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The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin's Image-Based
Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History

Author(s): Sigrid Weigel, Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith and Christine Kutschbach
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 2015), pp. 344-366
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of
Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-Based
Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual
Arts and Media History
Sigrid Weigel
Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith and Christine Kutschbach
In the contemporary boom of an interdisciplinary image science (Bild-

wissenschaft) Walter Benjamin is conspicuously absent even though the
image is one of his key concepts and his theoretical work is famously
characterized as thinking-in-images. His marginal role in this field is all the
more striking since Bildwissenschaft (in contrast to visual studies) does not
deal specifically with visual phenomena but with all sorts of images (in
accordance with the word Bild in German, which does not distinguish
between image and picture)1 and because Benjamin’s use of the word refers
to a meaning of Bild that precedes the distinctions among mental, visual,
and material images as well as the differentiation of scripture and pictures
and the separation of concept (Begriff) and metaphor.2 In his epistemology
the image is linked not to representation but to a simultaneous, instanta-
This essay builds on observations on Benjamin’s perception of art made in the third part of
Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick Truscott
Smith (Stanford, Calif., 2013), in order to systematically reconstruct the genesis of an imagelike
epistemology in Benjamin’s writings, that is, an epistemology based on images. Portions of this
essay have been slightly revised from that book.
1. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science,” Visual Literacy,
ed. James Elkins (New York, 2009), pp. 14–30.
2. As regards the prehistory of the distinction between metaphor and concept, see Jacques
Derrida,“White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New
Literary History 6 (Autumn 1974): 5–74.
Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015)

English translation © 2015 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/15/4102-0020$10.00. All rights reserved.
344

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2015 345
neous cognition (Erkenntnis)3 or insight (Einsicht). The importance of the
image in Benjamin’s theory attests to a way of thinking and writing that
favors simultaneity and constellation over continuity, similitude over rep-
resentation or sign, and the detail or fractionary (Bruchstück) over the
whole.4 Although Benjamin’s image refers to a wide range of meanings,
pictures, paintings, and other visual media have been of crucial impor-
tance for the development of his specific concept of the image and its
relevance for an epistemological access to history, memory, and culture.
Apparently the famous Benjaminian figures—especially the dialectical im-
age, thought-image, and memory-image—have concealed the great de-
gree to which his epistemology is grounded in an intensive engagement
with visual images and how indebted it is to the contemplation of the
relationship among pictures, language/writing, and time; in fact, his
thinking-in-images developed from a detour through considerations of
painting and investigations into photography and film.
Benjamin’s epistemology can be understood as a constellation based on
the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous (which appertains to a represen-
tation similar to images) in which the what-has-been and the now come
together in an instant—as image. This image, however, can only be trans-
ferred into knowledge when it is articulated in language. Instead of sug-
gesting the impossible, a definition of Benjamin’s concept of image, I will
undertake a reconstruction of its emergence and shaping within Ben-
jamin’s writings. His use of the word image and his imagelike (bildliche)
epistemology owe their existence to a twofold genesis: first, they inherit
a perspective trained through the direct viewing of art, in which ele-
ments of perception survive within a contemplation that can recall
scenes of revelation or epiphany; second, they are the product of his
3. The German Erkenntnis is difficult to translate; it emphasizes the act and moment of
grasping an intellectual insight, cognition, or knowledge.
4. From a historical perspective, his concept of Bild can be related to the system of
similitudes that precedes the era of representation and exists after the development of the latter
in modified forms as a kind of palimpsest, as described in Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les
choses: Une Archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966). W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of
image refers to this Foucauldian idea of similitude: “The image is the general notion, ramified
in various specific similitudes (convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, sympathy) that holds the world
together with ‘figures of knowledge’” (Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology [Chicago 1986],
p. 11). For the relation between Benjamin and Foucault see Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-
Reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines
(London, 1996).
S I G R I D W E I G E L is director of the Center for Literacy and Cultural Research in

Berlin.

346 Sigrid Weigel / Walter Benjamin’s Image-Based Epistemology
engagement with the history of media technologies in the context of his
ur-history of modernity.
While there has been much critical attention paid to Benjamin’s discus-
sions of photography and film (of photographs by David Octavius Hill,
Félix Nadar, Eugène Atget, August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Man Ray,
for example), as well as to the passage on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia in
The Origin of the German Mourning Play and the references to Paul Klee’s
Angelus Novus in “On the Concept of History,” the dense network of ref-
erences to and citations of paintings that pervade his entire corpus has
hardly been observed.5 And only recently were the numerous notes of the
young Benjamin on painting, color, and imagination discovered.6 The
countless, often rather short but tremendously dense, at other times ex-
tensive, considerations of pictures from contemporary painting and art
history have gone as yet unheeded. These include remarks on the Viennese
Genesis from Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Conrad Witz, Matthias Grünewald,
Hieronymus Bosch, Raphael, Rembrandt, Hans Holbein the Elder, Katu-
shika Hokusai, Charles Méryon, Hans von Marées, Antoine Wirtz,
Gustave Courbet, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Constantin Guys, Hon-
oré Daumier, J. J. Grandville, and James Ensor, to Paul Cézanne, Otto
Gross, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador
Dali, Klee, and many others.7
My main thesis is that Benjamin’s reflections on painting in his early
writings form a type of palimpsest, a sort of hidden grounding for the
subsequent development of a stratum of epistemology in which thinking-
in-images is predominant. Reports of visits to exhibitions and commen-
taries on individual artists and pictures occupy a fair share of space in his
extensive correspondence. Additionally, there exist numerous notes on
painting, imagination, and color along with commentary on artistic
schools or programs written by the young student. In his early work, he
formulated a philosophy of art that attributes a specific possibility for
cognition (Erkenntnis) and expression that can’t be translated into the
terms of either philosophy or art criticism. Thus it is neither the image nor
the word as such, neither painting nor literature (Dichtung) as such, to
which he ascribes a specific mode of knowledge. It is rather the elements of
5. There are exceptions; see Brigid Doherty’s brilliant analysis of Benjamin’s footnote on
Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in “Between the Artwork and Its ‘Actualization’: A Footnote to Art
History in Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ Essay,” Paragraph 32 (Nov. 2009): 331–58.
6. See especially the first systematic analysis of these notes in Heinz Brüggemann Walter
Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe, und Phantasie (Würzburg, 2007). See also Peter Fenves, The
Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, Calif., 2011), pp. 79–80.
7. A more detailed discussion of this appears in the eighth and ninth chapters of Weigel,
Walter Benjamin.

