Critical Horizons

A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

ISSN: 1440-9917 (Print) 1568-5160 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycrh20

Walter Benjamin on Photography and Fantasy

Eli Friedlander

To cite this article: Eli Friedlander (2017): Walter Benjamin on Photography and Fantasy, Critical
Horizons, DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2017.1374912

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Published online: 25 Sep 2017.

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 CRITICAL HORIZONS, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2017.1374912

Walter Benjamin on Photography and Fantasy

Eli Friedlander
Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The essay provides a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “News from Walter Benjamin; Karl
Flowers”, a review of the album of plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt; Goethe;
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Blossfeldt. I place Benjamin’s account of Blossfeldt’s achievement photography; fantasy; types;

primal phenomena
both in relation to Goethe’s studies of the vegetal realm as well as
to the fantasy world of Grandville’s Animated Flowers. This
juxtaposition allows me to interpret Benjamin’s understanding of
the possibilities opened by photography and the transformation it
brings to the relation of art to science and the imagination.

Walter Benjamin’s review of Karl Blossfeldt’s “Originary Forms of Art: Photographic

Images of Plants” that was published in 1928, the same year as the book appeared, is
entitled “News of Flowers”. My first point concerns the current translation to English
of the German “Neues von Blumen” as “News about Flowers”. It is, I take it, instructively
wrong.1 For to have something new to say “about” flowers is not the same as to receive
news of them, that is, from them. The reversal of our common way of understanding
the relation of representation and nature, expressed in Benjamin’s title, is, so I want to
argue, important to guide us through this short review. For Benjamin returns in it to
themes in his vision of man’s relation to the creaturely world, to what he framed in an
early essay, in biblical terms, as Adam’s task, as man’s capacity to heed the mute language
of nature and realise it in his own language.
But putting it this way, brings out the tension with the other term in the title, namely
“news”, which refers us, I take it intentionally, to the journalistic. The task of responding
in human language to the ways nature communicates itself must be always addressed
anew, and it becomes a particularly acute problem with the overwhelming presence of tech-
nology in the human world. Benjamin seeks ways to conceive of technology not as an instru-
ment to use or subjugate nature, but rather, as is particularly evident for him in the case of
photographic technology, as having its own way, to allow the ground of expression and
realisation. But what would it be to take photography, which is so at home in its journalistic
and reporting function, to receive through it news from the primal realm of vegetal life?
The review itself opens with the claim that criticism is a sociable art. The task of the
critic would be to allow a community of readers to come together around a book, just
as they might convene around a dinner table. The critic has in mind a “healthy reader
[who] mocks the reviewers’ judgment”.2 The critic should not be seen as inviting the
reader to join by making pronouncements that the reader is to emulate so as to gain

