Mika Elo

University of Art and Design, Helsinki

mikaelo_1999@yahoo.com

Paper presented at the conference of the Nordic Network for the History and Aesthetics of
Photography, Sophienberg / Copenhagen 23.8.2004

Walter Benjamin and the Historical Index of Photography

Indexicality is one of the key concepts of the contemporary theoretical discourses on

photography. It has its roots, on the one hand, in the Peircean sign theory; on the other hand, it
has affinity to the Bazinian notion of objectivity of the photographic image.1
The question of indexicality polarizes the whole field of theoretical discourses on
photography. It names a point, where the “realness” of the photographic image is at stake.
Is the photographic image an objective trace of reality? Is it a medium with a natural
capacity to point at something real? Or is it all about cultural codes? How is the specificity
of photography as a medium, or “the photographic”, to be determined?2 Does photography
belong to the domain of cultural signification, semiosis, or is it rather to be seen as a non-
linguistically mediated and technically enchanced form of perception, aisthesis?3
The idea of historical indexicality developed by Walter Benjamin opens an alternative
view on this aporetic point of questioning. This notion, togeher with the Benjaminian “media
aesthetics” and the “dialectics fo aura” forms a constellation, which challenges one to study
“the photographic” in a broader media theoretical context and to rethink the notion of the
medium in general.
Benjamin uses the term “historical index” when developing one of the key notions
of his radical historiography, namely that of the “dialectical image”. Even if Benjamin
doesn’t use the term “historical index” when discussing photography, the substantial ties
between his historiography and photography have been well documented. These imply a
certain paralellism between the photographic image and the dialectical one. It is not only a
question of the Benjaminian metaphorics of light. Rather, there is “an irreducible link between
thought as memory and the technical dimension of memorization, the techniques of material
inscription”(Cadava 1998, xviii). One of these techniques of material inscription of memory is
photography.
Benjamin characterizes the dialectical image as follows:

“Every present is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: every now
is the now of a specific recognizability [...] It isn’t that past [die Vergangenheit] casts
its light on what is present [die Gegenwart] or that what is present casts its light on
what is past; rather, an image is that in which the Then [das Gewesene] and the Now
[das Jetzt] come together, in a flash of lightning, into a constellation. In other words:
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 an image is dialectics at standstill. If the relation between the present and the past is
purely temporal, then the relation between the Then and the Now is a dialectic one: not
of temporal but of pictorial [bildlich] kind.” (GS, V/1 578)4
Without going too deep into the questions concerning the messianic dimension of the
Benjaminian historiography, it can be stated that Benjamin tries to break the narratives
of the historistic historiography by constructing still-image-like short cuts, which open a
radically other way of thinking of history. In his view, history, rather than being a question of
continuous prosesses, consists of decisive moments, the decisiveness of which is not entirely
in power of human beings. In Benjamin’s thinking, the place of chronology is taken by
cairology (Agamben 1993, 105). In short, Benjamin radically displaces the anthropocentric
view on history and abandons the idea of historical progress.
The dialectics of the dialectical image is not that of the Hegelian type, a working
towards a synthesis and Aufhebung. It is, rather, a destructive prosess, a critical decomposition
(Abbau) and destruction (Destruktion) of the tradition. The dialectial image is a “caesura of
history”, where its elements are loaded to a bursting point in order to make them break out of
any historical continuum (GS V/1, 587, 595). The work of destruction is destined to remain
unfinished, because there is no accurate measure for it. “The language of destruction only
says destruction” (Düttmann 1994, 54). Destruction tends to form new constellations, which
again produce new caesuras.
On a formal level it seems to me legitimate and informative to make an analogy
between the dialectical image and the pictorial technique known as anamorphosis5.
Anamorphosis, a systematic distortion of the perspective of a picture, shows that every visual
truth that has taken shape has its reverse side: it is only an illusion. Anamorphosis renders, so
to say, the visual illusion readable as an illusion. In this respect, the dialectical image can be
characterized as anachronosis, as a strategy which shows the illusory character of the historal
narratives based on the notion of time as something quantitative and continuous. It renders
history readable as an image of time.
One example – you might even call the paradigmatic one – of a dialectical image
in Benjamin, is the archade (Passage), the glass-covered shopping street, which was
characteristic for 19th century metropoles. For Benjamin, it is a concentreted image of the
historical experinece of 19th century, a “miniature model of the world”. It is an intertwining
of the dimensions the new and the old, the optic and the haptic, the public and the private. It is
a place where the inside turns out, where the need turns into desire, the dream into reality and
vice versa. In short, it is a passage in the true meaning of the word: a transition zone. It is the
homeland of polysemy, the world as a live-in picture.
Even if the elements of the Benjaminian dialectical images are anything but abstract,
the construction of them, still, in the first place, is a textual strategy, which doesn’t aim at
illustrating history. The dialectical image is not a descripiton the circumstances of a certain
historical situation. It is, rather, a strategic way of staging history in a text and as a text. One
could go as far as to interpret the notion “dialectical image” being a metaphor of “reading
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citatation” (“dialectical” referring to reading and “image” to citation) (Haverkamp 1992,
71,75). This would imply that dialectical image would be closer to image as an infinitely
reframeable (or “reciteable”) logical unit than to any visual image.
On the other hand, desipte of its textuality, the dialecitcal image is for Benjmain
something visual: it lights up like a flash and it becomes readable only from a certain
position (in time and space). The text is the thunder following its appearance (GS V/1, 570).
Nevertheless, it is not a question of optic visuality, but of allegorical figurativeness, which
carries with it a challenge to read.
According to Benjamin, dialectical images cannot be delibarately costructed. Every
image has its “inner movement”, according to which it can come together only with certain
other images. Benjamin calls this “inner movement” of an image its historical index (GS
V/1, 577-578). In this context the indexicality of the image doesn’t refer to a spatio-temporal
cause-effect relation (like the Peircean fingerprint) but rather to the conditions of possibility
of such a relation. What is at stake here, is the constitution of time and space. From the
Benjaminian point of view, what enables an index to point at something, is rather a certain
discontinuity between the terms of the relation than contact or continuity (Cadava 2001, 39).
Historical indexicality, more than being about the traces or inscriptions of light as
such, is about their readability: “The historical index of images, namely, doesn’t only tell that
these belong to a certain time, it says first of all that they first come into their readability at a
certain point of time.” (GS V/1, 577-8)
How does this relate to photography, or more generally to the optic media and to
picutres which we can look at with our eyes?

