eine Batterie Kraft lädt: der Flâneur. Endlich der Dritte: er lädt die Zeit und gibt in veränderter Gestalt – in jener der Erwartung – wieder ab: der Wartende.19

For those who behave like the prototypical player (Spieler), an attitude of which

Benjamin appears highly critical, time is treated as something to be staved off, gotten rid of, or vanquished. Expanding on the terse description given in these lines, we can add that the Spieler, as Benjamin presents him here, embodies an inclination to call upon games and other forms of distraction in order, as we say in English, to “fill” or “pass the time,” or as something to do “in the meantime,” in the long while (Langeweile) of waiting for a more worthwhile or enticing activity to emerge. As such, the Spieler represents a particular disposition towards time engendered by the abyss of boredom. By actively filling the time with distractions and activities, the Spieler avoids engaging with time itself and instead dispels it, displacing it back into the world, into things which

“occupy the time.” Benjamin vividly captures such externalizing efforts in the image of time exuding from the player’s pores (“Zeit spritzt ihm aus allen Poren”).

In contradistinction to the strenuous efforts of the player to “fill” time, to give it a shape or form in external activities that might quell the anxiety induced by boredom, the flâneur represents a diametrically opposed posture towards time which is similar to that of the dreamer described above. Invoking Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur as one who floats through the crowd as though immersed in a reservoir of electrical energy,

Benjamin draws an evocative analogy between the flâneur’s inviting disposition towards time and the way a battery is charged by energy: “Zeit laden, wie eine Batterie Kraft lädt:

19 GS 5.1:164. 125

der Flâneur.”20 The flâneur does not fill time; instead he is filled by time. In a state of leisurely idleness, the flâneur welcomes time into his midst. Time does not assume a particularly defined shape or form in this state of idleness, but is rather accepted as bare, unrealized potential or power: Kraft. As this opposition makes clear, for the flâneur boredom does not carry the same negative connotations, the same irksome, unsettling quality as for the player. The flâneur sees no need to expel or expunge time, to give it shape in the form of an external activity or pastime. Instead, time, taken as empty, unmolded potential without a clear aim or telos, is welcomed, received by the flâneur.

Much like the dreamer, to whom Benjamin compares the flâneur in another passage from

Convolute D, the flâneur does not relate to time on the level of progression (i.e. teleologically), but as in a dream. The act of “Flanieren” through the arcades, Benjamin writes, denotes a rhythm of slumber in which “Dasein” flows without accent, without distinction as though in a dream: “Das Dasein in diesen Räumen [of the arcades] verfließt denn auch akzentlos wie das Geschehen in Träumen. Flanieren ist die Rhythmik dieses

Schlummers.”21

Situated at a crossroads between these two, diametrically opposed modes of relating to time—the player and the flâneur—stands der Wartende, the one who waits.

Recalling Benjamin’s definition of boredom as a sensation brought on by a state of open- ended “waiting for,” the Wartende exhibits a more intimate attunement to the state of boredom than the other two figures. As the nominalized present participle “Wartende” highlights, this subject engages time in a manner very different from that of the flâneur or

20 Ibid. For a reading of Benjamin’s engagement with Baudelaire and the Flâneur, see Michael G. Levine, "En garde! Benjamin's Baudelaire and the Training of Shock Defense," in Writing through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 21 GS 5.1:162. 126

the Spieler (both nominalized infinitives). Whereas the flâneur and Spieler are primarily defined via action (or the lack thereof in the case of the flâneur), the grammar of the

Wartende emphasizes the manner of being of the subject in question as “one who waits.”

Neither quite action nor inaction, waiting suggests a mode of relating to time different from a chronology of actions, or in a state of idleness.

In a striking, compact description, Benjamin simply writes of the Wartende, “er lädt die Zeit und gibt in veränderter Gestalt – in jener der Erwartung – wieder ab.”22 The

Wartende invites time, becomes charged by it, but also discharges it back into the world.

In this way, the Wartende is both part flâneur and part Spieler. Like the flâneur, the

Wartende relishes time in its pure, unrealized potentiality as unformed, malleable Kraft, but like the Spieler, he also exhibits a certain desire to fill time, to give it a shape, an aim, a telos. Yet in stark contrast to the Spieler, the Wartende does not fill time with distractions or games, or posit a positive goal that might momentarily subdue the unsettling state of boredom. Instead, in a highly self-reflexive move, the Wartende meets time with a different, disfigured variation of itself: “er lädt die Zeit und gibt in veränderter Gestalt – in jener der Erwartung – wieder ab” (emphasis added). The

Wartende minimally shapes time, gives it a form by transforming it into Erwartung— expectation, anticipation (or in a less literal translation, hope).23

In transfiguring time from unformed, unrealized Kraft into Erwartung, the

Wartende performs a gesture that, we might say, forms a cornerstone of Benjamin’s own approach to futurity (and the (im)possibility of imagining or orienting oneself towards

22 GS 5.1:164. 23 Andrew Benjamin also comments on this moment of time acquiring a figure. See Benjamin, "Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity," 167. 127

utopia). We should note that Benjamin does not name, nor imply (as with the Spieler) the object towards which the Wartende orients himself. Instead, Benjamin gives us something very different: namely, an image of our very desire to imagine, to picture what the future might hold. Embracing the unknowability of what will come, while simultaneously tapping into the desire to shape, mold or imagine the future, the Wartende gives the future a shape in the figure of Erwartung. But Erwartung, as a figure, gives us nothing concrete to see other than the very structure of striving, of waiting for something to take place that conditions our relation to the future as open-ended potentiality. As such, the Wartende, as Benjamin presents him in this context, discloses a peculiar posture towards the future which hovers between open-endedness and a weak figuration, a mode of expectation that paradoxically expects nothing, that is to say, has no predetermined aim in sight.

At the crux of this gesture that the Wartende performs lies an aesthetic act, a formative, transformative move which gives time as empty, unformed potential a figure, a body, a shape (“in verändeter Gestalt”). In other words, the Wartende imagines the future, gives us an image towards which to orient ourselves in the form of Erwartung, but this image is itself radically negative. In giving us an image of Erwartung, of our very desire to have an aim in time, the Wartende assumes a threshold position from which the future appears most open. But such a posture requires that nothing actually appears, because we have an image which paradoxically gives us nothing to see other than the very future-directed structure of desire and yearning that underlies our conventional relation to the future as a teleological thinking in and towards ends. Challenging us to rethink what we understand under the term “expectation,” Erwartung, the Wartende

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neither directs his expectation towards particular events in time, nor does he orient himself towards another, different time to come after this one, thus simply repeating the view of causal, chronological time on a larger scale. Instead, in his absolute lack of a telos, a horizon, an end, the Wartende gives us to think the weak possibility of time itself, as a linear continuum of events, dissolving. The Wartende’s insight, we might say, is that of a time blind to all ends. By relating to and in time in a modus that lacks an aim, the

Wartende intimates from within the temporal spectrum the possibility of escaping its horizonal, end-oriented structure, the possibility of time itself becoming undone.

Importantly, it is precisely this loss of shape, of a clear picture of what the future holds that the Wartende himself figures, gives us to see in his name as the Wart-ende. The

Wart-ende paradoxically embodies, figures, the possibility of his own dissolution, of his own disfiguration not because he waits from an outside position for time to end, but insofar as he waits in time, but a time that seems to have lost its ends, its borders. In coming to stand in as a figure for that which is shapeless and unimaginable, the end of a manner of being structured by ends or aims, the Wart-ende intimates the dim possibility of a radically different order where the means-end relation might not obtain. Such a shapeless, seemingly unimaginable space is given thought in the nebulous weather that renders time amorphous. Perhaps for this reason, the weather occupies a crucial place in

Benjamin’s thinking of utopia, the possibility of which would seem to necessitate an absolutely unexpected, and unexpectable break with what preceded it, a great “deed” or rupture that would not simply install a different time to come after this one, but a time— if we should even call it that—that would undo time as we know it, a non-time that would

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correspond to the non-place that is utopia, both of which could seemingly occur only where and when we least expect it, that is to say, do not expect it at all.

Due to its close connection with boredom, the weather signals for Benjamin one realm in which the possibility of such an earth-shattering, unexpected event becomes faintly legible—an event that would skirt with the non-place that is utopia.. In a separate note from Convolute D, Benjamin connects the boredom which the weather typically tends to elicit to the cosmos, drawing on an association which also plays a key role in his political thinking (as we will see in the next section).24 What renders weather boring for the most of us, although we usually fail to perceive it, Benjamin argues, is its inherent connection to outer space. As he explains, nothing bores “gewöhnlichen Menschen” more than the cosmos. Indeed, for most people, the cosmos tends to exert a soporific,

“narkotisierend” effect.25 Although Benjamin does not elaborate on this claim, outer space in its expanse and seemingly indefinable vastness certainly suggests another sphere in which orientation is difficult—a space that carries inherent connotations of the alien, the foreign, and the unknown. Weather, although an earthly category, represents according to Benjamin’s view one of the “höchsten und lindesten Manifestationen” of larger “kosmischen Kräfte,” and as such shares in this larger sense of cosmic boredom.26

The deep connection that Benjamin senses between weather and the cosmos via the category of boredom—a connection which he also views at work in the traditional

24 For an exploration of the motif of the cosmos in Benjamin’s writing which touches on this connection to the weather, see Lorenz Jäger, "Kosmos und Sozialer Raum: Varianten eines Benjaminschen Motivs," in Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her: Texte zu Walter Benjamin, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Leipzig: Reclam-Verlag, 1992). 25 GS 5.1:157. 26 Ibid. 130

association of weather with empty chatter27— reveals a greater relation between weather, time, and the cosmos that also preoccupied Benjamin in a different, but not unrelated, context: his reading of Scheerbart’s utopian novel Lesabéndio in his early politics project.

In the following section, I turn to an early text in which Benjamin explores this constellation between weather, time, and outer-space in order to show how he instantiates a version of what he later describes as the Wartende’s stance towards the future by focusing on the dynamic figure of the cloud.

Kubin - Clouds - Scheerbart

For his wedding day in 1917, Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s “asteroid-novel”

Lesabéndio (1913) from Gershom Scholem. According to Scholem, this moment marked the first step in Benjamin’s ultimate “conversion” (Bekehrung) to the work of the recently deceased science fiction author.28 In order to appreciate the extent of this so-called

“conversion,” one need only step back to examine the imprint Scheerbart left across the broad span of Benjamin’s writings. Loosely scattered across the various corners of

Benjamin’s oeuvre, the name of this relatively obscure author emerges time and again. In a variety of notes, drafts, essays, reviews, and even one radio play, Benjamin returns to

Scheerbart primarily in connection with one of two texts: Lesabéndio and the manifesto

27 Benjamin writes of the hidden relation between weather, boredom, and the cosmos: “Nichts ist bezeichnender, als daß gerade diese innigste und geheimnisvollste Wirkung, die auf die Menschen vom Wetter ausgeht, der Kanevas ihres leersten Geschwätzes hat werden müssen.” Ibid. 28 In his memoir devoted to his friendship with Benjamin, Scholem writes, “Ich war damals schon ein großer Verehrer und Sammler der Schriften von Paul Scheerbart und schenkte ihnen zur Hochzeit mein Lieblingsbuch, seinen utopischen Roman Lesabéndio, der auf dem Planetoiden Pallas spielt und, mit Alfred Kubins Zeichnungen, eine Welt darstellt, in der die ‘wesentlichen’ menschlichen Eigenschaften durchaus verschoben sind. Damit began Benjamins Bekehrung zu Scheerbart, über dessen Buch er drei Jahre später einen großen, leider verlorenen Aufsatz Der wahre Politiker schrieb.” Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 52. 131

Glasarchitektur (1914)—the latter assuming a more prominent role in the 1930s as

Benjamin worked on the Arcades Project.29 In almost every case in which Benjamin invokes Scheerbart, one detects a sense of admiration. In a 1926 interview, Benjamin went so far as to single out Scheerbart among contemporary authors, stating that “[d]ie bemerkenswertesten Werke der deutschen Literatur sind nach wie vor die des vor nicht allzu langer Zeit verstorbenen Paul Scheerbart, obgleich sie beim breiten Publikum keinen Erfolg haben.”30

Benjamin’s great esteem for the relatively unknown author Scheerbart is also evidenced by his inclusion of the writer in another text which has unfortunately been lost.31 From approximately 1917-1920 Benjamin worked on a project which he generally referred to in letters as his “Politik.”32 As Uwe Steiner has summarized it, this early project signaled Benjamin’s attempt to “set down his thoughts regarding politics in a large-scale study.”33 From his correspondence and the remaining essays, drafts, and fragments of this project we know that Benjamin envisioned a three-part study centrally featuring a review of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918). The first two major sections,

29 In “Erfahrung und Armut” (1933), for example, Benjamin places Scheerbart at the helm of a cohort of modernists including such prominent figures as Bertolt Brecht, Adolf Loos, and Paul Klee, all of whom share in their work, according to Benjamin, a self-reflexive awareness of the difficulty of communicating or inheriting experience. For a description of the three reviews Benjamin wrote on Scheerbart (the second of which is missing and presumed to have been the version meant for the lost politics project), see the editor’s note: GS 2.3:1423. 30 GS 7.2:880. Benjamin gave this interview while in Russia. This quotation stems from a point in the discussion concerning the state of modern German literature. Immediately preceding his comments on Scheerbart, Benjamin laments what he regards as a paucity of good literature following the end of Expressionism. In the Moskauer Tagebuch, Benjamin recounts this interview, declaring that “kein anderer Autor habe so den revolutionären Charakter der technischen Arbeit herauszustellen gewußt” like Scheerbart (to which he adds in a parenthetical clause, “Es tut mir leid, daß ich diese gute Formel nicht in dem Interview zum Ausdruck brachte”). GS 6:368. 31 See the editor’s note: GS 2.3:1423. 32 GB 2:109. 33 Uwe Steiner, "The True Politician: Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Political," New German Critique, no. 83 (2001): 44. Steiner’s article offers an overview of the various influences on, and philosophical background of the project. 132

as Benjamin describes in a letter to Scholem, were to be titled “Der wahre Politiker” and

“Die wahre Politik,” with the latter consisting of two subsections, “Der Abbau der

Gewalt” and “Teleologie ohne Endzweck.”34 With the exception of “Der Abbau der

Gewalt”—a piece speculated to be nearly identical to the essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”

(1921)—the various titles all belie a clear Kantian influence, each echoing central terms derived from Kant’s essay “Zum ewigen Frieden” (1795) as well as the Kritik der

Urteilskraft (1790).35 Alongside Kant and Bloch, both of whom we can assume figured prominently in the politics project, Benjamin also planned to devote a section to

Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio, concluding his “Politik” with a reading of this text.36

This section takes as its point of departure a fragment of notes believed to have belonged to this final part of the lost politics project. In the fragment in question (which anticipates many of the ideas put forward in Convolute D), Benjamin offers us a vivid, albeit cryptic, intertextual illustration of the brand of hermeneutics that underlies his view of the possibility of utopia. In order to fully grasp the nuances of the schema he develops in this note, I read Benjamin’s comments alongside the two texts which he invokes in this fragment—Alfred Kubin’s Die andere Seite and Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio. Central to both of these novels is the motif of weather. Drawing on this shared thematic content,

Benjamin creates his own intertextual narrative in which Kubin’s and Scheerbart’s

34 The most complete description of the envisioned schema is found in a letter Benjamin wrote to Scholem: GB 2:54. Other references from which the broad outline of the project can be pieced together, include: GB 2:109, 119, 127, 177, and GB 3:9. 35 For a reading which focuses on the Kantian dimension of Benjamin’s politics, see Peter D Fenves, "The Political Counterpart to Pure Practical Reason: From Kant's Doctrine of Right to Benjamin's Category of Justice," in The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 36 Although there has been some confusion among scholars as to whether Benjamin intended to begin or end with a section on Scheerbart, the general consensus tends to favor the latter plan. For a brief discussion of the place of Scheerbart’s text within the politics project, again see Steiner, "The True Politician: Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Political," 61. 133

respective texts are imagined as counterpoints. Whereas Kubin’s novel is aligned with the earthly sphere (which requires overcoming), Scheerbart’s text is aligned with the possibility of an extraterrestrial, cosmic utopia. The clouded sky, meanwhile, forms the critical point of contact between these two spheres. The following begins by examining the earthly side of this dichotomy, focusing primarily on the role of Kubin’s novel in

Benjamin’s fragment. From Benjamin’s reading of this earthly sphere, we then follow his gaze as he turns it towards the clouds in order to imagine, with Scheerbart, the possibility of a utopia to come that lies radically beyond our earthly atmosphere in the furthest, fantastic reaches of outer space.

Although Kubin’s Die andere Seite (1909) and Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio (1913) were written only four years apart and fall into the same fantasy genre, Benjamin’s choice to connect the two also points to other less apparent relations between these two authors.37 The first-edition of Lesabéndio that Scholem gave to Benjamin was published with fourteen illustrations by Kubin, who today is best known for his work as a visual artist.38 Shortly after reading Lesabéndio, Benjamin read Kubin’s novel, most likely prompted by the collaboration he encountered between the two in the former text.39 In a note presumably belonging to the Scheerbart section of the politics project, Benjamin stages another encounter between these two writers by creating a complex intertextual

37 For an extensive analysis of the numerous connections between these two texts (but which only fleetingly touches on Benjamin’s fragment), see Clemens Brunn, Der Ausweg ins Unwirkliche: Fiktion und Weltmodell bei Paul Scheerbart und Alfred Kubin (Oldenburg: Igel, 2000). 38 The collaboration on Lesabéndio proved to be a decisive turning point in Kubin and Scheerbart’s friendship. As a result of Scheerbart’s immense displeasure with Kubin’s illustrations (which Scheerbart considered too anthropocentric for his asteroid novel), relations between the two were effectively broken off after this period. In the afterword to her translation of the text, Christina Svendsen offers a valuable overview of this pivotal disagreement, as well as ruminations on the stark contrast of visual styles between Kubin and Scheerbart, see Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel, trans. Christina Svendsen (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2012). 39 See Benjamin’s “Verzeichnis der gelesenen Schriften,” GS 7.1:441 134

montage in which different aspects of both of their novels converge through the trope of weather which they share:

Geld und Wetter (Zur Lesabéndio-Kritik)

Regen ist das Symbol des diesseitigen Mißgeschicks. Der Vorhang vor dem Drama des Weltunterganges Die verängstigende Erwartung der Sonne Das Hindurchblicken durch Wetter und Geld Einsinnige Bewegung gibt es in beiden nicht Der utopische Weltzustand ohne Wetter Das Wetter selbst eine Grenze für die Beziehung des Menschen zum apokalyptischen Weltzustand (Unwetter), Seligkeit (ohne Wetter, wolkenlos), das Geld bezeichnet einen andern, noch unbekannten Terminus. Regen, Gewitter: Weltuntergangsparade. Sie verhalten sich zu diesem wie ein Schnupfen zum Tode. Geld gehört mit Regen, nicht etwa mit Sonne zusammen. Der wetterlose Raum des reinen planetarischen Geschehens vor dem: Wetter der Schleier ist. Geld bei Kubin in der “Anderen Seite” genau wie Wetter.40

Drawing on imagery from Lesabéndio and Die Andere Seite, which are both explicitly named in this fragment, Benjamin delineates a set of dichotomies that can be loosely organized into the categories of the “this-worldly”—the “diesseitige,” the earthly—and opposite this realm, the other-wordly—the “Raum des reinen planetarischen

Geschehens.” On the earthly, this-worldly side, we have the spheres of weather and money, which Benjamin links with one another—“Geld gehört mit Regen,” “Regen ist das Symbol des diesseitigen Mißgeschicks.” Meanwhile, Benjamin attaches the other- worldly with the sun and the cosmos. Earthly misfortune, defined by money and weather, finds its counterpoint in a cosmological “pure” space devoid of these categories.

