CUESTIONARIO ANS
1. CASI SIEMPRE 2 ALGUNAS VECES
tion to content and meaning because he wants to explore how art can help human beings to come to terms with the universe in which they live. In his Lecture on the Snake-ritual(1923), for instance, in which he talks about the art and rituals of the Pueblo Indians, Warburg’s overall aim is described as follows:
I shall be satisfied if these images from the everyday and festive lives of the Pueblo Indians have convinced you that their masked dances are not child’s play, but rather the primary pagan mode of answering the largest and most pressing questions of the Why of things.42
The main claim of this lecture is that the snake is to be seen as a symbol that mediates between the Indians and the universe that surrounds them. During his visit to the United States in 1895–1896 Warburg noticed how the native population of New Mexico and Arizona derived from the serpent’s resemblance to lightning a belief in the possibility to influence the weather- conditions by way of so-called snake rituals, that is, dances that at times even involved real serpents. Those snake rituals, however, are not regarded as instances of purely irrational superstition but as transitions from such a primitive stage of believing to a rationalized stage of understanding:
The synchrony [Nebeneinander] of logical civilization and fantastic, magical causation shows the Pueblo Indians’ peculiar condition of hybridity and transition. They are clearly no longer primitives dependent on their senses, for whom no action directed toward the future can exist; but neither are they technologically secure Europeans, for whom future events are expected to be organically or mechanically determined.43
The serpent ritual is not entirely devoid of rationality because it testifies to the ability to engage in means-end thinking: the Indians are, unlike ‘primi- tives’ and animals, capable of substituting a purely passive and immediate response to their environment by actions that have the aim of modifying it. Warburg sees the serpent ritual as an embodiment of the process of cause- putting: if the Pueblo Indians gain a feeling of mastery over the world in which they live, claims Warburg, it is because they set up an intrinsic con-
41 Ibid., 599.
42 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans.
Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 48.
nection between the uncontrollable weather-conditions on the one hand and a not uncontrollable animal on the other. “[T]he Indian,” it is stated,
confronts the incomprehensibility of natural processes with his will to com- prehension, transforming himself personally into a prime causal agent in the order of things. For the unexplained effect, he instinctively substitutes the cause in its most tangible and visible form. The masked dance is danced causality.44
The Indians therefore “stand on middle ground between magic and logos”:45
the snake-ritual serves not only as a way to enter into a mystical union with the forces that are at work in the universe but also as a strategy to ward off the anxiety that comes with them.46
In Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther War- burg had already used, three years earlier, the same categories to describe the astrological practices of the age of Reformation. For Warburg, the pagan belief in astral deities that govern the movements of planets is like the snake ritual to be regarded as an embodiment of the process of cause-putting. While projecting the gods onto the planetary sphere, human beings gain a feeling of mastery. Though the gods in outer space were still believed to influence the events on earth, they were from then on deprived of the possibility of doing this in an immediate way: when gods become planets, their actions cease to be immeasurable. By way of this belief in personified planets, then, human beings grow capable of both establishing a connec- tion with the surrounding universe and of securing, for themselves, suffi- cient distance to overcome the feeling of its overall incomprehensibility. For this reason, these astrological practices are, like the serpent dances of the Pueblo Indians, not just superstitions but a sign of the ‘synchrony’ or ‘hybridity’ between irrational believing and rationalized understanding and of the ‘transition’ from the former to the latter: the reformers of sixteenth- century Germany are, no less than the Indians of North America at the turn of the century, to be seen as standing “on middle ground between magic and logos” (my emphasis). At the start of his essay, Warburg writes:
Logic sets a mental space [Denkraum] between man and object by applying a conceptual label; magic destroys that space by creating a superstitious—
44 Ibid., 48. 45 Ibid., 17.
46 See also ibid., 2: “To us, this synchrony of fantastic magic and sober purposiveness
appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment.”
theoretical or practical—association between man and object. In the div- inatory workings of the astrologer’s mind, these two processes act as a sin- gle, primitive tool that he can use both to make measurements and to work magic. That age when logic and magic blossomed, like trope and metaphor, in Jean Paul’s words, “grafted to a single stem,” is inherently timeless [eigentlich
zeitlos]: by showing such a polarity in action, the historian of civilization
furnishes new grounds for a more profoundly positive critique of a histori- ography that rests on a purely chronological theory of development.47
This passage is crucial for a double reason. The first is that it casts light on the roots of the problem that is being dealt with in the peculiar mixture of magic and logic that is astrology: what made the era of the Reformation turn to the meticulous observation of planets and stars is, according to Warburg, not a scientific interest but a feeling of anxiety. What causes this anxiety is, for its part, timeless; it is, as is clear from the lecture on the snake rit- ual, conditioned by the “largest and most pressing question of the Why of things,” that is, by a mystery that is as universal as it is unsolvable.48It is a
profound failure to know and to control that makes human beings reach for the ‘inherently timeless’ polarity of magic and logic through which they are to overcome a feeling of helplessness with regard to the surrounding world. Warburg’s opening statements, however, do not only reveal the uni- versal nature of the problem, that is, the anxiety for an incomprehensible world but also two essential characteristics of the solution to that problem. First of all, it is clear that the strategies that help human beings to contain their fears are essentially dependent on historical contexts and geographical locations; whereas the German reformers seek recourse to deified planets, American Indians use the serpent as a mediator. In this way, the fears and anxieties of human beings may be timeless and universal but their attempts to deal with them are not. These efforts to ward off the fundamental anxiety about the surrounding universe can never take place in an abstract realm or an a-historical manner and they inevitably take on a specific, historically and geographically variable form. The second point of interest is that these different strategies against fear do have one element in common: they will never succeed in replacing the mixture of believing and knowing by a com- plete and fully rationalized understanding of the universe. What underlies Warburg’s entire philosophical and anthropological framework is the idea
47 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 599. For the original terminology, see Warburg,
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, 202–203.
