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    Didi-Huberman's continuing investigation of the impedimenta of philosophy.

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    Atlas, How to Carry the World on Ones Back by Georges Didi-Huberman

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    Didi-Huberman's continuing investigation of the impedimenta of philosophy.

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    Atlas, How To Carry The World On Ones Back by Georges Didi-Huberman

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    DouglasW822
    Didi-Huberman's continuing investigation of the impedimenta of philosophy.

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    Atlas How to Carry the World on One’s Back? GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN ‘Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid November 26, 2010 — March 28, 2011 ZKM | Museum fr Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe May 7 ~ August 28, 2010 ‘Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburgo September 24 — November 27, 2011 With this new exhibi at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, wwe enter, hand-in-hand with Aby Warburg, a territory where images rule and words are superfluous, where the conventional timeline has been replaced by akind of cross-section of time, a journey back and forth between past and present, a journey on which we have been invited along not as mere spectators, but as alert participants in the construction of our own histories and identities. ‘The Mnemosyne Atlas aroused great interest when it was first formulated in the carly part of the twentieth century, but only now has it been analysed with the solid methodological tools deployed by the exhibition’s curator, Georges Didi-Huberman, who, besides giving the Atlas visual form, has completely updated the complex theoretical corpus underpinning it. His intention, and that of the other organisers, has been not simply to pay homage to Warburg as an intellectual figure of great stature, but to make of hima genius lock the protective, motivating, inspirational spirit of this exhibition of images spanning the period from 1914 to the present day, images that have been removed from their usual bookish or academic context and set down instead in a museum. How, we wonder, will visitors respond to this new exhibition and what kind of image-map will each draw up for him or herself after experiencing this veritable whirlwind of visual ideas? This exhibition forces us to rethink the purpose of institutions such as ours. ‘The Atlas brings together older ideas like the imaginary muscum with present- day concepts such as the virtual museum and universal access to images, and will, we hope, open up new ways of thinking about how best to manage and evaluate humankind’s visual and intellectual heritage. An atlas is not just a topographical description of territories with fluid borders; itis also the mythological figure of Atlas, bearing the weight, not of a physical world, but of the images that make up that world. ‘The fact that an institution like the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia should put on an exhibition inspired by Warburg's Atlas gives some idea of how important itis to read the past through the lens of the present. Conversely, it suggests that contemporary life can only be fully understood through a critical, analytical and participatory re-reading of the past. Warburg's chosen muse for this new discipline was not Clio, the muse of history, but Mnemosyne, the personification of memory, thus making of his project a manifesto for the battle against a form of image amnesia. Ministry of Culture Table of Contents Presentation, by Manuel Borja-Villel (8) 1. ESSAY ATLAS OR THE ANXIOUS GAY SCIENCE 1. Disparates. ‘To read what was never written’ The inexhaustible, or knowledge by imagination (14) — Heritage of our time: the Mnemosyne atlas (18) — Visceral, sidereal, or how to read the liver of a sheep (23) —Madness and truths of the incommensurable (29) — Tables for collecting the parcelling out of the world (37) — Heterotopias, or the cartographies of defamiliarisation [dépaysement] (44) — Leopard, starry sky, smallpox, spatter (52) IL. Atlas. ‘Carrying the entire world of sufferings’ A titan bent under the burden of the world (60) — Gods in exile and knowledge in suffering (68) — Survivals of tragedy, aurora of the anxious gay science (76) —‘El suefio de la razén produce monstruos’ (80) — An anthropology from the point of view of the image (86)— Samples of chaos, or the poetics of phenomena (93) — Points of origin and links of affinity (101) — Atlas and the wandering Jew, or the age of poverty (109) IIL. Disasters. ‘The dismantling of the world: that is the subject of art’ ‘Tragedy of culture and modern ‘psychomachias’ (118) — Explosions of positivism, or the ‘crisis of European sciences’ (128) — Warburg in front of the war: Notizkéisten 115-118 (139) — The seismograph explodes (150) — Panoramic tables to return from the disaster (160) — The atlas of images and the surveying gaze (Ubersicht) (165) — The inexhaustible, or knowledge by re-editing and piecing together [remontages] (177) Bibliography (192) 2. OUTLINE ‘THIRTY-SIX