Clouds: Walter Benjamin and the Rhetoric of the Image By 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 © Copyright 2015 by Michael Powers 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 iii 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. iv 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 v 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. vi 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 vii 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” viii 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