CONTACT Eli Friedlander frieli@post.tau.ac.il

© Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2017
 2 E. FRIEDLANDER

the right to sit at the table. Rather, he cunningly takes advantage of the curiosity, which
manifests itself in reading, as it were, over someone else’s shoulder. The healthy and
bad mannered reader must feel he is joining uninvited a dinner table. To set and ready
the table and disappear, leaving such guests to enjoy themselves is the highest achievement
of the critic, “at least [of] the only form of criticism that gives a reader an appetite for a
book”, Benjamin adds3 (Here too, I have amended the translation).
Why would a review of an album of plant photographs open this way? I take it that such
reference to the healthy reader, to bad manners, as well as to ingesting a book like food
raises the question of what a more natural rather than cultured mode of reading might
be. Call it a transformation of taste. It asks how can aesthetic judgment be more than
having a taste, and become truly eating, gaining substance for sustenance, for our true
needs. The judgment of taste cedes its place to the pleasure of the healthy appetite.
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Such judgment also avoids the representative mediation of the critic, or of the expert in
culture, who as it were vanishes from view, as if to allow a more immediate access to
the material. And to speak of the bad manners of the reader, of the uncultured, or the bar-
barian, lured by such a vanishing act of the critic, might be yet another way to suggest how
we are here considering the transformation of a fundamental structure belonging to the
field art. At least this is hinted, if we allow ourselves punning between languages: the
bad manner, in German Unart is that which no more belongs to art, as we know it.
Now Blossfeldt’s book is almost exclusively a book of photographs (the only text it con-
tains is a short introduction of the art dealer Karl Nierendorf and a list of the plates in which
the Latin name of the plants is paired with the enlargement factor of the photographs). “A
rich book,” as Benjamin puts it, “that is poor only in words. Is not therefore the table already
set, with one hundred and twenty plates?”4 I take it that Benjamin plays on the double
meaning of “Tafel,” in the German “Photographische Tafeln,” which is nicely conveyed
by the double meaning of the English term “Plate,” as in “photographic plates.”
But, would not the scarcity of words in the book precisely point to the necessary role of
the critic in stepping forth, making himself visible, that is exemplary, and showing how to
interpret the visual material? This would depend on how we understand the production of
meaning in these images. Are we to say that such photography requires much technical
skill, but it does not provide an occasion for the recognition of great significance?
Would it make Blossfeldt a craftsman who cannot articulate in words the wonders he pro-
duces with his instruments? “And here” Benjamin writes, “doing is more important than
knowing.”5 We are familiar with such a separation between the productive activity and
knowledge in art. As Kant would put it, genius lacks knowledge of the rule of production
of the work of art, meaning that it must be nature that, through inborn talent, gives the
rule to art.6 It is the task of judgment or criticism to open meaning in the work, and
make explicit the rule that lies slumbering in nature. Benjamin knew all about what it
means to give criticism equal footing in realising the work of art, since he wrote his doc-
toral dissertation on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism.7
We should nevertheless expect a dramatic transformation of the model of creation and
criticism, insofar as the instrument, the technology receives a primary role in the pro-
duction of art. That is, settling the issue of the place of criticism depends on what we
count as reading the photographic image. The character of such reading is taken up in
Benjamin’s quote of Moholy-Nagy’s famous claim that “it is not the person ignorant of
writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future.”8
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 3

We should not make this new literacy too literary. Indeed, Benjamin suggests that
Blossfeldt is a scholar of sorts whose silence is not the result of lacking knowledge, but
rather whose “knowledge is of the kind that makes the one who possesses it silent
(stumm).”9 Benjamin writes of “the great survey (overview) (Überprüfung) of the inven-
tory of human perception (Wahrnehmungsinventar)”10 to which Blossfeldt contributed.
This is not just a collection or gathering of material that awaits someone “making” some-
thing significant out of it. It is knowledge that takes the form of inventorying, and order-
ing. Such a scholar would fall silent because no further explanation needs to be added. In
the face of such an achievement, the critic need only clear the way to the recognition of
what is already laid out before us.
If no words need to be added, then everything must be capable of being shown in the
phenomena themselves. The gathering of the photographic images, of the image-exper-
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iments, can itself constitute the understanding, the presentation of nature that needs no
further interpretation or elaboration of meaning. But this naturalism would not amount
simply to showing us what natural beings, in this case, plants, look like in all their
details. Rather, it is as though the production of this body of images testified to the life
of nature itself. Benjamin follows this line of thought in suggesting how the images
come together with the force of a natural manifestation: “a geyser of new image-worlds
hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible”.
I note the expression “image-worlds” (Bilderwelten) (which should be distinguished
from the term worldview (Weltbild or Weltanschaung, used earlier in the essay) and
which suggests that when images of nature emerge as nature, they are not a mere collection
or a dispersed multiplicity, but come together in the unity of belonging to the same world.
To testify to an original unity, as I will attempt to gradually elaborate, is essentially a
matter of sensing relationships of similarity. As Benjamin puts it, “These photographs
reveal an entire unsuspected treasure of analogies and forms in the existence of
plants”.11 Therefore, if we conceive of this attunement to nature as a form of naturalism,
it will be of a radically different character than the striving for resemblance of represen-
tation to the object.
This last point is evident in Benjamin’s praise of Blossfeldt’s work as the achievement of
“truly new objectivity”.12 In using this expression Benjamin does two things: First, he
surely means to echo the name of an artistic movement – “Neue Sachlichkeit” – which
is also said to include, apart from Blossfeldt, such photographers as August Sander, and
Albert Renger-Patzsch. But, second, by speaking here of a “truly” new objectivity, he
further opposes his admiration for the achievement of Blossfeldt to the kind of wide-
eyed enchantment at thinghood found for instance in Renger-Patzsch’s book from the
same period, entitled “The World is Beautiful.”
Benjamin writes in his “Little History of Photography” that “in it is unmasked the
posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance.”13
Though this disparaging comment on Renger-Patsch is made in the context of Benjamin’s
assessment of the progressive social and political functions of Sander’s photographic col-
lection of types of individuals of the Weimar Republic, the further comparison with Bloss-
feldt’s photographs of plants shows that something more is at stake.
Renger-Patzsch understands the neutrality of the camera to be allowing us to focus on
the bare presence of the object, or to equate photographic beauty with the supposedly
intense awareness of facticity. His utterly precise and detailed close-ups bring out the
 4 E. FRIEDLANDER

