In Praise of Shadows
Commemorative Images and the Atomic Bomb
Stéphane Symons
Abstract
Starting from a description of a wooden panel and stone step that are displayed in a museum in Hiroshima, this essays reflects on the nature and capabilities of commemorative images. In line with insights derived from Walter Benjamin, the argument is made that commemoration is to be understood as a manner of rendering the past incomplete and of thereby modifying it. The shadows that are engraved into the wooden panel and stone step are a vital element in this discussion because they denote a moment of weakness that, even though it lacked the strength to preserve itself, has nevertheless been granted a survived existence in the present. In the second half of the essay, Western views on the shadow (as secondary vis-à-vis its referent) are opposed to Japanese views (the shadow as a force that surrenders its referent to a movement of renewal and internal transformation).
Résumé
Prenant comme point de départ la description d’une planche en bois et d’un escalier de pierre exposés dans un musée à Hiroshima, cet essai propose une réflexion sur la nature et les pouvoirs des images commémoratives. Dans le prolongement de la conception de Walter Benjamin, nous développons l’argument selon lequel l’acte commémoratif doit être entendu comme une façon de modifier le passé en le rendant incomplet. Les ombres imprimées sur la planche et sur les dalles en pierre sont un élément vital dans cette discussion. Elles renvoient à un moment de vulnérabilité qui, tout en manquant de la force pour se maintenir, perdure jusque dans le présent. Dans la deuxième partie de cet essai, la conception occidentale des ombres (interprétées comme secondaires vis-à-vis leurs référents) est opposée à la conception japonaise de celles-ci (selon laquelle elles fonctionnent comme une force permettant à leur référent de se renouveler et de se transformer).
Keywords
Somewhere in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, two objects are brought on display that seem not at all in their right place among the many photographs, material remains, documents and artworks that bear witness to the explosion of the atomic bomb. One of them is a wooden panel that upon first sight does not really seem to differ much from any ordinary wooden panel that one can find, especially in a country like Japan, by the thousands (fig. 1). The second one is made of stone and shaped like a normal set of steps used for the entrance of a house or a public building (fig. 2). Again, there is nothing striking about these steps and they are not unlike the steps that any person, in Japan or elsewhere, walks on whenever entering someone’s home or a shop.
Nevertheless, this article is devoted solely to an analysis of these two objects, and if it is to be considered an essay, this is because this concept can be taken in its most literal sense: this article entails nothing but an attempt to draw meaning from the wooden panel and the stone steps, however banal they may seem. For this reason, even if it will elaborate on the weighty philosophical or psychological concept of the “unbearable” and on the one physical or optical entity that cannot even be properly called an entity because it lacks a third dimension, the shadow, none of these ideas can be released from the discussion of the specific panel and steps in Hiroshima. A systematic analysis of what the concept of “the unbearable” denotes is thus not at all sought for, no more than an exhaustive description of the peculiar significance of the shadow for Western or Eastern culture.
A first element that will be crucial for this essay is the idea that neither the panel nor the steps are significant, meaningful or worthy of our attention on account of properties that are internal to them. That is to say, what makes the panel and steps significant is something that clearly comes from without, i.e. the shadows that can be perceived to have somehow “attached” themselves to them. In this way, as we will explain, neither the panel nor the steps can be said to really have meaning for they have become meaningful and this is only on account of something external that becomes visible through them.
A second element that will be important for our further analysis of the panel and steps is related to this external nature of the process through which these objects have become meaningful. Due to the shadows that can be made out on them, the panel and steps share in the double status that marks the photographic image: they are both traces and images at the same time or, put more precisely, they combine a physical existence (they are objects) with a signifying power (they refer to something else). This double status, as we will explain, allows the meaning or significance of these objects to be perceived as unfinished or unfulfilled, that is to say, it shows that the process through which these objects have become meaningful has not yet been fully completed. The significance of these objects is, for that reason, to be experienced as displaced or, put differently, it cannot be absorbed by them. The meaning of the panel and steps is always in excess and it denotes a “too much” (a remains or residue) or, as Gilles “Then I learned that he who fights against the night must move its deepest darkness so that it gives out its light.” Walter Benjamin in a letter to Herbert Belmore (1916)
Deleuze writes, it comes together with an experience of “nonsense” precisely because it “is saying its own sense” (Logic of Sense 79).