that the universe cannot in its entirety become an object of knowledge and that the absolute force that underlies it (‘the Why of things’) can never be aimed at as an object of consistent meaning. This is why he mentions the necessity to “critique … a historiography that rests on a purely chronological theory of development”:49whatever progress lies await for science, the blend
between magic and logos cannot be overcome. In short, Warburg contends that a failure to know is as irreducible now as it was for the Greek pagans, the German reformers or the Pueblo Indians at the turn of the century. The criterion to determine the success of a strategy of understanding or a set of practices can therefore from Warburg’s point of view neither be their consistency or rationality nor the sheer accumulation of factual knowledge about the outside world but only the degree in which they are able to release human beings from their primal fears.
From this perspective, the final paragraphs of the Lecture on the Snake- ritualare particularly revealing. Warburg’s claim here is that modern sci- ence and technology do not, however rational they may be, entail a funda- mental improvement over the mythological world-view of the Indians: the invention of electricity, for instance, has annihilated precisely the longed- for distance between man and world that allows human beings to overcome their anxiety:
The American of today is no longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He kills it; in any case, he does not worship it. It now faces extermination. The lightning imprisoned in wire—captured electricity—has produced a culture with no use for paganism. What has replaced it? Natural forces are no longer seen in anthropomorphic or biomorphic guise, but rather as infinite waves obedient to human touch. With these waves, the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space required for reflection. The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright brothers, who invented the dirigible airplane, are precisely those ominous destroyers of the sense of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos.50
On account of the primal fear that conditions them, the images that War- burg brings under research are, like Georges Didi-Huberman claims, to be seen as symptoms. “The ‘psychological history of expression’ that was dreamt of by Warburg,” writes Didi-Huberman in the chapter Symptom- imageof his book on Warburg,
49 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 599. 50 Warburg, Images, 54.
… was thus, before everything, meant as a psychopathology. The Warburgian history of images attempts to analyze the pleasure of formal inventions in the Renaissance, but also the ‘culpability’ of retentions of memory as they can become manifest [in those inventions]; it invokes the movements of artistic creation, but also the compulsions of ‘auto-destruction’ that are at work in the exuberance of the forms itself; it lays bare the coherence of esthetic systems but also the ‘irrationality’ of the beliefs [croyances] that at times underlie [those systems] … [I]f the symbol was at the center of Warburg’s preoccupations, it was not as an abstract synthesis between reason and the irrational, between form and matter, etc.—but as the concrete symptom of a cleavage that is unceasingly at work in the ‘tragedy of culture’.51
The irrational superstitions of the Pueblo Indians and the German reformers are symptomatic because they do indeed entail both an expression of and a reaction toa feeling of anxiety that cannot be contained. The symbol of the snake is, for the native inhabitants of New Mexico and Arizona, a symptom in that it is simultaneously a figure of both conflict and compromise:52in
it, anxiety is ventilated and contained at the same time.53 Likewise, the
Nachlebenof ancient, pagan beliefs in the hearts and minds of sixteenth century man is, in truth, the Nachträglichkeit of a primal fear caused by a fundamental failure to fully comprehend.
Though Didi-Huberman is right in claiming that the survival of super- stitious beliefs in Warburg’s research is to be analyzed as a symptomatic response the reasons that he gives for this are not altogether accurate. “[E]xpression, according to Warburg,” writes Didi-Huberman, “is not the reflection of an intention; it is rather the return of the repressed [retour d’ un refoulé] in the image.”54There is, however, no one-to-one connection between symptoms and repression. It is not because some symptoms are indeed the effect of a process of repression—an unsuccessful one for that matter—that this claim can be extended to the category of all symptoms: from the statement that all (unsuccessful) repression causes symptomatic
51 Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 284 (my translation). 52 Ibid., 298.
