Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought

Christopher D. Johnson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801464539
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Mnemosyne-Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Mnemosyne-Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought.

While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Mnemosyne-Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West's cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Mnemosyne-Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Mnemosyne-Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Mnemosyne-Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg's lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

1

ATLAS GAZED: MNEMOSYNE—ITS ORIGINS, MOTIVES, AND SCOPE

Memory

Mnemosyne mater musarum. Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses. Mnemosyne, who personifies memory, whose pool in Hades complements Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Mnemosyne, who, as Friedrich Hölderlin writes in the first strophe of his gnomic hymn “Mnemosyne” (ca. 1803), allows “the true” to occur despite, or perhaps because of, “time”:

Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos

Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast

Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.

…………………………

…Lang ist

Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber

Das Wahre.1 (1–3, 15–17)

A sign we are, without meaning,

Without pain we are and have nearly

Lost our language in foreign lands,

…………………………

…Though the time

Be long, truth

Will come to pass.2

Memory, Hölderlin intimates, sets us an endless, impossible task in part because we are forever shuttling between the familiar and “the foreign.” And if “language” is the principal means by which we remember, as the rich imagery and allusions in the hymn’s three strophes urge, then this is because it is fueled by metaphor whose task, as Aristotle and many others after him have observed, is to exploit our thirst for the “foreign,” that we might see similarities in things initially perceived as being quite dissimilar.

Tellingly, in the last version of this poem—the last hymn he wrote before his Umnachtung, or “loss of sanity”3—Hölderlin completely transforms the first strophe, rendering it less abstract, if no more transparent, by replacing “sign,” “language,” and even “time” with concrete images expressing the “law” of change:

Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet

Die Frücht und auf der Erde geprüfet und ein Gesetz ist,

Das alles hineingeht, Schlangen gleich,

Prophetisch, träumend auf

Den Hügeln des Himmels.4 (1–5)

Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked,

The fruits and tried on earth, and it is law,

Prophetic, that all must enter in,

Like serpents, dreaming on

The mounds of Heaven.5

If “all” must try the “fruits” of mutability, then each does so differently, no matter the common dream of something more permanent. Because, Hölderlin intimates, we are constantly called to remember ephemeral pleasures and mourn mortality, the fragile persistence of memory and the images it furnishes offer tangible proof that human existence derives much of its meaning from the experience, recollection, and thus repetition of this “law” of change. Memory persists even if we can imagine a place and a time, as Wallace Stevens memorably does, “where ripe fruit never falls.”

More particularly, when Hölderlin recalls, in both versions of the hymn’s last strophe,

Am Feigenbaum ist mein

Achilles mir gestorben…

By the figtree

My Achilles died…6

he spurs us not only to ask how and why he has emphatically made the dead Achilles his own (“mein…mir”), but also to pose again those questions riddling the history of all imitation of classical models, myths, and gestures. When the classicizing poet or artist remembers, whose memories is he reviving? Does he elect, if you will, to drink of Mnemosyne’s pool, or does he drink unwillingly, unknowingly, having perhaps also drunk of Lethe? What kind of knowledge does he gain by remembering? Is memory a personal daemon, or is her task to give birth to collective, cultural memories? When and how, that is, does the pathos of “my Achilles” become that of “our Achilles”? With his enigmatic yet concrete hymn, with his ambiguous “figtree,” Hölderlin offers no facile answers. He offers instead metaphors, symbols, and figures. His “figtree” may grow in the Turkish countryside around the burial mounds of Achilles and Patrokles, as described in a book that Hölderlin knew by an eighteenth-century English traveler;7 or it may refer to Luke 13:6–9, where the keeper of an orchard challenges Jesus’ order to cut down a barren fig tree in hopes that it will bear “the fruit” in the coming year; or, perhaps, it alludes to Mark 11:12–24 or Matthew 21:18–22, where Jesus curses a fig tree barren of fruit (suggesting probably the barren teachings of the Sadducees in the Temple), causing it to wither completely, and where the miraculous effect of his words symbolizes faith’s power; or it may be uprooted from any particular context and symbolize, more generally, the cycle of growth and decay. Or, perhaps, as was his habit, Hölderlin is playing etymologically with Μνημοσύνη, by recalling Achilles’ “wrath,” his “μη˜νιν,” which begins the Iliad, and how both words have a common proto-Indo-European root in men-, meaning “to think, remember, have one’s mind roused.”8 Or, as is likely the case, it signifies all of these things, as Hölderlin tries, yet again, to syncretize the Judeo-Christian and classical traditions by placing them in metonymic proximity.

