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Constellation

According to Oxford online dictionary, constellation refers not only, as a cosmic term, to a group of stars forming a pattern, but also a group of associated or similar people or things. Appropriating the concept of constellation, in this sense, has two connotations: on one hand, cosmic notion of constellation refers the regular arranged patterns of stars, and the discernment of the patterns is reckoned on the spectators; on the other hand, it is, in some sense, a structure that comprises both stability (the regular pattern) and variation (capacity of discernment) of the spectators. Constellation as a group of associated or similar people or things is a dubious idea; the notions of associated-ness and similarity convey arbitrariness.

In my research, the concept of constellation is appropriated as a way to lay out Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin’s ideas; and as re-configurational strategy of Theodor Adorno to allow invisible truth to be revealed. Two connotations of the concepts can be discerned in the appropriations. Constellation in ideas of Warburg and Benjamin are material ground; they accentuate on the emblematic and illustrative potency of images and the deeper logic among them. The emblem is a relational (representational?) idea wherein precisely rests possibilities to modify. In the case of Adorno, constellation is a structure to gather objective ideas; the task of constellational structure is to explain the philosophical truth, which is interpretation of the inner and hidden knowledge and truth. Adorno sees the constellation as a structure of a mass, which is the entirety of congregation of ideas or phenomena.

The concept of constellation in Warburg’s and Benjamin’s dictums is nebulous gravity, it does not have a regular form; the things – images or material objects – come together in arbitrary manners. Adorno’s constellation is the construction or re-construction of the congregation of things. The three German scholars, however, assimilate the concept of constellation to crack the hegemonic schema of iconography, historiography, and production of knowledge and truth. They reject the scientific notion of evidence, decisiveness, and positivism; their ideas of constellation as patho-formula, allegory and interpretation concern more on ideas, thoughts, and truths to be renewed and burgeoned.

Warburg’s patho formulas as constellation

In his book The Remembrance of Things Past: Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin, Matthew Rampley commences the book with his juxtaposed interrogation on the significances of the art historian, their approaches to study the past. Benjamin had particular affinity to Warburg; inheritance of Warburg, thus, can be found in Benjamin’s thoughts. Benjamin was about 30 years younger Warburg; when his The Origin of German Tragic Drama was published in 1928, he made references to Warburg’s important work Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in. Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten and dwelt with the similarities between his works and Warburg’s Library of Cultural Science Library (Rampley 2000: 2) In 1928, while this postdoctoral major work of Benjamin was finally going to be published, Warburg was working on his magnum opus Mnemosyne Atlas. It is not hard to imagine the influence of Warburg on Benjamin, thought the two scholars had never met during their lifetime. Their affinity lies in diagrammatic view on time and memory and the emergence of historical knowledge and truth on blasting and dispersion, namely constellation. The material form of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas – the more than 70 wooden boards, covered with black cloth; on each of the panel, pinned photographic reproduction of art-historical or cosmographical images under particular themes – on which Warburg would add, remove, arrange, and rearranged the images. The form of and treatment to the arrangement of the images, in order to channel some deeper logic to the immediate, is a constellation.

The thematic explorations of Warburg’s panels are another level of appropriating notion of constellation. Claudia Wedepohl, the lead researcher of the Warburg Institute in London reveals Warburg moved the theme of cosmology cosmic to the first part of the Atlas in penultimate version (August/September 1928), which was put in the second part in the establishing series (May 1928); The re-arrangement reveals Warburg sees his Atlas as a thinking instrument: Warburg believed that illustrating both the practice and the history of converting constellations in the heavens from powerful demons into abstract symbols was a significant new way of demonstrating the so-called self-awareness of thinking men. (from website of Warburg Institute online https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library-collections/warburg-institute-archive/online-bilderatlas-mnemosyne/mnemosyne-atlas-august) a constellation to connect and harmonise arbitrary relations.