singular resilient and utterly concrete thingness of things (Striving for “Objecthood”, in
the way this term is used by Michael Fried, would be another appropriate characterisation
of the problem of such photography). In his 1928 essay Joy Before the Object, Ranger
Patzsch writes, “Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement.”
But does nature really manifest itself naturally? Or is constructive work demanded to let
the concreteness of nature appear? Surely not by adding one’s creative touch to the rep-
resentation of the object, but rather by methodically producing and ordering images.
Blossfeldt’s enlargements do not seek the singular immediately (this would lead to mysti-
fying the concreteness of contingency). His work allows the recognition of similarity,
meaning the positioning of the single photograph as a type in relation to other types.
This methodical ordering of types would suggest that we have moved from artistic to
scientific practice such as botany. But Blossfeldt’s photographs are in no way mere illus-
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trations such as one would find in a botanical treatise. The title of the book refers back to
Goethe’s presentation of the primal phenomenon, in for instance his Metamorphoses of
Plants. And Benjamin develops his reflections on serial photography, here as well as in
relation to Sander, in terms of his deep appreciation of Goethe’s scientific method. In
Goethe’s morphological studies types are not ordered according to a simple taxonomy
of genera and species. Rather, by the arrangement and ordering of the phenomena,
Goethe aims to make present an origin, or to present the oneness of an idea in phenomena.
The idea would be manifest over and above the different individual species by way of the
sense of their transformability. The ordering makes manifest as Benjamin puts it “phases
and stages of things conceived as metamorphoses.”14
In his discussion of August Sander’s serial photography of types, Benjamin character-
ises that photographer’s mode observation in the spirit of Goethe’s remark: “There is a
delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes
true theory.” In Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” the articulated ordering of phenomenal
material does away with reductive explanations of phenomena in terms of abstract
general laws. “This ‘empiricism’,” Benjamin writes in another context “grasps what is
essential in the object itself; therefore, Goethe says: ‘The highest thing would be to under-
stand that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the funda-
mental laws of chromatics. One must not look for anything behind the phenomena; they
are themselves the doctrine’”15 Goethe does not give up on the essential like a positivist
would, but finds intelligence, one might even say the necessity of the idea, in the object
itself. Reason in phenomena is not to be viewed in terms of abstract lawful regularities.
And experiments, as Goethe understands them, do not function as confirmations of theor-
etical hypotheses. Rather, they provide experiential intermediary steps in the ordering of
phenomena, forming an experiential continuity that allows us to recognise phenomena as
belonging together, that is as taking part in the presentation of a higher essential unity
which Goethe calls the archetype or Ur-phaenomen). Phenomena would be rescued
from their contingency by partaking in the presentation of the archetype that is at the
origin of their relatedness.
Given this pull towards the scientific register of thought, albeit in its peculiar manifes-
tation in Goethean science, it is somewhat surprising to find Benjamin pursuing the issue
of types, not in relation to science, but rather in terms of what appears to be its exact oppo-
site, namely fantasy. By placing Blossfeldt’s achievement alongside Grandville’s work Les
Fleurs Animees, he raises the question whether science and fantasy can come together in
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 5

