“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves;…but existing is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.”
-W.H. Auden, In Memory of Ernst Toller
We are reaching, by means of this inquiry on desire, the limits of our capacity as human beings to explain the forces which drive us, the “powers we pretend to understand.” And yet, even as Auden questions these mystical powers, his mourning makes him certain that he knows past from present, himself from friend; or, at least, he believes he knows it. We might find a similar inquiry at work in F.R. Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience, which, by questioning the pleasure of embracing the past, has in its cross-hairs the very topic of desire’s simultaneous presence/absence.
How do we come to know our desire, and what is the function of writing in this process? To aid us in this quest, Ankersmit points us towards the work of Huizinga, specifically, “Huizinga’s initial plans for a doctoral dissertation,” in which “it had been his aim to investigate the expressions for the sensory perception of light and noise employed in the Indo-Germanic languages.” The larger point of such an investigation–Wessel Krul, Huizinga’s biographer, claims–was to find the origin of words in “direct lyrical formation” or “the lyrical metaphor of an already existing word for expressing feeling or sensation.”
Ankersmit explains this lyrical metaphoricity with the exemplary phrase, “the red sound of a trumpet,” where both redness and trumpets share the adjective “fierce [fel].” Ankersmit claims that the adjective fierce [fel] “expresses something that seeing and hearing apparently have in common”; something “not yet differentiated, or pulled apart, in correspondence to the nature of these two senses”; something that, “therefore, necessarily refers us to a level in our contact with reality that is prior to or deeper than both seeing and hearing.” Words like “fierce,” at this profound “level in our contact with reality,” were the object of Huizinga’s inquiry, because they “originally express a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere, and not a well-defined concept.”
“Hence the word fierce has a more intimate and direct relationship with sensory experience than words giving us literal descriptions of what we either see or hear. Fierce therefore belongs to the category of words that express the most intimate and direct experience we can have of reality. Here we really have reached a point where the epistemological barriers between language, experience, and reality begin to give way and where the three seem to merge into each other. But this most intimate contact is not achieved as in Gadamer’s case, by an intertwining together of reality, experience, and language but by a contact among the three where the individual nature of each of them is carefully respected despite the most intimate relationship that has been effected between them.”
At work in the last sentence is Ankersmit’s need to differentiate himself from the hermeneutics of preceding philosophers of history. Ankersmit claims that Gadamer understands the function of language only as a point that may intersect with experience, without acknowledging the location of Ankersmit’s/Huizinga’s synesthetic space that exists beyond, but uses, the categories of language and experience. We have already seen Gadamer’s hermeneutics explicated through the statement that “the religious form of the symbol corresponds exactly to the original nature of ‘symbolon,’ the dividing of what is one and reuniting it again[,]” a symbolic form that influenced a “modern aesthetics which (since Schelling) has sought to emphasize precisely the unity of appearance and meaning in the symbolic[.]” So if Gadamer highlights the symbolic nature of language, “the unity of appearance and meaning,” then how is this different from Ankersmit’s revival of Huizinga’s revival of van Deijssel’s “lyrical metaphor”?
Present within the subtext of Ankersmit’s argument is a lengthy history of arguments which claim–to cite Borges reading Nietzsche–that “all language is composed of dead metaphors.” Nietzsche himself compared metaphors to coins whose faces become worn after each exchange, no longer useable, such that: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” Borges believed that his task as a philologist/translator was to re-vivify dead metaphors, to make them again sensible, or alive “in our hearts.” He even points to the etymological origin of the term de-riva-tive, a river which flows down from a tributary, as a suggestion of how language is fluid, changes over time.
At the end of his lectures, Borges cites Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake–or Finn, Again Wakes–a cyclical story of life and death, men and women, land and sea, the bright blessed day “beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of…night!” And we have already touched on the problems of Finnegan’s Wake, which is to say that “Finnegan’s Wake is itself dominated by a binary between a masculine, geographic principle and a feminine, fluid principle. The earthy phallus creates structures and civilizations, spaces, which are washed over by the feminine river, time, causing them to erode, to decay, to heal, to transform. Again, we find ourselves reduced to two essential genders.”