The virtuality of the media

The textuality of the dialectical image can be addressed in terms of “readability”. The word
Benjamin uses is Lesbarkeit. As the grammatical form suggests, readability, Lesbarkeit, is
the possibilty of reading. According to Samuel Weber the ending (-barkeit) which Benjamin
uses here and in numerous other contexts, is actually a key to the whole Benjaminian
thinking (Weber 1999, 39). In most of the cases this -barkeit-structure themetizes the “post-
history” (Nachgeschichte) of a phenomenon (for example a work of art) or its “afterlife”
(Fortleben) after its technical reproduction. It names the dimension of retrospectiveness
(Nachträglichkeit), a kind of virtual presence (of the past), or more precisely, the dimension
of “virtuality that actualizes itself as virtual” (ibid., 41).
Thus, the readability of the dialecitcal image would be virtual. But how should we
think of this virtuality?
The philosophical implications of the -barkeit- structure (and its relevance for the
theoretical discourses on photography and new media) become perhaps as most evident in
Benjamin’s early text “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916). In this
text Benjamin formulates his philosophy of language that is directed against instrumentalizing
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notions of language as a “tool” or a means of communication. He thinks of language as
communicability which, in a certain sense, communicates only itself:

“What does language communicate [teilt mit]? It communicates the mental being
[Geistige Wesen] corresponding to it. [...] Mental being communicates itself
[teilt sich mit] in, not through, a language [...] Mental being is identical with
linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication [mitteilbar]. [...]
That which in a mental entity is communicable [mitteilbar] is its language. On
this ‘is’ (equivalent to ‘is immediately’) everything depends.[...] this capacity [das
Mitteilbare] for communication is language itself [...] Which signifies that all language
communicates itself. Or, more more precisely, that all language communicates
itself in itself [teilt sich in sich selbst mit]; it is in the purest sense the ‘medium’ of
the communication [Medium der Mitteilung]. Mediation [das Mediale], which is
the immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit] of all mental communication, is the fundamental
problem of linguisitc theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then
the primary problem of language is its magic. At the same time, the notion of the
magic of language points to something else: its infiniteness. This is conditional on its
immediacy. For precisely because nothing is communicated through language, what
is communicated in language cannot be externally limited or measured, and therefore
all language contains its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity. Its
linguistic being, not its verbal content, defines ist frontier.” (GS II/1, 142-143, SW 1,
63-64, italics in the original)