On August 6, 1945 at 8.15 a.m., Hiroshima was hit by what, in hindsight, needs to be understood as the most atrocious event that was ever planned by human minds and made real by human hands. In a flash of no more than a single second, approximately 70 000 people died and, in the months to come, at least another 70 000 succumbed to the effects of nuclear radiation. The wooden panel and the stone steps that are on display in the Peace Memorial Museum are material remains of that specific moment and that specific place: the shadows that are engraved onto them were cast by a branch with leaves somewhere in the city of Hiroshima and by a woman or man who on that summer morning was waiting for the bank to open. The process through which these shadows were transfixed onto the panel and steps is the result of the explosion of the bomb itself since this explosion was accompanied by such an extreme flash of light that it generated the same effect as a photo camera: a banal and fleeting moment was preserved forever, albeit not on a sensitive plate but on the harsh and natural material of wood or stone. Given the essayistic nature of this reading of the panel and steps, it seems advisable to already put forward the main results of this attempt at the outset of the article: in my view, these material witnesses to the destruction of the atomic bomb are images of memory or, to be more precise, images of commemoration or remembrance. The first part of this article will deal with the specific nature of such images of commemoration or remembrance; in the second part, I will come back to the particular significance of the shadows that are visible on them.
1.
In an answer to a letter from March 1937, Walter Benjamin writes to Max Horkheimer that “what science has ‘determined’ [festgestellt], remembrance [Eingedenken] can modify [modifizieren]. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete” (Arcades Project 471). It is my contention that this concept of remembrance, which cannot be released from a specific type of “mindfulness”, needs to be understood as a particular capability, that is to say, as the power to re-think or to alter the past. Whereas science seeks a permanent position (feste Stelle) for an event of the past and freezes it into an immutable fact, remembrance denotes a mode of thinking that enters into the past (ein-gedenken) and allows it to take leave from the present it once was. In this way, the past is experienced as something that has not been fully closed off and that, having survived until the moment of remembrance itself (Nachleben, Nachgeschichte), is still marked by a potential for change. Remembrance, in short, is the capability to save the past from its status as a fact and to rediscover it as still possible and it fulfills the past precisely by rendering it unfulfilled again.1
Before entering fully into the discussion of what remembrance can entail, it needs to be stated that what is ultimately at stake in an analysis of the wooden panel and the stone steps that are on
1. For more on these basic assumptions of Benjamin’s philosophy of history, see Friedlander 157-189, e.g. the statement that “[r]ecognizing the stakes of history would be bringing the present into a critical state” (169). For the closest reading of Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history and the difference with historicism, see Löwy. For more on the idea that what is factual can be rediscovered as potentially changing, see Weber, e.g. 40: “Benjamin’s -barkeiten … do not simply define their own virtuality in terms of the absence of what they name, but rather in terms of its radical alteration.”
display in Hiroshima, and in an analysis of the shadows that are engraved onto them, is the capacity to commemorate and re-think the destruction of the atomic bomb in the way that Benjamin had in mind. This does not of course mean that this destruction can in any way be undone or cancelled out but that the panel and the stone steps might come together with an experience of a past the meaning of which has not yet been fully exhausted. Expressed in metaphysical terms, one can defend the claim that the material remains of the nuclear bomb embody a power that was present within it but that, in having created something wholly new, cannot be equated with the force of mere destruction and the sheer horror of the bomb itself. The wooden panel and stone steps confront us with a power in the past that is, as Nietzsche put it in his famous essay on history, “plastic”, that is to say, which is itself in motion and which thereby grows capable of changing the moment in which it originates.2 It is in such a manner that
Benjamin, in a different context, has described a life that is “immortal” and “unforgettable”, albeit not at all because it is heroic or all-powerful and “even though it has no monument or memorial, or perhaps even any testimony” (“Dostoevsky’s The Idiot” 80).3 Such a life retains a distinct form of weakness but
it is experienced as having gained, from within that very weakness, a capability to survive and live on that remains irreducible. For this reason, the wooden panel, the stone steps and the shadows that have attached themselves to them are not just material remains in the ordinary sense of the word (as a noun) but their meaning remains in the literal sense of the word (as a verb): it is residual and does not seem to fully belong to any greater whole or unity. The significance of the panel and steps remains to a certain extent “at work” and alive precisely because they bring on display that something within them cannot entirely be made present or graspable.4
With this concept (or, rather, capability) of remembrance in mind, Benjamin’s statement in a letter to Gershom Scholem (1935) that it is possible to “capture an image of history” in “the detritus of present existence” (Briefe 685) can be read as already harboring an important critique of the well-known claim, made decades later by his friend Theodor W. Adorno, that “all culture after Auschwitz, together with the urgent critique of culture, is garbage” (Negative Dialectics 359). For it is vital to understand in what ways the “detritus” [Abfall] mentioned by Benjamin differs from the “garbage” [Müll] mentioned by Adorno and crucial to determine whether culture is either detritus or garbage since both statements presuppose a radically opposed view on what human thought entails and what it can be deemed capable of. In Benjamin’s view, that is to say, what is most valuable in a given period in history can be understood only from what does not really find a determined position within that period itself and what for that reason “falls off” [fällt ab] and remains dislodged. Such a “dislocated” meaning does not have its proper
2. See, for example, Nietzsche 62. For an application of this term to Warburg’s concept of survival (Nachleben), see Didi-Huberman 155-168.