At work in Borges’s concept of dead metaphors, as well as in his citation of the cyclical Finnegan’s Wake, is the belief that language can never ultimately get at experience, that, while it can perhaps succeed in the short-term, language forgets, divorces itself from what has been experienced. But Ankersmit wants to suggest that knowledge is not merely cyclical, that we can come to access experience in such a way that, through words like “fierce,” we create re-cognizable concepts out of “a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere.” If language is an arbitrarily constructed field of associations, then it must be learned, which means it can also be forgotten; but, if language is intrinsically linked to experience, then it will be impossible for metaphors to die.
Let’s try, again, to see if such lyrical metaphoricity is really possible, paying close attention to Ankersmit’s argument. Ankersmit claims that Huizinga’s project “was the result of literary influences that he had been exposed to in his youth rather than of some research program already existing in the linguistics of his time.” In particular, he was highly influenced by Lodewijk van Deijssel, who was at the forefront of a literary movement called “sensitivism.”
Ankersmit uses Van Deijssel’s model of sensitivism, which relies on a tripartite division of experience into observation, impression and sensation, listed in order of increasing proximity and intensity. Ankersmit considers observation an accurate category for “the statements that historians make about the past on the basis of documentary research.” While observation occurs at a remove, impressions occur when one has an environmental connection to an object, even though this connection “submit[s] to the subject’s mental makeup,” because we “are susceptible only to what can ‘impress’ us.”
Let’s remember Gadamer’s claim that the symbol is “the dividing of what is one and reuniting it again” when we read Ankersmit’s definition of sensation, which “expresses the most intimate contact with reality that we can have, and here subject and object are in complete equilibrium…so to say, a mutual embrace of subject and object in which each gives itself completely and unreservedly to the other, without any reluctance.”
When Ankersmit continues to describe this embrace, we find that the masculine/feminine binary, as in Finnegan’s Wake, again rears its head: “think of the embrace of Romeo and Juliet. In continuation with the metaphor of this loving embrace, sensitivism was also intended to be suggestive of how we experience reality in the sense of touch—for love is something that you do with your fingers, your mouth, and so on, isn’t it?” What is at stake here is Ankersmit’s fear of Derridean/Gadamerian theory, or any theory after the linguistic turn which claims that one will never come in contact with the very essence of things, that one’s experience will always-already be mediated by language. It was Ankersmit’s hope that the synesthetic realm, where redness and trumpets meet, could provide this definitive proof of sense touching sense in some final and unquestionable reality. In order to suggest that Derridean theory is indeed important, we might think of how a linguistic ‘transcendentalist’–a deconstructionist like Judith Butler–would contest Ankersmit’s heteronormative use of the happy marriage between men and women as the optimal sensation.
Ankersmit needs this comforting embrace because the theory of language as always-already mediating experience creates a paranoia of being disconnected, unable to touch things as they are. See Ankersmit’s fear of distance, of linguistic ‘transcendentalism,’ as he continues: “the eye is the most ‘transcendentalist’ of our senses,” because it “perceives the world while always keeping a safe distance from it; it will never be guilty of such a vulgarity as getting into actual contact with what it perceives, as is the case with the sense of touch.”
Privileging touch to sight, sexual embrace to merely looking at the beloved, Ankersmit wants to intensify experience/sensation. In defending his sense of touch, Ankersmit cites two sections of Aristotle’s De Anima (a text and author which we have already seen before, when discussing hylomorphism):
“For without touch it (i.e. the animal’s body) can have no other sense, every ensouled thing being, as we said, a tactile body, and, while the other elements apart from earth might be sense-organs, they would produce sensation by indirect and mediate perception, whereas touch consists, as its name suggests, in contact with objects. The other sense-organs seem to perceive by touch, but through something else, touch alone being thought to do so through itself.”…“And in the way we have said, the sense faculty is like the actual sense object—it is affected as being unlike but on being affected it becomes like and is such as what acts on it.” De Anima 418 and 435
Or, as Ankersmit summarizes: “unlike the eye, the sense of touch really adapts itself to what it experiences. Think again of feeling the form of a vase that we hold in our hands: We then feel the vase’s form because our own hands take on the very same form as the vase’s. We are formed by what we perceive, what we perceive leaves its indelible traces [emphasis mine] on us—and this, too, is a very Aristotelian reflection.”