40 GS 4.2:941. The editors of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften speculate that Benjamin wrote this note “im Zusammenhang mit der Zweiten Lesabéndio-Kritik, die nach Scholem identisch ist mit dem in den Briefen mehrfach erwähnten verlorenen Essay über den wahren Politiker. Die folgenden Aufzeichnungen dürften von 1919 bis 1921 stammen.” Ibid. 135

Whatever the fractured status of this fragment, it should be noted that the fundamental schema outlined here remained vital enough to Benjamin for him to include a revised version of it for publication approximately nine years later in the Einbahnstraße (1928).

There, within a section entitled “Steuerberatung,” he writes: “Geld gehört mit Regen zusammen. Das Wetter selbst ist ein Index vom Zustande dieser Welt. Seligkeit ist wolkenlos, kennt kein Wetter. Es kommt auch ein wolkenloses Reich der vollkommenen

Güter, auf die kein Geld fällt.”41 Once again, Benjamin aligns (rainy) weather with money and identifies a realm (Reich) of bliss (Seligkeit) in opposition to this world

(dieser Welt), in which neither money nor weather obtains.

In the passage from Einbahnstraße, as well as in the fragment above, the weather stands at the center of Benjamin’s reflections. Weather functions not only as a sign through which the state of this world, the world that already exists, becomes legible

(“Das Wetter ist ein Index vom Zustande diseser Welt”), but also as as a negative sign against which the possibility of a different, utopic world to come becomes imaginable:

“Es kommt auch ein wolkenloses Reich,” “Der utopische Weltstand ohne Wetter”

(emphasis added). In both cases, on the side of the this-worldly and on the side of the other-worldly, what is or what could be pivots on the weather, that is to say, on its presence or its negation. But what exactly would be negated by the arrival of the utopian, cloudless state that Benjamin imagines? Benjamin describes the “this-worldly” as a sphere of money and weather, but why does he focus on these two categories in entertaining what utopia would overcome? Furthermore, why does he tie money and weather together?

41 GS 4.1:139. 136

In the final sentence of the fragment, Benjamin offers the clearest answer to the relation he espies between money and weather: “Geld bei Kubin in der ‘Anderen Seite’ genau wie Wetter.” This answer, of course, generates more questions, for the relationship between weather and money in Kubin’s Die andere Seite is anything but obvious.

However, let us assume this challenge and see what Kubin’s novel can teach us about the relation between weather and money, and thus also about the possibility of utopia, as

Benjamin sees it. Let us focus on those components of Kubin’s complicated novel most closely related to Benjamin’s notes and the question of utopia, omitting when possible irrelevant plot summary or other aspects extraneous to the purviews of our investigation.

Weather and Money

At the center of Kubin’s “phantastischer Roman” Die andere Seite stands a secret

“Traumreich,” variously referred to as a dream country or dreamland.42 The term dreamland, however, should not be equated with a utopic or idyllic space, as the unfolding of the story makes clear. Unknown to the rest of the world, this dream realm

42 Although it exceeds the limits of this chapter, much can and has been said about the fantastic style of Kubin’s novel. More sober and realistic than the magical realism of a Gabriel García Márquez, and also generally less absurd than the dark surrealism of a Kafka, Kubin exhibits a unique mix of fantasy and the mundane in Die andere Seite. His sober description of the Traumland, which is depicted as neither an imaginary nor mental state, but rather in a highly realistic manner, is exemplary in this regard. Kubin not only situates the Traumland in a specific geographical location (a remote region of Asia), but describes it from the perspective of a first-person narrator who consciously reflects with the reader on the strangeness of the scenes he periodically encounters. Not surprisingly, Kafka can be counted among the several contemporary admirers of the book, a list including such prominent figures as Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. For a useful exploration of the Kafka-Kubin connection, see Renate Neuhäuser, Aspekte des Politischen bei Kubin und Kafka: eine Deutung der Romane Die andere Seite und Das Schloss (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998). For more on the reception of Die andere Seite, as well as a worthwhile reading of the novel and its seminal place in the genre of fantasy—the text is often viewed as a precursor and sometimes as an early example of German symbolism, as well as surrealism— see Anneliese Hewig, Phantastische Wirklichkeit. Interpretationsstudie zu Alfred Kubins Roman "Die andere Seite" (München: Fink, 1967). For an analysis of Kubin’s particular deployment of the dream metaphoric throughout the novel, see Gabriele Brandstetter, "Das Verhältnis von Traum und Phantastik in Alfred Kubins Roman 'Die andere Seite'," in Phantastik in Literatur und Kunst, ed. Christian Werner Thomsen and Jens Malte Fischer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980). 137

(the creation of a mysterious multimillionaire named Patera) lies hidden behind massive walls in a secluded region of Asia. The key thought that informs the whole of the dreamland, we learn early in the novel, is a contempt for everything related to progress,

“alles Fortschrittliche.”43 This includes modern fashion, architecture, technology and especially science. Citizens of the dream country don old-fashioned clothes, photographers employ early nineteenth-century technologies, and antiques and old trinkets are found everywhere, lending the place a museum-like atmosphere.44 Within the

Traumreich, progress and time appear to have come to a halt. Pointing to these unique circumstances, an ambassador for the dream country, sent to secretly recruit new members, markets the place as a sanctuary for those unsatisfied with modern culture.45

As the Traumreich ambassador explains to potential residents, one should not confuse the impetus behind forming the dreamland with the desire to build “eine Utopie, eine Art

Zukunftsstaat.”46 On the contrary, utopia, a “future state” with its implications of change and progress, is antithetical to everything for which the dreamland stands.

The conservative, anti-utopian stagnancy of life characteristic in the dreamland is reflected in an important aspect of the novel’s fictional world that Benjamin places at the center of his notes: its weather. Bringing to mind Benjamin’s remark on the double meaning of the word temps in French, both time and weather are intimately related to one

43 Alfred Kubin, Die andere Seite: Ein phantastischer Roman (München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1968), 9. 44 To name just one example of the several given throughout the novel: “Es gibt überhaupt nur Altes, man lebt wie Großvater im Vormärz und pfeift auf den Fortschritt. Ja, mein Lieber, wir sind konservativ, unsere Handwerker sind Meister im Flicken und Ausbessern. In jedem Fünften Haus ein Antiquitätenladen; hier lebt man vom Trödel.” Ibid., 74. 45 The ambassador describes the Traumreidch as a “Freistätte für die mit der modernen Kultur Unzufriedenen.” Ibid., 9. 46 “Der Herr dieses Landes ist weit davon entfernt, eine Utopie, eine Art Zufkunftsstaat schaffen zu wollen.” Ibid. 138

another in Kubin’s novel. From the moment of entering into the dream realm, the first- person narrator repeatedly mentions the oddly monotonous gray weather which forms a permanent fixture of everyday life:

Im großen und ganzen war es hier ähnlich wie in Mitteleuropa und doch wiederum sehr verschieden! Ja, es gab eine Stadt, Dörfer, große Ländereien, einen Fluß und einen See, aber der Himmel, der sich darüber spannte, war ewig trübe; nie schien die Sonne, nie waren bei Nacht der Mond oder Sterne sichtbar. Ewig gleichmäßig hingen die Wolken bis tief zur Erde herab. Sie ballten sich wohl bei Stürmen, aber das blaue Firmament war uns allen verschlossen. [...]Ich habe tatsächlich während dieser Jahre die Sonne nicht ein einziges Mal gesehen.47

Above the dream realm clouds hover permanently as both the time and the weather of this sphere mirror one another in their static sameness. Akin to Benjamin’s description of the monotonous, boring quality which time assumes under the cover of rain, Kubin depicts a realm which hyperbolizes such conditions as time and weather are both fixed in a permanently gray state. The persistent, unrelenting clouds of the dreamland render not only the hours of the day “ebenmäßig,” as Benjamin puts it in his description of rainy weather in Convolute D, but exponentially increase this sensation of uniform, nebulous time as each hour of every day appears the same: “ewig trübe,” “ewig gleichmäßig.” In occluding the sight of the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the blue firmament of the sky, the everlasting blanket of clouds over the dream country intensifies the sense of isolation and inertia which typify this sphere. Already detached from the rest of the earth through its hidden location and gigantic walls, the dream realm finds itself further separated from the celestial beings in the sky and all of their visible movements—the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, as well as the shifting of the constellations. Instead of movement and change, Kubin depicts an earthly realm

47 Ibid., 49. 139

ruled by consistency and sameness, a realm of the “diesseitige,” to speak with Benjamin, in which both time and the weather remain generally constant.

At the end of the passage above, the narrator describes the gathering of the clouds during storms, “sie ballten sich wohl bei Stürmen.” This detail offers us a useful image for understanding the peculiar mode of stagnancy and consistency which suffuses the

Traumreich. The dreamland in Kubin’s Die andere Seite is not inert to the point that nothing ever takes place within this sphere. The plot of the story is in fact driven in rather straightforward fashion by the chronological series of events that transpire to the narrator during his time living in this place. But despite such everyday occurrences, the dreamland on the whole, like the clouds that hover above the sky, remains relatively unchanged.

Despite meteorological and temporal fluctuations (events), the dreamland remains by and large stable. No substantial changes occur in the sky and time never seems to progress beyond the historical period (sometime in the early 19th century) in which it is mired.

Read in the context of Benjamin’s cryptic critique of the “diesseitige” of Kubin’s novel, as well as in connection with his discussion of boredom and the possibility of a “great deed” that opens when time loses its linear, teleological structure, Kubin’s Traumreich seems to indicate a state on the precipice of such a temporal revolutionary break. In both the spheres of weather and time that structure the dream realm, the possibility of something completely different, indeterminable and immeasurable occurring—change in a more fundamental, not a superficial sense—would, however, seem to necessitate a more profound rupture in either the meteorological or temporal orders, one which would not simply be recuperable as a version of the same.

140

Money, the other category which Benjamin places at the center of his notes on

Kubin’s novel, appears to signal yet another self-contained, homogenous sphere which utopia would undo. Not surprisingly, money exhibits many of the same core features which characterize weather and time within the dream realm. The case of money in Die andere Seite is exemplary, however, insofar as it elucidates the relations of calculability, causality, and reciprocity which a revolutionary break would have to confront in terms not only of the society it might envision, but also more fundamentally, in the very structure it would have to combat in setting the way for something entirely “new,” and hence categorically unpredictable.

In keeping with the antiquated way of life, the money of the Traumreich consists primarily of old coinage: Kreuzer, Gulden, and occasionally pieces of gold.48 Due to the lack of a single currency, not to mention a modern one which might serve as a stabilizing reference point, prices of goods fluctuate wildly and are generally unfixed within the dream realm. This monetary instability contributes to the dreamland’s bargaining economy. New citizens of the dreamland attempt to exploit this situation, by any means possible, as the narrator describes: “Taschenspieler waren sie alle ein wenig, und auch ich lernte bald manchen schönen Kniff. Aufs Mundwerk kam das meiste an. Dem Gegner etwas vorzutäuschen, das war der Witz.49 This capitalist zeal, however, eventually wanes as each newcomer discovers the strange difficulty of accuring wealth over a longer term within the dreamland. Inexplicably, and to the narrator’s astonishment, economic

48 Upon entering the Traumreich each newcomer receives a sum of welcome money. The narrator expresses surprise at the oudated dominations of money he and his wife are given: “Wir bemerkten da erst zu unserem Erstaunen, daß ich Kreuzer und Gulden in der Tasche hatte – auch ein Röllchen Gold war dabei.” Ibid., 45-46. 49 Ibid., 61. 141

transactions have a mysterious way of balancing themselves out in the Traumreich to the extent that nobody holds the upper hand for long. For example, after haggling an advantageous deal at a store, the narrator returns home to tell his wife of his success.

Upon recounting his triumph he finds that his wife has also recently returned from shopping, and due to an inordinate increase in prices was forced to expend the precise amount he had just saved.50 The gain acquired in the first transaction is offset and effectively negated by the second. Another example of this peculiar transaction- countertransaction mechanism which inexplicably governs all economic relations within the dream world is captured in the sudden appearance of bill collectors at the narrator’s door demanding payment for goods never purchased. Making matters stranger and more frustrating yet, such bill collectors often come accompanied by false witnesses, rendering contestation futile and payment inescapable.51 All in all, these perplexing economic events make it impossible for the citizens of the dreamland to accrue or accumulate wealth long term as any savings or profits garnered are eventually, seemingly without reason, balanced out by countertransactions. As the narrator writes, money does not contain the same “real” value within the dreamland as in the outside world since nobody is able to collect or hold onto it for long: “Die ganze Geldwirtschaft war ‘symbolisch.’

Wieviel einer besaß, wußte er nie. Es wurde Geld gebracht, wieder geholt, man gab aus und nahm ein.”52

In the “Geld und Wetter” fragment, Benjamin appears to indicate precisely this action-reaction, cause and effect relation when he writes that there is no uni-directional

50 Ibid., 62-63. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 61. 142

movement in either money or weather: “Einsinnige Bewegung gibt es in beiden nicht.”53

The constant exchange of money in Kubin’s Traumreich leads to a dizzying turnover in the dreamlanders’ economic positions, which are seemingly always in flux and yet simultaneously relatively constant—always hovering near equilibrium:

Der Wechsel von Glück und Unglück, Armut und Reichtum war ein viel rascherer als in der übrigen Welt. Fortwährend überstürzten sich die Geschehnisse. Aber ging auch alles noch so sehr drunter und drüber, man fühlte eine starke Hand. Hinter den scheinbar unbegreiflichsten Zuständen witterte man ihre verborgene Kraft. Sie war die geheimnisvolle Ursache, daß sich dabei alles halten konnte und nicht ins Bodenlose stürzte. Es war das große Schicksal, das über uns allen wachte. Eine ungeheuerliche, bis ins Verborgene dringende Gerechtigkeit, glich es alle Ereignisse wieder aus.54

These lines bring into focus the connection between weather and money in Kubin’s novel. Like the generally constant (gleichmäßig) clouds over the dream realm, money has a peculiar way of balancing itself out (ausgleichen), of offsetting and remaining even within this sphere. Because every transaction automatically generates a countertransaction, every input an output and vice versa, the monetary sphere in Die andere Seite accentuates what we can describe as a fundamental “andere Seite” logic—a structure of reciprocity and symmetry which underpins the system of monetary exchange in the dreamland and beyond. The “Gerechtigkeit” of economic symmetry that mysteriously governs economic affairs within the dreamland is not a justice that does away with class distinctions, i.e. it is not a Marxist form of justice. Nor does this

“Gerechtigkeit” indicate a sphere without money, as Benjamin imagines in the “Wetter und Geld” fragment. Instead, this “Gerechtigkeit” indicates the justice of monetary law

(Recht), a “justice” in which input on one side of the ledger book demands an equal

53 GS 4.2:941. 54 Kubin, Die andere Seite: Ein phantastischer Roman, 61-62. 143

expenditure of output. In other words, the “justice” which presides over the dream realm is one of reciprocity, of an equalizing force between debtor and debtee, between buyer and seller, in which each exchange is inscribed into a circular flow of giving and receiving. Each payment, each transaction anticipates and predetermines a counter transaction, as each is inscribed within an economy of exchange and circulation that always involves a notion of return.55

Stuck in the meteorological and monetary economies of exchange, of transactions that only generate counter-transactions, of weather that only generates more weather, the question becomes if there is any possibility of escape, of something completely indeterminable, incalculable that could lead us outside of, beyond such economies of reciprocity and exchange.56 In other words, is there any hope for change that is not simply ex-change, for change that might radically extricate us from the circular flow of causal time (which never breaks with what preceded or predetermined it) or from the similarly stagnant, insular spheres of weather and money?

In the “Wetter und Geld” fragment, Benjamin speaks to this possibility of breaking with circular, continuous time when he evokes the apocalyptic “Weltuntergang” anticipated by rain and storms: “Regen, Gewitter: Weltuntergangsparade. Sie verhalten

55 My reading of the treatment of money in Kubin’s novel and the circular (stagnant) structure of exchange that it implies draws heavily on, is greatly indebted to Derrida’s discussion of money and the gift in Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). As Derrida notes at one point in this text, at the heart of the notion of economy lies the “idea of exchange, of circulation,” and perhaps most importantly in view of Kubin’s novel, “of return” (6). 56 For a reading which similarly approaches the question in Benjamin’s writing of breaking such an economy of exchange (and which indicrectly touches on his description of a “good” which is pure, absolutely beyond money and weather—the “wolkenloses Reich der vollkommenen Güter, auf die kein Geld fällt.”) see Fenves’s analysis of what he describes as Benjamin’s interest in the “good right of goods” in Fenves, "The Political Counterpart to Pure Practical Reason: From Kant's Doctrine of Right to Benjamin's Category of Justice." 144

sich zu diesem wie ein Schnupfen zum Tode.”57 Beyond the clearly theological, messianic overtones of this description, Benjamin’s invocation of the Weltuntergang also points directly to Kubin’s novel, the third and longest part of which is entitled “Der

Untergang des Traumreiches.” In this section of the novel, Kubin meticulously describes in pseudo-religious imagery the downfall of the dreamland.58 While the Untergang of the

Traumreich can be traced on the level of plot to the series of changes which an outsider, an American comically named Herkules Bell instigates—these changes include monetary reform through the mass introduction of gold, the formation of political parties, and a failed revolution—it is made clear to the reader that the destruction of the dreamland does not come from without, but within. The narrator describes a type of “inner destruction”

(innere Zerstoerung) which underlies the collapse of buildings, streets, the social order and ultimately the dreamland as a whole.59 Even Herkules Bell, the outsider, is no longer distinguishable by the end of the story from the creator and ruler of the dreamland,

Patera.60

For one fleeting, critical moment in the self-destruction of the dreamland, however, the possibility for a relation to the “other-worldly,” to something completely different reveals itself as the clouds disperse at the climax of the dreamland’s

57 GS 4.2:941. 58 Examples of this include an epidemic sleep that sweeps over the country (178); the overrunning of the dreamland by animals (181); and a general chaos and plague (221) that leads to mass death (222). The various religious references and influences (both Christian and Eastern) in Kubin’s description of the Traumreich’s Untergang are examined in Hellmuth Petriconi, Das Reich des Untergangs: Bemerkungen über ein mythologisches Thema (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1958). 59Kubin, Die andere Seite: Ein phantastischer Roman, 187. 60 Near the end of the existence of the Traumreich a great battle between Patera and Herkules Bell ensues. In this battle, the two figures eventually become indistinguishable from one another as Patera and Herkules Bell merge into a strange “Doppelwesen” (200). 145

“Untergang.” As the dreamland sinks, engulfed into an abyss opened in the earth, the perpetual cloud banks begin to recede:

Bald wurde es heller, eine große glänzende Scheibe war am Himmel, unzählige glimmende Pünktchen überdeckten das dunkelblaue Firmament. […] Es waren der Mond und die Sterne … Seit drei Jahren hatte ich diesen Anblick entbehrt, fast vergessen hatte ich die große Welt über uns, und ich mußte mich dem Eindruck dieses unendlich hohen Himmels eine Weile willenlos hingeben. Eine scharfe Kälte drang mir in die Knochen, und ich blickte fröstelnd hinab. Die weite Wolkenbank, der Himmel des Traumreichs, hatte sich gesenkt.61

The possibility of connecting to the other-worldly, to the completely “other side” of interplanetary space—the “Raum des reinen planetarischen Geschehens vor dem: Wetter der Schleier ist”—becomes most acute at this moment, which is also the point at which

Lesabéndio, and its interstellar universe, comes most closely into contact with Kubin’s

Die Andere Seite.62 If Lesabéndio gives us to think the radically utopian, titular “other side” of Kubin’s novel, then Kubin begins to teach us how to relate to this alien other, or at the very least to where we should begin to look in the hopes of perceiving it: towards the clouds and the sky which both occlude the possibility of a completely other, alien space, and simultaneously compel us to think the possibility of something different to come for precisely this reason.