COURSES IN THE HISTORY OF THE ATLAS (223) 3. CATALOGUE ATLAS —HOW TO CARRY THE WORLD ON ONE'S BACK? Works in exhibition (228) Knowing through images Disparates plus disasters equals atlas (244) — Because art history is constantly to be pieced together (254) — Alphabet primers and pedagogies of the imagination (264) — The child-‘rag-and-bone’ man-archaeologist (274) Piecing thogether the order of things Infinite natural history (284) — But what are those things? (298) — And what do those variations of forms mean? (306) — Plate-plateau, tableau-table (314) Piecing thogether the order of places Upside down maps (322) — What an atlas does to the landscape (334) — The surveyor of cities, his camera, his thousand and one viewpoints (344) — Subjective geographies (360) Piecing thogether the order of the times Images for writing and piecing together lost time (368) — Images for dismantling the disastrous present (382) — A history of ghosts for big people (396) — From the disaster to desire, for the beauty of the gesture (406) Presentation ‘The atlas as a publishing genre sprang from a desire to collect together images from one particular area of knowledge. It became clear from the work of Aby ‘Warburg, however, that these collections of images could just as easily have their roots in a dense web of thoughts, in a kind of non-systematic system out of which would emerge a complex fabric (or ‘text’) woven out of various intellectual, spiritual and artistic phenomena. With the Bilderatlas, Warburg's system became part of contemporary thought, a project as endless, irreducible and uncontrollable as any project born from a compulsive — one might almost say excessive ~ desire to create an archive, His ideas have become a familiar presence in academic circles, both in regard to the creation (during his, lifetime) of the London Institute that bears his name and to the long scholarly road travelled, from the first studies made of him and his work (E. H. Gombrich’s intellectual biography, for example) to the profound and brilliant contributions by Georges Didi-Huberman, the curator of this exh However, until now, no one has attempted to set those ideas in the context ofa museum and apply them to our world the world that emerged from the First World War and its aftermath. ion. ‘The temptation to return to the problematic nature of the archive, almost a sub-discipline in contemporary culture (to judge by the amount of attention it has attracted in recent years), is roundly contradicted by Warburg's own ideas. ‘The opportunity to take up and restore his legacy in the form of an exhibition represents a very different challenge for a museum: there is no doubting the archivistic impulse that lies behind Warburg's Bilderatlas, but, interestingly enough, the historiography that has grown up around his work since his death, has failed to latch on to that. By focusing on the positivist, scientific, achivistic Warburg who emerges from the writings of Gombrich and Erwin Panofsky, we are returning to the underlying origin of his ideas and taking as our starting point one of the archetypes of paganism: the Dionysian. In speaking of the Dionysian aspect of Warburg's work, we are playing with his own interest in making diachronic connections, and at the same time trying to re-connect him with both Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacque Derrida: the Warburg archive is Dionysian in the sense that it has to do with desire, drive and evil. The museum thus becomes a way of drawing together those three impulses — without, one hopes, neutralising them ~ and linking together images and intellectual discourses. It does not do so, however, with any indoctrinatory intent, but uses Warburg's work as the theoretical basis on which to build new ways of making historical characters speak and interact, from a transversal, dialogic perspective rather than a linear, programmatic one. This approach opens up many possibilities, a distant echo of the ‘magnetic fields’ of André Breton and Philippe Soupault or the ‘mathematical relationships’ of Michel Tapié, new territories in which the frontiers between individuals, historical periods and geographies dissolve to reveal new constellations of images that offer a vision of ourselves as eminently historical beings endowed with memory, but also as schizophrenic beings capable of experiencing various layers of reality. In this new exhibition, then, the historical subject and the historian choose to follow in the dancing footsteps of the Dionysian maenad rather than the stately procession of the Apollonian priestess: the first shows, the second explains. We have tried, too, to locate Warburg within another archetype bequeathed to us by Antiquity: the genius loci, the inspiring, protective figure whose presence impregnates a place and which, while never visible, is nonetheless perceptibly there. This allows us to put together various sequences of images that encourage the viewer to rethink fundamental aspects, moments pregnant with modernity and its consequences: military conflicts, the post-atomic world, the rebuilding of civilisation, memory, the accumulation and circulation of wealth, etc. As with everything that flows from the Nietzschean Dionysian tradition, this