these photographs. Grandville’s work plays a role in Benjamin’s writing on 19th century
Paris, and on the widespread interest of the period in the depiction of types. It is manifest
in the outpour of a literature of types to which contributed such figures as Balzac, and
which were illustrated by such artists as Gavarni and Daumier. Caricature is indeed one
of the most efficient modes of typifying, by way of the simplification and exaggeration
of certain physiognomic traits of the person.
Benjamin takes the period’s fascination with types to constitute a response to the emer-
gence of the masses on the stage of history. That early encounter with the masses is itself
epitomised in a type: the flâneur. The flâneur takes delight in the variety of types, as
though they were individual species found in their living habitat. Through the study of
physiognomies a sense of natural beauty and liveliness domesticates the experience of
the crowd. The flâneur, as Benjamin puts it, is botanising on the asphalt, as though an
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urban transformation of Rousseau’s idle promeneur who fills his solitary walks in
nature with reveries and the collection of flowers. The appreciation of the richness of
the “human comedy”, is combined, for the flâneur, with the pleasure of divining character.
His mode of revealing significance out of the crowd, his illustrative seeing, as Benjamin
puts it, is expressed and made generally available in the literature of types.16
Grandville has contributed to this depiction of the human comedy in the literature of
types, but he was also using other realms of nature to extend his presentation of character
in physiognomy. The animal appears in human guise in his illustrations of La Fontaine
fables. In such fables the animal figure serves to simplify the human world, and so to
speak parcel the complexity of human individuality into embodiments of single traits
such as cunning, stupidity, frivolity or zeal. Animals are indeed beings to which it is
easier to attribute character. They do not have a psychology, but rather can be seen as
manifesting in their behaviour a single characteristic trait.
But, Les Fleurs Animés, adopts yet another approach. They have a different logic than
Grandville’s exploration of physiognomy through animals. The animals keep the overall
external form of a human body, are dressed and made to assume human postures and
mostly it is their faces that show their animal nature. They portray thereby the morals
of the human world. But the flowers are given a human face, the human physiognomy
is stamped over nature. This transforms the nature of caricature, which is no more in
the service of characterising the visible manifestations of human psychological consti-
tution in types. It is as though the cosmos is refracted through the plant world, as
though the plant world monadically expresses the world as a whole. “Grandville” Benja-
min writes “ … had the entire cosmos arise from the world of plants.”17 But what is pre-
supposed in Grandville’s depiction and presentation is the incapacity of nature to bring
what is essential to it to expression, to fulfillment, by itself. It is by stamping a face on
nature that the human creature violently arrogates to itself the power to express what
mute nature is incapable of communicating in and of itself.
This leads Benjamin to describe Grandville’s procedure in his animated flowers, as
“graphic sadism.” Grandville is stamping “the punitive mark of creatureliness, the
human visage, directly onto the blossom of the pure children of nature”.18 Through the
fantasies of Grandville, Benjamin evokes his vision of the violent linguistic sovereignty
of man over nature that replaces, after the Fall, the fulfillment of man’s task to name crea-
turely nature and give expression to its essential being. In these conditions naming no
longer continues nature’s tendency to reveal itself. It is rather giving it expression by
 6 E. FRIEDLANDER