According to Benjamin’s reading, rain and thunderstorms—those minor fluctuations in weather and time that occur in the dream realm—function as harbingers of an even greater event: the final, all-encompassing apocalyptic storm which would transform everything: “Regen, Gewitter: Weltuntergangsparade. Sie verhalten sich zu diesem wie ein Schnupfen zum Tode.”63 As diluted, weak prefigurations of such a world-

61 Ibid., 258. 62 GS 4.2:941. 63 Ibid. 146

changing, eschatological event, the minor meteorological catastrophes of rain and thunderstorms relate to the Weltuntergang the way sniffling does to death: as wet indicators of a potentially cataclysmic occurrence that would mark the end of the current order and spell the beginning of something entirely new. Bliss (Seligkeit), the weatherless, cloudless state of pure planetary interrelation to come becomes dimly visible, that is to say, legible in these moments of “bad weather,” “Unwetter”: “Das

Wetter selbst eine Grenze für die Beziehung des Menschen zum apokalyptischen

Weltzustand (Unwetter), Seligkeit (ohne Wetter, wolkenlos).”64

The common German word Benjamin uses which can be translated as “bad weather,” can be more literally rendered as “non-weather” or “un-weather,” “Un-wetter.”

In this term, the distinction between weather (of which “bad weather” is necessarily a subcategory) and the weatherless begins to unhinge. Simultaneously “bad weather” and

“non-weather,” the literal and tropological meanings of “Unwetter” unsettle one another, revealing a rhetorical and conceptual complicity between the two terms. The weatherless sphere of interplanetary action draws on the meteorological (the apocalyptic storm) to give shape and thought to its own, absolutely negative, alien existence. At the same time, the possibility of an entirely other weatherless dimension is called into question by the weak negativity of an “un” in “un-weather” which does not undo. Weather and “un- weather” (Unwetter), are not opposites, but as a “bad” modality of weather, a moment of weather gone awry or astray, Unwetter indicates a moment of alterity and deviation within the spectrum of the meteorological, not outside of or beyond it.

64 Ibid. 147

And yet, although we seem to have hardly moved beyond the earthly,

“diesseitige” sphere from which we began, we begin to suspect that precisely at this moment of ambivalence demarcated by “un-weather,” of weather’s trying to transcend and negate itself (at the moments of the clouds of the dream world balling up into storm clouds) while always recoiling into its own condition of possibility (or impossibility if you will), that we come closest to approaching the radically alien, unknown sphere of utopia. The un-settling “un” which disallows us to un-think weather when we imagine the weatherless, also productively alienates us from the stable conceptual categories between the earthly and the alien that a transparent use of language would afford. Weather as “un- weather” indicates a stormy moment of un-grounding in which nature, like a cloud, begins to drift away from itself in order to reveal the faint possibility of something else.

The rhetorical undecidability of the term, that is to say, the inability to choose or prioritize the destructive side of Unwetter as a mode of negation, or the positive side of

Unwetter as a form of weather, holds open in difference the potentiality of a completely other to come that would complete the Weltuntergang, but it does so from the side of the

“this-worldly,” the only world from which the possibility of something other-worldly is thinkable.

In the “Theologisch-Politisches Fragment,” a text thought by some to have been written around this same period,65 the importance of the category of Unwetter, and weather in general, for Benjamin’s political thinking comes even sharper into focus when

65 There is intense debate concerning the date of origin of the “Theologisch-Politisches Fragment,” as Adorno retroactively named the text. While many, including Scholem and Rolf Tiedemann, argue that it was most likely written in conjunction with the politics project—a view which the mention of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, and other language from the text would seem to substantiate—Adorno held firm to his view that it stemmed from late in Benjamin’s life. For more, see the editor’s comments: GS 2.3:946- 949. 148

we consider the prominent role he attributes to nature—specifically its destructive side— in contemplating the possibility of a messianic sphere to come. In the eternal, persistent flux of nature, its constant passing (Vergängnis), mankind acquires a glimpse, according to Benjamin, into a dimension that is instructive for a politics that would orient itself, however weakly, towards the possibility of a messianic (or perhaps even utopian) sphere to come: “Denn messianisch ist die Natur aus ihrer ewigen und totalen Vergängnis. Diese zu erstreben, auch für diejenigen Stufen des Menschen, welche Natur sind, ist die

Aufgabe der Weltpolitik, deren Methode Nihilismus zu heißen hat.”66 In the destructive, negative “un” of Unwetter we acquire a prime example of the sort of dynamic, nihilistic method that “Weltpolitik,” in the figural but also the literal sense, should adopt in order to prepare the way—to the degree that this is at all possible—for the non-place that is utopia. The possibility of such a non-place, it seems, becomes particularly palpable for

Benjamin in the un-eventful natural sphere of weather, a sphere often considered so boring that one would rarely look towards it in considering the limits separating us from the outlandish sphere of utopia. In an affirmative revaluation of the notion of destruction intimated in instances of Unwetter, Benjamin assesses in the “Wetter und Geld” fragment what we can consider to be the pendant position to the “boring” character of weather— the intrinsic potential that something unpredictable, cataclysmic, world-changing might occur from within this sphere. But in order to reach a state of cloudless, weatherless

“bliss” (Seligkeit), the weather must first be undone. As Benjamin famously writes at one point in the Arcades Project, “Die ‘Konstruktion’ setzt die ‘Destruktion’ voraus”: destruction is a precondition, a prerequisite for construction.67 Destruction not only clears

66 GS 2.1:204. 67 GS 5.1:587. 149

the way for something “new” to come, but as a potentiating force also opens possibilities, perhaps unforeseen or even unforeseeable ones. In his engagement with Paul Scheerbart’s novel Lesabéndio, a text which gives the term “Weltpolitik” new meaning, Benjamin explores further the political possibilities opened by the destructive side of nature.

Lesabéndio and Utopia

Benjamin’s focus on weather, and in particular Unwetter in “Wetter und Geld” as a sphere of utopian hope reflects not only the apocalyptic end of Kubin’s novel, which it explicitly invokes, but also points to the other text central to this fragment and

Benjamin’s larger engagement with utopian politics: Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio. In a remarkable coincidence, both Kubin’s and Scheerbart’s respective fantasy novels contain climactic scenes of destruction and change captured in the image of clouds violently dissolving in order to give way for something new—the results of which we, importantly, do not receive a clear picture of in either text. However, whereas the dissipation of the clouds in Die andere Seite occurs almost as a side effect, as a consequence of the self-destruction of the dream realm, in Lesabéndio the entire plot of the story orients itself rather single-mindedly towards a cloud, specifically the cloud which hovers above and sets a limit around the fictional planet Pallas.

Like almost everything in Scheerbart’s extremely alienating “asteroid novel,” the cloud that hovers above Pallas is unlike any cloud known on earth. This cloud functions not only as the planet’s primary source of light, effectively assuming the role of Pallas’

150

sun, but in shape it is often compared to a spider web.68 The “Spinngewebewolke,” as it is referred to throughout most of the novel, consists of “Trillionen feinster

Spinngewebefäden, die sich durcheinander spannen, ohne sich zu verwickeln und verknoten.”69 By day a light source for Pallas, at night the same spider-web-like cloud darkens and comes down to enshroud the planet, obstructing from sight the majority of the outside universe.70 Crucial for the story, this strange cloud that floats over Pallas hinders the Pallasians from knowing what lies beyond the sphere of their planet—a feature which directly connects the cloud in Lesabéndio to the eternal cloud bank over

Kubin’s Traumreich. The desire to know what lies on the mysterious other side of the cloud, and also what the cloud itself is, forms the main plot of the novel.

At the beginning of the book, Lesabéndio, the eponymous hero of Scheerbart’s book, wonders whether the planet Pallas on which he lives is in fact also a two-star system like others he has recently observed. After investigating this hypothesis with some fellow Pallasians, Lesabéndio discovers that a second planet indeed lies on the other side of the cloud over their planet. Spurred by this discovery, he devises the plan to create an enormous tower that would reach beyond the cloud miles above. This plan poses major difficulties as the “Spinngewebewolke” exerts a strong repulsive force, an “abstoßende

Kraft” that the tower would have to overcome.71 Although neither Lesabéndio nor the other Pallasians know precisely what might happen were this plan to succeed, the

68 “Der eigentliche Lichtspender ist aber auf dem Pallas nicht die Sonne, sondern eine weiße große Wolke, die hoch über dem Nordtrichter befindlich ist.” Paul Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Thomas Bürk, Joachim Körber, and Uli Kohnle (Linkenheim: Phantasia, 1988), 302. 69 Ibid., 307. 70 “Währenddem wurde oben die Wolke immer dunkler und senkte sich dann mit ungeheurer Schnelligkeit hinab – und machte Nacht auf dem Pallas, indem sie sich um den ganzen Tonnenstern herumwickelte; nut unter dem Südtrichter ließ sie eine freie Aussicht in den Weltenraum übrig.” Ibid., 307. 71 “Unsere Leuchtwolke oben hat abstoßende Kraft. Wie wärs, wenn wir nun diese abstoßende Kraft überwänden, indem wir noch höhere Türme bauten?” Ibid., 305. 151

Pallasians repeatedly speculate on the seemingly endless possibilities that such a project might open. Biba, one of the Pallasians, summarizes this view: “über unsrer

Spinngewebewolke ist schlechterdings ‘Alles’ möglich.”72

In order to realize this lofty goal and whatever it may entail, however, Lesabéndio must first convince his fellow Pallasians of the need to direct the entire planet’s resources and every Pallasian’s focus towards this single, enormous project. The difficulty in uniting the various figures of the planet with their disparate constructive and artistic agendas—almost all the Pallasians harbor their own, particular ideas of how best to decorate, reconstruct, or alter the planet—forms a central motif of the novel. In a number of scenes, the Pallasians discuss the necessity of their collectively focusing on

Lesabéndio’s plan. In a passage which Benjamin cites more than once in connection with the question of “newness” (Neuheit),73 Lesabéndio speaks of the possibly energizing effects of orienting oneself completely towards a single, distant goal:

“Ihr seid alle so müde – und zwar nur deshalb, weil Ihr nicht alle Eure Gedanken um einen einzigen ganz einfachen, aber ganz großartigen Plan konzentriert.

72 Ibid., 331. In the same conversation, Biba adds, “‘Was dann kommt,’ versetzte lachend der Biba, ‘wenn der Turm gebaut ist, das wissen wir nicht – das werden wir aber wissen, wenn wir ihn gebaut haben.’” Ibid., 331. 73 In “Erfahrung und Armut,” Benjamin invokes this line while describing the impoverishment of modern experience, or, more specifically, the general disinterest among modern people in having new experiences because of the prevailing sentiment that everything has been done before: “Sie haben das alles ‘gefressen’, ‘die Kultur’ und den ‘Menschen’ und sie sind übersatt daran geworden und müde. Niemand fühlt sich mehr als sie von Scheerbarts Worten betroffen: ‘Ihr seid alle so müde - und zwar nur deshalb, weil Ihr nicht alle Eure Gedanken Um einen ganz einfachen aber ganz großartigen Plan konzentriert.’” GS 2.1:218. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin recalls this line twice more. In one instance, he notes, as the editors (have probably incorrectly transcribed it), “Das Nein als Gegensatz zum ‘Planmäßigen’ zu fassen. Über den Plan ist Scheerbarts ‘Lesabéndio’ zu vergleichen: wir sind alle so müde, weil wir keinen Plan haben.”GS 5.2:696. And, in a later note, he writes “das Neue als Gegensatz zum Planmäßigen,” which is suggestively placed next to the comment “Bild und Destruktion in der Geschichte.” GS 5.2:1210. The comparison of these two citations, in addition to the context of the first quotation which appears surrounded by citations dealing with newness (Neuheit), allows one to make a case for reading the first citation not as “Das Nein” but as “Das Neue.” In both cases, as in the “Erfahrung und Armut” essay, therefore, Benjamin places the “Planmäßig” into relation with the question of “newness,” a relation which becomes clearer when we consider the trajectory of this “plan” and the way “newness” plays a role in the novel. Interestingly, the confusion between “das Nein” and “das Neue” exhibits precisely what is at stake here: the relation between negation and newness which lies at the heart at the possibility of utopia. 152

Solche Konzentration macht ganz allein wieder frisch, wenn auch die Ausführbarkeit noch in weiter Ferne liegt. Ihr verzettelt Euch.” Lesabéndio hatte kein Atelier, aber er war dafür bekannt, daß er immer nur einen so einfachen Plan mit sich herumführte, daß für den ein Atelier garnicht nötig wurde.74

In these lines, we acquire one sense of the political import of Lesabéndio for Benjamin’s thinking of the possibility of utopia, a connection which once led Benjamin to conclude that the planet Pallas was the “beste aller Welten,” a claim he intended to prove in the lost politics project.75 On Pallas, all the inhabitants of the planet eventually adopt

Lesabéndio’s single, “großartigen Plan” to build a tower. As a collective, they join together to follow the map, the image that Lesabéndio lays out. This unified concentration towards the same goal stands in sharp contrast to the lack of “einsinnige

Bewegung” in the spheres of weather and money, as described in “Wetter und Geld” fragment.76 Instead of Kubin’s stagnant, non-progressive world in which weather, money, and time never appear to lead anywhere new or unexpected—a realm in which each action predetermines the next and is inextricably entwined within circular temporal and meterological economies of exchange—in Lesabéndio Scheerbart imagines a very different fantasy world in which the entire planet joins together to move in one direction: towards the cloud above.

This singular concentration of the Pallasians towards Lesabéndio’s “großartigen

Plan” is not entirely unrelated to the image-less, orientationless mode of orientation that

Benjamin investigates in his writings on boredom. In fact, the possibility of a “große

Tat,” perhaps even a revolutionary one that cannot be imagined or calculated in advance

74 Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke, 328. 75 In a letter to Scholem from November 23, 1919, Benjamin describes his intention to demonstrate in his “zweite Lesabéndio-Kritik […] daß der Pallas die beste aller Welten sei.” GB 2:54. 76 GS 7.1:441. 153

forms a central point of Lesabéndio’s “großartigen Plan,” for none of the Pallasians know precisely what will happen when the tower is completed and they have reached their intermediary goal—the cloud, the meteorological “Grenze” between the “diesseitige” and the other-worldly that Benjamin describes in “Wetter und Geld.” As Benjamin notes in his first “Lesabéndio-Kritik” (which was presumably written around the same time as

“Wetter und Geld”), only in the act of tower building does it become “immer deutlicher” to the Pallasians “wozu der Turm dient. Er dient der Vereinigung von Kopf- und

Rumpfsystem des Asteroiden Pallas, der Wiederbelebung des Sterns durch die Auflösung

Lesabéndios in dem vereinten Doppelgestirn.”77 Oriented towards the cloud (an intermediary destination) and thereby to the larger, murky hope of possibly reconnecting the planets with one another, the tower project nonetheless lacks a determinate, specific destination from the outset, as Benjamin reemphasizes in his French review of the novel from the late 1930s: “A l’origine cette construction n’a pas de destination précise.”78 It is only after construction has already begun that the tower’s purpose begins to manifest itself. But even once this purpose begins to come into view—that the tower should serve to “réunir le torse de l’astéroide à sa partie capitale qui plane, sous forme d’un nuage lumineux, au-dessus de lui,”—the Pallasians importantly still lack a clear outline of precisely how this should occur.79 Lesabéndio’s “großartigen Plan,” we might say, reaches a limit, a vanishing point at the place where Lesabéndio himself is expected by some to dissolve, to disappear.

77 GS 2.2:619. 78 GS 2.2:631. 79 Ibid. 154

In Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio, the cloud, as an obstruction separating the two planets from one another, once again plays the familiar role of a threshold separating two spheres: what is from what could be; weather from the weatherless; this world, the known world from an unknown, perhaps constitutively unknowable utopian sphere: “Der wetterlose Raum des reinen planetarischen Geschehens vor dem: Wetter der Schleier ist.”80 Oriented towards the cloud at the limits of Pallas, the tower in Lesabéndio symbolizes a mode of (non-)direction that Benjamin would later identify with that of the

Wartende and with Langeweile: a peculiarly unoriented type of orientation insofar as it contains the seeds for its own undoing, orienting itself towards nothing concrete and thus simultaneously not orienting itself, giving us to think the limits of orientation as it drifts into its opposite.

Near the end of the novel, as the Pallasians raise the last segments of the tower and at last come into contact with the cloud above, achieving their intermediate aims, the story reaches a climax. At the moment that the tower finally touches the mysterious cloud, a violent storm ensues. In this scene of Unwetter, the “Grenze” separating Pallas from a “wetterlose Raum des reinen planetarischen Geschehens,” becomes porous, opening the way for the reunification of Pallas with its twin planet, or whatever other world-changing events might follow:

Die Spitzen der Stangen berührten die Wolke, und die Wolke begann zu zittern. Ein furchtbarer Donner wurde hörbar. Und die ganze Wolke begann, an den Rändern zu blitzen. Danach gab es einen Knall. Und die Mitte der Wolke, die ganz dunkelviolett leuchtete, bekam plötzlich einen Riß, der gelb aussah und unregelmäßig wurde. […] Dann entstanden in der Mitte der Wolke immer mehr Risse. […]Danach riß das Mittelstück der Wolke ganz und gar auseinander. Und die violetten äußeren Teile traten weit zurück, und die ganze dunkelviolette Wolke trat immer weiter zurück und bildete einen dunkelviolett leuchtenden unregelmäßig gebildeten Ring. Und wo früher die Wolke war, sah man jetzt nur

80 GS 4.2:941. 155

ein wogendes Lichtmeer von gelben großen Schlangenleibern, die auch leuchteten.81

The fissures and holes which open in the cloud in this thunderous scene mark it as a moment of Unwetter in the double sense: as both an instance of severe weather, and as a possible break within the sphere of weather itself. In this tempestuous image, the weather dynamically begins to undo itself, freeing the space for something completely alien and unforeseeable, that is to say, for something on the far side of the cloudy limit which demarcates the outermost region of the “this-worldly” sphere. Interestingly, both the tears in the cloud and the ring which it ultimately dissolves into are described as

“unregelmäßig.” This suggests—in contrast to the high degree of symmetry and regularity characteristic of the “diesseitige” as captured in Kubin’s Traumreich—that this is no regular, routine, predetermined or regulated break, that is to say, no minor meteorological fluctuation or event. Instead, as an opening onto the unknown, this radical, asymmetrical break appears to indicate a moment of alterity and change that exceeds all preexisting rules or standards (Regel) of measure (mäßig derived from Maß, measure). From this point of view, one might describe this rupture as a moment not of transition—there would seem to be no continuity between what preceded this unprecedented event and what might follow—but of a revolutionary leap in which old orders and measures are superceded, exceeded by something entirely new.