new way of linking images is intended to show rather than explain, and is, therefore, inexhaustible and open to as many interpretations as there will be visitors to the museum. Anyone coming to this exhibition will have the chance to walk around inside this new Bilderatlas. Warburg has, quite rightly, been seen as the father of the virtual museum, but visitors will now be able to come into direct, unmediated contact with those fields of images created ex professo. Any visitor walking through the rooms of any museum is always creating his or her own ‘montage’; this exhibition overlays that montage with another; one that suggests but does not impose a view. It acts as a kind of double moviola, that of the spectator and that of the Bilderatlas: the genius loci accompanies, but does not guide, leaving visitors free to impose their own desires on what they see. Manuel J. Borja-Villel Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Peter Weibel Director of the Museum fiir Neue Kunst Harald Falckenberg Director of the Sammlung Falckenberg Atlas or the Anxious Gay Science 1. ESSAY ‘ealways happens, Bitter presence, Itisa hard moment to pass! ‘And there is no remedy. Why? You cannot know why. You cannot look at it Barbarians! Everything is askew, I sawit! That 00, ‘And that too. Cruel misfortune! What madness! ‘There is no use in crying out, ‘That is the worst of all! ‘Truth is dead. ‘And if it came back to life?” Goya, Las desastres de la guerra ates 813, 14 15,26,32, 35, 38,4243, 44 45,48, 58, 68,74, 79,80, “What isthe Universal (das Allgemeine)? “The singe ease (der einzelne Fal). What isthe Particular (das Besondere)? Millions of cases (millinen Fle)” J.W. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder Die Entsagenden ‘We, open-handed and rich in sprit, standing by the road like ‘open wells with no intention to fend off anyone who feels like ‘drawing from us— we unfortunately do not know how to defend ‘ourselves where we want to; we have no way of preventing people from darkening us: the time in which we live throws into us what, is most time-bound: its dirty birds drop their filth into us; boys their gewgaws; and exhausted wanderers who come to us for rest, thei litle and large miseries. But we shall do what we have always done: whatever one casts into us, we take down into our depths ~ for we are deep, we do not forget — and become bright E Nietasche, The Gay Science I. DISPARATES “To read what was never written’ ‘THE INEXHAUSTIBLE, OR KNOWLEDGE BY IMAGINATION imagine that, opening this book, my reader already knows, practically, and very well, what an atlas consists of. The reader no doubt has one on his bookshelves. Buthas he ‘read’ it? Probably not. You don't ‘read’ an atlas as you read a novel or a history book or a philosophical essay, from the first page to the last. Besides, an atlas often begins ~as we shall soon seein an arbitrary or problematic way, which is quite different from the beginning of a story or the premise of an argument; as for the end, it often refers to the unexpected appearance of a new country, a new zone of knowledge to be explored, to the extent that an atlas almost never has what we might calla definitive form. Furthermore, an atlas is hardly made up of ‘pages’ in the usual sense of the term, but rather of tables, of plates on which images are arranged, plates that we consult with a precise goal in mind, or that we leaf through at leisure, letting our ‘will to knowledge’ wander from image to image and from plate to plate, Experience shows that, more often than not, we use an atlas in a way that combines those two apparently very dissimilar gestures: we open it, first ofall, to look for precise information, but ‘once we find that information we do not necessarily put it down, but instead continue to look through the different junctions, this way and that; in consideration of which we do not close the collection of plates until we have leafed for a while, erratically, without any particular intention, through its forest, its maze and its treasure; until another time that will be just as useless or fertile. We can understand already, through the evocation of this split, paradoxical use, that the atlas, with its utilitarian and inoffensive appearance, could indeed reveal itself to anyone looking at it as a duplicitous, dangerous and even explosive object, albeit an inexhaustibly generous one. In a word, it is a mine. The atlas is a visual form of knowledge, a knowledgeable form of seeing. Yet, combining, overlapping or implicating the two paradigms that this last expres an aesthetic paradigm of the visual form, an epistemic paradigm of knowledge ~ the atlas in fact subverts the canonical forms in which each of these paradigms tried to find its own excellence and even its fundamental condition of existence. The great Platonic tradition promised an epistemic model founded on the pre- eminence of the Idea: true knowledge supposes, in this context, that an intelligible sphere was extracted — or purified — beforehand from the sensible space, of images therefore, where phenomena appear to us. In modern versions of this tradition, things (Sachen, in German) find their reasons, their explanations, their algorithms only in causes (Ursachen) that