imagination and color in painting and literature’s specific mode of pre-
senting a problem that establish a genuine mode of perception; Benjamin
sees the latter as the “virtual possibility of formulating” the truth content
of a problem that in its multiplicity finds expression only in art.8 Because
this cannot be transposed to a discursive language or to philosophical
concepts, he developed a specific language of thinking-in-images. Later
this was elaborated as an epistemology, namely, in his writings from the
1930s, in which the temporality of images appears in conjunction with the
study of photography and film in the form of a temporally organized struc-
ture of perception significant for these media: for example, variable expo-
sure times, slow motion, and the speed of moving pictures. As a
counterpart to the poetic principle of shock found in Charles Baudelaire,
Benjamin conceptualized his thinking-in-images as the epistemological
principle of modernity.
Flash and Image

Among the best-known and most cited passages from Benjamin’s writ-
ings is the first fragment in Konvolut N of the Arcades Project, in which he
negotiates questions of epistemology: “In the fields with which we are
concerned, knowledge comes only flashlike [blitzhaft]. The text is the long
roll of thunder that follows.”9 Although images are not the explicit topic of
this passage, Benjamin’s figure of speech expresses the imagelike character
of perception. This is revealed through a foil that follows shortly thereafter:
his statement on the image as a constellation of the what-has-been and the
now that come together in a flash. In it, both Benjamin’s theory of history
and the key figure of his thought, the dialectical image, are expressed in
nuce: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present. . . .
Rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the
now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill”
(AP, p. 462).10 Although the first of the two cited sentences is a figurative
counterpart to the subsequent one, with its condensed version of his theory of
history, it is not metaphorical, at least not in the sense of indirect phrasing. Just
as the flash indicates an imagelike mode of insight in the first passage quoted,
the flashlike nature of a constellation is marked as an image in the second. The
flash and the image thus explain and substitute for each other; they are de-
ployed by turns to articulate a specific epistemology. The flashlike image—a
8. Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am Main, 1972–89), 1:1:173.
9. Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
Mass., 1999), p. 456; trans. mod; hereafter abbreviated AP.
10. For the German version, see Benjamin, “N,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:1:578.

sudden, ephemeral coming-to-appearance —becomes a mode of cognition
(Erkenntnis) that operates outside of the linear temporality of historiogra-
phy and narration. In other words, the mode of thinking- and speaking-
in-images leads to a way of knowing figured as a sudden flash that solidifies
into thought-images and linguistic images. Here, the image of lightning
predominates. It stands for a way of knowing that in an instant can illu-
minate an entire situation.
Yet Benjamin’s flash-image has nothing to do with the iconography of a
coup d’oeil, as exemplified at the end of the eighteenth century in the
famous panel Coup d’oeil du théatre de Besancon by French architect
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.11 As a “symbol of modern reason,”12 the coup
d’oeil presents a sovereign gaze, one that had traditionally been repre-
sented as the iconographic eye of god, but as a human gaze it has a profane,
military context:13 “COUP-D’OEIL (le) dans l’art militaire, est selon M. le
chevalier Folard, l’art de connaı̂tre la nature & les differentes situations du
pays, où l’on fait & où l’on veut porter la guerre.”14 Benjamin’s flash-image
stands diametrically opposed to such a sovereign gaze. As Caroline Pross
has shown, the coup d’oeil’s symbolic guarantee and affirmation of objec-
tive knowledge has replaced the authority of the eye of God, which, in the
iconographic tradition, alone can vouch for truth.15 In contrast, Benja-
min’s image-based knowledge as perceived in a flash-image can perhaps be
best characterized as a faculty in which an “enhanced presence of mind”
(gesteigerte Geistesgegenwart)16 is coupled with an involuntary mode of see-
ing. The flashlike cognition is something that befalls the person uninten-
tionally. It does not at all claim to take the empty space of God’s eye but is
situated precisely opposite to it, in the complementary position, namely, in
the line of succession of he who receives it or to whom it is revealed.
From the perspective of philosophical metaphors one could discuss this
11. See Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture: Considerée sous le rapport de l’art, des
mœurs, et de la législation (1804; Paris 1997), p. 2. See also Caroline Pross, “Coup d’œil:
Nachbemerkungen zu einem Bild von Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,” in Szenographien: Theatralität
als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Neumann, Pross, and Gerald Wildgruber
(Freiburg im Breisgau, 2000), pp. 453–65.
12. Pross, “Coup d’œil,” p. 453.
13. Or from Frederick the Great. See Horst Bredekamp, “Die Erkenntniskraft der
Plötzlichkeit: Hogrebes Szenenblick und die Tradition des Coup d’Oeil,” in Was sich nicht sagen
lässt: Das Nicht-Begriffliche in Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Religion, ed. Joachim Bromand and
Guido Kreis (Berlin, 2010), pp. 456–68.
14. “Coup-d’oeil,” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et des métiers,
ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 36 vols. (Paris, 1713–1784), 4:345.
15. See Pross, “Coup d’œil,” p. 455.
16. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,”
Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:503; hereafter abbreviated “DK.”

flash-image as a superimposition of two famous scenarios of flash within
European intellectual history, namely, the flash as the light of an epiphany-
like perception of revelation at the end of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Com-
media and the flashlike suddenness of the appearance of a “new world” in
G. W. F. Hegel’s introduction to Phenomenology of Mind. With the lines “la
mia mente fu percossa / da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne” (“my mind was
smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it”) at the end of Paradiso,17
Dante finally—after the passage through Inferno and Purgatorio and after
having experienced the limits of the common human gaze and words in his
search for a higher divine truth—experiences a sort of perception that
exceeds the existing repertoire of visual and verbal expressions.18 This
flashlike epiphany can be regarded as an emblematic scene of a higher or
divine truth that one receives but does not grasp. It finds its modern coun-
terpart in the Hegelian transposition of the Christian tenet into the idea of
an “Ansichsein des Geistes.”19 In Hegel’s philosophy the flash repeatedly
functions as a metaphor of the penetrating mind (Geist) that overcomes
the naturalness of man. One could say that by means of this operation man
reaches a higher truth through his own capacities. From a strong philo-
sophical viewpoint—that is, according to the demands of coherence and
unambiguousness—European thinkers tend to interpret the image of the
flash as a metaphor or as a poetic image that is liberated from the necessity
of philosophical language. Bernhard Taureck, for example, speaks of a
poetic use of images as being “grenzbefreit”20 or freed from the limits of a
philosophical truth. In opposition to such a perspective (in which litera-
ture and art are regarded as a surplus to cognition), I argue that Benjamin’s
writing cannot be understood as poetic language liberated from any phil-
osophical meaning but rather should be understood as a fascinating epis-
temology that expands the very limits of philosophical language. At the
core of this construct of ideas stands his thinking-in-images.21
There is however one passage in Hegel’s work where he does not use the
image of the flash as a metaphor for the mind overcoming nature but
17. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, vol. 3 of The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton
(Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 380, 381.
18. For Dante’s role within a discussion of the philosophical metaphor of flash, see
Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Metaphern und Gleichnisse in der Philosophie: Versuch einer kritischen
Ikonologie der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), pp. 390–407. (In his chapter on the flash
both Hegel and Benjamin are missing.)
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 12:404.
20. Taureck, Metaphern und Gleichnisse in der Philosophie, p. 400.
21. For a more detailed analysis of the use of images in his writing and the problem of his
thinking-in-images disappearing in translation, see chapter 7 of Weigel, Walter Benjamin.