3. See also the description of the same intimate relationship between weakness and power in Benjamin’s essay “Commentaries on Poems by Brecht” where he focuses on Brecht’s line that “the soft water, as it moves / vanquishes in time the mighty stone. / You understand – what is hard must yield” (246) and the concept of “weak messianic power” in “On the Concept of History”.
4. On the issue of meaning understood as a remains or residue, see different texts written by Giorgio Agamben, e.g. “The Assistants” (Profanations 29-35) (“[T]he unfulfilled is what remains” [34]), Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the
Archive (“[T]he remnants of Auschwitz – the witnesses – are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the
saved. They are what remains between them.” [164]) and The Time that Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. See also Benjamin’s own references to what can be called an “excessive” or “residual” meaning in a material object (meaning as a “too much” that has attached itself to a physical entity) in his “Little History of Photography” (what “even now is still real and will never be wholly absorbed in ‘art’” [510]) and in the Paris-essay (what “begins to outgrow art” [34]).
form or embodiment and, on account of this fragility, retains a dynamic of becoming-meaningful that sparks a progressive intensification of our attention.5 In other words, Benjamin presupposes a concept of
“weakly embodied meaning” and starts from the idea that our thoughts and actions are put into motion only by what cannot seemingly express itself and by what to a certain extent escapes from our gaze. For this reason, Benjamin’s concept of “weak messianic power” is, in fact, a tautology since nothing that is marked by the potential for rescue or fulfillment is not at the same time weak. For Benjamin, a given “power” becomes “messianic” precisely because it lacks the strength to reveal or communicate itself and it therefore finds expression only through something that remains foreign to it. In line with philosophical ideas and intuitions borrowed from Aby Warburg and with literary concepts distilled from Marcel Proust, Benjamin understands the past as a dynamic that, while being past, nevertheless continues to insist and subsist within the present. Such a past, moreover, can only be understood or thought for the first time at the moment of being-remembered itself.6
Adorno’s claim, on the contrary, associates culture and human thought with what does have a formative capacity on its own and a power to comprehend, grasp and determine. Adorno’s statement presupposes the idea that culture, and even “the urgent critique of culture”, is characterized by the propensity to illuminate and spiritualize and to highlight the internal necessity and inherent significance of a given phenomenon. For Adorno, such a form of thinking visits what is dark but only to then turn its back on this seeming incomprehensibility and expose it fully to the light of reason.7 It is only from this
perspective that post-Auschwitz culture can be termed “garbage” since, according to the well-known thesis put forward by Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the insatiable urge for Enlightenment and progress does not just fall short in adequately understanding the darkest chapter in Western civilization but, what is more, the propensity to force absurdity into making sense is to be taken for a form of fearful complicity. Whereas Benjamin understands history and the search for meaning as the ability to bear what is dislocated, to make legible what is inconspicuous and to repress the urge to determine or fixate, Adorno’s statement immediately ties a knot between culture and the faculty of cognition on the one hand and the urge to master the negative and to systematize difference on the other.
From Benjamin’s perspective on what human thought entails, the concept of the “unbearable” becomes visible as denoting that dimension in our thinking and acting which cannot possibly be taken for the foundation of systematicity or certainty because it inevitably remains foreign to the purity of form
5. This dialectic through which an entity that is inconspicuous on its own becomes meaningful through its capacity to sharpen our gaze and heighten our awareness underlies some of the most important paragraphs in Benjamin’s work. A first example is Benjamin’s characterization of melancholy contemplation in The Origin of German Tragic Drama: “the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us” (140). A second one is his description of a double portrait of the photographer Dauthendey and his wife: “[T]he beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it” (“Little History” 510). For more on this structure of becoming meaningful, see Weigel and Weissberg.
6. For only one, out of many, illustrations, see Benjamin’s Arcades Project: “The interest which the materialist historian takes in the past is always, in part, a vital interest in its being past – in its having ceased to exist, its being essentially dead” (363, Benjamin’s emphasis). For a similar idea, see also Jacques Derrida’s description of the specter as a “[r]epetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time” (10) in Specters of Marx, and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “pure past” in Proust and Signs (59).
and to the immutability of scientific determination. The unbearable thus denotes literally what cannot bear itself and what therefore inevitably becomes residual or excessive because it cannot be absorbed and “falls off”. It is, however, crucial to understand that, according to Benjamin, genuine thought originates only from within what is unbearable in this way.8 On account of this discovery of the genealogical origin
of culture in residue and detritus Benjamin belongs to the alternative tradition of thinkers that include, amongst many others, the early Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Scott Fitzgerald, Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, that is to say, that tradition which reveals that genuine thought always bears the trace of the attempt to think its “outside”. For these thinkers, the Ungrund (non-ground) of the unbearable is not at all an Abgrund (undifferentiated abyss) and the renunciation of the ideal of the purity of form and the determination of knowledge does not at all lead into an irrational and primordial unity where every principle of individuation succumbs to mere chaos.9 For this tradition, rather, the unbearable denotes the
Ungrund of thought which (as Deleuze puts it) is “neither individual nor personal, but rather singular. Being not an undifferentiated abyss, it leaps from one singularity to another, casting always the dice belonging to the same cast, always fragmented and formed again in each throw” (Logic of Sense 212).