But, thus far, we might wonder what really separates Ankersmit from Gadamer, if both embrace symbols where appearance meets reality; and, indeed, Ankersmit has compared the sensitivists favorably to the same symbolists described by Gadamer above. “Like the French symbolists of roughly the same time, Van Deijssel was also disappointed by what had, in the end, been achieved by naturalism or literary realism. Like the symbolists he felt that realism had not succeeded in its main aim, that is, to bridge the gap between language and the world. In order to remedy this, literature should not be content, in his view, to merely give us a believable and ‘realistic’ account of what our social world actually is like but aim to impart to the reader of a novel what one might call ‘the feel of reality,’ with all the connotations of sensory perception implicit in that notion.”
However, a divergence approaches, as Ankersmit claims, “whereas symbolists tended to fall back on a hermetic idealism in order to penetrate the secrets of reality that realism had remained blind to, Van Deijssel opted for the opposite route by radicalizing realism, and he did so by focusing on our most direct and immediate sensory experience of reality.” To explain this divergence, we might say that the symbolists search through the annals of literature and history, hoping to collect fine mementos to present on stage or page. On another road, sensitivists would be happier to go outside and journal as they walk, would attempt to achieve a close reading of in vivo experience.
The claim that Ankersmit views (French) symbolists as little more than librarians could be seen in his presentation of Mallarmé: “In opposition to Mallarmé’s well-known ‘the world was made in order to end up as a beautiful book,’ the sensitivist wants to ‘creep into’ reality and to overcome all boundaries between the self and the world. Thus when Herman Gorter (the undisputed literary genius among the sensitivists) could look at the colors of the evening sky and then feel affected by the silence of its clouds, this was to him a subconscious recognition of having become himself part of these clouds and of participating in their majestic silence. Surely, this is sensitivist experience par excellence (and, of course, Aristotle all over again).”
While Mallarmé wants to concatenate the libraries of the universe, Gorter’s journaling is part of his consciousness roaming into reality, into the very clouds he observes. The distinction is hit home by Ankersmit’s claim that: “Symbolism represents a movement toward the abstract; it has an elective affinity with idealism (think of Mallarmé’s Hegelianism); sensitivism, on the contrary, is a movement toward the concrete or even an attempt at identification or at a quasi-mystical unification with reality [emphasis mine].” However, the argument is overly reliant on a distinction between writing and experiencing, when Gorter’s journaling would seem to indicate that writing is a part of experiencing; why can’t one read Aeschylus as closely as one reads one’s own grief (assuming that it is even possible to separate the experience of one’s own grief and Aeschylus’s when witnessing/reading the Orestia)?
In his defense, Ankersmit does admit the existence of this tension in his argument, even claiming that it is an inevitable paradox of being a living being in the world: “[Sensitivism] is, in fact, the ne plus ultra of empiricism, since it wishes to do away with all that might stand in the way of a direct and immediate contact with the world itself; it wishes to lose itself in the world; it assigns to itself the paradoxical and self-destructive task of trying to overcome with (literary or poetic) language the barriers between language and the world inevitably created by language. In sum, it looks for the language to undo all language.” Ankersmit praises the sensitivists for being more than librarians, for being “the theorists of literary language who were fascinated by the problem of what language to adopt if we wish to circumvent language’s innate propensity to withdraw into a world of its own and to relinquish the world that it was meant to give us access to.”