rather in a different way: to express the phenomenon of the sudden visi-
bility of a new era, whose harbingers went unnoticed for a long time. In the
introduction to the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel depicts the birth and
transition of a new period as a “qualitative leap”; the decay of the previous
world is indicated during transition only by symptoms such as ennui and
levity, harbingers of the arrival of something different. “The gradual crum-
bling that left unaltered the physiognomy of the whole is cut short,” he
writes “by the ascent which, in one flash, all at once, presents the features of
the new world.”22 This passage attracted Benjamin’s attention when, after
initially keeping his distance from Hegel,23 he began to study his works
intensely during the 1930s in the course of his engagement with dialectical
materialism and his project on modernity.24 It seems that Benjamin refers
to this Hegelian idea of epochal transition in the final paragraph of “Paris,
the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (a kind of dense introduction to
the Arcades Project). Referring to Hegel, he rewrites his version of the
scenario completely, interpreting the arcades and other phenomena as
residues of a dream world; for him they are materialized wish symbols of
the crumbling bourgeois epoch:
The development of the productive forces shattered the wish symbols
of the previous century, even before the monuments representing
them had collapsed. . . . Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one
to follow but, in dreaming, pushes towards awakening [träumend
drängt sie auf das Erwachen hin]. It bears its end within itself and un-
folds it—as Hegel already noticed—by cunning. With the destabiliz-
ing of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the
monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crum-
bled. [AP, p. 13; trans. mod.]
In his radical reconceptualization of the constellation of historical transi-
tion Benjamin thus reads the symptoms of decay in a Freudian sense, in that
he relates them to dreams and the unconscious. In addition, the flashlike
visibility of the new world is not the product of the ascent’s force or activity
itself but rather the effect of a certain gaze, a gaze that is related to a specific
state of consciousness: “The utilization [Verwertung] of dream elements in
22. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York, 1977), pp. 6, 7; trans.
mod. And see Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke: 3:18.
23. “Hegel seems to be dreadful,” the twenty-five-year-old PhD student wrote (Benjamin,
letter to Ernst Schoen, 28 Feb. 1918, Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and
Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. [Frankfurt am Main, 1995–2000], 1:438).
24. You will find traces of Benjamin’s reading of Hegel in “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” in the notes of the Arcades Project, and in the correspondence with
Horkheimer and Adorno during these years.

the moment of awakening is the textbook case [Schulfall] of dialectial
thinking” (AP, p. 13; trans. mod.). Benjamin relates the flashlike appear-
ance of an image to the figure of awakening, which he comprehends not
only as an experience of the individual but also as a historical conscious
state. In one of the entries of the Pariser Passagen I, he situates such a
flashlike appearance at the site of “the transitional space of awakening in
which we now are living” (AP, p. 843). Also, in this context, the divine
origin of a sudden perception of an image (as in Dante) is echoed in Ben-
jamin’s reflections by restoring a trace of the premodern provenance of
this kind of appearance (that Hegel has sublated into the historical process
itself) in his own scenario of transition: “The transitional space in which
we are now living is likely to be traversed by gods. This traversal of space by
gods is to be understood as lightning-like” (AP, p. 843; trans. mod.).25 But
in contrast to Dante, Benjamin’s engagement with a Nachleben of epipha-
nic moments within the modern gaze is linked not to the Christian God
but to the Greek gods in modernity. His whole ur-history of modernity still
bears, in contrast to Hegel, traces of the inferno that Dante had passed,
although in the modern shape of Baudelaire’s enfer. For Benjamin the flash
of cognition is bound to the now of cognizability or the now of readability
that is assigned to the role that revelation owned in religion. But in his
modern site of epistemology it is not the Geist that has taken the place of
epiphany (Erleuchtung) but the flashlike lighting (Beleuchtung) whereby
the concept of an objective truth in effect also falls away.
It is important to bear in mind that this Benjaminian figuration has
developed neither by way of studying philosophy in general and Hegel in
particular nor by studying the metaphor of flash within European thought.
Rather, it is the result of his intense engagement with an a-chronological
approach to history and culture that goes back to his very early fascination
with pictures and was later informed by his analysis of media technology.
Therefore the following examination of Benjamin’s image-based episte-
mology concentrates on his own work to illuminate the traces of how his
thinking-in-images developed. I will unfold the scenes and various images
Benjamin contemplated on the path to Konvolut N, where the flash is the
image and the image is a flashlike cognition.
Latency of Images
“In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only
flashlike. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.” This passage can
also be taken as a motto for the place visual images have in Benjamin’s
25. See Benjamin, “Pariser Passagen I,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:2:1011–1012.