But again, even at this seemingly revolutionary, earth-shattering juncture of venturing into the unknown and departing from what was the status quo, the possibility of a new world is inextricably entangled within the very categories and events from which it attempts to extricate itself. The irregularity and radical asymmetry implied by a totally

81 Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke, 507-08. 156

unpredictable rupture, an irregular, unanticipatable moment of change occurs in direct relation (can only be measured in comparison to) the regularity, the “Regelmäßigkeit” from which it ostensibly departs. Once again we have the case of an “un-” in the

“Unregelmäßigkeit” of this “Unwetter” that can only undo insofar as it negates (and thus unwillingly reaffirms) the very condition that it seeks to overcome and escape. The possibility of something entirely new, of a revolutionary leap only becomes legible or imaginable when read in context, compared with, placed in some sort of relation to that which it attempts to negate or alter. And yet, despite this performative contradiction,

Benjamin emphasizes in the first “Lesabéndio-Kritik” that Scheerbart’s text affords us a

“utopische[s] Bild.”82 What leads Benjamin to such an apparently grandiose claim? What is utopian about the image that Scheerbart gives us? Indeed, how should we even understand this term, “das utopische Bild,” given Benjamin’s larger stance on the impossibility of creating an image of or predetermining utopia?

“Das Utopische Bild”: Technology, Language, Humor

In order to understand the extent to which Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio affords us a “utopian image,” as Benjamin puts it, it is necessary to keep in mind the fundamental ambivalence, the simultaneous impossibility and possibility of a revolutionary break with the old that moments of negativity such as “Unwetter” disclose. In “Wetter und Geld,” Benjamin appears at first sight to set up a strict oppositional relation between weather and a weatherless, utopian sphere of Seligkeit, with Unwetter occupying the pivotal threshold position separating these two categories. As we have proposed by focusing on instances

82 GS 2.2:619. 157

of Unwetter in Kubin’s and Scheerbart’s respective novels, the borders between these two supposedly opposed spheres are less well-defined and more nebulous than they might seem. In both novels, the clouded sky marks the limit of what can be seen or known.

Benjamin plays with this image in considering the limits of our ability to imagine a utopian sphere on the far side of the visible, the sensible, and the intelligible—an act of leave-taking that always seems to recoil back onto that from which it attempts to depart.

It is therefore important to note that in describing the image of utopia that Lesabéndio gives us, Benjamin does not write of an “image of utopia,” a “Bild der Utopie,” as though utopia were something that could be prefigured or depicted by an image, for example, if the Pallasians were to know in advance what lies for them on the other side of the cloud above their planet. Instead, Benjamin writes of “the utopian image” (“das utopische

Bild”) that the novel imparts: the image itself is in some way utopian, so it would seem.

The “utopian image” that Lesabéndio affords us must be viewed in line with what

Benjamin views as Scheerbart’s revaluation of technology and language as non- instrumental, i.e. non-exploitative media—a theme that Benjamin returns to throughout the 1930s in discussing the author and his “asteroid novel.” Like almost everything else in the extremely foreign, alien world of Lesabéndio, Scheerbart estranges both technology and language from how they are conventionally viewed as mediating tools in his depiction of life on Pallas, according to Benjamin’s reading.83 In the aforementioned interview, in which Benjamin lauds Scheerbart as a standout within the contemporary

83 Benjamin explicitly comments on the extent of alienation that pervades Lesabéndio in his essay “Erfahrung und Armut” (1933). In stark contrast to Jules Verne, whose texts portray “kleine französische oder englische Rentner im Weltraum,” Scheerbart’s characters are not humans “denn die Menschenähnlichkeit - diesen Grundsatz des Humanismus - lehnen sie ab.”. Benjamin’s assessment is convincing, especially when one considers that there are no earthlings at all in Lesabéndio, and the earth is only mentioned twice (near the very beginning of the novel). GS 2.2:216. 158

scene of German litertature, Benjamin describes the singular focus towards the tower project and the changes it might enact as a specifically technological mode of concentration, echoing a motif which also explicitly recurs throughout the novel as the artistic endeavours of the Pallasians are put on hold in favor of the tower-building project. Drawing a direct connection between the role of technology in Lesabéndio and the possibility of utopia, Benjamin states the following in the interview:

Scheerbarts Bücher sind utopische kosmologische Romane, in denen dem Problem der interplanetaren Beziehungen nachgespürt wird und Menschen als Schöpfer von Maschinen und Erschaffer einer idealen Technik dargestellt werden. Die Romane sind durchdrungen vom Pathos der Technik, von dem für die Literatur ganz und gar neuen und ungewohnten Pathos der Maschine, das indes weit davon entfernt ist, soziale Bedeutung aufzuweisen, weil die Helden Scheerbarts die Weltharmonie anstreben und das Erschaffen von Maschinen für sie nicht aus ökonomischen Gründen wichtig ist, sondern als Beweis für gewisse ideale Warheiten. Diese Abstraktheit ist auch der Grund dafür, daß die Romane keine besondere Beachtung finden.84

For Benjamin, Scheerbart’s “utopische kosmologische Romane” reveal an ideal form of technology (Technik) in which it is detached from both the social and economic concerns for which it is usually enlisted and instead put into the service of a larger goal:

“Weltharmonie.” Deployed in a striving for “Weltharmonie,” an aim specifically described as “abstract” an “ideal” (and thus to a certain degree nebulous, undefined),

Benjamin identifies a form of instrumentralism in Scheerbart’s employment of technology that broaches the limits of instrumental thinking as a mode of relating to things from the perspective of a means-ends structure. Aspiring towards the nebulous regulative idea of “Weltharmonie,” Scheerbart’s heroes, such as Lesabéndio, mobilize technology in a way dramatically different from how it is usually deployed, insofar as it is divorced from private concerns (of a person or a class, for example) and instead placed

84 GS 7.2:880. 159

into the service of something larger that is difficult to orient or create a picture of. For the

Pallasians, technology, as embodied in the construction of the tower project, is not simply a tool through which one achieves desired, external aims, but rather itself describes a specifically medial manner of relating to and in the world from the ungrounded, unoriented position of pure means, that is to say, means still open to seemingly endless possibilities, means that do not approach things with a predetermined outcome or goal in mind. In other words, technology is no longer simply treated as a tool to be wielded by a subject onto an object, instead it begins to drift into what we might describe as an intransitive state, a mode of action or movement that lacks a direct object and a horizonal direction towards which to orient itself in advance. Indicating this medial, non- instrumental reconceptualization of technology, Benjamin writes that for Scheerbart technology itself becomes proof, “Beweis,” for abstract, “ideale Wahrheiten.”

In the longer passage from the first “Lesabéndio-Kritik” in which Benjamin invokes “das utopische Bild,” he stresses precisely such an emphatically medial rethinking of technology in discussing the conspicuous lack of interiority throughout the novel:

Die strenge Fügung des erzählenden Aufbaues, die nichts als die Erbauung des Turmes ins Auge faßt, hat die Vollendung des Entwurfes ermöglicht. Dabei hat die geistige Überwindung des Technischen ihren Gipfel erreicht, da die Nüchternheit und Sprödigkeit des technischen Vorgangs zum Symbol einer wirklichen Idee geworden ist. Die Arbeit der Technik ist der deutlichste Ausdruck jener keuschen und strengen Deutung der Geschehnisse, die an ihre äußerste, reinste Oberfläche angeschlossen ist. Die Verflechtungen der Liebe, die Probleme der Wissenschaft und der Kunst, ja die Perspektive des Sittlichen ist gänzlich ausgeschaltet, um den reinsten unzweideutigsten Erscheinungen der Technik das utopische Bild einer geistigen Gestirnwelt entfalten zu können. In diesem Sinne ist jede Erschließung und Beschreibung des Sterninnern ein Schritt, der von der eigentlichen Aufgabe abführt und die gesetzten Grenzen überschreitet.85

85 GS 2.2:619. 160

Singly concentrated on the construction of the tower like the very Pallasians that he depicts in his story, Scheerbart omits various levels of interiority in his text, as Benjamin astutely observes. Dispatching with subjective emotions (“die Verflechtungen der

Liebe”), questions of knowledge and creation (“die Probleme der Wissenschaft und der

Kunst”), and ethical issues (“die Perspektive des Sittlichen”), Scheerbart depicts an alien world in which individual perspective and the subjective psyche appear to have no place insofar as they mark modes of interiority. In keeping with his fascination with glass architecture—specifically colored glass, which he at one points describes as containing

“Farbenwolken”—Scheerbart imagines a world in which the division between inside and outside is no longer a given.86 Rather than using technology to further one’s individual aims, wishes, or desires, Scheerbart fantasizes a world in which technology is utilized in the search for a greater truth, for cosmological “Weltharmonie,” as described above.

Despite the impression of technocracy that this technologically-oriented world view might elicit, we should note that Benjamin shares in Scheerbart’s zeal for technology only up to a certain point before inserting a subtle but crucial twist. The unusual pathos of the machine that Scheerbart exhibits—one not unlike the Italian Futurists at around the same period—does not render it the answer for solving all of the world’s problems, according to Benjamin. What Benjamin seems to suggest instead in the lines above is a mode of relating to and in technology that removes it from the cause and effect, inside versus outside relation in which an individual subject utilizes technology as a mediating tool in order to achieve external aims. Technology understood as a purely medial mode of

86 Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke, 212.Benjamin himself makes this connection between Scheerbart’s writings on glass architecture and the asteroid-novel in “Erfahrung und Armut” when discussing the houses that the Pallasians inhabit: they are housed: “verschiebbaren beweglichen Glashäusern wie Loos und Le Corbusier sie inzwischen aufführten.” GS 2.2:217. 161

relationality functions in the world rather than upon it from an outside position. As such, it cannot give us answers or fix what is wrong in the way that a mechanic applies to tools to remedy a problem. Lacking a manual to follow in its striving for utopian

“Weltharmonie,” technology, as Scheerbart instantiates it in Lesabéndio, retains its greatest potential in affecting the world not by acting upon it, but by acting in and with it, in propelling it forward in the perhaps structurally unrealizable hopes of ultimately achieving, reaching a utopian end.

Scheerbart’s unique reimagining of technology, therefore, goes hand-in-hand, according to Benjamin, with what the latter considers a purer, “chaste” (“keusch”) mode of interpretation or reading (Deutung) that approaches things not from the outside—as a tool that seeks to extract meaning—but from a continguous, lateral position. In other words, technology, as Scheerbart presents it in Lesabéndio, finds its parallel in a model of language that unsettles the binary oppositions of agency and passivity, interior and exterior, and means versus ends. Benjamin hints at this structural link between radically non-instrumentalized technology and language in the passage above when he writes “Die

Arbeit der Technik ist der deutlichste Ausdruck jener keuschen und strengen Deutung der

Geschehnisse, die an ihre äußerste, reinste Oberfläche angeschlossen ist.”87 For

Scheerbart, on the outermost surface, that is to say, outside of or at the limits of the inside/outside dichotomy (to the degree to which such an outside is thinkable), technology, like language, no longer functions as an instrument of mediation between inside and outside, or between form and content.

87 GS 2.2:619. 162

In extricating technology from its instrumental use-value, indeed from the anthropocentric impulse to use it as a tool to dominate and exploit the world—a line of critique that Benjamin briefly explores in the artwork essay—Scheerbart’s reconceptualization of technology evinces traits that recall some of the fundamental features that Benjamin highlights in his investigation into the structure of the medium from his early philosophy of language and color studies onwards (see Chapter One).

Rather than assuming the language of man (“Sprache des Menschen”) as the examplar of language per se, Benjamin subtly juxtaposes in his early language theory what he describes as “language as such” (“Sprache Überhaupt”)—a more dispersed, lateral model of language that he connects with the inter- and intralinguistic structure of translation— with the hierarchical anthropocentric model of language that largely treats it as a transparent tool of communication. While these two models are in no way mutually exclusive, and in fact are entangled with one another in numerous ways, the explicitly human model of language, or at least the emphatically instrumental version thereof, finds a counterpoint in Benjamin’s late reflections on Scheerbart. In the essay “Erfahrung und

Armut” (1933), Benjamin touches on this theme in drawing attention to the connection between non-instrumental language and technology that Scheerbart puts on display in

Lesabéndio. According to Benjamin, the central question that interests Scheerbart in his writing is how technology, “unsere Teleskope, unsere Flugzeuge und Luftraketen” will change humans, transform them into “gänzlich neue sehens- und liebenswerte

Geschöpfe” with a correspondingly novel, unheard of language:

Übrigens reden auch diese Geschöpfe bereits in einer gänzlich neuen Sprache. Und zwar ist das Entscheidende an ihr der Zug zum willkürlichen Konstruktiven; im Gegensatz zum Organischen nämlich. Der ist das Unverwechselbare in der Sprache von Scheerbarts Menschen oder vielmehr Leuten; denn die

163

Menschenähnlichkeit - diesen Grundsatz des Humanismus - lehnen sie ab. Sogar in ihren Eigennamen: Peka, Labu, Sofanti und ähnlich heißen die Leute in dem Buch, das den Namen nach seinem Helden hat: “Lesabéndio.”Auch die Russen geben ihren Kindern gerne “entmenschte” Namen: sie nennen sie Oktober nach dem Revolutionsmonat oder “Pjatiletka,” nach dem Fünfjahrplan, oder “Awiachim” nach einer Gesellschaft für Luftfahrt. Keine technische Erneuerung der Sprache, sondern ihre Mobilisierung im Dienste des Kampfes oder der Arbeit; jedenfalls der Veränderung der Wirklichkeit, nicht ihrer Beschreibung.88

Although Benjamin does not elaborate further on this seemingly crucial association between an arbitrary, constructivist mode of language and technology, the direct analogy he draws between the names Scheerbart gives his characters in Lesabéndio and the

“entmenschte” names which Russian revolutionaries give their children gives us a strong indication as to how we should understand this “new” form of technologized language.

Named after such inanimate objects as October, the five-year-plan, or an airline company, these de-humanized people (Leute) find themselves, as linguistic constructs, at the same level as things. Rather than maintaining the inherited divide between the human subject and external objects, the hierarchy between the anthropos and the rest of the world, such dehumanized names flatten out the relation between these various beings from the perspective of language. In a revolutionary gesture reminiscent of the Russians,

Scheerbart does not treat language as a human instrument that sets man above and apart from the objects he names and controls as one does his own words, but rather mobilizes it in a very different manner. Benjamin captures this shift nicely in the succinct phrase “der

Veränderung der Wirklichkeit, nicht ihrer Beschreibung.” For Scheerbart, language is not separate from reality, something that acts on it from the outside (from a state of

Beschreibung), but intimately takes part in it. As language changes, in language changing, so does reality.

88 GS 2.1:216-17. 164

Let us return once again to the claim that a “utopian image” presents itself in

Lesabéndio in the “Erscheinungen der Technik” divorced from subjective, personal modes of instrumentalization. What is at stake for Benjamin, and what makes this image utopian, is the manner in which it assumes a strange non-position that resides within a pseudo-linguistic medial sphere. The true “utopian image,” Benjamin seems to suggest, depends on a rethinking of the image as such along the lines of such a non-instrumental view of language and technology as presented by Scheerbart. Such an image does not approach things from the outside. It is neither a Vorbild, a model or example of what is to come, nor a Nachbild, an after-image of that which once was. Instead, the “utopian image” hovers in the dynamic, unlocatable space of Unwetter, a realm of medial flux from which the possibility of something absolutely other, alien shows itself dimly in a fluid act or process of bilden—forming but also imaging—that does not come to a complete halt, that is to say, solidify in the form of a concrete image.

In the decisive, final passage of the first “Lesabéndio-Kritik,” immediately following his description of non-instrumental technology and the “utopian image,”

Benjamin returns to the question of utopia and the (im)possibility of its representation by way of a surprising detour: humor. In a somewhat unexpected move—one which would have to be further explored, but at first glance appears to place Benjamin in a unique position not only in respect to the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, but also to a host of others who have tackled the difficult relation between aesthetics and politics—Benjamin argues that what makes Lesabéndio a utopic, and thus in some sense a political work, cannot be judged on the basis of its condition as an artwork. Rather, humor is that which

165

connects Lesabéndio to the realm of utopia, and also that which removes it from the realm of art:

Die Kunst ist nicht das Forum der Utopien. Wenn es trotzdem scheint, als könne von ihr aus das entscheidende Wort über dies Buch gesprochen werden, weil es voll Humor sei, so ist es doch dieser Humor, der umso sicherer die Region der Kunst übersteigt, und das Werk zu einem geistigen Zeugnis macht. Dessen Bestand ist nicht ewig und nicht in sich allein gegründet, aber das Zeugnis wird in dem Größeren, von dem es zeugt, aufgehoben sein. Von dem Größeren – der Erfüllung der Utopie – kann man nicht sprechen – nur zeugen.89

The opposition between art and humor at issue in these lines points to the larger nexus of

Benjamin’s thinking of the possibility of a non-instrumental, non-mediating mode of language, technology, and vision that we have been exploring. In “Paul Scheerbart:

Lesabéndio,” Benjamin draws a sharp distinction not only between art and humor but art and technology. Unlike “art,” which is presented here as something “in sich allein gegründet,” as self-contained and self-referential and thus implicitly not oriented towards unorientable, abstract ideals such as “Weltharmonie,” humor indicates a mode of medial other-directedness that (weakly) hints at the possibility of something greater, “Größeren.”

In a brief character study entitled “Der Humor” which Benjamin wrote at approximately the same time as the passage above, he describes humor in the following way: “Wenn das

Wort nicht mehr vermittelt ist der Humor da.”90 In this description, we find a clear connection between Benjamin’s conception of humor and his early philosophy of language in his attempt to shift our focus from the conventional view of media as transparent vehicles of transmission or communication. No more than language serves as an empty vessel for the transmission of content from one person to another, humor does not lie in the mediating function of the word. Instead, in both cases Benjamin locates a

89 GS 2.2:619-20. 90 GS 6:130. 166

medial dimension in which something occurs, in which language or humor, just like technology, performs itself.

What is especially significant about humor in this context, the reason perhaps that

Benjamin names it the deciding factor for the relation of Lesabéndio to utopia in contrast to that of art, is the way that the subject, indeed man relates to things in humor. “Im

Humor,” Benjamin emphatically proclaims, “läßt man dem Objekt als solchem

Gerechtigkeit widerfahren.”91 The object in question experiences justice precisely as an object in cases of humor. Anticipating the argument that he would present many years later in describing the flattening out of the subject-object hierarchy in the dehumanized language of Scheerbart, Benjamin describes humor as a “paradoxical case” (“paradoxe

Fall”) in which the rights of people are upheld precisely in denying their rights as people.

For this reason, he suggests, there is something monstrous in all humor (“das

‘Ungeheure’ jeden Humors”), but monstrous in a just way. The example Benjamin gives for this equalizing power of humor is captured in the response a husband gives to his wife who is complains about their baby’s crying: “seine Antwort: Schmeiß es doch weg, ist ein klassisches Beispiel des Humors. Es geschieht dem Kinde unter Ignorierung der

Person in ihm Gerechtigkeit, es darf schreien.”92 Justice for the individual at hand occurs here only once we allow ourselves to read between the lines and admire the irony and disjunction between the words uttered and the specific case in question. The absurd command to throw the baby away reaffirms the rights of the child by paradoxically ignoring them, by equating the child with a discardable inanimate object in an act of humorous, monstrous word play. Maybe even more crucial than the affirmative irony that

91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 167

suffuses this particular example is the general gesture that Benjamin identifies in instances of humor, namely, the lack of direct mediation (Vermittelung) via words.