Benjamin activates here a whole set of senses, which are implied in the German word
Mitteilung, its verbal form mitteilen and its parts mit and teilen (to communicate,
communication, to inform, information, to announce, to share, to divide, to split etc...) . All of
these connotations tend to disappear in the all-too-familiar word ‘communication’. Another
decisive term here is the Unmittelbarkeit (immediacy), which in the form Benjamin writes it,
Unmittelbarkeit, underlines the absense of any mediating instance (Mittel can be translated
into means). Thus, language as a medium is not mediation as the English translation suggests.
Benjamin uses the word das Mediale, which I translate into ‘mediality’.
Language as communication, as “immediate sense-sharing/splitting” is infinite, even
in a double sense: On the one hand, the limits of a language cannot be traced, because it
can communicate only itself. According to Benjamin, it is impossible to represent the total
absense of language (ibid., 141). On the other hand, language is the movement of its own
differetiation and diversivation, its “becoming another”. Against this background, language
can be characterized as “immanent absolute” or infinite totality, which, paradoxically, can
contain elements that eceed it (Gaygill 1998, 14).
How should we understand this in relation to the photographic image? How do
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language and image relate to each other?
According to Weber, the differentiation, which Benjamin sees as inherent to language,
produces virtuality. The communicability of language is not a possibility that only waits
for its realization. Benjaminian argument doesn’t aim at investing language with a capacity
to realize itself as communication. The term ‘communicability’ doesn’t name the relation
between a possibility and a reality. The virtuality of language is not something “possibly
real”. Language as communicability, the -barkeit of it, is, rather, a capacity or an ability,
which is real without any mediation; that is: without any other realization than it itself as
such. Its reality is of virtual nature. Antoher way of putting this in English might be: it is real
as its own effect6. The virtuality of language is its mediality, which is not tied to any real
medium. Mediality comes before mediation. (Weber 1999, 42)
Weber developes his interpretation referring to the thematics of historical corruption of
language which is central to the Benjaminian philosophy of language. Benjamin interprets the
biblical legend of the Fall from the paradise as a kind of arche-history or a grounding myth of
language.
The scenario Benjamin developes is rouhgly as follows: In its paradisic state language
is a language of names, where the linguistic being and the mental being are identical. The
extreme case is revelation (Offenbarung), which is the word of God; it names everything. The
paradisic language of names consists only of proper names. Every being has its own place
in the language. The language of man is a divine gift. It, as well, is a language of names, but
as such it is only a reflection of the creative word (which is the linguistic being of God).The
language of man consisits of words, which, in stead of being creative, are receptive. They
receive the languages of things. Benjamin thinks this in terms of translation: man translates
the mute languages of things into the sonic language of man. In paradisic state of lanuage, this
translation is guaranteed by the magical participation of evertything in the word of God. After
the Fall this situtation changes. The magical correspondence of all things gets disturbed. The
words loose their receptiveness, and in order to communicate something, they start to imitate
the creative naming. They start to represent something other than themselves. The language
becomes a means of communication. (GS II/1, 147-157 / SW1, 65-74)
The decisive text passage for the interpretation suggested by Weber is the following:

“The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God; only there is name,
because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge.
This means that God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names
them according to knowledge.” (ibid.,148/68)

