Splitting the picture: Studies in Walter Benjamin's image-theory and in Alexander Kluge's image-practice

The dissertation investigates Walter Benjamin's image-theoretical writings, and the practical and theoretical image-work of Alexander Kluge. The thesis seeks to isolate a number of thematic and conceptual motifs that figure prominently in each of the two bodies of work: architecture; the interval, hiatus, or the cut; time and temporality; media; and feeling, or the senses. The Benjamin-section identifies the specific mode of appearance described by Benjamin as Aufblitzen (flashing up) as the central temporal trait of the image in his theory. In this type of temporalization the image becomes the site for a series of manifestations all of which are categorically marked as disappearances as well. The architecture of the camera-medium reveals itself as pure means through the dissolve of (haptically traceable) forms in a process that Benjamin terms Entstaltung. Reciprocally, Benjamin theorizes architecture along the model of the Parisian arcades ( passages) as transient built manifestations (in contrast to Giedion's interpretation of modernist architecture as the revelation of a constructive technological unconscious). Benjamin also develops the temporal discontinuities of the cut that mark the filmic image as a correlate to the spatial discontinuities that characterize the drawn renderings of buildings in Linfert's doctrine. The perception or sensing of the filmic image and the image of architecture are thus shown to display structural parallels. In Alexander Kluge's work, the image of architecture is characterized by the contradicting temporalities of a will to temporal hegemony on one hand, and the escape from a presentist dogma through opening escape routes into the manifold layers of history on the other. Starting out from this contradiction, the dissertation identifies distinction as a basic operation for Kluge's (image-)work which it primarily generates through cut and montage. Kluge constructs his works in such a manner that they will restore the faculty of distinction to his audience's affectivity. The result is an oeuvre where small units and short forms generate and undermine large contexts, in which the media of book, film and TV are subject to strategic displacements toward each other and where time is no longer defined as chronological succession or saturated moments, but rather as heterochronicity.