Austerlitz (Benjaminian Musings)

Both Sebald’s Austerlitz and the National Socialist propaganda machine represent a sort of foil of poesis, or a sort of an anti-poesis, in the sense that the success of the project in either instance depends on a necessary repression of history’s fundamental becoming. The latter, a particularly disrespectful, authoritarian cousin of poesis, attempts to enforce univocality on its object, history, the essence of which is really characterized by flux, lability, polysemy, forcing supplementary stasis—ossification—upon suppleness. Becoming becomes Being through a violent transmutation of the present progressive of history into the present perfect of the photographic image, which inaugurates a simulacrum of history in the form of the archive in that the essential vitality of becoming, instead of remaining immanent to events, is attenuated into the silent metonymies of association connecting each constituent photograph of the archive to the others.

Such violence, however, sets in motion an infinite regress as old as Zeno: segments remain, in spite of any photochemical violence wrought upon them, intractably divisible into more segments; even something as lightning-quick as a shutter-click contains a duration itself infinitely divisible. As a consequence, there lurks in the perceived synchrony of the photographic image an indomitable diachrony only partially repressed through attenuation—a part maudite, an indivisible remainder, ghostly, half-remembered, haunting the photograph. Every photograph, then, contains a fiction: the triumph of the will to meaning over time itself in the age-old struggle of mimesis and reality, resulting, as the National Socialist’s Weltanshauung suggests, in an imagined nation of human imagination populated by privileged elements suspended in harmonious synchrony and purged of fugitive diachrony, its unassimilable Other.

Dialectics silenced, history apotheosized, happenstance and contingency overdetermined as efficient causes and thus fixed into necessity, into a national narrative—the National Socialist project finds an apt material metaphor in the photograph, an object born of light (kinesis, ousia), emulsion (matrix, milieu), paper (substrate) and fixative (logos)…