2.
Shadows are phenomena that, in this precise meaning of both words, can be termed “unbearable” or “singular” because they cannot be thought to bear anything whatsoever, let alone that they can be considered to rest in themselves or become entirely autonomous entities. Shadows are inevitably borne by something else and their existence cannot but depend on something that remains to a certain extent external, that is to say, the object or human being they are a shadow of and the rays of light through which they are produced. A shadow is the only phenomenon that is both real and entirely two-dimensional and for this reason it remains irreducibly different from the very phenomenon from which it originates: it is impossible to properly identify and describe the object or human being casting a shadow solely from a perception of the cast shadow itself. A shadow, in other words, can be endowed only with the status of being residual, dislocated or excessive: it is always redundant or “too much” vis-à-vis the entity it
8. The concept of “absorption” has a specific significance in Benjamin’s writings that seems upon first view unrelated to our discussion but does bear traces of the stakes we are dealing with. In a well-known passage in the “Artwork”-essay, Benjamin writes that “[a] person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it ... [whereas] the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (119). Absorption, which belongs to the same group of concepts as empathy and contemplation and presupposes a propensity to become one with an outside object, is opposed to concepts like innervation or distraction (Zerstreuung). In this way, absorption entails the inability to relate to meaning in its non-transfixed form and to a truth-in-motion. In innervation or distraction, on the other hand, the ego meets what is outside of itself as multiple and in flux and it grows capable of responding to it in its very transience and movement. For an excellent analysis of these discussions, see Andrew Benjamin and Eiland. See also Susan Buck-Morss’ views on a so-called “synaesthetic system” that revolves a form of “sense-consciousness, decentered from the classical subject, wherein external sense-perceptions come together with the internal images of memory and anticipation” (13).
9. The concept of Ungrund dates back to the work of the German mystic thinker Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), who introduced it as the primordial, unfathomable and irrational principle of freedom that is prior to Being and creation. This concept had a profound influence on later thinkers such as Friedrich Schelling (1775-1845). In line with his idea that nonsense is not the opposite of sense but the opposite of the “absence of sense”, the concept of non-ground cannot from Deleuze’s (and Benjamin’s) perspective be understood as the opposite of ground but as the opposite of the “absence of ground” or Abgrund. That is to say, a thought that seeks its non-ground does not become powerless or unable to grasp meaning but, on the contrary, it derives from this very confrontation with its outside, the necessary openness towards processes of differentiation and renewal that yield meaning. See also Benjamin’s views on gesture, interruption and quotation and Samuel Weber’s revealing essay , “Citability–of Gesture” (95-114).
derives its existence from. A shadow is no substantial being on its own but it is not a mere part or internal fragment of the object from which it originates either. A shadow, moreover, is transient and fugitive to such an extent that it appears to be ungraspable and it cannot be determined as having a fixed position (festgestellt). A shadow, in short, is weak in the meaning that Benjamin has given to that term. It can only be cast or thrown and, what is more, it cannot but fall.
Nevertheless, however lacking in individuality it may appear and however inessential to the existence of a given object it may seem, a shadow is not at all undifferentiated or indeterminate. On the contrary, few things are as particularized as a shadow for, even though it is impossible to recognize a given thing by looking at the shadow it casts, the mere existence of a shadow suffices as proof that such a thing must exist. What is more, with each and every shadow, we know that it is cast by one and only one entity and that it refers to precisely one physical entity, which, however different it may be to its own shadow, would allow us to retrace its origin. For this reason, a shadow is the most perfect illustration of an indexical image, which, unlike an iconic image, might not fully resemble its referent but is determined by a causal link with it.10 This indexical nature of the shadow-image explains why Pliny the Elder takes
the simple act of outlining the shadow of a departing lover on a wall to be the origin of painting (325), why “sciagraphy” was one of the early names of photography and why authors ranging from Dante to Hans Belting have understood the shadow to be the only truly natural image.