are correctly formulated and deduced, for example, in the language of mathematics. yn assumes — 4 Such would be, to summarise briefly, the standard form of all rational knowledge, of all science. It is remarkable that Plato's mistrust of artists — those dangerous ‘image makers’, those manipulators of appearance — did not prevent the humanist aesthetic from taking back all the prestige of the Idea, as Erwin Panofsky showed." This is how Leon Battista Alberti in his De pictura was able to reduce the notion of ‘tableau’ to the formulary unit of a rhetorical ‘period’, a ‘correct phrase’ in which each superior element would be deduced logically — ideally — from the elements of an inferior lower order: the surfaces engender the members that engender the bodies represented, in the same way that in a rhetorical period the words engender the propositions that engender the ‘clauses’ or ‘groups’ of propositions. In modern versions of this tradition, which we find for example in the modernism of Clement Greenberg, or, more recently, of Michael Fried, the tableaux find their superior reason in the very enclosure of their own spatial, temporal and semiotic frames, to the extent that the ideal rapport between Sache and Ursache maintains its force of law intact. A visual form of knowledge or knowledgeable form of seeing, the atlas disrupts all these frames of intelligibility. It introduces a fundamental impurity - but also an exuberance, a remarkable fecundity — that these models had been conceived to avert. Against all epistemic purity, the atlas introduces the sensible dimension into knowledge, and the diverse, and the lacunary character of each image. Against any aesthetic purity, it introduces the multiple, the diverse, the hybridity of any montage. Its tables of images appear to us before any page of story, of syllogism or of definition, but also before any tableau, whether we understand this word in its artistic sense (unity of the beautiful figure enclosed in its frame) or in its scientific sense (the logical exhaustion of all possibilities definitively organised into X axes and into Y coordinates). The atlas, therefore, straightaway breaks frames apart. It breaks the self- proclaimed certitudes of science, which is as certain of its truths as art is certain of its criteria. It invents, between all of this, interstitial zones of exploration, heuristic intervals. It deliberately ignores any definitive axioms. For it has to do with a theory of knowledge devoted to the risk of the sensible and of an aesthetic devoted to the risk of disparity. It deconstructs, with its very exuberance, the ideals of uniqueness, of specificity, of purity, of logical L.CCE. Panky, 1924pn.1728 exhaustion. It isa tool, not for the logical exhaustion of possibilities given, but and 6-89, for the inexhaustible opening up to possibilities that are not yet given. Its 2. B.Abert,1495,0,33.p.12 principle, its motor, is none other than the imagination. Imagination: a ‘CEM Baxandall, 1971, pp 37-50 i ' and 151-171, ld 1972,9p.202-211. dangerous word if anything (as is, already, the word image). But it is necessary to 15 join Goethe, Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’ in saying that the imagination, however disconcerting it is, has nothing to do with a personal or gratuitous fantasy. On the contrary, it gives us a knowledge that cuts across, through its intrinsic power of montage that consists in discovering — in the very place where it refuses the links created by obviated resemblances ~ links that direct observation cannot discern: ‘The Imagination is not fantasy; nor is it sensibility, even though it is difficult to conceive of an imaginative man who would not be sensitive. ‘The Imagination is a quasi divine faculty which perceives first of all, outside of philosophical methods, the intimate and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies. The honours and functions that he [Poe] confers on this faculty give it value such ... that a wise man without imagination no longer appears like a false wise man, or at least like an incomplete wise man ‘The imagination accepts the multiple (and even revels in it); not in order to summarise the world or to schematise it in a formula of subsumption: this is how an atlas is distinguished from a breviary or from a doctrinal summary. Nor does it do so to catalogue the world or to exhaust it in an integral ist: this is how the atlas is distinguished from a catalogue and even from a supposedly integral archive. The imagination accepts the multiple and constantly renews it in order to detect therein new ‘intimate and secret relations’, new ‘correspondences and analogies’ that are themselves inexhaustible, as is every consideration of the relations that a new montage would be susceptible to showing each time. ‘The inexhaustible: there are so many things, so many words, so many images throughout the world. A dictionary dreams of being their catalogue, ordered according to an immutable and definitive principle (ie the principle of the alphabet). The atlas is guided only by changing and provisional principles, the ones that can make new relations appear inexhaustibly — far more numerous than the things themselves ~ between things and words that nothing seemed