The Transformation of the Concept into the Dialectical Image
I. Introduction
Time is an important concept for all those who would claim descent, positively or negatively, from Hegel's dialectical philosophy. In the first place, dialectical thought is that which moves by way of the dissolution of the fixed rigidity of conceptual thought, already in fact implying a temporal character of some kind. In the second place, dialectical thought is immanently historical by the extension of this change to encompass the totality conceived of as social. The problem arises when one attempts to explicate the exact nature of this temporal and historical character: according to Kojève's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this temporal character of the Concept (the axial dialectical category) is that it is time itself, which therefore is always historical time; for Benjamin, time as time (and therefore as history) cannot be the whole story (so to speak) of time, and thus it is transposed onto space. The major consequences of this spatialization will be seen to be a radical mediation of the immediate and mediation, and a dissolution of the remnants of reification in Hegel's system, of which Reason's march in universal history is the greatest. So these two interpretations of the importance of time—time as time and time as space—overdetermine the concept of history, the former resulting in undialectical Reason and the latter in a dialectical dissolution of Reason itself. The exposition of the dialectical image will be a conceptual one, showing in fact the superiority of the image by the Concept's own immanent demands.
II. Hegel: The Negativity of Time as Time
To understand Hegel's fixation on the negativity of time, we must first relate it to the Concept (Begriff). In his own words, “Die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriff selbst”, and “Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist” (qtd. in Kojève 101). In other words, time is the empirically existing Concept itself, that Concept which is there. In interpreting these phrases, we must keep in mind Hegel's view of negativity as that which is the negation of the given, which negation is none other than the Concept, that immanent anti-given movement of the object. As Kojève summarizes, “The conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder” (140). The Concept of something is nothing but the always-occurring nihilation of that very something, the constantly-changing negation of that something, whether one believes that change comes from subject or object, or as Hegel believed, from both at once. Time as time for Hegel is Concept, because the subject-object divide of reality which creates movement in the proper sense only comes with the appearance of the Concept on the historical scene, with the advent of human (self-)consciousness. Therefore, Hegel's notion of time is applicable only to historical time—strictly speaking, nature has no time, though this does not discount the possibility of some kind of change. As nature does not have an inner telos, Hegel (according to Kojève) will say that it is not time but space.
The first important consequence of the manifold equivocation of time, Concept, and history is that Hegel's is ultimately a social philosophy. Ignoring for the moment his botched attempt at a philosophy of nature, Hegel proclaims the fundamentally historical nature of all thought and of all human being—indeed, the two are posited to be identical (if only in their immanent movement and not in their present givenness). Further, there can be no society without history—the past of a given social moment distinguishes the possible future in the present from dream or utopia. However, the relation of the temporal modalities of past, present, and future is not in Hegel a simple progression of past to present and then on to future. Rather, Hegelian Time is a movement from future through past to present. In other words, the “Project”, the Concept with a focus on the future, is determined by the historical past, and then becomes the moment of negation of the given in the present. Or again, Desire is Desire to negate the given real, which in that negation becomes past; this manner of past being formed through future (Desire/Concept) is what determines the present. Taken in this way, the temporal modalities cannot really be separated, but the moments are yet analyzable, the present turning upon the tension between future as desire to negate the given and past as that negated no-longer-given.
Time must be in space, and indeed the two mutually presuppose each other in good dialectical fashion. However, for Hegel, time is the primary contradiction, being that which is, however abstractly, opposed to the inert space of nature. Due to the necessary historical nature of time, that time must occur in a historical world, in other words, in space. However, the tension between the two is obvious—the moments of time are not for Hegel transposed onto a spatial world, because of the association of time with history and space with nature. Only insofar as nature exists in relation to social humanity and its history can the sub-categories of time be applied to it. Verstand is the name given to that spatial thinking that is philosophically inferior to Vernunft, one of whose primary categories is the Idea, the utter interiorization of Concepts (this interiorization being the very definition of Kantian or Bergsonian time) which, no matter how contradictory, are always already under the aspect of identity. Space, which is defined primarily by its exteriority, obviously cannot fill this gap (so to speak).
III. Benjamin: The Negativity of Time as Space
Benjamin's project can in some ways be seen as an internalization of what were in Hegel only externally related, namely time and space. Benjamin's preference for space over time is well-noted, as when he positively states, “The task of epic theater, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions” (150). Here the development of actions corresponds to Geschichte, (narrative) time, whereas representation seems to signify a spatial construction. Geschichte is disparaged, along with all perceived teleologies, as bourgeois ideology. Therefore, rather than deal with time as Geschichte, Benjamin transposes temporal characteristics onto space itself. The dialectical image is the result: it emerges out of the past, but its form and features can only be seen or understood in the non-narrative present, out of its temporal context. Here, though, we learn only about this present from it, not about the past. As an image it is spatial, and as dialectical it is philosophical, the spatialization of the Concept-as-time that was so important for Hegel. However, the transition, the translation from time to space is one whose character is yet to be established.
