Next dates: Tue, 22.07.14 / Sat, 26.07.14
In his book on the Origin of German Trauerspiel (1925), Walter Benjamin juxtaposes allegory and symbol. For Benjamin, if the symbol refers to the sign that is the natural bearer of meaning, in allegory the relationship between the sign and its significance is denaturalized or, as structuralism would have it, arbitrary. In his famous essay on photography, “Die Photographie” (1927), Siegfried Kracauer takes up the significance of photography in these terms. According to Kracauer, the issue is not whether photographic representation constitutes art but rather the social and historical significance of the development of the photographic sign. He explicates this significance by contrasting the photographic sign with both allegory and symbol. The symbol, he argues, is form of pictorial representation in which meaning is bound to its material expression. The use of symbols is the purview of consciousness that remains embedded in nature, i.e., of a consciousness that is not fully self-conscious. Following Kracauer, photography articulates insights of structuralism insofar as the relationship between the photographic sign and its significance is non-naturalistic (i.e., arbitrary and unmotivated), and in turn, the use of photography is the scope of a consciousness liberated from natural contingency (i.e., the purview of a consciousness that is self-conscious). Allegory, Kracauer argues, marks the disavowal of self-consciousness, dissimulating the contingent relationship between sign and its meaning as a natural one. Kracauer formulates the significance of photography in these terms: “Just as consciousness finds itself confronting the unabashedly displayed mechanics of industrial society, it also faces, thanks to photographic technology, the reflection of the relation has slipped away from it.” The second session takes up the dialectic significance of photography as a transformation of the sign.
Interventions by
Jan Sieber (Berlin)
Sinta Werner (Berlin)
Diana Artus (Berlin)
Nathania Rubin (Berlin)
Hosted by Anne van Leeuwen and Sami Khatib