to have brought together before. If Ilook up the word ‘atlas’ in the dictionary, normally, nothing else would interest me beyond, perhaps, any words that might have a direct resemblance to that word, or some visible relation: in the French dictionary I might see, for example, aflante (meaning ‘atlas’ architectural term for a support in the shape of a man) or Atlantic. But if 1 begin to look at the double-page spread of the dictionary, open before me like aplate in which T could find ‘intimate and secret relations’ between the French words atlas and, for example, atoll, atome, atelier, or in the other direction, astuce (meaning ‘trick’), asymétrie or asymbolie, I will then have started to deflect the very principle of the dictionary towards a highly hypothetical and adventurous atlas-principle. ‘The little experiment that I have described here reminds us of something like a child’s game: a child would be asked the lectio of a word in the dictionary, and he would be solicited by the delectatioof a transversal and imaginative use of the reading. The child is no better behaved than the images (from which comes the falseness and hypocrisy of the French dictum sage commie une image. He doesn't 8 ii: Huberman, 2002, ‘pp. 127-141 i, 2008, pp. 238-256 4.C Bude, 1857, p.329, + Tansatr’s not: Where Didi- Huberman quote from a published text, Ihave used the published English translation, r the orignal English, whereavaable. Where the translations were not available, "ave transated these quotations ysl as they appear in Did Huberman’s text 5. Meaning iterally 8s god as an image’ and tanslatable into English a's good ae god’ {6.W. Benjamin, 1927-194, p.473-S07. H. Blumenberg 1981 7.W. Benjamin, 1927-1840, pp.a79-480, Bl, (On the Mimeti Faculty’, 1933,in Selected Writings 1927 1934, Volume 2, Harvard University rss 1999, taiate by Rodney Livingstone, p. 722 9.1, 1916-1939. 145, 10d, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty 1933, Selected Writing, 1927-1934, Volume 2, Harvard University Press 1999, ransated by Roney Livingstone, p. 722 read in order to grasp the meaning of a specific thing, but rather to link this thing with many other things imaginatively. There would be two manners, therefore, of reading: a strict way, searching far the messages, and an imaginative ‘way, searching for the montages. The dictionary perhaps offers us a tool for the first of these searches, and the atlas certainly offers us an apparatus for the second. Benjamin has shown better than anyone the risk ~and the richness ~ of this ambivalence. No one has better revealed the ‘legibility’ (Lesbarkeit) of the world to the imminent, phenomenological or historical conditions of the very ibility’ (Anschaulichkeit) of things, thereby anticipating the monumental work of Hans Blumenberg on this problem.* No one has better liberated the reading of the purely linguistic, rhetorical or argumentative reading with which wwe associate it generally. To read the world is something much too fundamental to be confided to books alone or to be confined within them: for to read the world is also to link up the things of the world according to their ‘intimate and secret relations’, their ‘correspondences’ and their ‘analogies’. Not only do images offer themselves to our sight like crystals of historical ‘legibility’? but every reading — even the reading of a text ~ must take account of the powers of resemblance: “The nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears" between things. We could say, in this perspective, that the atlas of images is a reading machine in the very wide sense that Benjmain wanted to give to the concept of Lesbarkeit. I enters into a whole constellation of apparatuses that go from the ‘reading box’ (Lesekasten) to the large-format camera and to the video camera, as well as cabinets of curiosities, or more trivially, the shoe boxes filled with postcards that we find even today in stalls in old Parisian arcades. The atlas would be an apparatus of reading above alk that is, before any ‘serious’ reading, or in the strict sense of the term: an object of knowledge and of contemplation for children, at the same time a childhood of science and a childhood of art. This is ‘what Benjamin appreciated in illustrated alphabet primers, in building sets and children’s books And this is what he wished to understand on a more fundamental - anthropological — level when he evoked, in a magnificent phrase, the act of ‘reading what was never written” (was nie geschriben wurde, lesen). ‘Such reading’, he adds, ‘is the most ancient: reading prior to all languages’.”” But the atlas also offers all the resources for what we could calla reading after all: the human sciences ~ anthropology, psychology and the history of art in particular— underwent, atthe end of the nineteenth century and above all, during the first three decades of the twentieth, a major upheaval where ‘knowledge through imagination’, no less than knowledge of the imagination and of images themselves, played a decisive role: rom Georg Simmel’s work in sociology, which paid such close attention to ‘forms’, to Marcel Mauss's work in anthropology, from Sigmund Freud’s work in psychoanalysis —in which

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