thinking. The seen image, or a citation of an artwork, functions in his work
not uncommonly like lightning, supporting his theory that itself devel-
oped like a “long roll of thunder.” The span of time between the moment
the image is encountered and that of Benjamin’s writings in which it gains
its place and meaning is noteworthy. It is the time of latency, the time
between a flash of insight and conscious reflection, that raises the question
of the state of consciousness in which the pictures have an active role. It
pertains to the latency of knowledge that for a long time remains uncon-
scious or preconscious before the cultural and historico-theoretical impli-
cations of what has been seen are unfolded and configured. One could
describe this latency as the work of memory between the exposure and the
development of a visible image.
The trace of many images in this way inscribes comparable figurations
in Benjamin’s writings: first encounter—fascinated contemplation of the
image and impression, or being touched; latency—the image in one’s head,
as an imaginary vis-à-vis the reflection; thought-image—the discussion of
the image and the generation of a dialectical image within theory. For
example, Dürer’s Melencolia had already made the “greatest and most per-
fect impression” on the twenty-year-old Benjamin: “Only now do I have
an idea of Dürer’s power and above all the Melancholy is an immensely
deep, highly expressive piece,” he wrote of a visit to a museum in Basel in
July 1913.26 Yet the first appearance of the engraving in Benjamin’s work
came more than a decade later in his habilitation, The Origin of the German
Mourning Play, written in 1925, whose conception began in 1916. In the case
of Klee, it took more than two decades. As early as October 1917, as he
commented to Gershom Scholem on his own notes “Über die Malerei”
(“On Painting”), Benjamin used Klee to argue the irreconcilability of great
art and such “scholastic concepts” (Schulbegriffen) as cubism.27 From then
on, Klee’s name—and chiefly the Angelus Novus—leaves a permanent
trace in the letters and poems sent back and forth between Benjamin and
friends until, in 1940, Benjamin transfers the Angelus Novus into a
thought-image in order to discuss the concept of history rather than the
central scholastic concept of art history.
In the case of Grünewald, there is a much shorter interval. In the same
letter in which he recounts his visit to the museum in Basel and his en-
counter with Dürer’s Melencolia, Benjamin also reports how impressed he
was by Grünewald: “Finally, the largest of the paintings there, Grünewald’s
Christ on the Cross, seized me much more strongly this time than last
26. Benjamin, letter to Franz Sachs, 11 July 1913, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:143.
27. Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, 22 Oct. 1917, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:394.

year.”28 “Seized” (ergriff) here is not meant in the sense of being “overcome
with emotion” (Ergriffenheit), as the beloved phrase for museal enjoyment
of art would have it. It instead articulates the way in which the image had
seized his mind and thought. This time it took three years until the im-
pression left by Grünewald’s painting emerged in one of his texts, “Socra-
tes” (1916), which concerns the relationship between eros and knowledge.
In the context of a polemic against a pedagogical principle of eros wherein
eros is utilized as a means to the end of knowledge, Benjamin juxtaposes
the “saintly question” to the Socratic one.29 The second section of the text
begins with the citation of a painting: “Grünewald painted the saints with
such grandeur because their halos loomed [tauchte] out of the greenest black.
The radiant is true only where it is refracted in the nocturnal; only there is
it great, only there is it expressionless, only there is it asexual and yet of
supramundane sexuality.”30 It is only one sentence in which Grünewald’s
painting is present. At that time, Benjamin would have been thinking of
pictures from the Isenheimer Altar, of which he hung a reproduction in his
study and for which Scholem recounts “in 1913 as a student he had made a
special trip to Colmar to see the original.”31 This short passage concerns an
aesthetic practice of semantification—qua colors—that calls forth the sa-
cred directly from the materiality of the painting. These are reflections that
represent a kind of leitmotif in the notes from his university years. In them,
one may study the way in which Benjamin developed a mode of perception
based on viewing images that inherits elements of revelation or epiphany.
The Image as the Third

In one of the notes, in which the young Benjamin was occupied theo-
retically with questions of dramatic arts, painting, color, imagination,
“Sign and Mark” (Zeichen und Mal), and the like, namely, in a fragment on
“Imagination” (Phantasie), there is—just as erratic as the passage on
Grünewald—a sentence about paintings by Hans von Marées. According
to Benjamin, Marées’s paintings show “the grey Elysium.” He interpreted
this as a third type of “pure appearance” along with those of decay/sunset
and becoming/dawn. Considerations of eternal transience (Vergängnis)
and unending disintegration lead him to reflect on these phenomena in the
image of the sunset. Eternal transience is “like the dusk above the deserted
arena of the world with its deciphered ruins,” he writes. “It is the infinite
28. Benjamin, letter to Sachs, 1:143.

29. Benjamin, “Sokrates,” Gesammelte Schriften, 2:1:131.
30. Ibid., 2:1:130; my emphasis.
31. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main,
1975), p. 51.

dissolution of the purged beautiful semblance, bereft of all temptation.”32
In the extension of the comparison between decay and sunset, dawn is then
taken up as the image for becoming, which Benjamin would also like to
understand as a type of pure appearance: “Thus there is a pure appearance,
a burgeoning one, at the dawn of the world. This is the radiance that
surrounds things in Paradise.” However, the paintings by Marées do not
appear until Benjamin introduces a third mode of pure appearance with
which he transcends conventional metaphors of becoming and decay:
“Last, there is a third, pure appearance: the reduced, extinguished, or
muted one. It is the grey Elysium we see in pictures by Marées. These are
the three worlds of pure appearance that belong to the imagination.”33
Here, the image is provided as a supplement to the established natural
symbolism in order to introduce a third. This third is situated outside of
both concept (becoming and decay) and metaphor (dawn and sunset).
Later, Benjamin will explicitly describe the image itself as a third, in the
essay “On the Image of Proust” (1929) and the book Berlin Childhood
around 1900. In the latter, he locates the image beyond the opposition of
content to form using the same allegory as in the Proust essay: the
rolled-up stocking that serves as the pocket (Tasche) and the gift (Mitge-
brachtes) at the same time. Benjamin’s concept of the image thus emerges
beyond the oppositions between both content and form and concept (Be-
griff) and metaphor. Informed by meditations on the preconditions of
painting and the history of visual images, in the 1930s the image be-
comes for him the armature for an imagelike mode of thinking. Ben-
jamin thus used paintings as a medium with which to reflect on the
mode of perception and knowledge and, later, in the context of his
studies on modern culture, developed an epistemology that itself bears
the signature of modernity.
This concept of the image is not a descendant of aesthetic theory but
rather of Benjamin’s reflections on the philosophies of language and of
history. However, this does not mean that the visual image is derived from
the linguistic image; it is rather the case that the receiving aspect in contrast
to the denoting dimension is privileged, as it appertains to a biblical lan-
guage. This is the domain of a genuine pictoriality of script (Schriftbild-
lichkeit), to which the art-historical paradigm of the opposition between
picture and text is as irrelevant as the discourse of Paragone (competition
of the arts). In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Re-
production,” Benjamin even describes Leonardo’s comparison of music
32. Benjamin, “Phantasie,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:115.

