Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Image

Assoc Prof Alison Ross (Monash University)

This paper defends the thesis that there are major shifts across Benjamin’s writing in his treatment of the topic of the image. There is a loose consensus in major scholarly works on Benjamin that he had always been committed to the project of ‘thinking in images’ (e.g., Missac). This vague project is often articulated in terms of the ‘influence’ on him of the Goethean notion of the Ur-phenomenon in which a diagnostic value is identified in small things in respect of the larger constellations to which they belong (e.g., Arendt). I argue that such positions are not sufficiently attentive to the shifts across Benjamin’s writing on this topic, nor to the import of his polemical remarks on the notion of the Ur-phenomenon. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form as a comparative reference, I argue that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ and the work he was doing from 1927 up until his death in 1940 on The Arcades Project. The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The paper gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view.