It is clear from his own language that Ankersmit has an overwhelming feeling of being kept out from reality, of living in a world of words where there are “barriers” between himself and the world. To describe this feeling, Ankersmit uses Otto Kernberg’s theory of object relations, as well as the clinical psychiatric term “derealization.” Ankersmit defines the experience of derealization, which he says occurs whenever one feels the paradox of language overcoming language to access the world, as follows: “Perhaps the paradox of the directness and indirectness of this kind of experience is nowhere better exemplified than by the characteristic complaint of patients suffering from derealization or depersonalization when they say that they seem to experience the world ‘as if from under a glass cheese cover.'” If he feels that he has been trapped ‘under a glass cheese cover,’ it would make sense that Ankersmit might have an affinity for sensitivism’s capacity to ‘creep into’ reality. The re-occurring theme, where one feels that one is merely observing without the possibility of having contact, might give us an indication of an anxious attachment (either in Bowlby’s ethological-physiological sense, or in the more abstract sense of Kernberg’s object relations); the young of a species, when frightened, desire the comforting presence of a parental figure, need to cling to that presence.
An irony arises from the fact that clinical terms–Kernberg’s theories of object relations and the theories of derealization/depersonalization–may exemplify Ankersmit’s “glass cheese cover.” These are, after all, arbitrarily constructed terms, and one is aware that they cannot give full adequacy to one’s own unique experience of being. Being aware of these categories, but refusing them, may make it so that “the protective shield that normally processes our experience of the world and that mediates between us and the world has momentarily been taken away—so that a direct confrontation with the world results—hence the directness and immediacy of the sublime and traumatic experience of the world.”
Ankersmit claims that this “directness and immediacy” takes, as it did with the sensitivists, a synesthetic form; it creates “a feeling as if space had suddenly acquired extra dimensions, a different awareness of colors and, connected with that, a propensity to synesthesia in which the fullness of sensory experience causes an overflowing of the senses into each other.” This experience is “traumatic” because it is painful, “a ‘pathos,’ a passive submission and complete receptivity to [reality].”
The painful sublimity of such moments requires that one forego any category of analysis. “We encounter the sublime as defined by Burke or by Kant (to mention the two most influential theorists of the sublime), when the epistemological instruments we ordinarily use for making sense of the world suddenly prove themselves to be no longer equal to the task. This happens when pleasure and pain, which normally exclude each other within the Lockean epistemology adopted by Burke, paradoxically go together in our experience of the world (Burke) or when the imagination suddenly sees itself confronted with epistemological challenges that only Reason would be able to cope with (Kant).”
We might better understand why these moments of sublimity are painful if we refer to Ankersmit’s own personal history, as offered within Sublime Historical Experience. He tells us: “I had been a sickly child. With an almost perverse dedication I went through the whole long list of sicknesses that children are apt to fall prey to, while repeating several items on that list over and over again as if to make sure that I had not forgotten or inadvertently skipped them.” It is important to notice the playfulness in Ankersmit’s language, how he jokes as if he had wanted to be chronically ill–to notice that the purpose of his language (game) is to make pleasure out of pain. It is important, too, to note the language that Ankersmit uses to refer to his childhood isolation: “This regular confinement to bed tended to put me out of touch with things.”
When Ankersmit describes this youthful period of solitary contemplation, there is a resulting pain that resembles his “sublime historical experience,” insofar as the pathos sensitizes him to his environment: “I remember lying in my parents’ bedroom painfully aware that, meanwhile, my friends were swimming or playing in the snow. This painful awareness of being excluded from my school friends’ games stimulated in me an intense feeling of boredom…In boredom the interactions between ourselves and the world are temporarily suspended, and this suspension invites reality to manifest its true nature, untrained and undistorted by our interests and preoccupations.”
In these moments of heightened sense, Ankersmit’s contemplation can find nothing as its object other than the curtains that obstruct him from the world. “Overwhelmed by boredom, I often felt a peculiar fascination for the flower patterns on the curtains in my parents’ bedroom.” Ankersmit continues to return to these decorations that were once the extended object of his scrutiny. He loves the detailing of rococo ornament, because he believes that the twirling curves of such ornament evoke a wave that could not possibly stand, that therefore evoke the movement of a wave’s growth and crash, collapses past and future into a moment–presents a three-dimensional object in the midst of time, with just a flat image. It is worth considering how this condensation brings greater sensation, greater pleasure, into a single moment, perhaps into a single bedroom, cut off from the world.
