움직이는 이미지들(Images that Move) - 아비 바르부르크

(2019, Kerstin Schankweiler and Phiipp Wüschner)

 

 

 

I. Introduction

 

Visuality and 'the visual' are increasingly critical to understanding the role of affects and emotions that resonate within any given society. (...) This essay champions Aby Warburg (1866-1929) as an especially relevant resource for understanding affectivity in a visual context. Warburg's particular approach can facilitate the methodological analysis of images as they pertain to affects, (...). Warburg is appropriate for this task for two reasons. First, Warburg is considered a pioneer of 'image science'. Second, what makes him especially interesting for our purposes here is that he is also the most prominent representative of the discipline dealing with the questions of affectivity and its visual mediation. "Pathosformel"

 Within a hermeneutical framework, one particular arrangement of these tools is the iconographic-iconological method of image analysis, which is closely associated with Warburg's colleague Erwin Panofsky. His approach, we argue, not only exemplifies the art historian's habitualized method, but is also highly instructive for understanding the intellectual predicaments of affective analysis more broadly. 

 

 

II. Iconology and image description

Warburg and Panofsky

The two scholars met for the first time in 1912 at a conference in Rome. Panofsky himself compared the relationship between iconography and iconology with that between ethnography and ethnology. Accordingly, iconography is concerned with description and identification of depicted or the pictorial themes, while iconology aims at a more comprehensive interpretation of the content of an artwork. Panofsky divided his method into three ideal-typical steps or stages of interpretation (1) a pre-iconographic description of the object (2) an iconographic analysis of the meaning of what is represented, (3) an iconological interpretation, which contextualizes the object in its cultural and intellectual history. 

 

Baxandall

For him, a description of a picture is "a representation of thinking about a picture more than a representation of a picture". To describe a picture, we must rely on concepts. Baxandall points out that words and concepts are not used absolutely or informatively but demonstratively. (...) Describing is, above all, expressing one's interest in the picture. 

(...) Narrative follows the action of the figures and their relation to each other. (...) We contend that the ability to identify these elements is bound to the capacity of being affected and of becoming what Warburg called a "very sensitive seismograph" for formalized and mediatized motion and affect. The "seismographic" capacity can be refined through repeated encounters with bodies of art. 

 

 

III. Aby Warburg's pathos formula

3.1 Pathos and its expression

 With "Pathosformel" Warburg tries to address the depiction of expressive gestures, specifally those which are found in works of Renaissance art, echoing antique portrayals of almost archetypal affect ("Pathos"). Warburg was interested in the migration and circulation of images across time and space. 

What Warburg wanted to describe with the concept of the pathos formula is the result of a transformation: something that is individual and refers to a specific event (pathos) becomes something generic and permanent (a foruma). 

 

Examples that Warburg uses are dancing female figures like nymphs, gestures of death and the dying, such as Orpheus, or scenes of erotic pursuits, such as Zephyr and Flora. Warburg's interest lies not in the individual actualization of a general or basic emotion but in the generic reproduction of an expressive, affective formula that can seve many different purposes. (...) He understood expression as the result of conflicting forces between various elements. - One such element is affect intensity, which comprises will- and habit-independent

The principle of antithesis indicates how forms of expressions are invented not by biological necessity but by an inversion of already established movements. 

His focus on formulas as non-human agents does not mean that embodiment and experience, which have been emphasized in affect theory, have less relevance. - Bodies also have forms and can be read in this way. Building on the notion that affects have forms, Eugene Brinkema, in her book The Forms of the Affects (2014), outlines 'reading for form' as a methodological strategy. 

one could store these habits in the form of a repertoire or cultural memory, one could also store the possiblity of their affective reenactment, and thus, of affect or pathos itself. 

 

 

3.2 Formulaic iteration

Warburg then claims an expressive or 'gestural' genealogy (...) He is not interested in an evolution of styles. Rather he is concerned with the formal iteration of expressions of pathos that constitute a memetic series with cultural memory. 

He claims that some of the affective intensity belonging to the Death of Orpheus, or the War agains the Amazones of the Amazon Frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, has survived a number of changes. 