Hölderlin, Pound, and other archaizing poets decry the loss of meaning that comes with the loss of Mnemosyne and the Muses she begets. But they also believe that the mediation of memory, through art and literature, but especially through the vivid, energetic images that art and literature furnish, can constitute an experience different from the experience that occasioned the memory in the first place, and that this second-order experience, for all its vicarious fragility, can be redemptive.

Of course most of us have never possessed, let alone lost, the cultural memory of antiquity that Hölderlin or Pound cultivated. Yet one aspect of their efforts, at least, remains vital, even in these accelerating, amnesiac times: the mediation of memory, be it personal or cultural, still functions metaphorically. Rather than turning to narrative, memory often figures the past with the immediacy of images, images that may be borrowed, say, from Homer or Praxiteles, from the television, the Web, or our own experience. Mnemosyne makes the unfamiliar familiar, the strange less so. A paradoxical creature, even as she would annul temporal and spatial distances, she reminds us how “long” time is.

Time grows both longer and shorter when images of great pathos are involved. It also grows more subjective, more aesthetic. For my part, I remember that morning watching from my rooftop the Twin Towers burn, billowing gray smoke from their crimson wounds into the bluest of skies. I remember closing my eyes after the first tower fell, as if already to test whether, like a phantom limb, it persisted as an image on my eyelids. Then, as I was heading out to see what was to be done and seen, I saw it all on television, and it already had begun to change. Already that afternoon by the Manhattan Bridge with the fire trucks still coming in from Long Island a memory was forming, made at least partially of televised images, and I remember thinking that what I saw on the roof in the morning already had been rewound and framed by what I had seen on the screen, even as I gazed south at the funereal smoke that had usurped the towers.

In the ensuing years, the crush of mediated images has worked to transform that initial experience into a more attenuated, if universal experience. But aside from those ubiquitous images in newspapers, on television, and on the Web, some mediated images have had for me—and I know this to be the case for others as well—particular efficacy in bridging the gap between sensation and reflection, or between what the German phenomenological tradition calls “lived experience” (Erlebnis) and “memory” (Erinnerung). Meaning is mediated, an event: “…Lang ist / Die Zeit. Es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre.” To invoke Mnemosyne is still to invoke her children, the appropriating muses, as well.

Reading from his novel Austerlitz in October 2001 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, two months before his death by car crash, W. G. Sebald never recalled the events of the previous month. Nor did the reader who preceded him, Susan Sontag. They didn’t have to. Their works, their words, were already uniquely dedicated to the art of memory, to finding ways of expressing what it meant to remember when what was to be remembered defied all conventional narrative art. People were moved to be there and moved by being there partly, I think, for instruction in ways not to forget, for ways to make sense of the images stamped in their memories and the acrid smell still emanating from downtown.

Sontag, of course, had already written directly about the attacks and our responses to them. While her long essay on war photography, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), would later directly challenge the notion that she had championed in her essays collected in On Photography (1977), a notion that had become almost a cultural commonplace: namely that the repeated exposure, the overexposure, to horrific images dulls our sensibilities and abilities to respond to them, either aesthetically or politically. In rejecting the enthusiastic, clichéd embrace of the “society of the spectacle,” Sontag would underscore how certain images could still move her (and us): “Certain photographs—emblems of suffering, such as the snapshot of the little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, his hands raised, being herded to the transport to a death camp—can be used like memento mori, as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as secular icons, if you will.”9

Alternately, Sebald in his novels, or whatever one chooses to call them, had already refined a prose style and narrative technique that allowed the sediments of memory to accrete now ponderously, now vertiginously, such that the reader often could not tell to whom the memories belonged: whether to Sebald, his narrators, his protagonists, or to the texts they read. Indeed, the manner in which the pages of The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, and Austerlitz are punctuated now and again by uncaptioned photographs, images that often directly but sometimes obliquely illuminate the content of Sebald’s writing, constitutes another form of memory. Like his bricolage of sources, intertexts, and themes, these photographs suggest the heterogeneous, fragmentary character of memory. They also reinforce the notion of Sebald as an encyclo...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope
• 2. Ad oculos: Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Collecting
• 3. Metaphor Lost and Found in Mnemosyne
• 4. Translating the Symbol: Warburg and Cassirer
• 5. Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel
• 6. Exemplary Figures and Diagrammatic Thought
• 7. Synderesis: The “Bruno-Reise”
• Illustrations
• Bibliography