Worth noting, also, is Ankersmit’s citation from Roger Scruton: “Consider the leaf-moldings in Gothic architecture. There is no doubt that these are of great aesthetic significance: by the use of these moldings the Gothic architect was able to transform stone into something as full of light and movement as a tree in summer. But the resulting building conveys no thought about leaves…The same is true of the stylized flowers in a dress or a piece of wallpaper…The wallpaper is not asking us to think of the flowers contained in it. Put a frame around one of the flowers, however, and a signature beneath it, and at once it jumps at you, not as a pattern, but as a flower, asking to be understood as such.” In Scruton’s argument, the ornament is precisely not a form of representation; if it were intended as re-presentation, the floral pattern would always be second to the flower itself. Instead, the decoration evokes a sense of beauty quite its own, so that we might say that the boy Ankersmit, contemplating his mother’s curtains, is not deprived of an external world of flowers.
When discussing boredom in general, not just his own, Ankersmit supports the argument proposed by “psychologists [who] agree that boredom is always the result of an internal conflict, of internal ‘frictions,’ [such as] the Freudian Otto Fenichel [who] wrote in the first clinical treatise on boredom that boredom typically comes into being in case of a conflict of the desires of the id and the rejection of these desires by the ego.” In proposing the pain of boredom as a mere psychic friction, in arguing that “the ego denies to the individual the aims in which the id might have found its satisfaction,” one retains faith in the belief that there is an aim through which one can achieve satisfaction.
In other words, Ankersmit is describing a scenario similar to the one stated at the start of this essay, where one does not know the contours of desire’s absence. He cites Fenichel’s definition of boredom as occurring when “the instinctual tension is present, the instinctual aim is missing.” Desire, present as a tension; absent as a clear image, or “aim.” Ankersmit’s sublime pathos might therefore be coeval with the psychoanalytic concept of undoing repression, or also with my earlier description of love-knowledge, “where thought allows desire’s strange contours to become visible; or, where love, the submersion into these contours, enables one to know them.”
We might find the following ambivalence in Ankersmit: on one level, he wants to believe that his early, solitary education served a function of enlivening his senses, that he was not deprived in his sickly isolation; on the other, his painful childhood experience reminds him that there is a limit to what is achievable through thought/language alone. From a pragmatic position, one where we do not have to question every experience according to philosophy’s want, but where we take observations at face value, we might speculate on how many other philosophers/scholars have had similar experiences of isolation (Rorty himself describes turning to reading, to philosophy, after being bullied as a schoolboy.)
Indeed, this ambivalence is particularly relevant for Ankersmit’s frustration with philosophy after the linguistic turn, which may overestimate the potential for language to change reality. At the same time, scholars in the humanities, including Ankersmit, want to assure a lay population that contemplative activity may have a significant effect on the senses. We might see a compromise between these impulses, for example, in the willingness of Ankersmit and other theorists to accept the enigmatic/linguistic/symbolic categories of psychoanalysis, to accept the legitimacy of certain forms of psychology, so long as these do not wholly/overtly reduce sense-experience to physiology. (Hence the use of Kernberg’s object-relations, while Bowlby’s observations on attachment behavior are omitted.)
It must be said–whatever my quibbles with Ankersmit’s capricious reactions to language and philosophy; whatever my desire to take more seriously the insights of sociologists and clinicians, even if they lack the philosopher’s propensity to carefully define each term over the course of several paragraphs, if not papers–that I share a belief in the mystical capacity of contemplative thought. And I cannot avoid this belief, because the fact of the matter remains that desire is both absent and present, yet we somehow manage to submerge, painfully, into a realm where sense is heightened, where desire’s contours become visible. Indeed, Ankersmit’s most convincing evocation of such a mystical tradition comes from his use of part-time Jewish mystic, Walter Benjamin, specifically Benjamin’s theory of aura.