시간의 변화

지리적 변화

문화적 맥락의 변화

Afterlife is not a theory of the evolution of emotional expression, wherein an original image is simply copied and slowly changes over time until reaching its current form. The notion of after life follows a psychoanalyticl model of a symbolic relation between singular or collective experiences and symptomatic reiterations. - Warburg claims that some affective quality or pathos always survives, when different representations of the same formula are reiterated over time. 

What is 'stored' in pathos formulas is not the encoded meaning of a certain eotion - as Panofsky would likely see it - but its primal intensity. -- In this sense, intensity becomes form, while form is dynamized by intensity. 

Gilles Deleuze - the 'pure intensity' can no longer be attributed to a body of ice or water or steam, but has to be thought of as belonging to all of them and none of them at the same time. - Warburg's ideas too describe qualitative changes of a body, and they can reach singular thresholds that generate "extremes of physiognomic expression in the moment of highest excitement". - possible transition

He goes so far as to claim that the emotional, cultural, and religious contexts of a pathos formula, and therefore its meaning, may completely invert into its opposite over the course of history. The desire of pursuit might transform into the fear felt in escape, while the agony of death might invert into the ecstasy of lust. He calls this shift energetic inversion ("energetische Inversion") to express the dynamism and ambivalence of tension-filled movement. 

 

For Warburg, the most basic formula for any intensity is motion or movement. "Dynamogramme" - they create the illusion of movement and liveliness in something that stands still. - Dance actually works as an intensifier to the whole scene. - These moving elements act like accessories that Warburg calls "bewegtes Beiwerk" (moving accessories)

 

 

3.3 Pathos formulas as intenssifiers

 

From an iconographic perspective, it could be interpreted as a distorted grin, and as an expression of exertion and violent ecstasy. More striking for an analysis of affect, however, is the intensity of the dragged body, the falling abaya, the swung truncheons, and the dropped clutter on the street. - This temporary translatory movement is an integral part of pathos formula itself, a frozen moment in time that always already transcends the formulaic. 

Suddenly, the scene can be read as the moment after the last strength of resistance, which was still palpable in the depiction of the Amazon, has been spent. - They become plausible precisely as associations. That is to say, they are only plausible when understood as the actualization of a repertoire that precedes all interpreation, and which allows associations. - Regarding the image's representational nature as seconday to its affective genealogy. 

 

It cannot be denied that Warburg developed his idea of the pathos formula with reference to the human body. - Was especially interested in the depiction of human bodies and of human affectivity that certainly affect the beholder in a particular and very direct manner. - In Warburg's efforts to address what he calls moving accessories, we can already see a trajectory that leads beyond the human body. - Moreover, even art or images that are not figurative at all could potentially be read along these lines. (Cy Twombly's Work, or Jackson Pollock's expressionism)

The content or subject of the image and its affective intensity might drift apart from each other. - Attention must be paid to the internal resonances and possible dissonances between the context of the picture and the intensity of its affective qualities - akin to Roland Barthes' theorization of the studium or punctum in photography. A pathos formula does not illustrate a specific content, but almost literally "moves" or arranges the elements of an image, thereby also moving and arranging the affective relation between the image and the viewer. - "Storing" and releasing or reenacting affective intensity to a certain dynamic 'gestalt'. 

 

 

IV. Learning from Warburg

 

Cartography of pathos formulas. By the end of Warburg's life, the Atlas consisted of 63 boards wrapped in heavy black cloth covered with photographs of artwork, illustrations from books or albums, newspaper clipping, and other media. Warburg tried to give an instant, synoptic impression of the cultural, historical, anthropological, and philosophical interrelations of different pathos formulas by opening up the thought-space("Denkraum") in which they appear. Warburg's approach - always cognizant of the ruptures and discontinuities of history - poses a challenges to an evolutionary model. 

It is vital to understand that the cartopraphy Warburg developed in the Mnemosyne Atlas was a work in progress, and it also entailed performative methods like showing similarities and connections by rearranging media on his black boards when giving a talk. 

 

According to Georges Didi-Huberman, the role of the researcher as a seismograph for the affects encoded in all sorts of media is a form of embodied methodology, where the knowledge, expertise, and sensitivity of the researcher remain vitally important. 

 

 

V. Epilogue