decisively helping oneself to human figuration to wrest nature’s secrets. Call this the alle-
gorisation of nature.19
The possibility of seeing Blossfeldt’s photographs to be manifestations of Fantasy that
provide us with another more continuous relation of nature and the human world, require
us to elaborate further Benjamin’s understanding of Fantasy. Fantasy, for Benjamin should
be distinguished from productive forms of the imagination. In fantasy, neither is the
imagination productive or constructive, nor is it actively destructive, but rather it is con-
tinuously deforming. To be truly fantastic deformation should not be actively and exter-
nally caused. To sense deformation, without acting on form, we appeal to the similarity
that emerges in the ordering and placing of phenomena together, to the establishment
of a medium of similarities. We can experience deformation when things are brought
together by similarity. The recognition of the similarity of a dog to his owner, or a cook
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to a pot, may have the same effect as a caricature that actively exaggerates features and
produces a grotesque image.
In the significant cases, similarity-relation, which Benjamin also calls “affinity” or
“relationship,” is to be distinguished from an overlapping partial identity as well as
from analogy which always assumes a common structure of what is brought together.
Relationship as elementary affinity is the sense that things belong together by belonging
to the same pre-existing whole.20 This can be exemplified by contrasting briefly Bloss-
feldt’s or Sander’s type with the mode of typifying found in Galton’s photographic prac-
tice. Galton attempted to create portraits of types of human beings. By juxtaposing on the
same plate photographic impressions of different individuals belonging to one pre-deter-
mined category, he created a composite portrait of a type.
Galton’s method might be called “visual averaging.” The typifying by way of visual
overlap importantly depends on similarity being understood in terms of shared features.
Even if not all individuals of a certain type have all their features in common, there will be
with respect to every feature a critical mass of cases that determine whether or not it
belongs to the typical, or becomes visible in the superposition. The superposition of
impressions produces, to put it in Kant’s terms, the aesthetic normal idea of a given
species.21 As a result of this procedure, with Galton, typicality feels melancholic or spec-
tral, as though drained of expression or of life.
Returning to Blossfeldt, the deformation by relationship can also serve to distinguish
Blossfeldt’s plants from Grandville’s while recognising them both as manifestations of
fantasy. If the graphic line by its very nature cuts and divides, then Blossfedt’s “enlarge-
ment of the plant world into gigantic proportions [is] gently healing the wounds
opened by caricature.”22 It also becomes clearer how Benjamin can speak of Blossfeldt’s
achievement belonging both to the deformation of fantasy and to Goethe’s scientific prac-
tice. For, fantasy understood as deformation is not a matter of constructing something fic-
tional, out of this world. It is not the work of the productive imagination that puts together
a new being out of previously experienced elements of reality. Rather a space of fantasy
emerges in intensifying the sense of similarity, in forming the continuity of a medium
of similarities. Such fantasy space might indicate how phenomena are cohering as one,
as nature. Fantasy and the deepest naturalism come together when “leaping towards us
from every calyx and every leaf are inner image necessities which have the last word in
all phases and stages of things conceived as metamorphosis.”23 (translation modified)
Fantasy is the intense manifestation of the fullness of nature conceived in terms of the
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 7

dictum “‘Natura non facit saltus’ (Nature makes no leaps) of the ancients” Benjamin adds
that one may name it “the feminine and vegetal principle of life … that which is flexible
and that which has no end, the clever, the omnipresent.”24
Where does this leave us in assessing the relation of art and nature in Blossfeldt’s photo-
graphs? The title of Blossfeldt’s book “Urformen der Kunst” self-consciously points back to
Goethe’s investigation of the Ur-phenomenon. But based on his understanding of Goethe
Benjamin’s suggests an emendation to Blossfeldt’s characterisation of his achievement:
“Originary Forms of Art” Benjamin writes “certainly. What can this mean, though, but ori-
ginary forms of nature? Forms, that is, which were never a mere model for art but which
were from the beginning, at work as originary forms in all that was created.”25 Benjamin
distinguishes between a simple mimetic understanding of the relation of art to nature
which takes nature to be a mere model (Vorbild) and sensing nature’s presence as an
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archetype (Urbild) at the origin of that which is made, that is of art.