Weber pays attention especially to the oppositon only there/however: only there, in the
utopian dimesion of creative word, where the man has no access, the language can be the pure
medium of knowledge. Here, among the humans, however, there is not only one language, but
an impure multiplicity of languages, a whole set of various media. Man has the ability to give
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names to things, and thus raise himself above the nature like a creative god, but conceived as
a knowledge this naming is always “overnaming” (Überbenennung) (Weber 1999, 42-43).
This means that the communicability, the promise of communication inherent in language,
can actualize itself only as something virtual. After the Fall, the words are polysemic, and
they form with each other networks and constellations, which have their “inner movement”,
and historical conditions of readability, in short: they have a historical index. Language, apart
from being a divine gift, is also an infinte task of translation (GS II/1, 151/ SW1,71).
According to Benjamin, “every expression of human mental life can be understood
as a kind of language” (ibid., 140/62). His examples include the languages of technology,
justice, art, sculpture and music (ibid.). I add to this list the language of photography. But, in
which sense can photography be a language? And again, how do image and language relate to
each other?
For Benjamin, language is communicability, which cannot be reduced to the relation
between a signifier and a signified: “Language never gives mere signs” (GS II/1, 150 / SW1,
69). It has been even argued that the paradigm of experience that Benjamin is developing, is a
kind of “chromatic differentation”, rather than a linguistic signification (Gaygill 1998, xiii-xv,
13, 155).
Without taking stance to the possible hierarchies between the different models
of “sense production” (in this context we cannot say: signification) that can be found in
Benjamin, it can be stated that, from the Benjaminian point of view, the Fall from paradise
leads to a situation, where the actualization of all mediality tends towards some kind of
mediation. Only in the revelation the linguistic and the mental being are identical. But
still, on the other hand, even after the Fall “that which in a mental entity is communicable
is its language” (GS II/1, 142 / SW1, 63). It only actualizes itself as multiplication and
differentiation, be it chromatic, graphic or phonetic. This actualization is a process of
phenomenalization, the coming into appearance of communicability. It is a question of
knowledge of how to make something appear, and of the process of forming; in short, it is a
question of techné.
The work of art is the paradigmatic example of the site of actualization understood as
phenomenalization. This is the case in the Benjaminian thinking as well. Benjamin, however,
underlines that the work of art is not a closed totality. It is never complete, as long as it
survives as a part of tradition (Weber 1999, 43). It has a historical index. This applies also to
the photographic image.
Indexical image, be it dialectical or photographic one, is for Benjamin at the same
time a ruine and a diagram, where the future as well as the past are virtually inscribed. In
his article “A Small History of Photography” Benjamin writes that the spectator of the early
photographs cannot avoid of looking for a spakle of chance, a small detail, where the reality
has burned itself into the image. In this detail, the future moment has its afterlife, and the
spectator, located in another time, can still recognize it.
Something, which was never seen before the exposure, is inscribed in it as if by
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chance. Benjamin calls this, using psychoanalytical vocabulary, the optical unconcious (das
optisch Unbewusste) (GS II/1, 371). It is a realm of restructuration of time and space. It is
characterized by physiognomic richness in details. The camera transcends the scope of sense
perception by freezing rapid movements, by making microscopic strucures visible, etc. “It is
another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye” (ibid.,371). In the vocabulary of the
Benjaminian philosophy of language one could reformulate this by saying that the language
of photography is the communicability of the displacement of sense perception.
For Benjamin, the interplay of the two natures that speak to the eye and to the camera,
is analogical to that of the consciousness and unconsciousness. If the psychoanalysis makes
it possible to study the effects of the unconscious processes on the level of consciousness,
photography shows that “the difference of magic and technique is through and through a
historical variable” (ibid., 371). What should we understand under this difference?
If the term “technique” here is replaced7 by expression “phenomenalization of
mediality”, then, against the background of the Benjaminian philosophy of language, it can
be stated that photography, as the communicability of the displacement of sense perception,
reminds of the impossibility of tracing the limits of language. In other words, it would be a
question of the magic of language and of its displacements after the Fall. In a similar way
as the psychoanalysis decenteres the consciousness, photography displaces and puts in
question the opposition of aisthesis and semiosis. The historical character of the difference
between magic and technique would thus be a question of reorganization of the “mediun of
perception”.
The historical changes in the “mediun of perception” form one of the key themes of
the Benjaminian “media aesthetics”8, which again is tightly connected to his dialectics of
aura. These are themes I cannot study closer here, however, a short remark on the dialectic of
aura might be helpful for the understanding of my argument.
In the contemporary media theoretical discussions it is almost a commomplace to be
contet with stating, that the Benjaminian concept of aura is ambivalent. Benjamin, it is said,
was on the one hand welcoming the decay of aura, on the other hand he was nostalgic about
it. This view, however, is a result of a limited interpretation. In a closer study, it becomes
evident that rather than being a definable philosophical concept, aura is a strategic term,
which Benjamin uses in numerous contexts in various ways. The figure of aura follows
a complex logic, which gives an impression of ambivalency. At least three levels of aura
can be detected: aura of originality, pseudo-aura and an aura without aura (Fürnkäs 2000).
Another critical point in the reception of the Benjaminian dialectics of aura is the difference
between decay and disappearance (see for example Steiner 2003). For Benjamin (this is the
line of interpretation I follow), the decay of aura is a historical process, where aura becomes
readable on its all levels; and this doesn’t imply a total disappearance of it. It is true that
Benjamin writes, for example discussing pictorialism and jugendstil, that aura ought to be
destroyed. This applies, however, only to a specific historical situation or situations, where
aura becomes readable as pseudo-aura. The auratic has its “inner movement”, its historical
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index.

