Week 36: 20th – 26th May
Continuing on from my exploration of the symbolic languages of idioms and memes, I have been doing more research into the concept of the allegory, ‘a type of emblem or trope which contains an element of infinite iteration, as opposed to a symbol which is based on determinate reference, recognition and identity.’ (McDonnell, p.26) Such investigations are found throughout history in art and writing, and particularly in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze with reference to the earlier works on the subject by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Walter Benjamin.
Alchemical allegories
My interest in allegory has been growing as a result of working with alchemical metaphors in art. Allegory as a way of thinking was an important element of interpretative methods before the Enlightenment’s construction of a worldview based on positive knowledge, rigorous empirical study, and inductive reasoning. Such metaphorical associations were used to explain the ways that substances looked and behaved, as well as insinuating spiritual connections, thereby functioning as both literary and scientific at the same time. (Wamberg, p.85)
Artists have continued to use alchemical metaphor throughout history through the use of ‘alchemical thought-pictures’ in the work of French illustrators of the early 1900s. Word play and allegory were used in order to avoid government censorship of satirical images, and worked in affective ways, ‘according to the motto of the Rosicrucian Michael Maier, “to reach the intellect though the senses”.’(Wamberg, pp.156-7)
Benjamin’s theory of allegory
Benjamin began to develop his theory of allegory around 1923. He equates allegory with a kind of experience which ‘arises from an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent…’ For Benjamin, allegory as conveyed through an aggregation of signs which represent fleeting and fragmentary truths rather than empirical knowledge, allows him to deconstruct the nature of the symbol, rather than oppose it outright. (Cowan, pp.109-110)
Truth and iteration
Such an inquiry also requires a resolution of the philosophical nature of truth, as a condition which is ‘unpossessable and impossible to present’, unlike factual knowledge. As such, allegory ‘arises in perpetual response to the human condition of being exiled from the truth’. Such forms of allegorical reasoning are explored in origin-myths related to the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
The argument that truth is never fully present, requires that it must continuously represent itself. Therefore, representation becomes less about the end product and more about its process, thus negating the dualism of experience and expression. As Cowan explains ‘allegory explicitly recognizes that the knowledge it affords is illusory. It manifests this awareness precisely by the unconvincingness, the mechanicalness, and finally the deadness, of its devices’. (Cowan, p.118)
Deleuze and the Fold
Benjamin’s exploration of allegory in relation to the Baroque is essentially traurich, or tragic, due to its perpetual inability to fully access truth. However, although Deleuze agrees with the analysis of allegory as a continual différance of meaning, he is more interested in Leibniz’s reading, which accepts this form of infinite iteration as a positive and joyful action. (McDonnell, p.38)
As Timothy Flanagan concludes in his essay in Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader: ‘The reason that allegory is so philosophically significant [to Deleuze] is that no other form of expression is apt to elucidate the emergence of any perspective on the world without also requiring that things be resolved in terms of a disjunctive schema that would require an abstract, or at least determinate, beginning and end – limits not only to specific objects but so too to the drama of life, or physis, in general. By contrast, by a process of repetition whereby meaning is produced through the continuous presentation of events rather than represented in the unity of a narration, allegory suspends the lessons to be learned from life in general and instead adduces an apprenticeship of recognition towards the very reality of those indiscernible conditions of life itself’. (Flanagan, p.59)
Further reading
Bainard Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory’, New German Critique, 22 (1981) pp. 109-122
Niamh McDonnell & Sjoerd van Tuinen (eds), Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader
Jacob Wamberg (ed), Art and Alchemy, (University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006)