Ankersmit cites Benjamin’s definition of an aura as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.” Ankersmit’s most convincing explanation of this “unique appearance or semblance of distance” uses Benjamin’s analysis of French Impressionism. As Ankersmit notes: “Impressionism was unreservedly ‘phenomenalist’; it wanted to show the world as it presents itself to us; it is interested in the movement of a tree’s leaves or of the waves on a pond and in how the light plays with them and not in the leaf or the waves itself. It wants to capture the surface of things and is, as such, a movement toward us and away from the things themselves. In this way impressionism and how it experiences the world has its social counterpart in the flaneur or the dandy…: the flaneur is not involved, neither committed nor engaged; he simply looks—and his gaze is all the more penetrating, direct, and pitiless since it is never led astray by any interest, by any program, hope or even preceding question.”
It is worth noting here that this definition of French Impressionism contradicts van Deijssel’s tripartite model of sensitivism. According to van Deijssel, one could only sense an object when fully engaged with it; but, here, Ankersmit is describing a time when one’s engagement obscures one’s vision, as he elsewhere states: “as soon as the eye comes too close to what it perceives, everything becomes an indiscriminate blur.”
Instead, French Impressionism offers a space where there is the “semblance of distance,” such that: “The eye operates here like the sense of touch—the eye then firmly resists the tendency so natural to it of searching for truths behind how the world appears to us. The flaneur knows that the great truths are always the most obvious truths, but precisely because of this they are the most difficult to identify since they require from us the unnatural and almost superhuman effort to stay at the surface and to avoid approaching them with a set of preconceived questions.” So, while French Impressionism uses the same word as van Deijssel’s category of “impressions,” it differs from typical “impressions” insofar as typical impressions “submit to the subject’s mental makeup,” because we “are susceptible only to what can ‘impress’ us.”
One might do well to pause, and remember Gadamer’s description of what it means to read, in his Truth and Method: “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there…The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings…In any case, understanding in the human sciences shares one fundamental condition with the life of tradition: it lets itself be addressed by tradition.”
This “fore-projection” may account for impression’s censure, where phenomena “submit to the subject’s mental makeup,” whereas sensation occurs in the moments of sharp surprise [punctum], when “the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.” It is hard not to note–when accounting for such terms as “present itself,” “assert” and “against”–how a text may, almost physically, resist its own mis-interpretation.
And yet, misinterpretations do happen. Ankersmit himself seems to miss what is on the surface of Benjamin’s definition of aura as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.” Space and time. Space: the “appearance or semblance,” occurring in a single moment. Time: the movement across “distance, no matter how close the object may be.” Sight requires distance, duality; but, as Ankersmit and Aristotle have noted, touch requires a monistic form. The spontaneity of sight and touch therefore requires a simultaneous dualism/monism, occurs whenever moments concatenate themselves into a single image, just as one’s eyes unconsciously shuttle across the pixels of a picture, like a loom generating a textile, such that there is a “weave of space and time.”
(In her abstract art, Sophie Taeuber-Arp tries to separate images into constitutive atoms on a lateral-horizontal grid, tries to access these originary boxes through which the unconscious eye composes a final image, in a method that literally assimilates the method of making textiles.)
So, on one hand, the aura conveys the ever-strange fact that there are particulate moments [perhaps Erlebnis] that coalesce into a single memory-image [perhaps Erfahrung], such that “the great truths are always the most obvious truths, but precisely because of this they are the most difficult to identify since they require from us the unnatural and almost superhuman effort to stay at the surface.” Ever-strange because this version of auratic experience tries to bring into consciousness precisely those events which are at its margins, which are unconscious.