The double index of photography

In the Archades Project Benjamin writes, paraphrazing one of his “definitions” of aura:

“Trace is the appearance of closeness [Erscheinung einer Nähe], however distant

might that be, which left it. Aura is the appearance of distance, however close might
that be, which caused it. In the trace we get hold on the thing, in the aura it holds us in
its ban.” (GS V/1, 560)

For the theoretical discourse on photography, the most interesting aspect of this aphoristic
formulation is the way it brings the ideas of a spatio-tempoal and a historical indexicality
together. Following Benjamin, one can say that an indexical image is not only able to show
that which has been “there” but also to show something that was never seen in the first place.
As an indexical trace the photograph is “appearing of a closeness, however distant might that
be, which left it”. The photographic image is an inscription of the contact between the object
and its image – or, to borrow the expression of Roland Barthes: “a umbilical cord” made
of light (Barthes 1993, 81). At the same time, it is , however, “the appearance of distance,
however close might that be, which caused it”. The photograph marks a break between the
image and the spectator, between the “then and there” and the “here and now”. In other
words, the photograph visualizes the relation between the past and the present, and at the
same time it forms a crystalline intertwining of the Then and the Now; in short, it forms a
dialectical image, where the aura and its decay become readable.
Related to the context of theoretical disussions on photography the interplay of aura
and trace can be reformulated as the interpaly of the (Peircean) spatio-temporal indexicality
and the historical one (aura standing on the side of the historical and trace on the spatio-
temporal indexicality). Where the aura becomes readable in its decay, there the photographic
image appears as a kind of backdrop or setting where history takes place. Probably the most
obvious example of this is the interpretation that Benjamin makes of the photographs of
Eugène Atget. Benjamin sees Atget as a forerunner of surrealistic photography, the pictures
of Paris “suck the aura from reality like water from a sinking ship”. The photographs of Atget
are comparable to “crime scenes”: there is nothing to see in them, only traces to read (GS II/1,
378, 385).
This kind of theatricality of the photographic image is thematized in an elaborated
way also in the texts where Benjamin discusses certain photographs portraying Kafka and/or
himself as a child. Here, Benjamin makes use of textual strategies, which could be called
photographic. In his article “Small History of Photography” he writes of an early portrait of
Kafka:
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 “There the boy stands, perhaps six years old, dressed up in a tight, almost humiliating
child’s suit overloaded with trimmings, in a kind of winter garden landscape. Palm
fronds stand staring in the background. And as if to make these upholstered tropics
still more sultry and oppressive, the subject holds in his left hand an oversized, broad-
brimmed hat, such as Spaniards wear. He would surely be lost in this setting were it
not for the immensely sad eyes, which dominate this landscape predetermined for
them.” (GS II/1, 375, transl. Cadava 1998, 149)

In his Kafka-essay (written in 1934) Benjamin repeats this description almost from word to
word adding to the end, however, one remark: “[...] landscape predetermined for them, into
which the auricle [Muschel] of a big ear listens” (GS II/1, 416, transl. Cadava 1998, 149).
In Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (written in 1932-34) describes a
photograph, this time from his own childhood, in following terms:

“I’m standing bareheaded, holding in my left hand a mighty sombrero, which I allow
to hang down with studied grace. The right hand is occupied with a staff whose
lowered handle is visible in the foreground, while its end is hidden in the bundle of
ostrich plumes, which flow forward off a garden table. Entirely off to the side, next to
the door curtain, the mother stood rigid, in a tight bodice. Like a mannequin she gazes
at my velvet suit, which for its part, seems overloaded with trimmings and cut from a
fashion magazine. But I am disfigured by my similarity to everything around me here.
I dwelt in the nineteenth century as a mollusk dwells in its shell, and the century now
lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear.” (GS IV/ 261, transl.
Cadava 1998, 108-109)