53 For a truly brilliant example see Warburg’s characterization of the grisaille figures in
Francesco Sassetti’s burial chapel in the Santa Trinita church in Florence: “They form part of the symbolism of energy, synthesis, and balance; but they are confined to a shadowy existence, beneath the sphere of the sacred, where they can never disrupt Ghirlandaio’s serene realism by introducing the gestural eloquence of their Roman virtus.” In Aby Warburg, “Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contribu-
tions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 247.
responses to occur—be it pathological ones or not—, it does not follow that, vice versa, all symptoms are the outcome of a process of repression. A symp- tom can very well be the return of a desire that has remained immune to the mechanism of repression, rather than the return of something that has hitherto been repressed: some affects repeat themselves, not because they were initially repressed but in spite of attempts to do so. Hence the rever- sal by some post-Freudian thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, of the research-problem that occupied Freud: what, from their perspective, should puzzle the psychoanalyst is not so much the question why repression so often fails and thus gives rise to a symptom as, vice versa, the question why repression would succeed in the first place, given the extraordinary force behind so many of our drives.55The Nachleben of pagan beliefs that
Warburg sees at work in the era of the Reformation is to be analyzed in this way: in spite of the symptomatic nature of these superstitions, the affect that underlies them cannot be considered as repressed. These irrational beliefs do spring forth from an anxiety for a universe that cannot be fully compre- hended but they exemplify the attempt to overcome this anxiety without the force of an external agency that would repress it. This is what Warburg discovered in the images of the German reformers: they are not just a sign of the times, expressing what Panofsky calls an ‘intrinsic content or meaning,’ nor the return of a repressed anxiety like Didi-Huberman claims them to be but they are instruments that, in Riegl’s words, “regulate”56the relation
between man and world and, moreover, succeed in taking away the very anxiety that initially gave rise to them.
This comes most clearly to the fore in Warburg’s discussion of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. For Warburg, Dürer’s engraving is not merely an ex- pression of underlying ideas but the outcome of a “truly creative act [eigent- lich schöpferische Akt] … which gives [it] [a] consoling, humanistic mes- sage of liberation [humanistischen Trostblatt] from the fear of Saturn.”57
Warburg’s analysis focuses on the square that is built into the wall rep- resented in Dürer’s picture. Recognizing it as the magic square of Jupiter, Warburg makes the claim that it is the image of the one planet that could
55 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone
Press, 1984) and their statement that “the sign of desire is never a sign of the law, it is a sign of strength [puissance].” (11).
56 Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, 231.
57 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 644. For the original terminology see Warburg,
counterbalance the harmful influence of Saturn. By depicting this square, claims Warburg, Dürer invoked Jupiter’s magical powers and thus grew capable of warding off the bad effects that come from the Saturnine con- stellation:
Magically invoked, Jupiter comes to her [that is, the winged figure in Dürer’s engraving] aid through this benign and moderating influence on Saturn. In a sense, the salvation of the human being through the countervailing influence of Jupiter has already taken place; the duel between the planets … is over; and the magic square hangs on the wall like a votive offering of thanks to the benign and victorious planetary spirit.58
According to Warburg, Dürer explored the influence of Jupiter as a way to transform the negative effects of Saturnine determination—gloom or ‘harmful’ melancholy—into the essentially positive quality of the humanis- tic genius: contemplation or ‘spiritual’ melancholy. “Dürer,” writes Warburg,
shows the spirit of Saturn neutralized [unschädlich gemacht] by the individ- ual mental efforts of the thinking creature against whom its rays are directed. Menaced by the ‘most ignoble complex,’ the Child of Saturn seeks to elude the baneful planetary influence through contemplative activity.59
In this way Dürer reveals that it is possible to overcome the harmful effects of the fearful awareness that the forces at work in the surrounding universe cannot be possessed as objects of knowledge, that is, the so called Saturnine condition that is melancholy. However symptomatic and irrational it may be, the response to a not fully controllable or knowable world is not inher- ently pathological. Dürer’s engraving is, for Warburg, proof that it is not impossible to combat “the daemonic grotesques”60that make us anxious:
“[S]aturnine gloom has [here] been spiritualized into human, humanistic contemplation.”61Dürer shows that it is possible to look straight into the
eyes of a world that resists knowledge without responding with despair. In Warburg’s opinion, moreover, Dürer brings to the fore that the anti- dote against the Saturnine condition is to be derived from the very same powers that were believed to cause these harmful effects in the first place. The belief in the therapeutic influence of Jupiter is evidently as irrational as the belief in the pathogenic influence of Saturn. The genius of Dürer,
58 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 645–647.
59 Ibid., 645. For the original terminology, see Warburg, Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdi-
gungen, 261.
60 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 645. 61 Ibid., 645.
however, lies precisely in the discovery that these irrational responses to the failure to fully comprehend the surrounding universe could just as well be part of the solution rather than of the problem: it is because it depicts the absurd belief in Jupiter’s beneficial influence that Melencolia I succeeds, like the serpent-ritual of the Indians, in transforming the despair that triggers such superstitions into a feeling of mastery. If Dürer releases human beings from their feeling of isolation it is therefore not by repressing it, nor by