On the other hand, aura conveys the mystical fact that sense transcends distance, occurs always there and here: there as object, here as experience. This mysticism might explain Benjamin’s interest in translation, because, if one separates the term into its constitutive parts, to trans–late is literally to carry across. Moreover, if one accepts Benjamin’s description of aura as both spatial and temporal, then it should come as no surprise that the distance transcended by sense may not just be there and here, but also then and now. One commenter on Benjamin’s theory of aura, Miriam Bratu Hansen, even argues that–among its many different uses in Benjamin’s oeuvre–there is “the notion of aura as a premonition of future catastrophe [which] harks back to medical theories since antiquity that use the term to describe symptoms of anxiety and unease preceding and foreboding epileptic or hysterical attacks.” In other words, Benjamin’s investigation into aura is inflected by a period when various psychological/physiological medical researchers take seriously the capacity for other times–past through memory, future through premonition–to inhabit one’s body, or for one’s body to inhabit multiple times. This is a period where the simultaneity of presence/absence in desire was taken seriously as a scientific phenomenon.
Let’s therefore take Benjamin’s aura to be describing a moment when one has an intimation of the object of one’s desire, of what will happen, or of what one wants to happen; one could therefore say that the aura comprises a desire with well-defined contours. This definition of aura carries over into Benjamin’s definition of translation: “Fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together…must follow one another in the smallest detail. So instead of making itself similar to the meaning, to the Sinn of the original, the translation must rather, lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of the meaning of the original, to make both recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel.”
We might think of this passage from Benjamin’s The Task of The Translator as describing a process similar to that of the Japanese art-form kintsugi, which repairs a broken ceramic by bonding precious metals to its seams. Highlighting the edges of a fracture, a fragment, ultimately creates a process where one realizes that the present is particulate, even as one has an intimation of its constitutive whole. It’s like puzzle pieces that way.
Ankersmit himself [for indeed that is the whole purpose of this foray into Benjamin, to better understand Ankersmit’s use of language] describes as an auratic experience a snowball breaking in half, where each half can feel the contours of the other in its moment of cleavage. Ankersmit’s image is meant to convey a theory about love present in Plato’s Symposium, the myth that men and women were once united wholes, split in twain, now searching desperately for the other half that may complete them. If we think of the jagged contours of a crystalline fracture–how, in every snowflake, they are supposed to be unique; how they carry a texture rich “in detail”; and how they perhaps are even “lovingly” connected, by embracing every aspect of each other–we can understand the link between Benjamin’s definition of translation and Ankersmit’s examples of auratic experience.
Ankersmit uses Benjamin’s Theory of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction to greater evoke this snowball image: “We can become aware of aura only when the work of art is on the verge of losing it…[Reproduction] takes away the aura from the work of art, but precisely because of this makes us aware of the fact that the work of art possessed this aura at all…[T]he insight is expressed most convincingly by Benjamin when he points out that the human face possessed an aura that was lost by the photograph.” The snowball knows the contours of the other in the moment of departure, and one comes to know the contours of one’s desire for faces precisely when they are present/absent, provided in the form of a photograph with no in vivo equivalent. (And the experience of living in Zoom-quarantine is eerily similar, as one wonders what it is about the face that is missed through digital representation/communication.)
It would severely undercut Ankersmit’s elevated rhetoric if we say that this insight amounts to nothing more than the common saying “you don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.” However, we might give Ankersmit/Benjamin the credit of noticing that they attempt to discover how we can bring the-knowledge-we-don’t-know-we-have into consciousness, the kind of unconscious knowledge which is present within the very maxim “you don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone,” since the maxim does not attempt to explain itself, to define “what you got.”
Although, it is unclear whether Ankersmit’s snowball metaphor is a just translation for Benjamin’s notion of aura. In the definition of translation, Benjamin might not intend to say that there are perfect complements, that the language from which one translates matches its edges to those of the language into which one translates. Rather, both languages are “recognizable as broken fragments of a greater language.” In other words, one could therefore say that every language is fragmented, a piece of the “greater language” which comprises meaning. The privileged moments occur when language evokes, in its expression, a gap between the medium of language and the world it represents–in Ankersmit’s terms, “the language to undo all language.” And, from here on out, I wish to suggest that the aura–or at least the aura as I want to use it, as I deem it a useful term–occurs when one sees this gap, this trace of a broken vessel, which amounts to coming across the silhouette of desire.
To be continued.