33. Ibid; my emphasis.

and painting by a measure of their duration (fleeting versus eternal) as an
example of a “crude mode of observation” (“plumpe Betrachtungsweise”)
(“DK,” p. 498 n. 23). The elaboration of the concept of image in Benjamin’s
work does not stand in the Western tradition of aesthetics or theory of art;
it goes back neither to Platonic ideas nor to the canon of treatises on
painting amassed since Leonardo, Alberti, and others.34 It is rather a gen-
uine product of modernity, generated out of the context of “Jewish Think-
ing in a World without God.”35 In it, perception and knowledge are shaped
by a receptive, receiving stance. In Benjamin’s early writings, the prototype
of the receiver is the listener (Hörende). So it is in “The Conversation”
(“Das Gespräch,” 1914) that the speaker receives the meaning of his own
speaking from the listener.36 Similarly, in the essay on language from 1916,
a fundamental work for Benjamin’s entire theory, the earliest form of
speaking by humans is not considered as a sovereign act of denotation but
rather as a recognition of the mute language of things and nature that
translates it into the verbal language of humans. It is out of this nexus of
thoughts that the young Benjamin developed his reflections on painting,
imagination, and color. The latter may be seen as a transposition of the
figure of the listener into the realm of the visual—and thus as a specifically
Jewish contribution to Bildwissenschaft.
In the fragment on imagination, the rainbow assumes a central role, an
image in which appearance and visual perception are indistinguishable.
For the young Benjamin, the rainbow became a preeminent image with
which he could discuss the question of the truth of painting—a question in
which the problem of representation of revelation reverberates. Here, in
the image of the rainbow, the theme of color conjoins with that of imagi-
nation, and the latter provides Benjamin with an alternate dimension of
the image that stands in contrast to its being a likeness. Additionally, imag-
ination indicates the specific mediality of a painted image in which repre-
sentation and unrepresentability penetrate each other. In his notes on
painting, written in parallel to his dissertation “The Concept of Criticism
in Romanticism,” he thematizes painting as a medium of reflection in
34. In the early notebooks, for example, Leonardo da Vinci plays no role, even if his treatise
on painting appears in a list of titles to be consulted for the theme “color” (Benjamin,
“Anmerkungen zu Seite,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:699 n.119). It seems as if Benjamin is first
properly familiar with da Vinci’s ideas through his engagement with Paul Valèry’s Introduction
à la methode de Leonardo da Vinci (1894), yet even then not to have intensely studied them, as
indicated by the indirect citation found in, for example, “DK,” 1:1:498 n. 23 and 499 n. 24.
35. I take this phrase from the title of the commemorative publication for Stéphane Mosès;
see Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès, ed. Jens Mattern,
Gabriel Motzkin, and Shimon Sandbank (Berlin, 2000).
36. Benjamin, “Das Gespräch,” Gesammelte Schriften, 2:1:89–96.

which something else at the same time finds expression in conjunction
with representation: “the light of ideas struggles with the darkness of the
creative soil [schöpferischen Grundes] and in this struggle it engenders the
imagination’s play of color.”37
Benjamin had already used the rainbow—in its characteristics as both a
medium and a pure quality without substance—as an image for the colors
of imagination in an early dialogic text, “The Rainbow: A Conversation on
Imagination,” presumably written in 1915. Here the rainbow ends up being
for him an “Urbild,” a primordial image of art: “And the rainbow is to me
the purest manifestation of this color which animates nature and fills it
with spirit (durchgeistigt), returns its origin to imagination, and makes it
into a mute, seen ur-image of art. Finally, religion transposes its holy realm
into the clouds and its blessed realm into Paradise.”38 As an ephemeral,
colored appearance—one explicitly not stemming from the oil paints of
the artist but rather from an atmospheric reflection—the rainbow be-
comes the image of an immaterial painting. Due to its colorfulness, this
appearance becomes the prototype of art. With the last sentence of the
cited passage, Benjamin interprets it as the effect of a history in which
heaven—formerly the seat of the Gods—is transformed into a formation
of clouds. Although secularized and profane, there the afterglow of a per-
ception, which was previously at home in religion, is active. In Benjamin’s
reflections the rainbow is situated on the threshold between the visible and
the invisible; at the same time it functions as a transitional image between
Benjamin’s reflections on painting and his epistemology.
Transitional Images: Vortex and Flames

The flash-image—both the image of a flash and the image as flash—was
set up by other images, namely, images of natural phenomena in motion
from other realms, such as the vortex or eddy. With these images a tem-
poral dimension enters the stage; they serve to enable Benjamin to formu-
late an a-chronological figuration of history. For example, among the
entries of the first period of his Arcades Project, “Pariser Passagen I” (1928–
1929), one comes across the note: “All true insight forms an eddy. To swim
in time against the direction of the swirling stream” (AP, p. 843). And in his
diary from 1931, at a time when he contemplated suicide, one finds a pas-
sage that prefigures the criticism of progress elaborated later in his theory
of history. Here it is condensed into the image of an eddy:
37. Benjamin, “Gedanken über Phantasie,” Gessammelte Schriften, 6:114.

38. Benjamin, “Der Regenbogen,” Gesammelte Schrtiften, 7:25.

My attempt is to express a conception of history in which the concept
of progress would be completely displaced by that of the origin. The
historical, understood in this way, can no longer be sought in the
riverbed of a course of progress. Here, as I have already observed else-
where, the image of an eddy replaces that of the riverbed. In such a
vortex, the earlier and the later circulate—the pre- and post-history of
an occurrence or, better yet, a status of it.39
Already in this passage we see the concern with a specific temporal struc-
ture from which Benjamin develops a specific view of history distinct from
historicism by means of a counterimage to the conventional metaphor of
the flow of time: the eddy as an image of the interaction of pre- and post-
history, of the past and the present, and of eternity and the instant. These
reflections on time also go back to his early notes on painting. In 1920, as he
was occupied with expressionism in the context of a review of Ernst
Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918), he read, among other things, Kandin-
sky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1911). In a note that reflects upon the mediality
of the artwork’s aftermath, Benjamin grapples with Kandinsky’s differen-
tiation between the eternal and contemporary values (Zeitwert) of a work
of art. The medium through which an artwork affects later eras invariably
differs from that through which it has an effect in its own time:
Kandinsky expresses this by saying that the eternal value [Ewig-
keitswert] of works of art appears more vividly to later generations,
since they are less receptive toward their contemporary value [Zeit-
wert]. Yet the concept of “Ewigkeitswert” is perhaps not the best ex-
pression of the relation. We ought to investigate which aspect of the
work (quite apart from the aspect of value) really seems more evident
to later generations than to contemporaries.40
These notes show how Benjamin extracted the differentiation central to his
reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities, namely, the
distinction between the artwork’s material content (Sachgehalt) and truth
content (Wahrheitsgehalt) and between commentary (Kommentar) and
criticism (Kritik) from his critical discussion of Kandinsky’s conception of
the temporality of art: “If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a
burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chem-
ist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash
39. Benjamin, “Autobiographische Schriften,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:442–43.