Shadows have a distinct significance for a Western culture and this can only be explained by elaborating further on this double nature and on their singular and indexical character. Shadows, that is to say, reveal that things are not reducible to their most natural image yet remain inseparable from it: no given thing requires a shadow to exist – it cannot, both in a figurative and literal way, be identified with it – but, still, it cannot in any way be released from it either. A human shadow is most illustrative in this account: like our body, our shadow reveals that there is a dimension to our existence that we, while we cannot distance ourselves from it, cannot fully make into our own either (we cannot fully identify ourselves with our shadow).11 Like a mirror image, a shadow combines a sense of desindividuation with
a form of complete singularisation: it is itself intangible and ungraspable but it nevertheless remains an index for the existence of one and only one phenomenon in space.
10. The singular nature of the shadow and the structure of the link between a shadow and its referent (the shadow as causally determined by but irreducibly different from its referent) runs entirely parallel to the idea of a mathesis singularis (“a new science for each object”) and the link between the photographic image and its referent as famously described by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (8, 75).
11. See e.g. the reference to the shadow in a crucial passage in Foucault’s text “Of Other Spaces” (1967). Shadows can indeed be taken for heterotopia’s, i.e. other spaces/spaces of otherness in which the very opposition between self and other is blurred. “In the mirror I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent. … From the standpoint of the mirror [moreover] I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (24). The structure of this argument about the singularity of shadows mirrors Rudi Visker’s argument that the subject “is not without a centre, but caught in the unbreakable spell of something from which it derives its singularity. Accordingly, what is most ‘proper’ to the subject, what lies at the basis of its irreplacability, of its non-interchangeable singularity – in short of its being ‘itself’ – has nothing to do with some secret property or some hidden capacity, but results from a lack of resources on its part, from its eliminable poverty, its incapacity: the subject is something that has missed an appointment, and it would never have even existed without that break, rent or gap through which it gains, rather than loses, its intimacy” (116-117). The inability to fully identify oneself with one’s shadow seems an illustration of such an “incapacity” or “missed appointment”.
This complex structure of the shadow explains why it comes together with such special significance for our Western culture, for instance in horror stories where it indexes the certain presence of an external force that itself, however, does not become fully perceptible. If it is indeed possible to hide behind one’s own shadow, this is only because it both grants visibility and withdraws from sight at the very same time. In German expressionist films, for instance, the shadow becomes – as Lotte Eisner puts it – “an image of Destiny” (130): it provides proof for the existence of a power that both asserts itself and remains intangible. Similarly, in the old legend of Peter Schlemihl, who sells his own shadow to the devil for money but is then ostracized from the human world and in Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s The Woman without a Shadow, where the Empress tries to overcome her inhuman existence by buying the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow, a shadow appears both inessential to one’s personality (it can be bought or sold) and indispensable for an existence that is genuinely human.12 The shadow is therefore, as Victor
Stoichita writes, “the very prototype of the irremovable sign. It is undetachable from, coexistant and simultaneous with the object it duplicates. [However,] [t]o suggest (and to perform) such an exchange, we must accept that it is ‘exchangeable’ and that it has an exchange value. We must therefore accept its reification” (170).13
The same paradox explains the importance of shadows in Western painting: even though a shadow is itself two-dimensional, intangible and ungraspable, it is nevertheless a painted shadow which renders an object on canvas the illusion of a third dimension and the semblance of a solid grounding in space. Despite the association with semblance or illusion, it is the painted shadow which conjures the reality effect most of all and, even though it is forever thrown and cannot but fall, it is only on account of its shadow that an object can, in the illusory space of a painting, be perceived to stand.14
In the second half of the 19th century, however, an important shift took place with regard to
the use of shadows in Western painting. As will be elaborated later on in this essay, this shift has a distinct relevance for our attempt to understand why the engraved shadows on the panel and steps in Hiroshima can be thought of as images of commemoration or remembrance. Impressionist painters like Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro and post-impressionist artists like Alfred Sisley, that is, did not make extensive use of shadows to depict the illusion of the object’s solidity and a rigid anchoring in space but, on the contrary, to make visible the transient nature and fugitive existence of essentially non-anticipatable and unrepeatable phenomena like the wind rustling through the leaves of a tree. Shadows are here no longer used to present, on the two-dimensional plane of the image, things that do have, in real space, a third dimension but, the other way around, they release the most instable and lively dimension
12. For more on similar issues, and a brilliant analysis of the difference between shadow stage (“other” stage) and mirror stage (“same” stage), see Victor I. Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow (29-41). This book, an incredibly rich resource for artistic elaborations of the shadow and a profound analysis of its significance for Western culture, also includes a detailed analysis of the legend of Peter Schlemihl (167-185).