As in the joke above, humor does not arise from direct, transparent acts of mediating speech. Rather, a performative linguistic dimension is involved in cases of humor, a shrinking of the gap separating word and deed, and by relation between word and thing. In this sense Benjamin writes that in genuine cases of humor one does not laugh about or over somebody or something, “man lacht im Humor nicht über einen

Menschen.” Rather laughter, especially the raucous kind, inheres within Humor itself

(“vielmehr gehört das Gelächter, und zwar das laute, in den Humor hinein”). Laughter, as a possibility contained within the very act of humor, participates in the humorous act as part and parcel of it, “es ist Teilnahme am Vollstreckungsact.” Put another way, again by

Benjamin, humor resides in execution, “Vollstreckung,” in “Rechtsprechung ohne Urteil, d.h. ohne Wort.”93

In “Der eingetunkte Zauberstab” (1934), a review of Max Kommerell’s book Jean

Paul (1933), Benjamin returns to the concept of humor via Kommerell’s own analysis of the subject in Jean Paul’s writings. Although a detailed exploration of how Benjamin reads Kommerell reading Jean Paul on the topic of humor would exceed the scope of our focus here, a few aspects of Benjamin’s review particularly stand out in terms of elucidating the “utopian” element involved in the non-instrumental media (imagistic, linguistic, and technological) that Benjamin highlights in contemplating the representability of utopia via Scheerbart. In agreement with Kommerell, Benjamin stresses that humor often entails a thought of the elasticity (Dehnbarkeit) of the “ich,” a

93 Ibid. 168

“Dehnbarkeit” that lacks borders and tends to drift into the boundless, “in das

Grenzenlose.”94 Continuing with this thought, Benjamin comments on and approvingly cites Kommerell in the following line concerning Jean Paul’s humor: “Der Weltraum selbst liegt ihm nicht ferner, ist ihm auch nicht unwirtlicher als sie. Denn ‘Jean Paul dachte sich nicht, wie manche Denker, in die Welt, sondern weg von der Welt.’” Humor removes one from the world, away from what is, as well as away from a stable notion of subjectivity and objectivity, rendering the self flexible, dynamic, and borderless. In this way, humor opens the way for the subject to disperse from himself and into unbound, unknown space: “der Weltraum.” For Benjamin, this notion of elasticity and humor brings Jean Paul into the orbit of Scheerbart: “in dieser dünnen Atmosphäre hat später

Paul Scheerbart, der Verfasser des ‘Kometentanzes’ und der ‘Astralen Novelletten,’ sich heimisch gemacht.”95 Departing from the world, indeed away from the self, Kommerell, according to Benjamin, is “just” (gerecht) to the “destructive side” of humor in his study.96

Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the constellation of utopia, the weather, time, and non-instrumental modes of mediality that Benjamin creates throughout his writings, he names Aristophanes’ The Clouds as one of the great comedies in his discussion of humor in the Kommerell review.97 In fact, in a longer passage, which in part mirrors the typology of the senses cited in Chapter One, Benjamin explicitly links

“Phantasie” and “Entstaltung” to humor and destruction near the end of the Kommerell

94 GS 3.1:412. 95 Ibid. 96 “So gelingt ihm zum mindesten das eine: dem Humor nach seiner destruktiven Seite gerecht zu werden.” Ibid., 413. 97 Ibid., 414. 169

review, creating one more link between his life-long preoccupation with modes of non- instrumental media and the political focus which becomes more explicit in his later work:

“Entstaltendes Geschehen,” Benjamin writes, “ist der Stoff Jean Paulscher Dichtung. Es ist die Stelle, an der sie mit der Traumwelt sich berührt. So viel die Ahnung von diesem wolkigen Kern vermitteln kann, so viel - nicht mehr - enthüllt sich dem Verfasser.”98

Structurally linked to fantasy, which never presents itself directly, but only in disfigured and immanently disfiguring form, one cannot acquire a firm grasp on the cloudy core of humor—it does not allow itself to be directly mediated (vermittelt). In the rest of this passage, Benjamin establishes another link between his early color studies and his late writings on Scheerbart when he invokes “reine Farbe,” the “Medium der Phantasie” in connection with humor. Benjamin’s reflections on this “medium” can also be applied to the non-instrumental, utopian modes of language and technology that Scheerbart gives us to think: “Ihre Wolkenheimat, in der Formen sich weniger gestalten als entstalten, ist das

Reich des Wandels.”99 Benjamin suggests, with some due hesitation, that such fantastic representation, which alienates itself from the realm of form (“sich der Gestalt entfremdet”), which always seems to be on the move, at drift away from itself, towards something else without ever stepping beyond itself, across its own threshold, weakly anticipates, perhaps, a messianic realm: “nimmt damit vielleicht nur Bilder des tausendjährigen Reichs vorweg.”100 Paradoxically, such images, if we should even call them that, prefigure a utopian, messianic sphere precisely insofar as they do not figure anything, as they hover on the verge between figuration and disfiguration, blindness and

98 Ibid., 416. 99 Ibid., 417. 100 Ibid. 170

insight. The “utopian image,” we can now suggest, is such a disfigured, disfiguring

“image,” one on the limits of the imaginable, showing us what it cannot show, and thus showing us nothing: it is the non-image of non-space (u-topia).

In the scene above, when Benjamin describes the inability to evoke what is larger, of the fulfillment of utopia—“Von dem Größeren – der Erfüllung der Utopie – kann man nicht sprechen – nur zeugen”101—he appears to imply such a sort of imagistic “zeugen” that might relate us to utopia. Zeugen, of course, carries a loaded double meaning: while it most commonly means to testify to or give evidence, it can also mean to sire or procreate. In the context of the line above, this double meaning produces two distinct readings. One cannot speak of the fulfillment of utopia, one can only create it. Or one cannot speak of the fulfillment of utopia, one can only bear witness to it. Despite this difference—the creation of utopia still to come (a future utopia)—and the testimony of utopia which already was (utopia as a bygone or past paradisal state)—both readings indicate a certain lack, an inability to reach utopia directly.102 Instead, all we are left with is a picture of our inability to acquire a clear picture of where or when utopia might be— as something yet to come in the future, or already gone in the past, if it ever was. Torn between these two, contradictory directions, the only image we have of utopia, the

“utopische Bild” which gives itself to be seen, in humor, leaves us adrift in the hopes that what is might become undone, that the temps has come for something new—a new relation to language, technology, or sight, for sights unseen.

101 GS 2.2:620 102 In Einbahnstraße, Benjamin recalls the futilitity that accompanies acts of zeugen when he simply writes at one point, “Überzeugen ist unfruchtbar” GS 4.1:87. 171

Chapter 4

Wolkige Stellen: Kafka’s Disfigured Image-World

In 1931, seven years following Franz Kafka’s death in 1924, a collection of previously unpublished texts appeared under the title Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer.1 This same year, on the occasion of this posthumous publication, Benjamin completed his first piece on Kafka intended for the public, a radio lecture simply titled “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer.”2 Benjamin’s manuscripts, letters, and notes reveal a deep and sustained fascination with the author, who at the time was not widely known. On June 20,

1931, while still working on the Kafka lecture, Benjamin wrote to Scholem of his deep immersion in Kafka’s work: “ich habe fast sein ganzes Werk letzthin – teils zum zweiten, teils zum ersten Male – gelesen.”3 Benjamin’s fascination with Kafka’s language and strength as a storyteller shines through in his carefully crafted readings of the author, interpretations that are in their own right extremely literary in style, even for Benjamin’s standards.

In the Kafka lecture, as well as in his essay “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten

Wiederkehr seines Todestages” (1934), Benjamin meticulously examines the tropes and

1Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erzählungen und Prosa aus dem Nachlass, ed. Max Brod and Hans Joachim Schoeps (Berlin: G Kiepenheuer, 1931). 2 See GS 2.2:676-683. For a comprehensive overview of Benjamin’s radio work—including the Kafka lecture—see Sabine Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk: Programmarbeit zwischen Theorie und Praxis (München: K. G. Saur, 1984). Unfortunately, to date no recordings of Benjamin’s radio pieces have been found. 3 GS 2.3:1155. 172

figures that suffuse Kafka’s writing, following them ever deeper into the labyrinthine world of the author in an attempt to illuminate and unfold his texts from within. Rather than apply external interpretive models, Kafka, Benjamin argues, demands to be approached on his own terms, from within his own “image-world”; his texts call for a

“Deutung des Dichters aus der Mitte seiner Bildwelt.”4 One of the central figures that

Benjamin himself deploys in his own, highly imagistic writings on Kafka is the cloud.

While he never explicitly situates the cloud within Kafka’s own texts, his use of this figure affords us an image of the very structure that he considers to form the nebulous core of Kafka’s “image-world.” According to Benjamin, everything in Kafka’s world exists in an uprooted, disfigured (“entsellt”) state.5

In this chapter, I turn Benjamin’s method back on himself by looking closely at how he interprets Kafka, and in particular how the cloud plays a central role for him in illuminating the disfigured, dispersive, always other-directed character of Kafka’s writings. More than a mere metaphor for the opacity or murkiness of Kafka’s writing, the cloud intimates an aesthetic mode of self-differentiation and self-alterity that underlies and structures this perceived murkiness. It is crucial that Benjamin writes of Kafka’s

“Bildwelt,” for as he himself suggests at least twice, one of the main tensions, if not the definitive one, which organizes Kafka’s writing also obtains for the structure of visual image: the antagonism between dissemblance and mere semblance, that is to say, between appearing as something else, and mere appearance. My claim is that Benjamin’s recurring interest in “cloudy spots” in Kafka’s work is connected to his sustained interest in the image. In this case, Kafka’s stories present an opportunity to reflect on what it

4 GS 2.2:678. 5 Ibid. 173

means for a story to illustrate, or to present an image of something. Kafka’s stories, as shown below, are never images of something, or a means to an end, but images of, best represented by a cloud caught in an endless state of drifting towards that never arrives, that is, never arrives at anywhere other than a disfigured version of itself.

The significance Benjamin places on the figure of the cloud in his reading of

Kafka has not gone unnoticed in the extensive secondary literature on Benjamin. From

Werner Hamacher’s seminal essays “The Word Wolke—If it is One” and “Die Geste im

Namen,” through Sven Kramer’s monograph Rätselfragen und wolkige Stellen, to the writings of Michael Levine and Rodolphe Gasché, multiple critics have foregrounded the role of the cloud figure in grappling with Benjamin’s interpretation of Kafka.6 Building on the work of these scholars, this chapter examines the three main areas to which

Benjamin attaches the cloud in his reading. The first section focuses on Benjamin’s analysis of the proliferation of meanings embedded in the cloudy core of Kafka’s writing, and the question of orientation (or the lack thereof) in Kafka’s so-called parables. The second section expands on this interest in orientation by turning to Benjamin’s central concept of “Entstellung” as presented in his engagement with Kafka, and his closely

6 See Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke -- If it is One," in Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988); "Die Geste im Namen: Benjamin und Kafka," in Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). Sven Kramer, Rätselfragen und wolkige Stellen: zu Benjamins Kafka-Essay (Lüneburg: Zu Klampen, 1991). Michael G. Levine, "The Sense of an Unding: Kafka, Ovid, and the Misfits of Metamorphosis," in Writing through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Rodolphe Gasché, "Kafka's Law: In the Field of Forces between Judaism and Hellenism," MLN 117, no. 5 (2002). Although the “wolkige Stelle” comes to signal something slightly different for each of these scholars with their varying points of emphasis—for Hamacher the failure of communication and an aesthetic mode that hovers between disfiguration and figuration; for Kramer the linguistic, metaphorical layer underpinning concepts; for Levine the lack of a “weight-bearing structure” supporting Kafka’s parables (153); and, for Gasché, the nontransparency of the law in Kafka’s writing—the nuanced differences between these critics’ respective takes on the “wolkige Stelle” nevertheless underscore the ineluctable centrality of this polymorphous figure in Benjamin’s essay, as well as the need to engage with this figure in investigating Benjamin’s understanding of Kafka. 174

related analysis of the deictic gesture. In this section, I explore the connection that

Benjamin makes explicit between the visual and the linguistic sign by way of Kafka’s writing, although this relation also implicitly subtends the rest of my (and Benjamin’s) analysis, in particular where we have to deal with Benjamin’s figurative (bildliche) language—language that distorts just as much as it illuminates. The third and final section explores the temporality that Benjamin attaches to the cloud as a figure of deferred and always deferring meaning. By contrasting Benjamin’s interpretive approach to his interlocutors, Brecht and Adorno, we gain a better idea of what is at stake in the sort of “non-productive” reading of Kafka that Benjamin offers. In unpacking these different aspects of Benjamin’s challenging interpretation of Kafka, this chapter simultaneously seeks to go beyond Kafka or Benjamin in investigating the larger possibilities and impossibilities of reading that transmits a lesson, and the structures that enable or disallow such medial transference.

The Drift of Things: Kafka’s Anti-Parables

In the first three sections of his four-part essay “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” Benjamin conjures the image of clouds in order to describe Kafka’s style of writing. Twice he writes of a “wolkige Stelle” that forms the diffuse, opaque center of Kafka’s stories. In a third instance, he uses the uncommon verb form wölken in order to depict the dynamic, unsettling character of this mysterious core which

“beclouds” (“wölkt”) Kafka’s texts.7 In this way, Benjamin disperses the “wolkige

Stelle” across three different Textstellen, simultaneously exposing and enacting a key trait

7 See GS 2.2:410, 420, and 427. 175

that informs his interest in the figure of the cloud as it pertains to Kafka: the difficulty in containing, pinning down, or orienting his texts.

One of the central claims that organizes Benjamin’s reading of Kafka is the notion that his texts must be viewed as parables, even if they push the boundaries of how this genre is conventionally defined. If a parable does not clearly deliver a message, or if the transmitted message remains nebulous to the reader, then to what extent can or should one still call it a parable? What conventions define the form of the parable? And to what extent do Kafka’s stories evince, fall short of, or transform these features? Benjamin’s multilayered response to such questions comes in part through the way he uses the cloud, a figure that lends thought to both the opacity of Kafka’s stories and, more profoundly, to the his stories radically unoriented, other-directed movement. Also highlighting this feature of Benjamin’s reading, Michael Levine suggests that it is precisely “by means of these ‘cloudy spots’ that Benjamin orients himself in Kafka’s text—orients himself, that is, in the direction of a demanding revolutionary practice of perpetual disorientation.”8

It is clear that Kafka’s work subverts traditional definitions of the parable.

Conventionally speaking, the parable is considered a seemingly straightforward, didactic literary genre. Parables offer lessons or principles by way of illustrative narrative construction. Beyond the surface level of the parable, the reader should be able to derive larger lessons, truths, or bits of wisdom. To present this moral or lesson, parables often rely on narrative strategies such as subtext, or the more explicit staging of moral dilemmas. The norms of this form require an analogical relationship between story and lesson. In other words, parables demand a firm ground against which one might orient

8 Levine, "The Sense of an Unding: Kafka, Ovid, and the Misfits of Metamorphosis," 154. 176

and thus decode the moral from the story. In the case of Kafka, however, this is hardly, if ever the case. As Benjamin emphasizes at various points, Kafka’s often paradoxical and perplexing stories offer no clear interpretations. And yet, despite this lack of a transparent meaning, Benjamin insists that Kafka’s stories should be viewed as parables. The crux of

Benjamin’s argument about the peculiar character of Kafka’s parables is bound to the key phrase he uses to describe the core of Kafka’s texts: “wolkige Stelle.” Embedded in the phrase “wolkige Stelle” is a faint but telling disjunction that reveals a great deal about the parabolic structure of Kafka’s texts, as Benjamin perceives it.

The German word Stelle translates most commonly into English as place, spot, or location. Derived from the transitive verb stellen, to put or place an object, a Stelle generally marks a particular site, be it in a spatial, temporal, or figurative sense. The compound noun Textstelle (a literary passage), for example, designates a determinate, confined portion of text. While one can certainly cite a Textstelle, thus more or less lifting it from its context, the term Textstelle itself intrinsically reminds one of the particular location, the Stelle, which the passage occupies within the greater work from which it stems. Central, therefore, to the notion of a Stelle is the existence of a stable context according to which the Stelle, as a measurable location, can be determined. Accordingly, one cannot help but notice a conspicuous mismatch in Benjamin’s phrase “wolkige

Stelle.” By appending the adjective wolkig to this noun, Benjamin does not simply modify, but drastically transforms the Stelle into something approximating its polar opposite: an obscure, murky, “cloudy” spot, that is to say, something ungrounded and unidentifiable. By nature of being unfixed to any particular location, infirm, and ungraspable, clouds intimate precisely that which cannot be pinned down or festgestellt.

177

Whereas a Stelle is determinable, clouds not only resist fixation, but in their opacity suggest the possible interruption of transparent acts of mediation, blocking the transmission of light or, in figurative terms, content or meaning.

These two contradictory terms in the phrase “wolkige Stelle” are central to

Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka’s work. By merging these contradictory terms, Benjamin hints at more than a metaphorical fogginess that renders his texts difficult to decipher. At odds with itself, pulled in two conflicting directions, the formulation “wolkige Stelle” intimates a fundamental tension which suffuses Kafka’s writing: an irreducible other- directed negativity which Benjamin gathers at one point under the dispersive term

“Entstellung”—deformation, disfiguration, or displacement.9 Perpetually ent-stellt,

Kafka’s stories disperse like clouds detached from, and unattachable to, any one fixed meaning or location. And yet, despite, or rather because of their constitutive ungroundedness, Kafka’s parables often seem to point in multiple directions, mimicking and simultaneously exploding the deictic gesture that defines the conventional parable, which would seem to point in at least one clear direction.

There is one moment in the Kafka essay that powerfully exemplifies this gestural structure of the cloud figure as it represents the unique parabolic nature of Kafka’s stories. Benjamin writes that were one to happen across the parable “Vor dem Gesetz” in the collection of short stories Ein Landarzt (1920), one would think to have discovered

“die wolkige Stelle” in the collection’s interior (“in ihrem Innern”).10 In the same way, were one to encounter this same parable in Der Prozeß, the posthumously published

9 In his 1931 radio lecture on Kafka, Benjamin identifies Entstellung as a defining feature of Kafka’s writing. See GS 2.2:678. This term is discussed in more detail further below. 10 GS 2.2:420. 178

novel from where it originally stems, one would likely also give it paramount importance.