40. Benjamin, “The Medium through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later
Ages,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings, trans. Livingstone et al., ed. Marcus Bullock
et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1996–2003), 1:235; trans. mod.

remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself
preserves an enigma: that of what is alive.”41
In this way, the simile of the burning pyre, which appears in the opening
emblem to Benjamin’s essay on Goethe, is recognizable as a transitional
image (Übergangsbild)—located at the threshold between the reflections
on painting during his university years and the imagelike epistemology
developed in his later writings. It is a transitional image both in terms of its
character (a simile) as well as content (flames between rainbow and light-
ning). Wood/ash and flames form an opposition that is due to two differ-
ent forms of knowledge: on one hand, the chemist’s knowledge and on the
other, the critic’s. In contrast to this, lightning and thunder are figured in
the Arcades Project as joined modes of one epistemology. In an instanta-
neous flashlike cognition the material-content and meaning-content co-
incide with one another, similar to what transpires in a visual image, and
the succeeding text reflects upon their interrelation and interaction.
Iconography and Technology

The genesis of the flash as image for perception and of the epistemolog-
ical image itself may be studied in an entry found in “Pariser Passagen II,”
which focuses on the introduction of the electric light. Using the example
of the “Passage des Panoramas,” Benjamin reads the shift from oil lamps
and gaslights to electric lighting as a transition from a mythical to a mod-
ern setting. While one who entered the passage in 1817 was still lured by the
“sirens of gaslight” and the odalisques of oil flames, the scenery abruptly
changed in electric light:
With the flashing of electric lights, the fair glow was extinguished in
these galleries, which suddenly became more difficult to find, plied a
black magic at entranceways, and peered from blind windows into
their interior. It was not decline but transformation. All at once they
were the hollow mold from which the image of “modernity” was
cast.42
Here the lighting of electric light can be regarded as a modern flash of
Apelles; in its illumination the image of modernity emerges “from dark to
light,” just as it had in the work of the Hellenistic painter.43 This ema-
nation of modernity from the flash of the electric light forms a key
scene for the way in which images from mythology and the history of
41. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Selected Writings, 1:298.

42. Benjamin, “Pariser Passagen II,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:2:1045. And see AP, p. 874.
43. E. H. Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1976), p. 16.

art are for Benjamin, in light of technology, transformed into genuine
imagelike perception.
In many notes for the Arcades Project, he outlines scenarios that appear
to be images of modern painting; on the other hand, there are sections in
which he speaks not only in images but also with pictures—more specifi-
cally, with citations of specific paintings. In this way, individual paintings
he has seen are summoned to stand in as snapshots of modernity. Using
the example of scenes one may observe at the St. Lazare train station,
Benjamin describes, for example, how the train station becomes a stage:
Once again we see performed the timeworn Greek melodrama: Or-
pheus, Eurydice and Hermes at the station. In the mountain of lug-
gage under which she stands arches the rocky path, the crypt into
which she sinks when the Hermaic conductor with the signal disc,
watching for the moist eye of Orpheus, gives the sign for departure.
Scars of departure which zigzag, like the crack in a Greek vase, across
the presented bodies of the Gods.44
This perspective that discovers scenes from mythology within images from
the metropolis is prefigured by paintings of classical modernity. This is
evident in a variant of the entry from “Pariser Passagen I” in which Ben-
jamin characterizes motifs such as “Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes at the
station” or “the Hermaic conductor with the signal disc” as neoclassical
and continues: “With the neoclassicism of Cocteau, Stravinsky, Picasso,
Chirico and others, the case is as follows: the transitional space of awaken-
ing in which we are now living is likely to be traversed by gods. This tra-
versal of space by gods is to be understood as flashlike.”45 While the first cited
scenario thematizes correspondences between mythology and modernity,
the second variant reflects a perspective in which central concepts of Ben-
jamin’s epistemology are condensed—namely, the awakening that he
views as the “paradigm of dialectical thinking” and a flashlike appearance
(AP, p. 898). Benjamin privileges the threshold between dreaming and
waking as a setting to articulate a simultaneity of nonsimultaneous facul-
ties of consciousness, which demonstrates the psychoanalytic basis of his
epistemology. But with the ephemeral appearance of gods he adds an im-
portant aspect to the psychoanalytical constellation of a transitional space.
It is evident in the motif of the Gods crossing through space in a flash
that aspects of a mode of knowledge survive in his flash-image, recall-
ing a notion of epiphany or revelation. In this way, Benjamin uses
44. Benjamin, “Konvolut L,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:1:512. And see AP, p. 406.
45. Benjamin, “Pariser Passagen I,” pp. 1010, 1011; my emphasis. And see AP, p. 843.

images that come from the iconography of art history, yet he wrests
them from iconographic convention and, in his Urgeschichte der Mod-
erne, transforms them into thought-images of a certain knowledge ed-
ucated by visual images.
Whereas in traditional iconography lightning usually represents the
wrathful God, against the backdrop of industrialization it became the
lightning of cognition. “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe,” a
fragment composed during Benjamin’s years at university, is one of the
preliminary studies for the “Critique of Violence”; the fact that retributive
violence reaches into categories of older forms of law is already reflected.
Here, he had already cited the image of lightning and, remaining at that
time completely within the frame of traditional iconography, decoded it
without problems. That is to say, he then could still translate it into a
verbally articulated insight:
As the purifying hurricane speeds ahead of the tempest, God’s fury
roars through history in the storm of forgiveness, in order to sweep
away everything that would be consumed forever in the lightning
bolts of the divine uproar. What is expressed metaphorically in this
image needs to be formulated clearly and distinctly in conceptual
form: the meaning of time in the economy of the moral universe. In
this, time not only extinguishes the traces of all misdeeds, but also by
virtue of its duration—beyond all remembering or forgetting—fos-
ters, in ways that are wholly mysterious, the process of forgiveness,
though never of reconciliation.46
By contrast, within the context of the Arcades Project, the same image (that
of lightning) is transformed from a symbol of godly wrath within biblical
iconography into an epistemic figure. This transformation takes place
from the viewpoint of a cultural development coined by technology, as
Benjamin’s examinations on the history of media and technology serve to
shift images to a mode of thinking beyond iconography.
An abrupt, shocklike “sudden exposure” of memory and a “flashlike
insight” were already mentioned in “A Berlin Chronicle,”47 where Benja-
min writes: “I think of an afternoon in Paris to which I owe insights into
my life that came in a flash, with the force of an illumination.”48 Also in his
book on Baudelaire, he states that in the novels of Victor Hugo “the phys-
46. Benjamin, “Die Bedeutung der Zeit in der Moalischen Welt,” Gesammelte Schriften,
6:98. And see Benjamin, “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe,” trans. Livingstone,
Selected Writings, 1:287.
47. Benjamin, “Berliner Chronik,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:516.
48. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” trans. Jephcott, Selected Writings, 2:614.