The comparison of these three passages give an idea of the complexity of the cross references
chearachterisic for the Benjaminian texts. Franz and Walter are surrounded by similar, almost
the same requisites, they are standing in the same kind of posture, etc. These passages form a
kind of double or triple exposure, where photography appears as a realm of self alienation, or,
more precisely as an process of “detachment from the self as demarcation of a self”, as Weber
puts it in in his discussion of aura (Weber 1996, 87-88).
In “Small History of Photography” the description of the image of Kafka is the
immediate continuation of a passage, where Benjamin writes of his own childhood
photographs. Here, these images are juxtaposed side by side, in Berliner Kindheit they are
superimposed. The “ear-shells” (the auricle, Muschel, is also a shell) that are listening into
each other form an allegorical space, where the photographic light comes into its readability.
In Benjamins autobiographical text Berliner Kindheit the passage in question is a
part of a chapter called “Mummerehlen”. It is imbedded in a reflection on how a child tries
to make sense of the world with help of similarities. In a German childrens’ rhyme there is
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a character called “Muhme Rehlen”. For a small child it doesn’t mean anything specific, so
it turns into “Mummerehlen” and becomes a part of the murmuring (Mummen) of languge,
out of which the things it names (inclusive the child itself, who tries to find its place in the
language) differentiate like from a cloud: “In course of time I learned to murmur myself into
the words [Worte], which actually were clouds [Wolken]” (GS IV/1, 261). Benjamin’s choice
of words, here, as in so many other cases, is highly reflected. In the murmur of language the
words are similar to each other; they are clouds – Worte sind Wolken. Benjamin activates
the semantic potential of this kind of similarity between the words in many of his texts.
In Berliner Kindheit the word ‘cloud’ forms for the murmuring language a centre, which
Benjamin approaches “with somnambulent sureness” (Hamacher 1988, 147). The cloud is
not a metaphor in any traditional sense. It is not a sensuous image of an noumenal content.
It is, rather, a “medium of likeness” (ibid., 163, 165). It is similar without being similar to
something. It is of form and of color and of their diffenentiation. As the name of the word, the
cloud names the “sense production” taking place in it.
The murmur of the language, which is able to name anything and nothing, is the
promise of naming inherent to language. This promise, however, is something language can
redeem only virtually. It is the capacity of language to distort and to displace and thus to
produce similarity. In other words, in order to be a self, an “I”, one has to appropriate the
position of the enunciator performatively by saying “I”.
The photograph reproduces this structure, but the self is now objectified. As a figure
against a background the photograped person is his own representative. The place of the self
inscribed into the image is as unapproachable as the position of a dead person in a language;
to say “I am dead” is not enough. The “image-I” can be itself only as a dead body.
When studied from slightly a different point of view, the double exposure of Kafka/
Benjamin can been seen as a dialectical image, where the Now and the Then emit sparks.
Trace, in contrast to aura, refers spatio-temporally to the place of recording. The child was
“there” in front of the camera. In the trace of light we can get hold on this “there”. The double
exposure, however, suggests that the “there” is always already dispersed. It can be located
only in the image, which for its part is a part of a whole imagery. Against the background of
the Benjaminian philosophy of language, this means that the promise of a locating (which is
the promise of “namig” of photography as language) inherent to the photo-graphing, to the
tracing of light, can actualize itself only virtually. What takes place in the photographic light
has no place of its own.
As the opposing term to trace, aura, for its part, names the historical conditions of
readability of the photographic image. From the historical situation of Benjamin, from his
“Now-time”, the studio photography of the late 19th century appeared as a historical index
of the economy crises of the 1920s and 1930s. The articifially created athmosphere of these
images was for him a symptom of the decay of the bourgeois life style. Late 19th century
produced a huge amount of photographic images with overloaded symbolism of postures
and requisites: a woman reading a book, a man thinking with his hand on the forehead, a
10
young man gazing into the future... Now, a century later, this imagery appears, not only as
a symptom of the identity cirsis the bourgeois, but also as a kind of cataloque of gestures of
the bourgeois life style. While the uncanny texture of time and space makes its appearance in