The obvious change is that from narrative to non-narrative, and this is the ostensible reason for the translation, but yet another consequence is the retention of a certain temporality. Benjamin holds onto notions of past and present and future, moments that are made both intimately internal to one another and at the same time absolutely external. For example, in describing the storyteller, what we may rightly take as a dialectical image, Benjamin writes, “Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision” (83). This distance Benjamin speaks of is a temporal distance, although not only that. Internally-related, the dialectical image contains it's own pastness as an element, related, to be sure, to its future, which is now the present. The present is where the knowledge is gained, where action can take place, where mediation meets immediacy as Hegel proclaimed was necessary. On the other hand, these concepts of past, present, and future are external to space and to each other, in the sense that their relations are dissected and their organs exposed. The death of the narrative is thus assured in this spatial constellation, wherein the immediacy of the present is privileged against the mediation of time. To remain historical, the dialectical image is temporal, but it is certainly not time itself, as is Hegel's Concept.
There remain two questions relating to the dialectical image, that of its immediacy and that of its critical negativity. The immediacy of the dialectical image is, on the surface, problematic. As an image out of context it is obviously not mediated in the same overt fashion as the Hegelian Concept. Context, according to Benjamin, destroys the dissimilarity of the object at hand: “[Proust] lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of resemblance” (205, italics mine). The similarity of things or processes to one another, be it a phenomenal similarity or, perhaps more importantly, a contextual similarity, is false. So we have a theory in which mediation, under the aspect of identity, is distorting and false. But this identity is only a partial one, remaining focused on the mediation of time. Indeed, systemic mediation may avoid the entire problem for Benjamin, in that the constellation of bourgeois society remains for him an important reference point. Following Hegel's dictum that there can be no immediacy without mediation and vice versa, Benjamin takes it upon himself to extract the true kernel of mediation from its time-bound shell. This results, not surprisingly, in the messy mediation of the present, that spatial relation in which the lack of time-context is at the same time the placing of the image into what may be interpreted as its true context. Again, Benjamin is utterly historical though he repudiates history as such, though he opposes immediate context qua context. The immediacy of the dialectical image thus becomes its true mediation. Corresponding to the fragmentation of society, the utter falsity of the bourgeois ideology of progress, Benjamin's fragmented spatial dialectics are wholly justified. From this its critical negativity follows, insofar as the new “immediacy” is in some sense the truth of the old, if only (and it assuredly is) negatively.
IV. Conclusion: The Ideology of Progress and Critical Temporality
The following remark by Kojève appears as the antithesis of Benjamin's understanding of both dialectic and time: “It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, as dialectical entity” (232, italics Kojève's). It would not be off the mark to level the charge of bourgeois ideology against Kojève, left-Hegelian though he may be. However, the temptation to do away with him on this account must be resisted, and in the name of Hegelian thought itself.
Benjamin writes, “Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past” (262). A better example of historicism could not be found than Hegel himself, in whose philosophy history receives its proper ordering only after the fact, and in which strictly phenomenological knowledge of history and consciousness only emerge in the post-historical world (Kojève 183-4). Hegel's eternal past is one that cannot adequately develop even into an image thereof, not because of the negating-negativity of the Concept, but because of Hegel's hypostasis of History predicated on the undialectical nature of his notion of Reason. Indeed, there is nothing in the character of the dialectic itself that would proscribe the type of transformation that Benjamin has wrought from time to space, as long as that space is properly historicized.
But to what extent is Benjamin's dialectical image capable of the destruction of ideology, particularly that of bourgeois progress? Benjamin writes, “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time” (261). Dialectically, things change not by continuous progress, but by violent break—concepts don't approach their opposites slowly and thereafter “run together” until they are unrecognizable; rather, they crash into each other as mighty waves, as the furious demolition of a storefront via molotov cocktail. An obvious “artistic” parallel is the montage, the spatial decontextualization-as-proper-contextualization. This spatial time thereby pointed to is one absolutely antithetical to the Hegelian philosophy of history, which viciously betrays the very character of dialectical thought itself. Only such a gradualist model could declare the “end of history”, or the related claim of the reformists that the groundwork has already been laid, and that all that is left to do is wait for utopia. Hegel claimed not more than this!
Finally, in the spirit of remaining political, we may say a few concluding words about the importance of a spatialization that is both historical and preservative of critical negativity. First, as historical, the dialectical image retains the social mediation of the Hegelian Concept and the Marxian insistence on economic and social practice. Second, as critically negative, the dialectical image leaves behind the problematic Hegelian and vulgar Marxist teleology which would subordinate the particular to the already-assumed individual as universally-mediated particular, which is nothing other than the system of capitalist oppression itself, in all its bloody self-denial.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.
Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Print.
All material copyright Nick Beard (except the cited sources).