In other words, Benjamin suggests that the primal images resting in nature can be
revealed, or better realised in art rather than by direct observation of nature itself. This
would not occur in art that seeks to imitate nature, but rather nature is sensed in the
space of similarity or continuities between the world of plants and the products of the
human world. The peculiar character of these continuities is underscored when Benjamin
writes that we encounter in the enlarged plants, vegetal “Forms of Style.” This last
expression put by Benjamin in square quotes refers most probably back to Alois Riegl’s
Questions of Style which unfolds the history of the vegetal motif in ornament. In particular
it is worth noting in this context that one of the moments in Riegl’s book is his engagement
with a theory of the emergence of ornamentation on columns directly from an attempt to
reproduce the leaf of the acanthus. This theory, traceable to a story found in Vitruvius
would stand for a simple realism which takes nature as a model, needs to be replaced
by the more fundamental account of the presence of nature as archetype in ornament.
That natural origin or art is what Riegl identifies as the Kunstwollen or the will at work
in art. Style then would be misunderstood if seen merely as a framework of conventions
of a period, or alternatively in terms of the characteristic personality of the artist. It has the
unity of nature at work in art, a kind of unity that only a whole environment of manifes-
tations methodically inventoried and ordered can make evident.
It is such a more fundamental relation of art to nature that Benjamin recognises in the
medium of similarity mirrored in Blossfeldt’s photographs. They afford us a sense of crea-
tive nature at work in the human world. This continuity between nature and art is the
point of the examples that Benjamin mentions:
One senses a gothic parti pris in the bishop’s staff which an ostrich fern represents, in the
larkspur and in the blossom of the saxifrage, which also does honor to its name in cathedrals
as a rose window which breaks through the wall. The oldest forms of columns pop up in
horsetails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the
shoots of the monk’s hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer.26

It is significant that a couple of years later, in the “Little History of Photography” this very
same description of the space of similarities in Blossfeldt’s photographs follows Benjamin’s
first reference to his famous notion of the optical unconscious.27 The release such pho-
tography affords from the confines of consciousness would be badly understood if it
were merely attributed to the fact of enlargement that reveals to us things unseen
 8 E. FRIEDLANDER

before. Benjamin clearly contrasts Blossfeldt’s achievement and what is given to us by a

microscope, say the look of cellular tissue:
… it must be food for thought in even the most sober observer that the enlargement of what
is large – the plant, or its buds, or the leaf, for example – leads us into a wholly different realm
of forms than does the enlargement of what is small – the plant cell under the microscope,
say.28

It is only with the enlargement of what is large that we would speak of an optical uncon-
scious. Photography allows us to recognise, aspects of what is already visibly given to us in
experience. It is within the experienced that photography makes room for the recognition
of that intelligence which is not a matter of consciousness, that is, of the intelligence of
nature. As Benjamin puts it in another context “we discover our conviction that we
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have experienced infinitely more than we know about”.29

The methodical ordering of similarities does not present an object for consciousness,
but produces an environment of meaning. To reveal the optical unconscious in fantasy
is to present through that environment the belonging together of appearances as
nature. Importantly, it is a matter of establishing friendly relations with the realm of
the minuscule (to which the microscope would seduce us merely crudely and by force).
A friendly relation is a matter of recognising relationships between our meaning sur-
roundings and that new field of play opened to us by the enlargement of the visible.
This establishment of an affinity to nature as a whole might have, in the past, come
under the name of magical thinking. That is magic was that practice through which
man’s perceptual awareness was related to a cosmos.30 Technology in art now takes up
the importance that was formerly attached to magical practices. As Benjamin writes: Pho-
tography “make[s] the difference between technology and magic through and through his-
torically variable.”31
In the last lines of the essay, Benjamin returns to the theme that opened his review, to
how Blossfeldt’s book offers food for thought: “We, the observers, wander amid these giant
plants like Lilliputians. It is left, though, to fraternal great spirits such as Goethe and
Herder, to sun-soaked eyes, to suck the last sweetness from these calyxes.”32 I leave
aside the suggested connection between the literary fantastic of Jonathan Swift and the
other modes of fantasy we have elaborated and focus on the way in which, when the
table is set, and the photographic plates laid out, the chalice (Kelchen) or cup, can also
be the calyx, that out of which we drink the sweetness of nature.
The enlargement of plants makes the distracted or casual observers into Lilliputians
wandering among the plant world. But in order to truly nourish from such gigantic
plants, to suck from them the concentrated sweetness of nature, or to establish fraternal
or friendly relationships with them, one needs a gaze fitting to their stature. Only it
would provide a perspicuous overview of that environment. The sun-soaked eyes could
be a reference to the opening lines of Goethe’s essay “The experiment as Mediator
between subject and object” in which he writes: “Like the sun which draws forth every
plant and shines on all, [the observer] must look upon each plant with the same quiet
gaze.”33 Speaking of the gaze, which shines equally on all means that no phenomenon
has an inherently higher significance than others. Constituting the continuity of surround-
ings of meaning involves a certain equal temperament of the phenomena that are part of it.
The figure of the sun further suggests the generative character of the gaze, or the gaze
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 9