Particularly within the latter work, Benjamin suggests, this parable occupies such a distinguished position (“ausgezeichnete Stelle”) that it seems to be the source from which the larger text unfolds: “man [könnte] vermuten, der Roman sei nichts als die entfaltete

Parabel.”11 Although this may very well be the case—and Benjamin seems to imply that it is—discovering this parabolic “wolkige Stelle” at the heart of Kafka’s writing does not necessarily lead the reader any closer to unlocking the meaning of the novel in which it is found. In a rich double analogy, Benjamin contrasts the peculiar way in which Kafka’s cloudy parables “unfold” (entfalten) to that of traditional parables:

Das Wort “entfaltet” ist aber doppelsinnig. Entfaltet sich die Knospe zur Blüte, so entfaltet sich das aus Papier gekniffte Boot, das man Kindern zu machen beibringt, zum glatten Blatt. Und diese zweite Art “Entfaltung” ist der Parabel eigentlich angemessen, des Lesers Vergnügen, sie zu glätten, so daß ihre Bedeutung auf der flachen Hand liegt. Kafkas Parabeln entfalten sich aber im ersten Sinne; nämlich wie die Knospe zur Blüte wird.12

According to Benjamin, Kafka’s parables do not “unfold” in an act of revelation. As such, they do not lend themselves to satisfying the reader who seeks to smooth out the wrinkles and complexities of his texts to a single, graspable meaning which one can hold in the palm of one’s hand, and perhaps even instrumentalize as one does a lesson or a moral. Instead, Kafka’s texts unfold, entfalten, by developing and unfurling in a transformative way, analogous to the bud in the act of blossoming. The model for unfolding here is not one of disclosure towards the reader, but of organic, dynamic transfiguration of the text itself: a Prozeß of metamorphosis or Verwandlung in which the text appears to alter ever anew before the reader. While the traditional parable is likened

11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 179

to a paper boat, a lifeless, man-made vessel meant to transport content from one destination to another, Kafka’s parables, Benjamin suggests by way of contrast, deliver nothing separate from themselves.13 Just as one cannot sever the bud from the blossom into which it unfolds, Kafka’s parables provide no readily identifiable, extractable meaning, rendering them practically useless.14 Granted that Kafka’s texts might manifest a certain sense of development and movement—another connotation captured in this image of natural growth—however, the cyclical character of this movement implies another crucial distinction between the common, ship-like, parable, and those of Kafka: the Kafkan parable constitutively refuses completion, to reach a final destination at which it might unload a message. In the same passage in which he offers this suggestive comparison, Benjamin writes of the interminable series of considerations

(“nichtendendwollende Reihe von Erwägungen”) spawned by the parable “Vor dem

Gesetz.”15 Lacking a clear course, the Kafkan parable can be said to leave one adrift in a state full of the promise and hope of a meaning yet to come, but a potential that remains only that insofar as it is never comes to fruition—a state of potentiality not dissimilar to the perpetual movement of “Wolkenwandelbarkeit” as discussed in Chapter Two.16

13 For a reading which explores the role of paper in this scene, and Benjamin’s work as a whole, see Kevin McLaughlin, "The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," MLN 114, no. 5 (1999). 14 For more on Benjamin’s larger critique of instrumental thinking, see Gerhard Richter, "Toward a Politics of the Unusable," in Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 231-46. 15 GS 2.2:420. 16 Although it exceeds the scope of this study, as it would require a more detailed exploration, one can detect a certain pseudo-Kantian strain here in Benjamin’s turn towards nature and away from examples of man-made purposeful construction in searching for an adequate comparison for Kafka’s artworks. Imbued with a vague sense of meaning, but lacking a clearly identifiable lesson, Kafka’s artworks, we might say, following Kant, manifest something approximating “purposiveness without purpose” (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck). For an illuminating reading of Benjamin’s reception of Kant, see Peter D Fenves, "The Political Counterpart to Pure Practical Reason: From Kant's Doctrine of Right to Benjamin's Category of Justice," in The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 180

In using this metaphor of the blossoming bud, this passage in the Kafka essay bears remarkable parallels to the opening scene of Hegel’s preface to the

Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). Benjamin certainly would have been familiar with this famous passage, in which Hegel evokes nature in order to illustrate the dialectical movement of negation and sublation, from Knospe to Blüte and beyond:

Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, daß jene von dieser widerlegt wird, ebenso wird durch die Frucht die Blüte für ein falsches Dasein der Pflanze erklärt, und als ihre Wahrheit tritt jene an die Stelle von dieser. Diese Formen unterscheiden sich nicht nur, sondern verdrängen sich auch als unverträglich miteinander. Aber ihre flüssige Natur macht sie zugleich zu Momenten der organischen Einheit, worin sie sich nicht nur nicht widerstreiten, sondern eins so notwendig als das andere ist, und diese gleiche Notwendigkeit macht erst das Leben des Ganzen aus.17

Although it may be tempting in light of this intertextual reference to view Benjamin’s assessment of the way Kafka’s stories unfold in terms of a Hegelian dialectic, one would be well served to bear in mind Benjamin’s larger critique of dialectical progress in comparing these two passages. Hegel calls on the relation between Knospe and Blüte in order to illustrate a progressive dialectical model in which one “Wahrheit” negates another, and then comes to take its place (“Stelle”), only for to be also ultimately negated and superseded by an ever higher level (from “Knospe,” to “Blüte,” to “Frucht,” and so on). Benjamin, on the other hand, calls on this philosophically-laden image precisely in order to proffer a counterexample to the teleological orientation of dialectical progression. In contrast to the conventionally conceived parable, which carries a message towards the reader in a more or less straightforward fashion, the Kafkan parable eschews

17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heed, vol. 9 (Hamburg: F Meiner Verlag, 1988), 10. 181

linear progression and communication in favor of a more dynamic and complex mode of unfolding.

Lacking a definitive goal or meaning towards which to orient oneself, indeed often lacking the narrative conventions of a clear beginning or end—one thinks, for example, of K in Der Prozeß, who awakens to find himself already implicated in ongoing proceedings and dies only to be outlived by his shame18—the reader of Kafka often finds him- or herself wandering through his literary “image-world” in a disoriented manner.

Rather than developing towards a point at which the lesson or moral of the story reveals itself, Kafka’s parables unfold in a manner that proliferates and multiplies, rather than reduces, the wrinkles of the text. As Carol Jacobs writes of another scene of “Entfaltung” in Benjamin (from his translation essay) that bears many of the same marks of this scene, unfolding of the sort Benjamin describes “results in a proliferation of abundant folds that violently camouflage the content while maintaining it as non-adequate otherness.”19

Continually folding in, on, and away from itself in a state of dynamic, transformational flux, the cryptic Kafkan parable always seems to be adding layers, expanding before the reader like a perpetually blossoming bud. Instead of revelatory unfolding, entfalten, the reader encounters disfigurative proliferation, which we might describe, following

Benjamin, as a state of dynamic ent-falten. In other words, his parables do not unfold, they do not allow for a simple reversal or undoing of the folds of the text in order to reveal the message wrapped inside. On the contrary, Kafka’s parables un-fold: they

18 In the very last line of Der Prozeß, as K lies there dying, he contemplates his own state with the following words, “‘Wie ein Hund!’ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.” Franz Kafka, Der Process, ed. Malcolm Pasley and Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 312. 19 Carol Jacobs, "The Monstrosity of Translation," in In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 78. 182

multiply and intensify the wrinkles of the text in a dispersive, other-directed manner that continuously leads one away (ent) in multiple directions. With its folded and always folding texture, the Kafkan parable makes it difficult for the reader to acquire a firm grasp on the lesson ostensibly wrapped inside. Indeed, even more fundamentally, Kafka’s parables with their rumpled texture challenge the presumption that anything, any meaning or content to be transmitted lies inside the text, that is to say, that this purported content is anything other than a different side of the text’s exterior folded in over itself.20

The characteristic of Kafka’s parables to fold forward and away from themselves with their slippery, wrinkled texture describes not only a key feature of how his texts are constructed, but also implies the state of the reader who travels through and within them.

In the essay “Der Sürrealismus” (1929), Benjamin suggests that there is something intoxicating at work in the act of reading. Alongside the seemingly mundane activities of waiting and thinking, reading marks a form of “profane illumination” (“profane

Erleuchtung”) for Benjamin.21 Although he stops short of explicitly connecting reading with the state of drug-induced consciousness, he describes a kind of ecstatic modus which attends both activities. Contemplations on “Rausch” emerge in his writings from 1927 into the mid-1930s, during which time Benjamin participated in a series of drug studies, sometimes as the subject and sometimes as the observer. In the protocol from one of these experiments, which Benjamin’s friend the physician Fritz Fränkel oversaw,

Benjamin invokes the image of clouds in order to capture the state of drug-induced

20 Benjamin’s fondness for this image of objects folding over themselves can be found throughout his writings. For a paradigmatic example, see the vignette “Schränke” in Berliner Kindheit um 1900: GS 4.1:283-84. 21 GS 2.1:307-308. “Der Leser, der Denkende, der Wartende, der Flaneur sind ebensowohl Typen des Erleuchteten wie der Opiumesser, der Träumer, der Berauschte. Und sind profanere.” (308) 183

ecstasy. Speaking under the influence of one gram of hashish, Benjamin describes to

Fränkel (who recorded the protocol) what he considers to be the “third” and perhaps greatest “secret” disclosed to him by his inebriated state, a secret which Fränkel views as instructive for understanding the general character of his “Rausch”:

Es folgt in einer “tiefen Phase, in die ich willkürlich fast hinunterschreite, ungeheuer tief” das dritte “große” Geheimnis. Dieses ist in der Tat eine Zusammenfassung des Grundcharakters gerade dieses Rausches. Es wird als das Geheimnis der Wanderung bezeichnet. Zugrunde liegt dem Wandern nicht eine zweckmäßige Bewegung, nicht eine Spontaneität, sondern ein bloßes unergründliches Gezogenwerden, das Wandern ist ein pathischer Zustand, man könnnte ihn an den Wolken verdeutlichen, wenn man imstande wäre, ihrem Zuge mit dem Gefühl zu folgen, sie zögen nicht sondern sie würden gezogen.22

This sense of losing control, of being pulled away from oneself like a cloud whose movement is not self-given and purposeful (zweckmäßig), but rather murky and unfathomable (unergründlich), touches on several of the motifs that recur in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka. Chief among these associations is the figure of the cloud, which

Benjamin deploys here via Fränkel in order to give thought to a state of self-withdrawal, a certain loss of the self understood as a spontaneous, active agent. Losing himself within a diffuse state of ecstasy, the intoxicated subject (Benjamin) becomes cloud-like, that is to say, easily distracted, receptive towards being pulled in several different directions.23

Such a subject does not walk or stand on his own feet, but rather drifts passively, seemingly without will or aim: “sie zögen nicht sondern sie würden gezogen” (emphasis added). Carried ecstatically outside of himself by an apparent outside force, the intoxicated subject drifts in a manner that lacks reason or purpose, “zweckmäßige

Bewegung.”

22 GS 6:602. This protocol stems from April 18, 1931. 23 For more on the vital concept of distraction in Benjamin’s work, see Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 184

According to Fränkel, this description of aimless drifting strikes at the core of this specific state of “Rausch,” it forms its “Grundcharakter.” What underlies (“zugrunde liegt…”) such intoxication, what forms its base or ground, is ironically the very lack of a ground (Grund) in the double sense of both purpose and a stabilizing support that the word carries in both English and German. Ecstatic movement of the sort Benjamin describes here is at its root both bottomless and unfathomable, “unergründlich,” a mode of “Wanderung” grounded in its very ungroundedness. Etymologically related to wandeln

(to alter, but also in its less common usage, to stroll aimlessly), the ecstatic subject wanders about like a shape-shifting, aimless cloud, pulled along in an unpredictable, incalculable manner.24 The Kafka essay, written during this same period, demonstrates a similar interest in questions of groundlessness, instability, and disorientation. In Kafka’s cloud-like parables, one encounters a comparable want of orientation as the ground beneath one’s feet never seems secure for long. The text carries the reader, enwrapped in one of the many folds, all of which seem to lead down different paths, readings, or interpretations.

The vast reception history of Kafka’s writings testifies to the perplexing and productive difficulty in orienting oneself in and to his parables, as the same texts often spawn numerous, and often contradictory, theological, psychological, and socio-political interpretations. As Benjamin suggests, referring to two of the most prominent ways of interpreting Kafka during his day, the psychoanalytic and theological interpretations of

24As captured in the term “Wolkenwandelbarkeit” (see Chapter Two), wandeln is the preferred verb in German used to describe the transformative movement of clouds. The link between wandeln and wandern can also be seen as obtaining, inter-linguistically, in Wordsworth’s canonical poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” 185

his work “fundamentally miss the mark” (“grundsätzlich […] verfehlen”) of his writing.25

But perhaps the same should be said of any such one-sided, reductive approach.

Following Benjamin, the question might be posed whether there is any plausible way of acquiring a firm grasp on Kafka’s stories, or whether they are fundamentally,

“grundsätzlich,” ungrounded. In one of his notes to the Kafka essay, Benjamin writes,

“für die Parabel ist der Stoff nur Ballast, den sie abwirft, um in die Höhe der Betrachtung zu steigen.”26 While this statement may be especially valid in the case of traditional parables in which the narrative medium, the metaphorical paper boat, is unwrapped and discarded in order to unlock the moral or lesson stored inside (the Betrachtung, or lesson, the parable imparts), Kafka’s parables appear to lack a ballast altogether. As Levine has observed, the absence of a solid ground against which one might gather one’s bearings

(in the sense of support, as well as orientation) emerges time and again in Benjamin’s

1934 essay.27 This groundlessness, perhaps nowhere more explicit than in the repeated use of cloud imagery, acquires its most thorough conceptual articulation in his discussion of “Entstellung.”

“Sie ist nicht da”: Gestures of Displacement

In the 1931 radio lecture on Kafka, Benjamin invokes the concept of “Entstellung” in order to describe the character of the figures and signs (“Zeichen”) that permeate Kafka’s texts. For the Benjamin of the 1930s, “Entstellung” becomes a defining term not only for understanding Kafka, but different models of representation and indeed the sphere of

25 GS 2.2:425. 26 GS 2.3:1256. 27 Levine, "The Sense of an Unding: Kafka, Ovid, and the Misfits of Metamorphosis," especially 151-54. 186

language as such.28 In his writings on Kafka, the concept becomes most apparent in

Benjamin’s repeated explorations of the deictic gesture, both in the way they appear throughout Kafka’s writings, but also the deictic character of his texts themselves. The latter point bridges his reading on Kafka and his artworks with the larger question of artistic and linguistic representation in general, and the possibility of language or any other medium—including the image, which he at times explicitly indicates in his reading of Kafka—of transmitting something outside of itself.

Variously translatable as deformation, disfiguration, or displacement, the term

Entstellung, as Benjamin was certainly well aware, occupies a central place in Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, Entstellung marks above all else the result of an act of psychic repression in which certain memories or fantasies undergo deformation in the unconscious mind. As the distorted sign of an underlying psychic act of self-censorship, a process in which desires or memories are disfigured, Entstellung indicates not only a psychic occurrence, but also importantly a certain type of linguistic function. Drawing heavily on this Freudian concept, Benjamin identifies a complex hermeneutic challenge that Kafka’s texts demand and in the process begins to suggest what it is about his parables that renders them something like anti-parables.

Kafka’s literary “Bildwelt,” Benjamin suggests, does not consist of mimetic reproductions or after-images, that is to say, disfigured representations that can be traced back to a direct, identifiable cause. Pointing to a specific example that might be falsely read in this way, he writes, “natürlich ist keine Rede davon, daß Kafka das nachbilden

28 For a useful overview of the centrality of this term in Benjamin’s oeuvre, as well as the way he adopts this concept from Freud while giving it his own spin, see Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997). 187

wollte” (emphasis added).29 Although the reader of Kafka often senses that “kleine

Zeichen, Anzeichen und Symptome von Verschiebungen” abound in his texts, these traces and hints, he suggests, should not be read as mere symptoms, that is to say, as secondary indicators or evidence of something that directly preceded or caused them.30 In

Kafka’s “Bildwelt,” the signs of Entstellung have the peculiar added dimension of leading forwards just as much as they do backwards. Instead of reflecting a stable origin back onto itself in a manner that might strengthen and solidify the primacy of the original, Kafka’s writing, according to Benjamin, should be viewed as a “reflective pane”

(“spiegelnde Scheibe”), a distortive mirror that reflects past and future onto one another:

Wenn wir sein Werk aber als seine spiegelnde Scheibe nehmen, so kann ein solches längst vergangenes Kapitäl sehr wohl als eigentlicher unbewußter Gegenstand solcher Schilderung erscheinen, und die Deutung hätte nun seine Spiegelung im Gegensinne genauso weit vom Spiegel abgerückt wie das gespiegelte Modell zu suchen. Mit anderen Worten, in der Zukunft.31

While the “Zeichen” that make up Kafka’s “Bildwelt” may very well testify to an underlying cause, an “unbewußter Gegenstand,” the link connecting these signs to their origin appears to have been irreparably severed. The possibility of interpretation,

“Deutung,” which might hit the mark, point to (deuten) and thus reveal the underlying, original “Gegenstand” is therefore deferred and displaced into the future. The “original” object (or meaning), which finds itself represented in distorted form in Kafka’s writing, finds its matching image, its corresponding interpretation reflected not back towards it, but away from it, projected into an unknown time to come.

29 GS 2.2:678. 30 Ibid. 31 GS 2.2:678. 188

Conspicuously missing from these lines, which paint a picture of how Kafka’s writing hovers in a dynamic, dispersive, disfigured realm, torn between the past which it distorts, and drifting towards the future where things might be set right, is the present.32

The present is not present in this description of Kafka’s “Bildwelt.”33 Or, put another way, the present only presents itself in signs of disfiguration, signs that point both forwards and backwards, seemingly simultaneously. The present of Kafka’s literary world, therefore, only presents itself as something different from itself, as a trace or an image of itself already at its origin, at the moment that it enters presentation and thus

(re)presents itself at all. Following from these features of Benjamin’s reading, we might say that these characteristics of displacement and disfiguration inhere in every literary text insofar as they are instances of representation. Indeed, disfiguration and representation become something like disfigurations, or representations, dis-presentations of one another here. What seems to make Kafka’s texts stand out in this regard, is the way in which they bring this characteristic of all literature and the infirm ground on which it stands (or drifts) into the foreground. The “Gegenstand” of literature, not only of

Kafka’s, can be said to have nothing firm in either the past, present, or future against which to stand (Gegen-stand).

The major hermeneutic challenge in reading Kafka stems from this constitutive structure of displacement whereby every scene, every image drifts forwards as much as it

32 At another point in the 1934 Kafka essay, Benjamin writes: “Niemand sagt ja, die Entstellungen, die der Messias zurechtzurücken einst erscheinen werde, seien nur solche unseres Raums. Sie sind gewiß auch solche unserer Zeit. Bestimmt hat das Kafka gedacht.” GS 2.2:433. 33 In a fragment, Benjamin writes: “Es kommt ihm [Kafka] darauf an, die Gegenwart durchaus zu eliminieren. Er kennt nur Vergangenheit und Zukunft, die Vergangenheit als das Sumpfdasein der Menschheit in gänzlicher Promiskuität mit allen Wesen, als Schuld, die Zukunft als Strafe, Sühne, vielmehr: von der Schuld her stellt sich die Zukunft als Strafe dar, von der Erlösung her stellt sich die Vergangenheit als die Lehre, die Weisheit dar.” GS 2.2:1205. 189

does backwards, and no object appears to be firmly rooted or self-identical, transparently present onto itself, or bound to something else which is stably grounded. Instead, every object (Gegenstand) in Kafka’s image-world displays the unsettling sense of standing across or apart from itself, Gegen-stand, already at its origin an image of itself. Benjamin draws attention to this heightened non-self-identical, imagistic character of Kafka’s writing—a character instructive for understanding the modus of literary representation at large—in the following lines:

Kafka ist davon so erfüllt, daß überhaupt kein Vorgang denkbar ist, der unter seiner Beschreibung – d.h. hier aber nichts anderes als Untersuchung – sich nicht entstellt. Mit anderen Worten, alles, was er beschreibt, macht Aussagen über etwas anderes als sich selbst. Die Fixierung Kafkas an diesen seinen einen und einzigen Gegenstand, die Entstellung des Daseins, kann beim Leser den Eindruck der Verstocktheit hervorrufen.34

Ironically fixed on the non-fixed, a modus of Entstellung in which everything exists in an uprooted state, Kafka hyperbolizes a key feature that defines the genre of the parable— the form that Benjamin would ultimately associate most strongly with him: the deictic gesture. The deictic gesture forms one of the (murky) keys to understanding Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, and indeed Benjamin’s understanding of language and literature and its ability to transmit or transfer a lesson, content outside of itself.

In order for the parable to function, the parable requires a referential ground against which one can orient and decipher the lesson or meaning of the narrative. The didactic element of this genre largely depends on the existence of such an interpretive ground from which the story can orient or point the reader towards the intended lesson. A main reason for the unwieldy proliferation of possible interpretations in Kafka’s parables, according to Benjamin’s reading, is the lack of stabilizing ground in combination with an

34 GS 2.2:678. 190

overflow of deictic gestures in his texts, gestures that lack a solid ground beneath. The result of this set of circumstances is that Kafka’s texts evince the impression of pointing to many places, and no place, at once (as alluded to in the section above). As Benjamin describes the overall character of his writing, “alles, was er beschreibt, macht Aussagen

über etwas anderes als sich selbst.”35 Nothing is firmly grounded in Kafka’s world, including the very deictic gestures that point elsewhere.