iognomy of a métropole flashes at moments.”49 When the image itself has
become a flash in those places in the Arcades Project where the dialectical
image is conceived as “a flash of lightning” (AP, p. 21), then it seems as if
technology’s flash of lightning had literally struck into painting. In
nineteenth-century Paris (which was, for Benjamin, the capital of moder-
nity) it was the railroad that pulled full steam into the iconography, as it
were—just as the same breach occurred in William Turner’s paintings
(whose work Benjamin, however, never mentions). In Konvolut F of the
Arcades, which is dedicated to the theme of the railroad’s construction,
Benjamin refers to Karl Gutzkow’s Paris Letters II (1842) and reads the flash
of lightning as an emblem of the technical age. He comments on a quota-
tion from Gutzkow about a lightning bolt over the Austerlitz Bridge in the
following manner: “The Austerlitz Bridge was one of the first iron struc-
tures in Paris. With the flash of lightning in the sky above, it becomes an
emblem of the dawning technical age” (AP, p. 151; trans. mod.).
Shock and the Temporality of Images

The development of Benjamin’s imagelike epistemology bears a signa-
ture of modernity for which the technical history of images themselves
plays a prominent role. Following his early reflections on painting and art,
Benjamin’s nascent engagement with photography and film around 1930
was a decisive step toward the concept of a flashlike cognition. His reflec-
tions on the temporality of images come primarily from his readings of
photographic and cinematic images. It is remarkable that his intention to
discuss film as aesthetic—that is, in light of the historical index of percep-
tion—is based on, of all things, Franz Wickhoff’s work on medieval min-
iatures and on Alois Riegl’s interpretation of late Roman art. He thus bases
his thesis on two authors who, he stresses, were the first to employ their
respective (art) objects of study, objects that had lain buried in the classical
tradition, in order to gain insights into historically specific perceptions:
“The era of migration of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the late-
Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art
different from that of antiquity but also a different perception” (“DK,” p.
478). In this way, Benjamin consults the “Strenge Kunstwissenschaft” (the
title of one of his reviews)50 for his studies of the culture of modernity.
He discusses the temporality of photographic and cinematic images
first of all alongside their technical development. Thus it is—in his
49. Benjamin, “Der Flâneur,” Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:564.

50. See Benjamin, “Strenge Kunstwissenschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften, 3:363–74. For a
detailed discussion, see the eighth chapter of Weigel, Walter Benjamin.

“Little History of Photography,” for example—mainly through the
specific technical development of apparatuses that allow for variable
exposure time that the “incunabula of photography” are differentiated
from the photography of his own time.51 The former radiates more of
the aura that vanishes with the later, technically motivated “control
over works of art.”52 Or Benjamin condenses the effect of slow motion
and the temporal structure of film’s moving pictures53 in the figure of
the “dynamite of the tenth of a second” (“DK,” p. 461).54 Modes of
perception altered by fleeting images furthermore become for Benja-
min the matrix of a radically transformed culture of memory and per-
ception and a modern epistemology. At this point shock comes into
play—as a mode of perception that arises from the temporal structure
of modernity insofar as it is owed to suddenness. Benjamin’s engage-
ment with shock plays a significant role in the elaboration of the flash-
image into a central epistemological figure. The shock mediates
between psychoanalysis/theory of memory and media technology/cul-
tural history respectively; it forms the background against which he
develops his unique epistemology. Let me thus briefly address the the-
ory of shock, whose development in Benjamin’s thought we can trace
clearly in three steps: (1) its foundations in a theory of memory, (2) its
technical reformulation, and (3) its extension into cultural history.
In the context of the autobiographical “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932),
Benjamin discovers shock to be at play in operations of memory that
produce images. The question as to the origin of particularly resilient
memory-images is answered here by the fact that shock isolates these
images from ordinary memories. While this idea of isolation remains in
Freudian trauma theory, in Benjamin’s text the image of a memory-
plate (Erinnerungsplatte) takes the place of Sigmund Freud’s paradigm
of the traumatic shock, which, due to the strength of the impression,
breaches the psyche’s protective shield. In “A Berlin Chronicle” the
memory-plate is already associated with the figure of lighting. Benja-
min writes of a flaring light (aufschie␤ende Licht) and of “moments of
sudden lighting” (Augenblicke plötzlicher Beleuchtung) that are “at the
51. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter,
Selected Writings, 2:517.
52. Ibid., 2:523. For a detailed analysis of the ambivalent position of aura and the loss of
aura in history, see Rodolphe Gasché, “Objektive Diversionen: Zu einigen Themen Kants in
Benjamins ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technsichen Reproduzierbarkeit,’” in Walter
Benjamin: Moderne und Gesetz, ed. Ashraf Noor (Munich, 2011), pp. 239–66.
53. In the 1920s, it was 240 frames per second.
54. Jimena Canales describes the time unit of a tenth of a second as a trope of modernity in
Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago, 2009).

same time moments when we are separated from ourselves [Au␤er-
Uns-Seins]”: “While our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved
actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in an-
other place and is touched by the shock, as is a little heap of magnesium
powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our
deepest self in shock that our memory owes its indelible images.”55
Here, Benjamin reformulates Freud’s conception of trauma, based in a
theory of memory, with an eye toward the technical side of the process
(the production of images). This perspective is less concerned with the
event that caused a trauma than with the process of isolating memory-
images, which he reflects upon with the help of images of lighting and
the flames of a match. Thus the concept of shock is introduced as a
quasi-technical counterpart to Freud’s concept of trauma. In Benjamin
the aspect of lighting replaces the breaking-through of the protective
shield; the foundations for a cultural-theoretical elaboration of shock
are now in place. As is well known, in “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–39), Benjamin uncovers in the equip-
ment and apparatuses of film a mode of viewing that corresponds to the
isolation of images due to shock. In this case, however, the effect is
produced by the technology itself. What makes film unique for him is
the “force of its technical structure” that film produces as a physical
shock effect.
Subsequently, in his book on Baudelaire (1938–39), Benjamin describes
the culture of modernity as being a mode of perception structured regu-
larly through exposure to shock. The temporal motif of “the second” is
here the central theme of altered time. Thus, it is highly significant that in
Baudelaire the second hand of the clock—“la Seconde”—appears as the
gambler’s partner:
Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide
Qui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup! c’est la loi.
[Keep in mind that time is an avid gambler
Who wins without cheating—every time! It’s the Law!]56
In an engagement with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which
occurs here for the first time explicitly (in the third section of the
second edition of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in 1939), Benjamin
discusses the memory-theoretical consequences of an experience for
which the “exposure to shock [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm.”57
55. Benjamin, “Berliner Chronik,” p. 516. And see Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” 2:633.
56. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, 4:331.
57. Ibid., 4:318.

