Images are encountered in language

N2a,3. A key question for the Arcades Project overall, something to consider that has wider implications, is how can Benjamin say the "place where one encounters" dialectical images "is language"? At first glance this seems curious, since we normally or intuitively divide the visual from the linguistic. But with this passage he first sets up two starkly divergent conceptions of the historical project, "it's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present it's light on what is past," so that he can position his own project squarely in the middle of these two strains, with the unifying idea of "image," a word he uses to describe, as we know, a very much central component of the Arcades Project. Most basically for Benjamin the image is the citation itself and the details of its literal meaning, exactly as if it were a photograph, something seemingly frozen in time that we might pore over to uncover its every detail and nuance, drawing any conclusions we can about when it was taken, by whom, as well as who or what seems to be in the image. If we see the citations as images in this sense it's easy to understand the whole project as montage. In the proper understanding of the image, "what is past" or what-has-been is able to line up with, come together with, correspond to "the now" in such a way that a "constellation" of meaning is formed that in fact bridges historical time and reveals an identity of past and present in such a way that the dialectical movement between the different conceptions of history mentioned above is no longer operative or relevant, brought to a "standstill," static, motionless, like a collection of stars in the sky.

What's curious as well is that as soon as Benjamin puts forward the concept of dialectics at a standstill, as if it were an ultimate goal of his project, of reading, of historical perception, he immediately turns around to reinforce how linear perceptions of time and history, the continuous, do define how the present is related to the past: this idea of chronological progression is in fact something we hang on to. And he also goes on to reinforce the idea that the relation of "what-has-been to the now" is a dialectics defined by movement, or dialectics in the pure sense, "emergent," even as it continues to be defined by an absence of "progression," something that might be at a standstill. The passage is complex in this subtle alternation between stasis and movement, a constant tendency of the detail, the interpretation of the image, to both fall back into linear time and to be revealed in a suddenly emergent flash as part of a kind of phenomenological constellation of a simultaneity of what-has-been and the now. This is an understanding of the image comparable to Barthes, this struggle in one and the same thing between a denotation and connotative meaning.

But as I wrote at the start of this post, we also need to consider how it is that Benjamin comes back to the idea that where images are encountered is "in language." Here we can immediately say that all of Benjamin's citations use language, words, text, that they are citations of text taken from books and hence linguistic in nature. Images are thus built up through words, words enable us to construct in our minds images of the past. But there is another idea at work here as well, almost as if this first idea is a literal interpretation of the problem, but one that leads to the more substantial. That is, by "place" Benjamin is indicating the "pure language" of "The Task of the Translator," a place where a more universal human language is accessed, so that through the dialectical image we come to experience and understand that language, we come to be in this language, which is a crossing of present and past as much as it is a crossing over of the visual, the phenomenological, the theological, and the philological. "Language" for Benjamin is finally comprehensive of all experience, including that of the nominally antithetical image, the dialectical image (which all images must be). Benjamin could have easily collected photos.