In this vein, Benjamin observes with regard to the countless hand gestures, tilted heads, and other postures that permeate Kafka’s stories that one finds a “Kodex von

Gesten” throughout his work. But, he adds, even Kafka himself lacks the key:

wird man mit Sicherheit erkennen, daß Kafkas ganzes Werk einen Kodex von Gesten darstellt, die keineswegs von Hause aus für den Verfasser eine sichere symbolische Bedeutung haben, vielmehr in immer wieder anderen Zusammenhängen und Versuchsanordnungen um eine solche angegangen werden.36

Lacking a secure ground for symbolic meaning, “eine sichere symbolische Bedeutung,”

Kafka’s gestures hover around and encircle “um eine solche” missing referential center, remaining usable, repeatedly citable (“immer wieder”), but lacking the weight of a definitive message or meaning. At another point, Benjamin once again draws attention to the lack of a ground supporting the gestures Kafka employs, gestures that are detached from their inherited, codified meanings: “der Gebärde des Menschen nimmt er die

überkommenen Stützen und hat an ihr dann einen Gegenstand zu Überlegungen, die kein

Ende nehmen.”37 Cut from their traditional meaning, one can never be quite sure what the gestures of Kafka’s characters signify, and yet in an odd way, insofar as they are still

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, 418. 37 GS 2.2:420. 191

recognizable as gestures, they retain the essential analogical structure which similarly defines the relational “of” structure of the parable.38

Neither quite pointing elsewhere (successfully, in a way that would bring the endless “Überlegungen” that they engender to a decisive halt), nor simply static, self- contained, the Kafkan gesture shares many of the central features that Benjamin identifies in the Kafkan parable. Benjamin makes this comparison explicit in the following passage:

Sie sind nicht Gleichnisse und wollen doch auch nicht für sich genommen sein; sie sind derart beschaffen, daß man sie zitieren, zur Erläuterung erzählen kann. Besitzen wir die Lehre aber, die von Kafkas Gleichnissen begleitet und in den Gesten K.’s und den Gebärden seiner Tiere erläutert wird? Sie ist nicht da; wir können höchstens sagen, daß dies und jenes auf sie anspielt.39

Neither hermetically for themselves, “für sich,” nor simply illustrative of something else,

Kafka’s parables hover in a tension-laden, liminal state, moving towards something else, but never seemingly reaching their destination. His “Gleichnisse” retain the posture and gesture of transmitting a lesson, a “Lehre,” but in actuality they transmit nothing but their own emptiness, gesturing towards the gesture that would transmit meaning. In place of

“Lehre,” we might then say that Kafka’s hollowed out parables and gestures offer only

Leere: they skirt and play with the possibility of Lehre (“auf sie anspielt”), but in the end they only gesture, deictically indicate its absence, “sie ist nicht da.” In a subtle but powerful inversion of the deictic gesture of the traditional parable, which points towards a graspable meaning or lesson, Benjamin offers us something like the Kafkan counter- gesture, the gesture of Entstellung and of the Kafkan parable in general: “sie ist nicht da.”

Perpetually displaced (entstellt), Lehre, if there indeed is any in Kafka’s stories, is never

38 As McLaughlin puts it, “what gesture bears in Kafka’s work is bearing as such,” "The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," 980. 39 GS 2.2:420. 192

there, never simply present for one to grasp. And yet, his stories constantly seem to point to its possible appearance, not here, “nicht da,” not there, “nicht da,” but always elsewhere.

Unattached to any fixed “Lehre,” Kafka’s parables and gestures give thought to a dynamic space of deictic communication that lacks a clear orientation, a space that

Benjamin again turns to the disfigurative figure of the cloud in order to describe in yet another scene. Playing with the haptic and conceptual meanings of the word “faßbar,”

Benjamin draws a direct connection between the signature Kafkan empty gesture and the comparable murkiness of his parables, which tend to defy comprehension: “[e]twas war immer nur im Gestus für Kafka faßbar. Und dieser Gestus, den er nicht verstand, bildet die wolkige Stelle der Parabeln. Aus ihm geht Kafkas Dichtung hervor.”40 The empty gesture, devoid of meaning, lies at the heart of Kafka’s parables; it forms the nebulous place, from which his entire poetry (Dichtung) emerges. At the center of Kafka’s writing, rather than a “Lehre” or “sichere symbolische Bedeutung,” we find a “wolkige Stelle,” an unfirm, dispersive point, an irreducibly other-directed decentered center.

Importantly, here as elsewhere the “wolkige Stelle” indicates not merely a foggy or mysterious point in Kafka’s writing, but rather a fundamental aporia in the field of metaphoric and analogical relations. The “wolkige Stelle” marks not only the point of incomprehensibility and failure of communication, but also the condition of possibility from which something graspable (faßbar) or communicable might appear. In itself beyond comprehension, beyond reach—always dispersing away from itself and from us—it nonetheless forms (or, more literally, images, “bildet”) the other-directed gestural

40 GS 2.2:427. 193

ground of Kafka’s parables, and as such marks an unending potential of Leere becoming

Lehre.41

In another closely related scene from the Kafka essay, Benjamin again looks towards the sky in contemplating the state of such Kafkan gestures ungrounded from inherited or pre-established conventions. In a somewhat unexpected turn, Benjamin

invokes El Greco and in his work identifies the

pictorial equivalent to the dynamic type of gesturing

towards devoid of a stable meaning: “Kafka reißt

hinter jeder Gebärde – wie Greco – den Himmel auf;

aber wie bei Greco – der der Schutzpatron der

Expressionisten war – bleibt das Entscheidende, die

Mitte des Geschehens die Gebärde.”42 While much

Figure 4. 1: El Greco "View of Toledo" could be said about the unexpected, anachronistic (1596-1600) connection Benjamin establishes between Kafka and this Renaissance painter, the decisive point, “das Entscheidende,” connecting the two artists lies in a mutual emphasis on the gestural medium as a sphere of mediation detached from an external ground, or firmament, as the sky has been “torn open.” In “View of Toledo,” one of El Greco’s

41 Thomas Schestag focuses on a related structure of cloudy, deictic pointing that occludes transparent mediation in his discussion of Benjamin and Fritz Fränkel’s experimentation with Rorschach images in their drug studies of the early 1930s. In a text that Fränkel co-wrote with Benjamin’s younger sister, Dora, they invoke Hamlet, the “Wolkendeuter” in describing the scene of interpreting a Rorschach image. As Schestag demonstrates, this metaphor illuminates just as much as it obscures, that is to say, as much as it does not simply point beyond itself, but also to itself as the very, cloud-like structure of pointing. Schestag writes at one point, “der […] Wolkendeuter Hamlet verkörpert die Undurchsichtigkeit, Undeutlichkeit und Deutungslosigkeit vielleicht, des Deutungsvorgangs, in den beide, Versuchsperson und –leiter verwickelt sind. Nicht die Deutung einer Wolke oder eines Fleckens steht hier auf dem Spiel, sondern das Wolkige und Fleckichte im Deuten überhaupt” (89). Thomas Schestag, Lesen - Sprechen - Schreiben (Kritzeln) (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014), especially 80-117. 42 GS 2.2:419. 194

masterpieces, we find a prime example of what Benjamin appears to have in mind in these lines. Distorted, irregular, and bursting with pockets of light, the depiction of the sky in this painting is anything but mimetic or “natural.” As Benjamin calls El Greco the

“Patron Saint of Expressionism,” El Greco denaturalizes the sky in this image, in which the upper third of the painting commands the viewer’s attention towards this painterly sky. 43 In this way, the artist calls attention to the role of the artistic medium that interjects itself between the viewer and what is represented. El Greco portrays not only the sky, but moreover the medium of gestural depiction and representation itself, “die Mitte des

Geschehens.”

Benjamin’s choice of the sky, and clouds in particular, in order to lend thought to the gesture’s medial character and the limits of transparent, illustrative representation enters into a longer aesthetic tradition that views the distinction between sky and earth as fundamental for understanding the structure of departure and difference that lies at the heart of the concept of the image as such. In The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy elaborates at length on this crucial connection, tracing it to its archetypal, mythic origins:

“The image always comes from the sky—not from the heavens, which are religious, but from the skies, a term proper to painting.”44 He continues to explain that “the sky is the separated.” By “the separated,” Nancy refers to an essential contrast and the nature of differentiation itself:

It is first of all something that, in the ancient cosmogonies, a god or a force more remote than the gods separates from the earth, […] before the sky and the earth,

43 For more on the connection between El Greco and the German Expressionists (a connection the Expressionists themselves made and which Benjamin is clearly drawing on here), see Enrique Lafuente Ferrari and José Manuel Pita Andrade, El Greco: The Expressionism of his Final Years (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1969). 44 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 5. 195

when everything is held together, there is nothing distinct. The sky is what in essence distinguishes itself, and it is in essence distinguished from the earth that it covers with light.45

Based on this ancient division, Nancy reads the sky itself as “distinction and distance.”

For this reason, the sky is not only an image among many, but something akin to the primal image: “The image comes from the sky: it does not descend from it; it proceeds from it, it is of a celestial essence, and it contains the sky within itself.”46 Through his invocation of cloud and sky imagery, Benjamin can be seen as subtly inscribing his essay on Kafka into such a tradition of thinking about the image. Kafka’s “Bildwelt,” in which everything is disfigured (entstellt), always pointing, gesturing away from itself and nothing seems to be firmly grounded, is an image-world in the truest sense. It is a world of distinction and difference, a cloudy sphere in which every word, every image seems to point elsewhere like an image, but images that lack a clear referent or meaning.

The imbrication of vision and language in Kafka’s literary “image-world” comes to the fore at those moments in which Benjamin considers the non-transparent, non-self- identical character of Kafka’s texts. From his early color studies onwards, Benjamin challenges the naïve assumption that images simply show or illustrate something beyond themselves. Instead, he emphasizes the other-directed drift that structures the image as such. Through their modus of Entstellung, clouds become a key figure for Benjamin in thinking through this sort of image-like ungrounded drift as it is paradigmatically found in the gesture of Kafka’s parables. In an early fragment entitled “Über Schein” (1924), written in conjunction with his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin locates a similar form of representational drift at work in the structure of “semblance,” “Schein.”

45 Ibid., 6. 46 Ibid. 196

Among the various categories of Schein that he classifies in this short sketch, two, which he directly contrasts, particularly stand out: “Schein hinter dem sich etwas verbirgt,” and

“Schein hinter dem sich Nichts verbirgt.”47 Expounding on this juxtaposition, Benjamin offers a compact analysis of these two forms on the basis of their relation to the (cloudy) media of vision and language:

Zusammenhang des Scheins mit der Welt des Visuellen. – Eidetisches Experiment: Ein Mann gehe über die Straße und aus den Wolken erscheine ihm, zu ihm geneigt, eine Karosse mit vier Pferden. Demselben erschalle bei einem andern Gang aus den Wolken eine Stimme mit den Worten: Du hast dein Zigarettenetui zu Hause vergessen. Wird nun in der Analyse der beiden Falle die Möglichkeit der Halluzination – also eines subjektiven Grundes für den Schein – außer acht gelassen, so ergibt sich: im ersten Fall ist es denkbar, daß Nichts hinter der Erscheinung steht, im zweiten ist das nicht denkbar. Der Schein, in dem das Nichts erscheint, ist der gewaltigere, der eigentliche. Dieser ist also nur im Visuellen denkbar.48

While much can be said of this highly suggestive “eidetic experiment,” for our purposes here we should first note that Benjamin chooses the sphere of clouds in order to stage these two modes of appearance—(narrowly-defined) linguistic Schein and visual Schein.

The clouds in this scene mark not only the realm of appearance as such, but also the place at which different forms of semblance depart—resemble or differ from one another.

Speaking with Nancy, the sky marks, indeed stages the space of distinction in this passage. On the one side, we find linguistic semblance: a voice calls from the sky to remind a man that he has forgotten his “Zigarettenetui zu Hause.” According to

Benjamin, it is impossible in such a scenario to imagine that this voice comes from nowhere, that nothing resides behind such semblance—somebody hidden behind the obfuscating clouds, for example, to whom the voice could be attributed. Touching on the

47 GS 1.3:831. 48 Ibid. 197

division that he draws in his color studies between the formative and the receptive senses,

Benjamin accents the difficulty in detaching the linguistic and oral modes of perception from the notion of a subject who stands behind such sensual modes of appearance, giving them their shape.

In contrast to, although inseparable from, such linguistic (dis)semblance,

Benjamin presents an instance of visual scheinen: the celestial appearance of a “Karosse mit vier Pferden.” An apparent reference to Helios and his horse-drawn chariot—the

Greek personification of the sun who is also sometimes referred to as “Phoebus Helios,” derived from the Greek word for shining, phoibus—this scene of visual semblance offers a stark counterpoint to the comparably mundane instance of linguistic communication concerning a cigarette case lying elsewhere. Rather than pointing beyond itself towards something either behind or within it—a speaking subject or an external referent— imagistic semblance, Benjamin stresses, does not necessarily lead one beyond the sight at hand. Not only is it unclear what the message might be of this visual scene, but more importantly it is easily thinkable, denkbar, that nothing external resides behind such semblance. Instead of seeming like or appearing as something else that it represents and/or covers over, visual semblance allows one to think appearance detached from an outside subject, phenomenon, or meaning. In invoking the very embodiment of scheinen in this scene in the chariot and horses of Helios, Benjamin shifts the focus from semblance as dissemblance—i.e. the disfigured form of something beyond it—to the realm of semblance as such, a visual realm whose appearance is not dictated, formed by knowable outside forces. Because the source of the optical appearance in this unusual scenario cannot be traced to a definable origin, what appears, paradoxically, appears as

198

nothing, “Nichts.” Not only does nothing determinable lie behind such appearance,

“Nichts hinter der Erscheinung steht,” but nothing itself appears in such appearance, “der

Schein in dem das Nichts erscheint” (emphasis added). In its capitalized, nominalized form, “Nichts,” “nothing” might in fact be more accurately translated as “nothingness.”

Not necessarily attached to anything outside of itself, visual appearance enables us to perceive, to see the medium of semblance itself, semblance a priori to and detached from anything that gives itself to be seen in this sphere, that is to say, semblance that has not yet drifted into re- or dissemblance of something else outside of itself, which it represents, in however disfigured, entstellt, form. In order to see something like pure semblance devoid of an object that it dis- or resembles, however, semblance must assume a shape, even if only minimally. The “Nichts” with a capital “n” appears to offer us such a non-image, an image of the image that does not illustrate anything other than itself, other than its own medial structure, a dynamic, detached, ungrounded medialilty that remains always open to taking on the shape of something else.

Returning to Kafka, one sees a version of this antagonism at work in the “wolkige

Stelle” of Kafka’s parables that we have been discussing. The “wolkige Stelle” that organizes Kafka’s parables indicates a tension between semblance which transports a meaning, a Lehre, and semblance which transports nothing (Nichts) other than itself, and therefore appears empty, leer. A variation of the dichotomy that we observed at play in

Benjamin’s reading of the Kafkan gesture, the “wolkige Stelle,” insofar as it hovers between these two poles, marks both the failure of external communication, and simultaneously the very possibility of such mediation—a possibility that remains precisely on the basis of this failure. Shortly after finishing and publishing parts of the

199

1934 Kafka essay, Benjamin began planning a revised version of the essay (which unfortunately was never completed) that would highlight precisely this oppositional tension. Pointing to these two poles that dictate Kafka’s writing, Benjamin states in a note from this period, “während der Lehrgestalt von Kafkas Stücken in der Form der Parabel zum Vorschein kommt, bekundet ihr symbolischer Gehalt sich im Gestus. Die eigentliche

Antinomie von Kafkas Werk liegt im Verhältnis von Gleichnis und Symbol beschlossen.”49 The (traditionally) parabolic, instructive side of Kafka’s writing, together with its symbolic (self-enclosed), murky side build the fundamental antinomy at the heart of Kafka’s texts.

In a longer passage, probably intended to be an addendum to the revised Kafka essay, Benjamin explores this essential Kafkan antinomy by superimposing it from one of

Kafka’s stories onto the visual realm of painting. Repeating a version of the lines above,

Benjamin begins by outlining the two poles of Kafka’s work: on the one side, we find the mystic, the visionary, and a corresponding gestural language (“Geberdensprache”). On the other side lie the parabolist (“Paraboliker”), the wise man, and a language of instruction (“Sprache der Unterweisung”). These two antithetical positions, Benjamin is careful to point out, mark not only an opposition (“Gegensatz”), but also an entanglement, “Verschränkung.” He continues on to suggest that the most explicit instantiation of this relation can be found in Kafka’s short piece “Von den

Gleichnissen.”50 In his brief analysis of this text, Benjamin focuses on the two central lines of the conversation it presents. In the opening scene, the accusation is put forward that the “Worte der Weisen” always remain precisely that: parables, “immer wieder nur

49 GS 2.3:1260. 50 Ibid. 200

Gleichnisse seien,” and as such remain effectively unusable, inapplicable (unverwendbar) for daily life.51 In response to this complaint about the inapplicability of parables to life, another speaker asks: “Warum wehrt ihr euch? Würdet ihr den Gleichnissen folgen, dann wäret ihr selbst Gleichnisse geworden und damit schon der täglichen Mühe frei.”52 In a witty retort, the second speaker proposes a solution that unsettles the presupposed relation between parable and external reality. Rather than attempting to instrumentalize the parable by finding a way to apply it to daily life, the second speaker inverts the relation and primacy of external reality to the parable by suggesting that we step into the parable, direct ourselves towards and into it, rather than trying to orient it towards us.

In order to illuminate what is at stake in this peculiar story and the movement that it entails, Benjamin draws a suggestive comparison, one might even say a Gleichnis, between Kafka’s story and one of his own favorite stories, that of the Chinese painter:

Sie erzählen neben manchen andern Geschichten zur Magie der Malerei auch die folgende, von einem großen Maler: Er bat seine Freunde in die Kammer, an deren Wand das letzte Bild seiner Hand, die Vollendung langen Bemühens und der Malerei überhaupt hing. Die Freunde, die das Bild bewunderten, wandten sich, um ihn zu beglückwünschen, nach dem Meister um. Den fanden sie nicht, wie sie sich aber nochmals dem Bilde zuwandten, da winkte ihnen daraus der Meister zurück, der eben im Begriffe stand, in der Tür eines gemalten Pavillons zu verschwinden. Er war, um mit Kafka zu reden, selbst Gleichnis geworden. Eben damit aber hatte sein Bild magischen Charakter erlangt und war keins mehr. Sein Schicksal teilt Kafkas Welt.53

In this fantastic story, which Benjamin directly connects to the figure of the cloud in

Berliner Kindheit, the painting is converted from its conventional status as an illustrative two-dimensional representation into a medial space with a certain thickness and depth—a transformation that recalls Benjamin’s reading of the gestural space intimated by Kafka

51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 1261. 53 Ibid. 201

and El Greco, a space at the “Mitte des Geschehens.” The consummation, “Vollendung,” of painting paradoxically comes at the price of its own undoing. By stepping into his painting, the medium of representation, the painter transforms the image into something approximating its opposite. Rather than representing something external to it, in a mode of communicative dissemblance, we have a case here of the “image of” transmuting into pure semblance, scheinen that seems to be on the verge of not pointing to anything beyond itself. No longer illustrating something external to it, but still visible to the audience that stands across it gazing onto the painter in his medium, the image hovers at the threshold of becoming “keins Mehr,” like the very painter who stands at the doorway on the verge of disappearing, “verschwinden.” The same general structure, Benjamin suggests, can be mapped onto the cloud-like structure of Kafka’s parables. They stand at the threshold of showing nothing, delivering no lesson outside of themselves. And yet, insofar as they appear to us like parables, they retain the weak possibility of being instructive, of communicating something. But in order to access this undefined something, they seem to demand that the reader step into them.

