Art after Appropriation by Welchman John C.;

Author:Welchman, John C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 672510
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

This coupling of the materialism of one history with the form and scope of another reveals a shape, a corrective and a compulsion in Benjamin's understanding of the inherited past. But we should resist positioning the face according to a vulgar symptomology, a kind of facial determinism that sees the countenance as a mere scene of inscription for the crow-footed march of historical reality. The face is a multiplex screen of histories, causes and selves. It is a machine that simultaneously manufactures difference and mills identity.

Tiedemann argues further that the transition from the first to the second drafts of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk project (1927–40)—which entailed an effort ‘to safeguard his work against the demands of historical materialism’ — preserved ‘motifs belonging to metaphysics and theology… in the physiognomic concept of the epoch…s closing stage’.57 He provides further arguments for Benjamin's concretion and specificity, modelled on the illuminations of the face:

The abstractions of mere conceptual thinking were insufficient to demystify… [capitalism…s abhorrent effects], such that a mimetic-intuitive corrective was imposed to decipher the code of the universal in the image. Physiognomic thought was assigned the task of ‘recognising the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’ (V:59). The prolegomena to a materialist physiognomies that can be gleaned from the Passagen-Werk counts among Benjamin's most prodigious conceptions. It is the programmatic harbinger of that aesthetic theory which Marxism has not been able to develop to this day.58

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