form of the setting, the objectifying effect of the kamera becomes visible as well. The freezed
gestures of the human body seem to imitate themselves. The two indices of photography
become intertwined: the trace of the past the “there and then” appears as being invested
with unredeemed possibilities, with certain virtuality inherent to every moment. The whole
spectrum of anachronotic effects of photography come into its readability: at stake is not
just interpretation of historical documents but also the structures of time and space as the
constituents of subjectivity and of bodily presence.
Against this background it is symptomatic that many artists and scientists of the
late 19th century showed almost an obsessive interest for bodily gestures. Many writers
meticulously described the physiognomy of the urban masses, Etienne Jules Marey and
Eadweard Muybridge worked at chronophotography and Jean Martin Charcot studied the
attacks of hysteria with help of photographs. Besides the hysteria the so called Tourette
Syndrome (neurological condition leading to a generalized catastrophe of gestural sphere) was
in the late 19th century a fairly prevalent disease. Interestingly enough, this disease, however,
abruptly almost disappeared in the beginning of the 20th century. Why the late 19th century
showed such an interest for gestures? Was it somehow connetcted to photography?
As an explanation for the disappearance of Tourette Syndrome Giorgio Agamben has
proposed the hypothesis that “ataxy, tics and dystonia had, in the course of time, become a
norm, and that beyond a certain point everyone had lost control of their gestures” (Agamben
1993, 137). This claim resonates in an interesting way with Benjamin’s Baudelaire-study.In
“Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” Benjamin states that the circumstances in the late 19th
century had become unfavourable for lyric poetry. The structure of experience had changed:
“the shock experience had become the norm” (GS I/2, 608, 614-615).
Both Agamben and Benjamin are addressing the structural change of experience
that finds its culmination in the 19th century. This developement is exemplified by the
displacement taken place, during the centuries, in the use of the word “sensation”. At the
dawn of the modern era, sensation, in stead of its earlier meaning, “perceiving”, became
successively to mean something exrtaordinary, something sensational. The seasonal markets,
nature catastrophes and the french revolution were called sensations. And, finally, with the
proliferation of afternoon papers the sensational became a central force forming the publicity.
(Türcke 2002, 89-118)
Photography has had a central role in this process. It has, for its part, influenced the
constitution of public space and the intertwinig of the domains of the aesthetic and the politic.
Photography has been used in recording, not only of bodily gestures, but also of exotic
landscapes, of crime scenes, of ciriminals and of all kinds of incidents. In short, during its
relatively short history photography has become a kind of universal medium of identity. As
the reverse side of its being a constituent of the social, photography restructures time and
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space, the framework of all experience. New objects and events emerge in the photographic
light. Photography produces objectivity and actuality.
For Benjamin, photography is a chiasmatic bond of nature and culture. It raises the
question of historicality of the “medium of perception”. From his point of view photography
is a hybrid of physics and metaphysics, chemistry and alchemy, technique and magic. As a
language photography is a hybrid of the “languages of things” and the “expression of human
mental life”, a state of dispersion of the sense perception, and, perhaps, even a transgression
of the language of man. This is to say that the historical index of photography turns back to
point at photography itself. It points at the historical conditions for reading a photograph as an
image drawn by light.
The digitalization of photography has set new challenges for reading photographic
images. Often the spectator cannot without additional information figure out, if an image
is drawn by light or by a computer programme (or something between these two, which is
most often the case). The language of photo-graphy, light-tracing, has to deal with traslation
problems, which cannot be solved by following the grammatics of any real medium. This
caesura of the medium of photography made visible by the digitalization, is to be understood
as a challenge to think mediality and its phenomenalization in terms of virtuality. The promise
of emplacement as the promise of photography (as a laguage) can be redeemed only virtually.
When the displacements of the frontiers between the languages cause problems of translation,
as now in the case of digtalization photography, the task of the media theorist (who is a kind
of translator) is to analyse the historical changes in the relation of technique and magic.