(Un)Productive Reading: Waiting for Kafka’s Stories to Rain

Benjamin’s diagnosis of the lack of an underlying meaning or lesson in the various instances of gestural “cloudiness” that permeate Kafka’s writing, was not an interpretation well received by all of his friends and intellectual interlocutors. As was so often the case, Scholem, Brecht, and Adorno all had very different reactions to the 1934

Kafka essay, although the overall verdict was decidedly critical. One of the more intriguing aspects of these responses, especially in consideration of our investigation into

202

the “cloudy” character of Kafka’s parabolic style of writing, is the way in which this imagery itself became an implicit and explicit point of contention among his friends and fellow critics. In this regard, it is especially worthwhile to take a look at Brecht’s and

Adorno’s respective replies.54 In their responses, both Brecht and Adorno draw on weather and light imagery, using atmospheric language in criticizing Benjamin’s reading.

But rather than to trying to dwell and inhabit the nebulous, always other-directed space that Benjamin identifies and opens in his reading of Kafka, Brecht and Adorno seek to transcend and pass through and dissolve the so-called “cloudy spots” of Kafka’s texts and his language in order to allow for something else, something behind or inside of them to emerge. As such, the contours of Benjamin’s unique interpretive approach—one that in many ways mirrors the very type of dynamic stasis he identifies with Kafka—become more legible when positioned against these interlocutors.

In the summer of 1934, in exile in Sweden, Benjamin had numerous discussions with Brecht concerning his recently completed Kafka essay. Among those conversations, well-documented in Benjamin’s diary, one finds an exemplary entry from 31 August in which Benjamin recounts a recent debate in which Brecht accused him of further mystifying, rather than clarifying, Kafka’s texts. Brecht, according to Benjamin, claimed that the essay “vermehre und breite das Dunkel um [Kafka] aus statt es zu zerteilen.”55

Instead of further obscuration, further nebulousness, Brecht argues for a more enlightening, edifying approach: “Demgegenüber komme alles darauf an, Kafka zu lichten, das heißt, die praktikabeln Vorschläge zu formulieren, welche sich seinen

54 For a reading of the Scholem-Benjamin correspondence on the topic of Kafka, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 55 GS 2.3:1165. 203

Geschichten entnehmen ließen.”56 Brecht’s desire for interpretation that would lead to more instructive, practical results, finds a sympathetic—if less instrumentalizing—echo in the critique that Adorno delivered to his friend at around the same period. These discussions help us to also understand the importance of Benjamin’s critique, and the way in which he stood apart in trying to redeem cloudiness as a positive aspect of texts.

In a lengthy letter dated 17 December 1934, Adorno provided Benjamin with a detailed critique of the Kafka essay, a response so meticulous that Benjamin would repeatedly return to it as late as 1938 as he continued to harbor the idea of eventually publishing a book on Kafka. After responding to Benjamin’s interpretation of Odradek (a character in “Die Sorge des Hausvaters”) as the disfigured (entstellt) “Form, die die

Dinge in der Vergessenheit annehmen,”57 Adorno turns his attention in one of the most critical passages of his letter to Benjamin’s usage of the cloud to describe Kafka’s parables:

Gewiß ist Odradek als Rückseite der Dingwelt Zeichen der Entstelltheit – als solches aber eben ein Motiv des Transzendierens, nämlich der Grenzwegnahme und Versöhnung des Organischen und Unorganischen oder der Aufhebung des Todes: Odradek “überlebt.” [...] Hier ist mehr als “Wolke,” nämlich Dialektik und die Wolkengestalt gewiß nicht “aufzuklären” aber durchzudialektisieren – gewissermaßen die Parabel regnen zu lassen – das bleibt das innerste Anliegen einer Kafkainterpretation; dasselbe wie die theoretische Durchartikulation des “dialektischen Bildes.”58

In what must have become a familiar gesture to Benjamin throughout their debates in the

1930s, Adorno accuses Benjamin in these lines of lacking dialectical rigor.59 For Adorno,

56 Ibid. 57 GS 2.2:431. 58 GS 2.3:1176. 59 For an overview of the various debates between Benjamin and Adorno, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977); Willem van Reijen, "Die Adorno-Benjamin-Kontroverse," Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 60, no. 1 (2006). Meanwhile, for an analysis that emphasizes the similarities 204

Odradek’s disfigured being, his “Entstelltheit,” marks a dialectical tension between the organic and the inorganic, a tension sublated in Odradek’s death which leads to a literally higher plane: über-leben. Adorno begins by qualifying his related critique of the

“Wolkengestalt” that Benjamin identifies with Kafka’s parabolic mode of disfigurative writing by acknowledging the impossibility of clarifying (or “enlightening,” “aufklären”) the nebulousness of his parables. Nonetheless, he goes on to insist that the image of the cloud does not suffice for an understanding of Odradek or Kafka’s parables: “hier ist mehr als ‘Wolke,’ nämlich Dialektik.” As such, the aim of a Kafka interpretation must be to mediate the poles of tension in Kafka’s texts in order to make his parables “rain.” The use of the passive voice in Adorno’s description, “die Parabel regnen zu lassen,” can be read as emphasizing that such a dialectical rain—whatever that would look like—would not simply result from the intervention of an outsider or critic. Rather, in thoroughly dialecticizing through Kafka’s parables, the interpreter would merely release that which is already latent in the nebulousness of Kafka’s stories in an act of immanent critique.

For Adorno, it seems, Benjamin’s insistence on the cloudiness of Kafka’s parables remains too static, too undialectical, and too unmediated of an interpretation.

Although he does not outright dismiss the existence of a “wolkige Stelle” at the center of

Kafka’s writing, Adorno co-opts Benjamin’s language in order to emphasize the need to step beyond this cloudy realm, indeed through it in a dialectical, rain-making process. A

Kafka interpretation, he insists, must transcend the murkiness of his texts, rendering this opacity productive. Although Adorno does not emphasize an instrumentalizing or more

between the two critics (of which there were many), see Gerhard Richter, "Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno," in Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers, ed. Alessandro Giovannelli (London: New York, 2012). 205

outright “pragmatically” productive interpretation like Brecht, both express a desire to see something more emerge from Benjamin’s reading.

In contrast to this desire for a more productive, generative reading, Benjamin follows a different interpretive principle in engaging with Kafka’s work. In line with

Adorno, Benjamin senses the existence of something waiting to be realized in Kafka’s parabolic writing. Benjamin offers an image of this latency in his 1931 radio lecture, when he suggestively describes Kafka’s books as “Erzählungen, die mit einer Moral schwanger gehen.”60 But the peculiar thing about Kafka’s texts, he adds, is that they carry this “Moral” without ever giving birth to it, “ohne sie je zur Welt zu bringen.”61 In this literally pregnant image, we acquire a vivid example of the sort of temporality that underlies Benjamin’s insistence on the “cloudy” character of Kafka’s parables, parables that, as we briefly saw in Benjamin’s description of Entstellung, occupy a place neither rooted firmly in the past, the present, or the future.

Pregnant with a “Moral” which they never disclose, Kafka’s stories hover in a transitional space radically on the verge, suspended between past and future. In this tension-laden state gestating with possibility, both past and future reside beside one another in a present riven in two. Just as much as the state of pregnancy recollects and makes visible through a trace structure a previous moment of inception, it equally points towards a future moment of revelation—the figurative next step in a procreative dialectical movement which Adorno appears to desire in wanting to see Kafka’s parables

“rain.” But in contrast to this want of a more productive reading, Kafka’s stories, as

Benjamin accents through this metaphor of a perpetual pregnancy, never break water, that

60 GS 2.2:679. 61 Ibid. 206

is to say, never lay bare the “Moral” which subsists inside of their nebulous womb.62

Recalling Benjamin’s description from his Wahlverwandtschaften essay of the structure of “Unenthüllbarkeit” that forms the condition of possibility for beauty, we might say that

Benjamin approaches the “Moral” immanent in Kafka’s parables as inextricable from the

Hülle in which it dwells.63 Instead of releasing and thus reducing the myriad potentialities inherent in Kafka’s texts to a single, definable moral, Benjamin attempts to stay faithful to the pregnant potentiality in Kafka’s writing by refusing to reduce his parables to a lesson. Although the image of a pregnant mode of temporal suspension that presents no clear lesson or moral may not seem properly revelatory to a reader such as Adorno or

Brecht, for Benjamin this image gestures, deutet, (in a highly self-reflexive manner) towards the murky, self-dispersive core that organizes Kafka’s literary image world.

The lack of realization of the productive potential inscribed in Kafka’s texts also finds expression at other moments of Benjamin’s engagement with the author. In a letter to Scholem from 12 June 1938, Benjamin, prompted by his friend, attempts to offer an explanation of his overall image (Bild) of Kafka. The image that Benjamin delivers, already anticipated in several passages from the 1934 Kafka essay, is that of an ellipse.

According to Benjamin, Kafka’s work is organized around two widely separated

62 This suggestive metaphor can be read in connection with the following from Berliner Kindheit um 1900 concerning long-forgotten, paradisiacal books that the child remembers in dreams: “Die Bücher standen nicht, sie lagen; und zwar in seiner Wetterecke. In ihnen ging es gewittrig zu. Eins aufzuschlagen, hätte mich mitten inden Schoß geführt, in deme in wechselnder trüber Text sich wölkte, der von Farben schwanger war.” GS 3:275. 63 See GS 1.1: 195. For a useful introduction into Benjamin’s reading that touches on the important place of the Hülle in Benjamin’s reading of Goethe, see Burkhardt Lindner, "Goethes "Wahlverwandtschaften" und die Kritik der Mythischen Verfassung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft," in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften: Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos Literatur, ed. Norbert W. Bolz (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981). 207

temporal foci—a time of mythical experience exemplified by the concept of tradition, and a modern mode of experience:

Kafkas Werk ist eine Ellipse, deren weit auseinanderliegende Brennpunkte von der mystischen Erfahrung (die vor allem die Erfahrung von der Tradition ist) einerseits, von der Erfahrung des modernen Großstadtmenschen andererseits, bestimmt sind.64

In orbiting around and being pulled between these two, widely-separated modes of experience—the mythical and the modern—Kafka’s work is determined by what at first sight might appear as incommensurable, antithetical stances concerning the relation of art and truth (Wahrheit). As Benjamin describes in the continuation of his letter to

Scholem—developing on an argument already adumbrated in other works of the 1930s, perhaps most famously in the well-known “Storyteller essay”—the difference between modern and mythical experience hinges on the question of communicability. Whereas mythic experience holds firmly to the belief that truth as a universal constant can be preserved and passed down from one generation, or one individual, to the next in the form of wisdom, “Weisheit”—a defining feature of the parable—such a confidence in the inviolability and transmissibility of truth noticeably erodes in modernity.65 What singles out Kafka, according to Benjamin, is his unique response to this modern condition.

Rather than holding on to individual truths and forfeiting the ability to communicate such subjective experiences (a response supposedly elicited by other modernist writers), Kafka develops an unusual approach which blends the mythic transmissibility of experience with a modern distrust in the ability to firmly grasp any one truth. As Benjamin poetically

64 GB 6:111. 65 Ibid.,112. For a more detailed discussion of this passage, see Michael Jennings, ""Eine gewaltige Erschütterung des Tradierten": Walter Benjamin's Political Recuperation of Franz Kafka," in Fictions of Culture: Essays in Honor of Walter H. Sokel, ed. Steven Taubeneck (New York: P Lang, 1991). 208

puts it, Kafka sacrifices the position of knowledge of truth in order to hold onto the structure of its communicability: “er gab die Wahrheit preis, um an der Tradierbarkeit

[…] festzuhalten.”66 A slightly different iteration of the tension in the nebulous Kafkan gesture, as discussed above, Benjamin once again emphasizes the lack of communicated content while retaining the posture of communication.67

The absence of “Lehre” in Kafka’s parables is not absolute or permanent, in

Benjamin’s eyes. The possibility for its appearance always remains in play. Unlike

Brecht or Adorno, who seem to locate the realizability of this potential in the present, depending, for example, on a properly dialectical reading, Benjamin postpones and displaces this possibility into an undefined time yet to come. In some of the richest scenes of the Kafka essay, Benjamin yet again returns to the cloud and cloud-like rhetoric in order to describe this temporal dimension of Kafka’s texts.

On the topic of how Kafka’s stories gesture towards a “Lehre” that is not there, at least not at the present, Benjamin suggests that “Kafka hätte vielleicht gesagt” that his stories deliver this missing “Lehre” as a relict (“als ihr Relikt sie überliefert”), to which he adds “wir können ebensowohl sagen: sie als ihr Vorläufer vorbereitet.”68 Haunted by the relict of something that once was, and preparing the way for something that might be

(or be again), Kafka’s other-directed parables hover on the brink of two temporalities as signs, we might even say images, that point both backwards and forwards: going into the future pregnant with the past, “Erzählungen, die mit einer Moral schwanger gehen.”69

66 GB 6:112. 67 For a reading which bears great attention to the question of tradition and transmissibility raised here and in the context of Scholem and Benjamin’s discussions on this particular topic, see again Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. 68 GS 2.2:420. See also notes in GS 2.3:1256. 69 GS 2.2:679. 209

The doctrine or moral embedded in his stories lie before us in the double sense of both anterior and also in front of, that is to say, somewhere in the future waiting to be realized.

In this manner, Benjamin touches on the structure of the future anterior that he also invokes elsewhere in his writings, as we have seen, in contemplating the temporality the image.70

In the Kafka essay, Benjamin summons another iteration of this structure in an image made famous in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” where Benjamin describes the figure in Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” as caught in a future-directed storm that drifts from a (paradisiacal) past: “ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her.”71 Twice in the Kafka essay, a similar image recurs. At one point, he writes of “ein Sturm, der aus dem

Vergessen herweht.”72 This cloudiness of what is forgotten and of the past reappears at the beginning of Benjamin’s essay. In a gesture that he repeats in the last section of the four-part essay, Benjamin begins the first section, and thus the Kafka essay as a whole, by drawing an analogy, a Gleichnis, between someone else’s story and the stories of

Kafka.

The story that Benjamin retells in the opening scene of the Kafka essay stems from Alexander Pushkin.73 In Benjamin’s rendition of the story, which follows the original rather closely, the Chancellor Potemkin, who has succumbed to one of his periods of depression, remains in his room, to which he has retreated, refusing to sign any of the necessary official documents intended for him. This prickly situation leaves the

70 For example, see my discussion of “zeugen” in connection with “das utopische Bild” at the end of Chapter Three. 71 GS 1.2:697-98. 72 GS 2.2:436. 73 Benjamin is thought to have read the text from the following source: Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Anekdoten und Tischgespräche, ed. Johannes von Guenther (München: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1925). 210

government in a state of disorder, interrupting its normal proceedings. Into this situation steps an unknown clerk named Schuwalkin, who gallantly declares that he will resolve the matter if the councilors will allow him. Unannounced, Schuwalkin enters Potemkin’s dark corridor with the sheath of documents in hand. As Benjamin recounts the rest of the story:

Schuwalkin trat zum Schreibtisch, tauchte die Feder ein und, ohne ein Wort zu verlieren, schob er sie Potemkin in die Hand, den erstbesten Akt auf seine Knie. Nach einem abwesenden Blick auf den Eindringling, wie im Schlaf vollzog Potemkin die Unterschrift, dann eine zweite; weiter die sämtlichen. Als die letzte geborgen war, verließ Schuwalkin ohne Umstände, wie er gekommen war, sein Dossier unterm Arm, das Gemach. Triumphierend die Akten schwenkend trat er in das Vorzimmer. Ihm entgegen stürzten die Staatsräte, rissen die Papiere aus seinen Händen. Atemlos beugten sie sich darüber. Niemand sagte ein Wort; die Gruppe erstarrte. Wieder trat Schuwalkin näher, wieder erkundigte er sich eilfertig nach dem Grund der Bestürzung der Herren. Da fiel auch sein Blick auf die Unterschrift. Ein Akt wie der andere war unterfertigt: Schuwalkin, Schuwalkin, Schuwalkin ...74

Immediately following these lines, Benjamin writes: “Diese Geschichte ist wie ein

Herold, der dem Werke Kafkas zweihundert Jahre vorausstürmt. Die Rätselfrage, die sich in ihr wölkt, ist Kafkas.” As various commentators of this scene have observed, some of the different, entangled issues at stake in this story include questions of identity, self- representation, and perhaps most significantly, at the center of it all, the relation between the linguistic sign and that to which it refers.75 Potemkin signs, multiple times, under the name of another. The signature, the mark that is supposed to vouchsafe for the singularity, the authority and uniqueness of the one who signs is not only falsely

74 GS 2.2:409-10. 75 Eduardo Cadava, for example, highlights the issues of “disguise, distortion, displacement, and mummen” that we have been focusing on in our reading. See Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997), especially 115-17 and 50-51. McLaughlin, on the other hand, shifts to focus on the question of the carrier or the bearer in this scene and, from this angle, the role of paper: McLaughlin, "The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," 980-81. The bureaucratic dimension of this story, meanwhile, is explored in Rodolphe Gasché, "Kafka's Law: In the Field of Forces between Judaism and Hellenism," ibid.117(2002). 211

employed, attached to another, but this violation of the singularity of the signature and the proper name is repeated numerous times, further accentuating the repeatability and detachability of the name from that which it is meant to designate.76 As Benjamin emphasizes at the end of the story in an epizeuxis that trails into an ellipsis, the name

Schuwalkin could seemingly be repeated into eternity, “Schuwalkin, Schuwalkin,

Schuwalkin …,” or possibly even another name that might fill this gap. Indeed, as

Eduardo Cadava has noted, one of the major revisions that Benjamin undertook in his revision of the Pushkin story is the replacement of the original name that Pushkin uses,

Petukov, with this name Schuwalkin.77 Thus at a higher level, Benjamin performs and repeats the very gesture that Potemkin performs in the story, substituting one name for another and in the process disclosing the structure of iterability that subtends every linguistic utterance.

That Benjamin views this story as a “herald” for Kafka’s work, one that “storms ahead” of it by two hundred years, refers first and foremost to the dispersive structure of displacement (Entstellung) that it stages, similar to the always other-directed character of

Kafka’s parables. Additionally, Benjamin refers to the temporality of this displacement, in which the possibility of a singular, identifiable “Lehre” is fundamentally unsettled by the gesture that brings this possibility into view. In a peculiar anachronism and another instance of misplaced identification, Benjamin plainly states: “die Rätselfrage, die sich in ihr wölkt, ist Kafkas.”78 It is not a question similar to or like Kafka’s, but Kafka’s

76 Benjamin retells the story at another point under the title “Die Unterschrift,” see GS 4.2:758-59. Ernst Bloch also, coincidentally, tells his own version of the story, also highlighting the signature in the title of his rendition, “Potemkins Unterschrift.” See Ernst Bloch, Werkausgabe Spuren, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 118-19. 77 Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, 150. 78 GS 2.2:410. 212

question itself that beclouds Pushkin’s story. Detached from Kafka, but still under his name, the riddle that flocculates in Pushkin’s story seems to proceed from Kafka just as much as it precedes or anticipates him. Storming ahead (voraus) of itself in the double sense—both ahead and ahead of—the cloudy “Rätselfrage” of Kafka stages its own temporality here, one that keeps hope for a “Lehre,” for a proper meaning or interpretation open precisely on the basis of our inability to pin down Kafka’s cloud-like parables. The radical rejection of presence that Benjamin ascribes to Kafka’s stories in such scenes keeps hope alive for interpretation that might hit its mark and bring a lesson into the light. But not here, “nicht da.”79 Perhaps elsewhere.

79 Ibid., 420. 213

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