He thus updates Freud’s theory of trauma, which describes trauma as a
state of exception in the mechanisms of memory, in case the threat to
the protective shield by external influences should gain normalcy and,
as an effect, produce a habitualized mode of behaving.58 Benjamin de-
scribes this as parrying shock by the presence of mind. Proust, Valéry,
and Baudelaire (among others) are, for him, guarantors for the possi-
bility of reacting to modernity’s altered ways of perception in a creative
manner. On these grounds, Baudelaire emerges as Benjamin’s protag-
onist for modernity; he is the one who turned shock into a poetic
principle.
Epistemological Profit of His Studies of Modernity

The possibility of not just an altered poetry but an epistemology is
also due to the lesson of this mode of perception. Parallel to the work
on shock, Benjamin worked on a theory of knowledge that may be
viewed as an epistemological counterpart to shock. Starting in 1935, he
writes in letters of a specific epistemology proper to modernity59 whose
crucial condition he identified as the “‘destiny’ of art in the nineteenth
century.”60 His epistemology should, as he writes in a letter to Gretel
Adorno in 1935, “be crystallized around the concept of the ‘now of
recognizability,’ handled by me in a very esoteric manner.”61 The the-
oretical implementations thereof are found in Konvolut N of the Ar-
cades Project, which begins with the already-cited passage on flashlike
cognition and the long-rolling text that follows. We can trace quite a
period of latency for the role this image will eventually take in Benja-
min’s epistemology, for it emerges first as a metaphor in January 1928,
when he informs his friend Scholem in Jerusalem that soon a package
with The Origin of German Tragic Drama and One-Way Street will ar-
rive at his doorstep. He asks Scholem to “regard this probably indefi-
nitely meandering letter as the chain lightning which is followed after a
few days, corresponding to the distance between the eye of the storm
and the Holy Land, by a long roll of thunder in the shape of an enor-
mous box of books. May it resonate powerfully within the steep walls of
your magnificence’s mountainous headspace.”62 Later, during Benja-
min’s work on his modern-era project Arcades, this linguistic figure
58. For more on the cultural and historical implications, see the tenth chapter of Weigel,
Walter Benjamin.
59. See Benjamin, letter to Scholem, 20 May 1935, Gesammelte Briefe, 5:83.
60. Benjamin, letter to Gretel Karplus, 9 Oct. 1935, Gesammelte Briefe, 5:171.
61. Ibid.
62. Benjamin, letter to Scholem, 30 Jan. 1928, Gesammelte Briefe, 3:321.

falls into its central place as an image for his new epistemology, which
is marked by the now of recognizability.
In light of this specific configuration of cognizability, the “relation of
the present to the past,” structured traditionally by temporality, is rewrit-
ten into an imagelike structure. This however marks the qualitative turn-
over brought about by accelerated time into a constellation “in which the
has-been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”
(AP, p. 462; trans. mod.). A vision trained in the observation of paintings
and a consciousness shaped by media historically motivated shock com-
bine in Benjamin’s theory of perception to elaborate an imagelike episte-
mology of a flashlike cognition.
As he hints in the same context, this way of knowing, however, also
involves a “dangerous moment”: “The read image, by which is meant the
image in the now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp
of the critical, dangerous moment which is at the basis of all reading.”63
Especially from the perspective of a theory of history, he reflects on the
price of an ephemeral kind of knowledge, namely, the fact that the image
that flashes up describes not only sudden recognition but also an equally
sudden disappearance. When, in the thesis “On the Concept of History”
(1940), he stresses the disappearance of the image that flashes up (and
thereby also discusses the precarious aspect of an imagelike knowledge),
then the concomitant unstable nature of this way of perception is only here
brought to expression in its full meaning: “The true image of the past flits
by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment
of its cognizability, and is never to be seen again.”64 This indeed means
precisely that the image cannot be captured or grasped. At this point it is
once again understandable why the lightning in the emblematic passage on
the flashlike cognition must be followed by the long-rolling peal of thun-
der. It requires the subsequent text in order to grant the status of knowl-
edge to an image that suddenly comes into appearance like a flash. The
image is always in danger of disappearing, especially when it concerns a
nonmaterialized image, which cannot depend on a durable medium for its
survival. Language—as the long-rolling thunder of a flashlike cognition—
would thereby become another, alternative mode to the material im-
age—at the same time an indispensable element and condition of
possibility to allow the involuntary status of flashlike cognition to become
fruitful for thinking. In Benjamin’s work, the concept of the dialectical
image stands for this precipitation of imagelike perception into conscious
63. Benjamin, “Konvolut N,” 5:1:578. And see AP, p. 463.

64. Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:695.

thought: “Thinking consists of the movement of thoughts, but their arrest
as well. Where thinking comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with
tensions, there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the move-
ment of thought” (AP, p. 475; trans. mod.). The a posteriori character of
reflection in relation to the image is likewise expressed in the image of the
long-rolling thunder, which represents the linguistically constituted re-
flection, literally in the German word nachdenken (which means to “think
afterward” and to “reflect”) and in the characterization of Benjamin’s epis-
temology as Bilddenken.


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The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin's Image-Based

Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History

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Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith and Christine Kutschbach

In the contemporary boom of an interdisciplinary image science (Bild-

Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015)

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S I G R I D W E I G E L is director of the Center for Literacy and Cultural Research in

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Flash and Image

8. Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf

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25. See Benjamin, “Pariser Passagen I,” Gesammelte Schriften, 5:2:1011–1012.

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The Image as the Third

28. Benjamin, letter to Sachs, 1:143.

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32. Benjamin, “Phantasie,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:115.

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Transitional Images: Vortex and Flames

37. Benjamin, “Gedanken über Phantasie,” Gessammelte Schriften, 6:114.

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39. Benjamin, “Autobiographische Schriften,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6:442–43.

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Iconography and Technology

41. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Selected Writings, 1:298.

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Shock and the Temporality of Images

49. Benjamin, “Der Flâneur,” Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:564.

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Epistemological Profit of His Studies of Modernity

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63. Benjamin, “Konvolut N,” 5:1:578. And see AP, p. 463.

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