Notes:
1. See for example Peirce 1991, Bazin 1958.
2. See for example Batchen 1997, Osborne 2003.
3. Peter Osborne sees the opposition of semiosis/aisthesis actually lurking behind a whole set of tensions and
fundamental differences in apporach in the field of cultural studies. These only culminate in the theoretical
discourses on the (photographic) image (Osborne 2001, 21).
4. In the following I use the abbeviation “GS” of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften and “SW” of his Selected Writings.
5. One of the most famous examples of anamorphosis is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533).
6. Weber uses here the word wirken (to influence, to have an effect), which has an ethymological connection
to Wirlichkeit (reality). For an informative analysis of this word family and its philosophical implications see
Heidegger 1994.
7. I argue for this replacement elsewhere in my doctoral thesis. Benjamin gives numerous hints of a co-existence
of a “historical” and a “metaphysical” register in his texts. There are also good reasons to read his early
“metaphysical” and late “materialistic” work with and through each other (see for example GS I/3, 918, GS VII/
1, 416, Caygill 1998).
8. The term “aesthetics” refer here to a theory of aisthesis, not to a theory of beauty (see for example GS I/2,
478, Schöttker 2002, 411-433).

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Literature:
Agamben, Giorgio (1993): Infancy and History – The Destruction of Experience, Verso. (Infanzia e storia 1978,
Giulio Einaudi Editore).
Barthes, Roland (1993): Camera Lucida – Reflections on Photography, Vintage. (La chambre claire – note sur la
photographie, Gallimard, 1980).
Batchen, Geoffrey (1997): Burning with Desire – The Conception of Photography, MIT Press.
Bazin, André (1958): Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris.
Benjamin, Walter (1991): Gesammelte Schriften (vol.I-VII), (ed.) Tiedemann, Rolf & Schweppenhäuser,
Hermann, in cooperation with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Suhrkamp.
Includes the following essays referred in the text (year of writing indicated in parentheses):
(1914/15) Fragment 83: “Reflektion in der Kunst und in der Farbe” (GS VI 117-118)
(1916) “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (GS II/1, 140-157)
(1931) “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (GS II/1, 368-385)
(1933) Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (GS IV/1, 235-304)
(1934) “Franz Kafka” (GS II/2, 409-437)
(1939) “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (Dritte Fassung) (GS I/2,471-508)
(1939) “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (GS I/2, 605-653)
(1928-40) Passagen-Werk (GS V/1, V/2)
Cadava, Eduardo (1997): Words of Light – Theses on Photography of History, Princeton Univ. Press.
— (2001): “Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins”, October 96, Spring 2001.
Caygill, Howard (1998): Walter Benjamin. The Color of Experience, Routledge.
Düttmann, Alexander Garçia (1994): “Tradition and Destruction – Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Language”, in
Benjamin, A. & Osborne, P. (ed.): Walter Benjamins Philosophy – Destruction and Experience, Routledge.
Fenves, Peter (1996):”The Genesis of Judgement: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin’s “On
Language as Such and on Human Language””, in Ferris, David S. (ed.): Walter Benjamin – Theoretical
Questions, Stanford Univ. Press.
Fürnkäs, Josef (2000): “Aura”, in Michael Opitz & Erdmut Wizisla (ed.): Benjamins Begriffe Bd. 1, Suhrkamp.
Hamacher, Werner (1988): “The Word Wolke – If It Is One”, in Nägele, Rainer (ed.): Benjamin’s Ground – New
Readings of Walter Benjamin, Wayne State Univ. Press.
Haverkamp, Anselm (1992): “Notes on the “Dialectical Image” (How Deconstructive is it?)”, diacritics fall-
winter 1992.
Heidegger, Martin (1994): “Wissenschaft und Besinnung”, in Vortäge und Aufsätze, Neske 7. printing.
Osborne, Peter (2000): “Sign and Image”, in Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Routledge.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1991): Peirce on Signs – Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, (ed.) James
Hoopes, University of North California Press.
Schöttker, Detlev (2002): “Benjamins Medienästhetik” in Schöttker, Detlev (ed.) Walter Benjamin
Medienästhetische Schriften, Suhrkamp.
Steiner, Uwe C. (2003): “Eine gelungene Anmaßung”? – Die Aura der Reproduktion und die Religion des Medi-
alen dei Walter Benjamin und Patrick Roth”,www.iwbg.uni-duesseldorf.de/Pdf/Steiner11.pdf, 1.7.2004
Türcke, Christoph (2002): Erregte Gesellschaft. Philosophie der Sensation, Hanser.
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Weber, Samuel (1996): Massmediauras. Form, Technis, Media, Stanford Univ. Press.
—1999: “Virtualität der Medien” teoksessa S. Schade, G.C. Tholen (toim.): Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst
und Medien, Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

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