History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

And this is where literary studies, steeped in its own formalist methodologies, can continue to be of greatest use. But as Meyer Schapiro, speaking from the same historical moment as Benjamin, observed, there is no formalism outside of history, for even the most abstract (or willfully obtuse) of aesthetic projects "built up out of other objects, that is, out of other interests and experience, would have another formal character."(27) Thus when Cadava writes that "photography does not belong to history; it offers history. It delivers history to its destiny. It tells us that the truth of history is to this day nothing but photography," I can't help but worry that he retains the flavor of Benjamin's project, but risks losing sight of its possibilities for radical critique.(28) These possibilities are rooted in Benjamin's self-consciousness about speaking from within a particular historical moment that encompassed not only the proliferation of technologies of mechanical reproduction in the golden age of the illustrated press and classic cinema, but also the rise of Fascism, the first glimmers of the flaws in the promise of revolutionary Marxism and the near decimation of the tradition of enlightened German Jewish intellectual endeavor that had produced him. Not for a moment would I wish a comparably tragic experience of history upon Cadava and other contemporary scholars, but I do think it is appropriate to ask what history is being referred to here? As Carl Schorske has aptly observed, cultural studies has a tendency to ask questions around "History" while seldom allowing history to determine the questions.(29)

Finally, then, it is not only the historicization of theory but the conditions of a revitalized practice of history through Benjamin that remain at issue. In a recent review of the first volume of Belknap/Harvard's collection of Benjamin's writings, Arthur Danto remarked that Benjamin seemed suited for only two jobs: a cloistered academic or a rare-book dealer. While Danto lumps Benjamin's failure to achieve his doctorate (his dissertation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama was rejected as inscrutable by his committee) together with his apparent lack of interest in setting up a secondhand shop as equally typical of "Benjamin's gift for the self-defeating" this dichotomy need not be as dismissive as it might initially seem.(30) In his book on history, itself profoundly influenced by photography, Kracauer wrote what is difficult not to read as a defense of his friend, who had committed suicide on the border between France and Spain in 1940:

So the question as to the meaningfulness of "technical history" would seem to be unanswerable. There is only one single argument in its support which I believe to be conclusive. It is a theological argument, though. According to it, the "complete assemblage of the smallest facts" is required for the reason that nothing should go lost. It is as if the fact-oriented accounts breathed pity with the dead. This vindicates the figure of the collector.(31)