13. For a similar analysis of the shadow, see also Dennis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows”: “[Cast shadows are] the very exemplar of a nondisplaceable sign: rigorously contemporary with the object it doubles, it is simultaneous, nondetachable, and, because of this, without exchange-value. It is only cast on the spot, without the possibility of a proxy” (114). As we will see in what follows, a large part of the Western fascination with shadows is indeed inspired precisely by the imaginary possibility of detaching the nondetachable and of exchanging what is without exchange-value. 14. For an extensive analysis of this paradox, see Gombrich. See also Roberto Casati’s manipulated images of Chardin’s painting Copper Urn (by removing the shadows from the painting the depicted objects lose their solidity) and his analysis of Galileo Galilei’s related attempt to provide evidence for the superiority of painting over sculpture (by blackening the unshadowed parts of a statue, it appears to float) (7-8).
of a given phenomenon by, so to speak, putting it to motion. These painted shadows do not any longer transfix or determine a stable position but surrender an object to a rhythm of variegation and multiplicity, change and differentiation. By making use of shadows in this way, painting can to a certain extent be thought to transcend its own limits as an immobile image: as (two-dimensional) images within other (two-dimensional) images, the painted shadows are used by impressionist artists to make the fragility and dynamic of real phenomena perceptible. As such, they suggest the beauty of these things that cannot even be truly grasped or eternalized by any immobile image whatsoever and they capture the poetry of phenomena the appearance of which is co-present with a sense of disappearance and vanishing.15
It is for this reason no surprise that the exotic virus of le Japonisme affected so many European impressionist and post-impressionist artists in the second half of the 19th century since it is precisely this
love for what is fleeting and transient and, moreover, a fascination for the play of shadows which marks an important element of the so-called Oriental gaze.16 In his important philosophical pamphlet In Praise
of Shadows (1933), the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki famously proclaims that Japanese culture “find[s] beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” (46). Effigies or flower-arrangements in the alcove of Japanese houses, for instance, do not merit our attention by virtue of the way they look in themselves or when isolated from their environment but only to the extent that they “set off to unexpected advantage both [themselves] and [their] surroundings” (31). In Japanese aesthetics, in other words, shadows are no mere indices and they do not have a merely secondary significance vis-à-vis the objects they are a shadow of. On the contrary, shadows are endowed with a capacity to release objects from their rigid isolation and self-identity and they are believed to allow them to join in an unanticipated and ever-changing variation alongside and together with their surroundings. “The beauty of a Japanese room,” writes Tanizaki, “depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else” (29). Shadows thus succeed in creating a surprising and playful dance out of entities that, when experienced in isolation from each other, are firmly rooted and immutable. They inject time and the change of light in an otherwise self-absorbed and strictly organized universe.17
This Japanese love of shadows differs to a great extent from our own, Western views. Having built our ideals of rationality and progress, from Plato onwards, on the insight that a given effect cannot have any qualities or possibilities that were not already present in the entity from which it originates,
15. For the most profound and extensive analysis of this typically modern aesthetic gaze, see Charles Baudelaire’s famous description of the “painter of modern life,” e.g. the references to the ability to see “everything in a state of newness,” to “express ... [the] luminous explosion in space” of living beings and to seek “Beauty in its most minute manifestations” (8, 18, 34). Even though Baudelaire connects this modern gaze to a love for artifice and a hatred vis-à-vis the purity of nature, on account of the shadow’s double nature (cf. supra) it can be seen as embodying something that is nevertheless very important to his analysis, that is, a principle of irreducible difference that problematizes the view on nature as governed by eternal and immutable laws. Ultimately, what matters most to Baudelaire is not to overcome Nature as such but to lay bare a dynamic of differentiation and rejuvenation, whether this can be found to be a natural one or not. See his reference to fashion as “a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation” (33).
16. For more information on this connection between Japanese art, especially the prints of artists like Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), and European (visual) artists see Shigemi (e.g. the reference to Edouard Manet’s so-called “unfinished” brushwork and use of similar strategies of “assemblage” and “montage”). See also Van Gogh’s famous reference to Japanese art in a letter to Theo (September 1888): “[I]sn’t what we are taught by these simple Japanese, who live in nature as if they themselves were flowers, almost a true religion? ... [O]ne cannot study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming merrier and happier, and we should turn back to nature in spite of our education and our work in a conventional world” (410). 17. Hence Tanizaki’s analysis of the Japanese affirmative attitude towards the “impure”, the “unclean”, the “insanitary”.