In three opening plates of the final version of Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg starts with the constellation of relations from the notions of cosmology and cartography; and how humanity historically represents in according to the cosmic notions. The first one (Panel A) shows the map of heaven with its constellation, a map of Europe that seemingly correspond to the heavenly constellation, and family tree of Medici. The second panel (Panel B) devotes to the theme of marcrocosm and miscrocosm (Gombrich 1970: 292) which is about the analogic relations between humanity and the cosmos. It also shows various degree of transferring the cosmic system to humanity harmonic correspondence; from mystic abstraction to the earthly geometric evolution. The relations between cosmos and humanity render into visual representation of the mystic profound of Kelper’s discovery of law of planetary motion [1]; it tells the potentiality of human to envisage the unknown. This opening sequence of Warburg’s Atlas illustrates his concept of constellation as tool for kindling thoughts, ideas, and translatio in things; Christopher Johnson compares translatio as Greek meta-pherein (metaphor) to the essential proposition of Warburg’s pathos formula (Johnson 2012: 61) which is transmission of cultural memory through images in dispersed temporalities.

Metapherein, according to online etymology dictionary, means “figure of speech by which a characteristic of one object is assigned to another, different but resembling it or analogous to it; comparison by transference of a descriptive word or phrase”; (https://www.etymonline.com/word/metaphor) the term shares the connotation of metaphor wherein distance between two objects is necessary for the resemblance and analogy to be revealed. The distance, space or gap catalyses the dynamics of cultural memory in an image to blast the pathos formulas. Pathos formulas refer to the emotional abstraction, like an expression of extreme affect; they are recurring forms of representation that mediate between the desire for the absolute and the pure contingency of sensuous experience (Johnson 2012: 63). Thus, images are charged or metaphorically infused with pathos-laden thoughts – or more precisely memory – that survive through time as inheritance transmitted social memory; and they can be renewed by contacting with selected will of particular period, in Agamben’s interpretation as crystallisation of an energetic charge and an emotional experience (Agamben 1999: 94) The pathos formulas, in this sense, are constellation of the metaphorical infused memories in dispersed time.

Benjamin’s flashing of time and allegory as constellation

The particular affinity of Walter Benjamin to Aby Warburg reveals in former’s assertion of history as an inquiry of afterlife:

History ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has been recognised in the analysis of the “afterlife of works”, in the analysis of “fame” is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general. (Benjamin 1999: 460 [N2, 3])

Benjamin’s idea of history is not at all as past, present, and future occur in linear manner; the past always inscribes in present, namely the afterlife, or the survival of the past. Like Janus – the god of beginning and passage of time – history has two faces; it looks at past and the future, it sees the same things from past, present, and future. History, in this sense, is a constellation wherein the past and present burst. The concept of constellation is often referred to the well-known N Section of Arcade Project of Walter Benjamin:

It’s not that what is in past casts light on what is present, or what is present its lights on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other word, image is dialectics at a standstill. (Benjamin 1999: 462 [N2a, 3])

Constellation is the diagrammatic progress of history; it is a concept of multi-temporal in single dimension. The diagrammatic progress of history is illustrated in material forms/objects, namely the arcade, barricades, panoramas, and glass during the strolling of flâneur. The cityscape unfolds to flâneur as phantasmagoria; every street and every object that he encounters led him to history. Benjamin asserts it as anamnestic intoxication that the material encounters in the city brings not only the present perceptions but also dead facts – the possessed abstract knowledge – which is bygone experience and life. (Benjamin 1999: 417 [M1, 5]) Thus, the flâneur’s strolling is an experience of going through constellation as the ‘colportage phenomenon of space’; the visual sensuous forms encountered in the strolling are assigned corresponding historical knowledge.

The experience of colportage phenomenon of space is awakening where history goes back to its origin. The phantasmagoria of imagery wherein the past clashes the now inscribed with constellational dynamics to awaken history. The truth lies in this moment of constellation. The gaze of flâneur is the gaze of allegorist; who sees the anxiety of history via the dispersal of material objects in the city appears to him as phantasmagoria. The objects before his eyes fall into ambiguity experience in multi-temporal past. Allegory, in this sense, is diagrammatic array of resemblances and analogies.

Allegory, to Benjamin, is a subversive treatise to the historical truth; and the methodology of the treatise is philosophical contemplation based on constellations of fragmented ideas. The true value lies on the brilliance of the representation of the fragments of thoughts; and the philosophical contemplation that holds the brilliance of mosaic as constellation. (Benjamin 1998 :28-19)

The analysis focus of Benjamin on German baroque tragic drama is its allegory and the illustrative amplitude. To Benjamin, the mourning play contains its distinct forms in which the content and object is not about myth or tragedy, but rather historical life. Allegory is a schema of approaching historical knowledge; and the symbols encapsulate the potentiality to intervene history and attempt to establish something new by cancelling the seeming relationship and rendering arbitrary in deviation. Like his assertion in Arcade Project, the constellation as allegory is material ground as Benjamin’s notion of history. Ruins, arcades, angel of history, allegory, colportage, et cetera, are all images in Benjaminian’s constellation.