partaking in the growth of nature itself. It would be a mode of contemplation, which, like
the sun, draws forth the beings it shines upon and realises them.
So, after all is said and done, an essay that started with a call for a natural appetitive view
of “reading”, with the common uncultivated reader, seems at the end to re-establish aris-
tocratic privilege to those few who can through their genius realise nature to the fullest.
Unless, Benjamin’s reference to sun-soaked eyes, be read also as pointing to a kinship
between the gaze of such uncommon human impartial observers as Herder and Goethe
and the gaze of photography, that which was said earlier in the review to create light-pic-
tures. Would not the neutrality of the camera, think of it as the other-than-human equa-
nimity of its gaze, be equally sensitive to all, and precisely thereby open the possibility of
the highest realisation of nature. As Benjamin puts it a few years later, in the “Work of Art
essay”, in realising to the full what the photographic technology has in store for us, we
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would transform or translate into a new configuration the ritual or auratic character of
art and thereby also do away with “a number of traditional concepts – such as creativity
and genius, eternal value and mystery”.34

Notes
1. For the English Translation of the essay see Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–
1934, 155–7. For the German original see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Band III, s.
151–2.
2. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 155.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186–97.
7. See for example: “Yet not only is criticism, in Romantic art, possible and necessary, but in the
theory of Romantic art one cannot avoid the paradox that criticism is valued more highly
than works of art. Even as practicing critics, the Romantics had no consciousness of the
rank the poet occupies over the reviewer. The cultivation of criticism and of the forms, in
both of which they won the highest honour, are established in their theory at the deepest
level. In this they achieve complete unanimity in deed and thought, and they fulfilled
exactly what to them mattered most. “The absolutizing of the created work, the critical
activity, was for [Schlegel] the highest.” “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”
in Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 1, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, 185.
8. At the end of the “Little History of Photography”, written a couple of years after the review of
Blossfeldt, Benjamin quotes the same passage and adds: “But shouldn’t a photographer who
cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Won’t inscription become the
most important part of the photograph?” (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2,
527).
9. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 155. Thinking of the fact that these are photographs
of the plant world, makes it imperative to distinguish the muteness of nature which calls for
expression, from the silence of knowledge, the silence which has to do with the completion of
the task of naming nature. This is not the silence of the one who knows not how to ask, nor is
it the essential absence of words in the face of the ineffable, but rather a silence of realization.
10. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 155. Translation modified.
11. Ibid., 156.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 526.
14. Ibid., 156.
 10 E. FRIEDLANDER

15. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, 192.

16. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 419. On the literature of types see especially the section
entitled “The Flâneur” in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, in Benjamin,
The Writer of Modern Life, 66–8.
17. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 156. In the 1939 exposé of the Arcades Project Ben-
jamin speaks similarly of Grandville’s achievement in his book “Another World”, “Un Autre
Monde” in conjunction with the rise of World Exhibitions. Just as different parts of the world
are represented by commodities in the pavilions of world fairs, with Grandville’s féeries com-
modities extend to every aspect of the cosmos. One might also say that the sphere of com-
modities comes to refract the entire universe: “World exhibitions construct a universe of
specialties. The fantasies of Grandville achieve the same thing. They modernize the universe.”
(Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1999, 18).
18. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 156.
19. The possibility of speaking of “graphic sadism” in Grandville’s fantasies in part rests on the
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metaphysical difference Benjamin draws between the graphic line, which belongs to the cat-
egory of the sign (Zeichen) and colour which is a mark (Mal). The line can appear only on a
background and drawing the line gives a separate identity both to figure and to background,
it separates figure from ground. In Grandville the graphic line does not use the page as back-
ground, but another being, the blossom of the flower to which it gives a determinate
expression or identity by tracing on it the human face. As opposed to the graphic line that
is a sign, the fundamental character of a mark is that of a manifestation in a medium.
Thus, Benjamin conceives of colours in painting as marks having no background. Fantasy
would have two paradigmatic manifestations as mark and as sign: the one is the colours of
fantasy, the other is the ornament or the arabesque. The question then would be how to
view photography, or more specifically Blossfeldt’s photographs? Do they essentially
belong to the field of the mark or to that of the sign, or maybe they overcome that very div-
ision? Something about the graphic character of the medium was implied by Benjamin’s
account of the problem of reading a photograph and its relation to captions (for instance
in news). There are also well-known accounts of the forceful or even wounding character
of the photograph. Yet, these might emphasize too much the pointed singularity in photogra-
phy. Indeed, viewing it in terms of a manifestation of fantasy, it is the possibility of presenting
the typical that would be important to it. It would also relate it to the field of the mark (or to a
possible overcoming of the duality of sign and mark) and provide us with another more con-
tinuous relation of nature and the human world.
20. The latter is not manifest as purposive form, that is through the scheme that demands the
concept of an end. Deformation by relationship tends towards dissolving the uniqueness
of impressions. At the limit deformation would eventuate in a continuum of nuanced tran-
sitions. The paradigm of such intense deformation in the mark is what Benjamin identifies as
the colours of fantasy.
21. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 117–8.
22. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 156.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 157.
25. Ibid., 156.
26. Ibid.
27. In his “Little History of Photography” Benjamin writes that “it is through photography that
we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual
unconscious through psychoanalysis. Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technol-
ogy and medicine are normally concerned – all this is, in its origins, more native to the
camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet at the same time, pho-
tography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the
smallest-meaningful yet covert enough to find a sanctuary in waking dreams, but which
enlarged and capable of formulation, make[s] the difference between technology and
magic through and through historically variable. Thus Blossfeldt with his astonishing
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 11

plant photographs, etc … ” (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 512 translation

modified).
28. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 156.
29. Ibid., 278. Photography would be one of the most important instruments to realize the
meaning of the claim Benjamin puts forth in his essay on surrealism:

histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no

further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the every-
day world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable,
the impenetrable as everyday. (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 216)
30. See in particular Benjamin’s discussion in “On the Mimetic Faculty”, in Benjamin, Selected
Writings, Volume 2, 720–2.
31. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 512. For sure, technology as such, even the cinematic
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technology is not automatically progressive. The problematic use of technology in artistic

forming of the human environment is something that Benjamin engages in depth in consid-
ering the vegetal tendencies of cast iron that are typical of Art Nouveau or Jugendstil. Jugen-
dstil’s treatment of iron in vegetal motifs is for Benjamin an attempt to “tame” technology
and aestheticize it. It is not the awakening of nature in and through technology, but the
dream that one has awaken.
32. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2, 157.
33. von Goethe, The Collected Works, Volume 12, Scientific Studies, 11.
34. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4 1938–1940, 252.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The present paper is part of a larger research project on the role of fantasy in Benjamin’s writing.
The project was supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation.

Note on contributor
Eli Friedlander is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Among his publications are Signs
of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (2001), J.J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (2005) Walter
Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (2011) and Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aes-
thetics (2015). His current research is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

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