the idea that a created phenomenon (a shadow) can embody a capacity or power that cannot be derived from its cause (the object which casts the shadow) is difficult to grasp. The view that a shadow might not simply be a merely reactive or secondary entity but that it ought to be explored as something that is to be located on the same plane as its origin and, moreover, as an element that actively works upon it, is foreign to our hierarchical way of thinking. Surely, the most revealing illustration of a specifically Western view on the shadow is Masaccio’s fresco St. Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow (1425-1426) in the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine Church in Florence. In this fresco, St. Peter is famously depicted while healing an unfortunate, crippled man who is seen begging in the street. This redemptive power of St. Peter’s shadow, however, cannot in fact be taken for a quality of the shadow itself since it is derived from a quality that pertains to the entity by which the shadow was cast: St. Peter’s sacred body. The shadow has thus become a sort of emanation or aura of his body and its supernatural, healing powers.18 Moreover, the shadow works upon something that is external to both St. Peter’s body and the
shadow itself, that is, the body of the crippled man who is touched by St. Peter’s shadow. The power that Tanizaki describes, on the contrary, denotes an active force realized by a shadow over against its own origin and not vis-à-vis an object that is entirely external to it and, what is more, it does not presuppose that the object casting the shadow is sacred or endowed with supernatural capabilities. According to Tanizaki, it is precisely the most banal and ordinary objects and phenomena which are, through the activity of their own shadow, suddenly and unexpectedly put into motion and made to variegate.
3.
This Japanese love of shadows as an active force releasing a capability for differentiation and variegation in their own origin is of importance to the claim that the shadows engraved on the wooden panel and the stone steps in Hiroshima can be termed images of commemoration or remembrance. For this commemorative potential of the shadows in Hiroshima is tied to the experience that these inherently residual entities have nevertheless somehow become independent. These shadows, that is, have seemingly detached themselves from their referents, however essential or natural the relation between the two may be. The fact that these shadows have become engraved onto the wooden panel and stone steps grants them the peculiar position of what is both a physical entity and an image at the same time: they are no ordinary shadows because these would not be able to exist independently from their origin, yet they are no mere images of shadows either because they do not simply resemble or look like shadows. The shadows in Hiroshima, that is, do not, like the painted shadow in Masaccio’s fresco for instance, depict or refer to shadows because they are shadows but still they are obviously no ordinary or natural shadows because the objects by which they are cast are no longer there. As such, our experience of these shadows shares in the “indecision” that marks according to Dennis Hollier the use of shadows in surrealist art and “makes it difficult to know if one is faced with a real shadow or a reproduced one, if one is looking at a cast shadow or its image, if one is inside a space of the indexical type or looking at a space of the iconic one” (116). The shadows in Hiroshima are, in another phrase of Hollier, “orphan shadows”: they are dis-indexed because their referent is not present but they do not fully enter into the iconic space
18. See also Hans Belting’s analysis of Masaccio’s fresco and his description of St. Peter’s shadow as “not just an extension of the body but also of its field of action” (205, my translation).
of resemblance either because, instead of being created or reproduced, they were cast by actual objects. There is, moreover, a remarkable mirror-image to the concept of “orphan shadows” that is indispensable to the attempt to understand the commemorative potential of the shadows in Hiroshima. For shadows can only be experienced as being to a certain extent autonomous from their referents if those referents can for their part be imagined to, at least potentially, exist without their shadows. In Japanese aesthetics, therefore, the discovery of real shadows as an active force of differentiation and variation comes together with the creation of imaginary worlds in which these origins are for their part depicted as released from their own shadows. Japanese aesthetics does not merely cherish the shadow as an active force, bringing out a principle of differentiation in its own origin, but it just as much bears witness to a love for scenes of a nature that is without shadow and to a preference for human beings that appear to have shed their most natural image. To give but one example, the Japanese art form that is most widely known in the West and was most influential to impressionism and post-impressionism, the art of the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, depicts a universe that contains no shadows at all. In his book on Hokusai, the French writer Henri Focillon writes that
… if one wants to summarize the most characteristic qualities [of Japanese art] in the eyes of Europeans [one sees that] it does not seek to reproduce but to merely suggest the third dimension in space. It restricts the scale of values that it only interprets from the perspective of effect, and not from the perspective of depth. It indicates how volumes are modeled with linear indications and emphasis, sometimes with softly flattened surfaces, without using shadows. (47) Ukiyo-e prints, in other words, depict the very type of scenes that, in Tanizaki’s view, are characteristic to the Japanese gaze, that is, fleeting and transient moments and sudden and unexpected movements and variations but in the minds of the artists who created them the presence of shadows would be detrimental to the effect of cosmic lightness that they seek. Whereas Tanizaki writes about the propensity to “extend” (Tanizaki 30) phenomena by way of light and shadow, Focillon writes that “Japan limits itself: it reduces space” (Focillon 54) and, whereas the former describes “the genius … that by cutting off the light [one imparts] the world of shadows” (Tanizaki 33), the latter emphasizes that the Japanese gaze “chases the night away” (Focillon 54).
