Bergson must be credited for linking perception as experienced time to the productive activity of memory and, moreover, for having shown how perception and memory interpenetrate. Just as perception of the present is fuelled by images from memory, the past can be given a more differentiated form in relation to the present. Benjamin quotes from Bergson’s Matter and Memory : “Memory thus creates anew the present perception; or rather it doubles this perception by reflecting upon it either its own image or some other memory-image of the same kind.”33 In our perception we are, as Bergson puts it, “constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception is really comparable to a closed circle in which the perception-image, going towards the mind, and the memory-image, launched into space, career the one behind the other.”34 While for Bergson memory as time brought into the present is determined subjectively and later biologically, Benjamin is interested in images of collective memory. “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with the material of the collective past,” as he writes.35 In this sense, “experience” can be understood comprehensively as the potential of a past that is rendered present. This was Benjamin’s revolutionary achievement, for he transferred the experience of lived time from the personal into the historical sphere and thus proposed a new type of mediation between the collective and the individual, the past and present.
One of the linguistic concepts that Benjamin uses in order to find an aesthetic form for the linkage of history with present experience is that of the dialectical image. For Benjamin, the dialectical image is an image that is imbued with time. The dialectical image is imbued with real time “not in natural magnitude—let alone psychologically—but in its smallest gestalt.”36 This “smallest gestalt” is the temporal difference discerned in a quotation or testimony to the past. In it, we find a concrete instance of that volatile linkage of jetztzeit and past that Benjamin tries to pinpoint. In The Arcades Project he writes:
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past; 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. For while the relationship of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. 37
Benjamin’s “image” of history initially refers to the rejection of a one-dimensional understanding of history as a linear-successive process. In the dialectical image, time is sublated as a linear notion when in the “now of its recognizability” the past and the present meet directly and without distance. 38 The past is rendered present; it flashes up as an image, creating correspondences between jetztzeit and the past. In the dialectical image, past and present here and there mutually illuminate one another. It is an image that, to quote Georges Didi-Huberman, “is able to remember without imitating, that comprises a new, indeed unheard-of and truly invented form of memory.” 39
Although Benjamin’s dialectical image is not meant to be a material image, but suggests a form of representation that is beyond all image-based visualization, as a figure of thought it sheds light on the aesthetic structure of Coleman’s installation. In Box, the representation of a historical event and its direct, physical experience, or in general terms, topic, compositional structure, materiality and effect, incessantly and dialectically refer to one another. Coleman’s work creates a representation that cannot be pinned down. The subject of the boxing match corresponds to a mode of representation that is structurally very similar to the rhythm of the punches, to the discontinuous shock-like rhythm of the visual pulse with the hammer-like beat. Coleman’s work produces an effect (the rendering present of a fragmentary and discontinuous image of history) that is already an innate structuring principle in this work (as fragmentary and dissociating as it is). The artwork is based on a form of fragmentary representation, which concurs with a conception of history that is likewise defined by fragmentation and dissociation. Because the dividing line between the artwork and the viewer’s body appear to dissolve, seemingly we, the viewers, penetrate the body of the boxer, just as the visual/aural apparatus penetrates our bodies. If we understand this artwork—and in fact this is what I would like to propose—as a kind of contemporary history painting, we must also accept it as a radical renegotiation of this very idea. Not only because it questions a positivist tradition of historical representation and the beliefs in continuity, progress and permanence that come with it; nor—as I have discussed in reference to Benjamin—because it replaces a linear understanding of time with an idea of history that is seized and actualized from the present and at the same time in the present, but because the artwork creates an image without being a representation. Like Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image, Box evokes an image of history that is beyond pictorial depiction. And this is because its actual location is neither the visual nor the aural medium but a visitor-body that is physically seized by the impact of the beat and integrated into the work. It is only in the visitor’s physical and reflective experience that the individual parts of Box (the visual pulse, the beat and the voice) blend to form the work. Only there does this installation materialize in its entirety as an artwork. And only there does this work’s conception of condensed time become concrete—in a moment that is both jetztzeit and history simultaneously, like, to borrow Benjamin’s words again, “a muscle that contracts historical time.”
In this staging Coleman brings two distinct levels of the work of art together: the level of representation and portrayal, which shows and re-presents something , and a dimension within which this portrayal shows itself, making its reality-creating effects explicit. Coleman’s work produces an effect (the envisioning of a fragmentary and discontinuous image of history) that is already present in the (just as fragmentary and dissociated) structure of the work. It is only through the conjunction of these three areas of subject matter, structure and physical effect that the meaning of the work finally emerges. It is in this particular aesthetic construction that the singularity of this work of art lies, and also its link to an aesthetics of the performative, in Austin’s terms.
Digression: The Saying of Doing (John L. Austin)
When John L. Austin introduced the expression “performative” in the mid-1950s, he was referring to the active character of speech. The underlying proposition of his argument is that under certain conditions language creates the reality it describes, so that one actually does something with words. In the 1990s, Judith Butler gave Austin’s linguistic theories a social and political horizon by emphasizing the constitutive and the restrictive powers of conventions; both are prerequisites to giving the individual the performative power to create a reality.
Butler’s wider application of the performative subsequently was adopted by cultural studies, in that it is also possible to examine the performativity of visual art as a specific area of social praxis. In my view, however, this extension of Austin’s theory also led to the loss of an essential aspect of the concept: Austin not only describes how we take action with words, but also develops a way of speaking in his own presentation in which his saying and doing with words are related to one another in a performative manner.
Austin’s lectures, published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words, operate as a kind of instruction manual; establishing the existence of a performative level of speech by demonstrating how the production of meaning can be created through “doing” while speaking. This view of Austin is also suggested by Shoshana Felman and Sybille Krämer (independently of one another and with different emphases), both of whom I draw on here.40 Their reading