Adorno’s constellation of concepts, a structural attribute

Constellation in Adorno’s assertion is not a materialistic connotation; the constellation is not an arbitrary rendering that is coalescence of things before one’s eyes as flâneur gaze of Walter Benjamin. For Adorno, constellation is construction of historical ideas for the interpretation of philosophical actuality. The contextualisation of Adorno’s concept of constellation is often started with his early work The Actuality of Philosophy in 1931; the actuality denotes an affinity that Adorno intended to capture the philosophical and cultural aspect of true which counters the scientific positivism. Could the philosophical self-appointed task of providing a unified account of human reality, (Pensky 1997: 2) was for the young Adorno first and foremost question. Adorno urges this cardinal philosophical questions be answered. (Adorno 1977: 120)

Adorno argues the actuality of philosophy lies in its status to continuously interpret the meaning of true. The philosopher juxtaposed science to philosophy as the former is for research and the task to interpret is assigned to the latter. (Adorno 1977: 122-123) The way to restore actuality of philosophy is to accentuate interpretation and leave the empirical methods to sciences. (Lanning 2013: 62) The task of interpretation of Adorno is less a proceeding based on presumption on historical totality; rather, a constellative structure of thinking. Adorno’s constellation is a structural attribute comprised of existing ideas, without accentuating on historical images as Benjamin; his approach inherits less arbitrariness than the material ground assertion of Benjamin. The task of philosophy is to interpret the historical truth; Adorno’s notion of history is unintentional and emerges from the human-constructed constellation (Lanning 2013: 63) He rejects truth being intentionally contained in history and the Hegelian notion of history as intelligent and particular process. For Adorno, history is a not the higher intentional consciousness wherein truth reveals itself and freedom of humanity can be realised. Truth emerges from interpretation of historical ideas of social reality on constellative attribute; the social redemptive power of constellation is deeply inherited from Walter Benajmin.

Authentic philosophical interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time. Just as riddle-solving is constituted, in that the singular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various groupings long enough for them to close together in a figure out of which the solution springs forth, while the question disappears – so philosophy has to bring its elements, which it receives from the sciences, into changing constellations, or, to say it with less astrological and scientifically more current expression, into changing trial combinations, until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears. (Adorno 1977: 127)

Note:

[1] Johannes Kepler, (born December 27, 1571, Weil der Stadt, Württemberg [Germany]—died November 15, 1630, Regensburg), German astronomer who discovered three major laws of planetary motion, conventionally designated as follows: (1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; (2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc (the “area law”); and (3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits (the “harmonic law”). Kepler himself did not call these discoveries “laws,” as would become customary after Isaac Newton derived them from a new and quite different set of general physical principles. He regarded them as celestial harmonies that reflected God’s design for the universe. Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centred system into a dynamic universe, with the Sun actively pushing the planets around in noncircular orbits. And it was Kepler’s notion of a physical astronomy that fixed a new problematic for other important 17th-century world-system builders, the most famous of whom was Newton. (Online Encyclopaedia Britannia, retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Kepler)

Reference:

Adorno, T. W. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos (New York, N.Y.), vol. 1977, no. 31, 1977, pp. 120–133.

Agamben, et al. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verson, 1998

Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf. Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Belknap Press, 1999.

Gombrich, et al. Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography. 2nd ed., Phaidon, 1986.

Helmling, Steven. “Constellation and Critique: Adorno’s Constellation, Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, p. 27.

Johnson, and Christopher D. Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images. 1st ed., Cornell University Press, 2012.

Lanning, Robert. In the Hotel Abyss: an Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Adorno, Boston: Brill, 2013.

Pensky, Max. The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern. State University of New York Press, 1997.

Rampley, Matthew, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Harrassowitz: Germany, 2000.

Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Germany: Akademie Verlag GmbH. 2008

Vennes Cheng / THINK-PAD series 04: Constellation 「書寫作為思考」筆記系列四：聚合群