It is important to understand that these statements do not contradict each other but are complementary. That is to say, this mental space in which objects have lost their shadow and seemingly exist without it (the “floating” world) is constructed in order to sharpen one’s gaze to experiences in real life where shadows, however impossible this may be, seem to detach themselves from their referents and, in this very “orphan” state, act upon them. This complementary relation between shadows-released-from-their-referents and referents-released-from-their-shadows allows for experiences where the borders between what is real and what is non-real become slightly blurred without however disappearing completely. The shadowless universe of the Ukiyo-e is, however non-real it may be, not a merely fantasized or purely invented world because such products of imagination function as a way to set up a specific type of psychic relation with the real world: it is only by imagining a non-existing world in which physical objects and human beings seem to “float” and have become weightless that one learns to relate to the real, surrounding world as a universe that is always potentially in motion and variation. For their part, “orphan shadows” are, however real they may be, elements that come together with a
dimension of virtuality or a hitherto non-realized possibility. They border on both the indexical and the iconic plane and they thus allow what is clearly felt to be absent to nevertheless find an extended field of action, presenting itself in an altered state.
From this perspective, the possibility that shadows and their referents can be released from each other allows for an experience of the surrounding world as sharing in a dynamic of renewal and rejuvenation. Bodies in space are thus no longer experienced as mere obstacles to light since they just as much transmit it and they do not always cast shadows on the ground because they can to a certain extent be regarded as potentially weightless, defying the laws of gravity and changing from within in an unexpected way. In short, if in such a world things and human beings do not any longer always have a shadow, this is because they can sometimes more or less become one themselves. This redeeming quality of independently existing shadows and referents is very hard to grasp for a culture that is steeped in the Western, rationalized and hierarchical way of thinking. With the possible exception of specific artistic strategies in surrealism, the place in Western culture where shadows are imagined as existing independently from their referents denotes either the realm of illusion (Plato’s cave) or the realm of death (Dante’s Hell) (see Stoichita 20-28). Nevertheless, the redeeming potential of the separation of shadows and referents is crucial in grasping the commemorative potential of the wooden panel and stone steps in Hiroshima. These can only become images of remembrance if they manage to sharpen our gaze to something that blurs the lines between what is real and non-real and thus, as Benjamin put it, goes beyond the scientific quest for “determination”. The “mindfulness” that he deems essential to a form of genuine remembrance is an active faculty because it constructs a relationship with a past that, “while being past,” is still somehow a part of the present.19 The transfixed shadows, that is to say, refer
to those things that were irrevocably destroyed by the explosion of the atomic bomb (the fragile leaves of a branch on a tree and the body of a man or woman waiting for the bank to open) but they succeed in making visible the very weakness or vulnerability of those entities by which they were originally cast. These shadows index the scene from which they derive their existence while presenting it at the same time as something that was incapable of withstanding a force of extreme horror. They grant a certain presence to what is at the same time experienced as absent and they denote, within our present, a dimension of incompleteness. On account of the double nature of the relation between a shadow and its referent (irreducible difference and inseparable connection), the shadows on the wooden panel and stone steps do not function like any ordinary sign or image. Unlike normal signs and images, which are not marked by a natural connection with their referent and merely point towards it as an external entity, the shadows in Hiroshima actualize a dynamic within their referents that renders them unfulfilled. The shadows that are engraved on the wooden panel and stone steps in Hiroshima have “lost” their referents in the two-fold meaning of that word as understood by Rebecca Solnit: “Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing” (22) The imprinted shadows are not at all monumental or heroic but they allow our minds to “get lost” in
19. See in this regard the reference to a “vital interest” (my emphasis) in the past’s “being past” (Benjamin’s emphasis) in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (363). This concept of a past that is experienced as being both past and still somehow alive is also the foundation of Benjamin’s views on Proust’s mémoire involontaire. See the reference to remembrance/recollection in “On the Image of Proust”: “The important thing to the remembering author is not what he experienced [erlebt hat], but the weaving of his memory [Erinnerung], the Penelope work of recollection [Eingedenken]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory?” (238)
this way, that is, they make it possible that the “unfamiliar appears” and is commemorated in the manner that Benjamin understood that term. These shadows allow us to re-think and “modify” their own origins by granting these objects a continued presence beyond the initial moment of terror and suffering. To a certain extent they redeem the nuclear bomb’s destructiveness since they bring to the fore a capability, at work within this very destruction, of preserving things that did not have the strength to preserve themselves. Their forms are essentially unfinished, their embodiment is irreducible in its weakness and the inspired act of remembrance cannot overcome the limits of what is imaginable but still, they show, as Dennis Hollier puts it, that “[o]nly what is incapable of living, survives” (114). It is precisely because they remain falling that these shadows allow their origins to stand in their very absence.
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Stéphane Symons is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the KU Leuven. His field of research is twentieth-century aesthetics and philosophy of art. He has published articles and a book on pre-war German and post-war French thinkers (mainly Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida) and on contemporary art and politics.
