Thursday, June 26, 2008

Notes on Walter Benjamin

Notes on article about Walter Benjamin’s notion of Allegory and Symbol, Fragmentary, and Representing the Other

l Benjamin addressed Allegory over symbol

l Reject German Literature of highly symbolic

l Regard Allegory as fragmentary which is closing to the flashing-moment nature of reality experience

l Symbol as Beauty and Eternality, which both are artificial

l Allegory as inner reality of symbol

l The entity and harmony of Symbol is based on the repressing its counterpart Allegory

l Interested in the difference between parts and its counterpart entity

l The fragmentary between allegory and the reality

l Visual technology, film and photography

l 19C photography preserved a space of reality, similar to what the psycho-analyst called the unconscious (optical unconscious?)

l the world and space in photo, as “other”, which is different from human empirical world, beyond human consciousness

l how to represent the “other”

l “other” as unconscious, but “the Other” as association of symbolic system that suggested by psycho-analysis

l Benjamin’s “the Other” explores the alienating of granted order, time and linguistic system

l Symbolic arts function as integrate (associate or making connection of) empirical (phenomenal?) world and ethic world, material world and transcend world, beauty and ritual experience as well

l (For Ancient Greek Mythology)Man-nature-god are belonged to different levels of experience, but they are never stopped to exchange, transform and translate to each other

l image and divinity

l Symbolic Arts can only reach the Aesthetics, but doing nothing with the History

l The fullness of Aesthetics is used to compensate the lacking of existence, and the formalist harmony function as compensating the fragmentary of History.

l When the illusion of entity embedded in Symbol loses its aura, history become fragmentary

l Both (history and symbol, or symbol and allegory?) are system which is generated by image and symbols

l For symbolic arts, certain symbols are upgraded and sublime as entity of divinity

l Without (the god of ) naming (language), world does not exist

l The Harmony of symbolic arts is an imaginary (Ideal) harmony

l Symbol as Ideal

l Allegory admit the lacking of human being

l Melancholy as alienation of human-nature-god, lacking of transcendence (divinity)

l The Other as Melancholic object which travel and do not belong to the space and time between the empirical world and transcend world

l Melancholy as both of lacking and being too much, destroying and construction

l Allegory as new reality of symbol

l The Other as against socialization

l Symbol employs reality effect on illusion, while allegory reveals the nature of illusion (similar to self-reflexive ethnography, don’t pretend to be objective, address the existence of authorship)

l Illusion supports (governs) the entity of symbolic order

l (fragmentation VS continuity) similar to (allegory VS symbol and History)

(P. 182)

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