S. Weigel: The Lightning Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images. Walter Benjamin’s Image-Based Epistemology and its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History

Moderator/Respondent: Robert Pogue Harrison (Professor of Italian and the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature)

»In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge [Erkenntnis] comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.« This sentence from his Arcades-project belongs to the most fluently cited passages of Benjamin’s work. However, in contrast to many reading the lecture argues that this has not to be understood as a metaphor. Instead lightening flash and image function as words mutually replacing each other in order to describe a mode of sudden, simultaneous recognition / knowledge that is at the centre of his image-based epistemology.
This lecture argues that this epistemology is informed by (1) an intense study of paintings and other pieces of visual arts and (2) the engagement with the development of media technology in modernity. Whereas the younger Benjamin studied the perceptive mode of visual art as a site of afterlife of an epiphanic mode of insight he later, in the context of his project on modernity, turned this mode of knowledge, due to the invention of electricity and technical media, into a modern epistemology. Through a kind of breaking in of technique into iconography many of its conventional figures were turned into epistemological constellations. In this way Benjamin developed a theory of knowledge and history based in simultaneity.

Sigrid Weigel ist die Direktorin des ZfL. Sie ist Vorsitzende der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentren Berlin, Professorin am Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte der Technischen Universität Berlin und Leiterin der Projekte Figurationen des Märtyrers, Gesicht als Artefakt, Kulturelle Semantik Georgiens, SchädelBasisWissen, Susan Taubes- Edition und Zeugenschaft.