Conversation strives toward silence, and the listener is really the silent partner. The speaker receives meaning from him; the silent one is the unappropriated source of meaning. The conversation raises words to his lips as do vessels, jugs. The speaker immerses the memory of his strength in words and seeks forms in which the listener can reveal himself. For the speaker speaks in order to let himself be converted. He understands the listener despite the flow of his own speech; he realizes that he is addressing someone whose features are inexhaustibly earnest and good, whereas he, the speaker, blasphemes against language.
Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth” (II), 1913-14
There were so many things that flowed through my head when I was teaching the photography class (just over a week ago) that I wanted to write my way through. But there was no time, and even now as I take this moment the guilt rises that I haven’t written my final comments to all of them. I am easily overcome by messianism when speaking about photography. I often think of writing as so many nuts, bolts, and screws—but I never think of photography that way.
I was teaching about style using Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, rather than using a parade of stilted stylistic examples. The thing common to both is a conception of style as something internal, rather than the external dress of a work. Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero offers the rather succinct thesis that language represents a horizon, a horizontal plain that governs possibility. In photography, the limits of the materials (particularly in regard to contrast or dynamic range) set up a sort of horizon which photographs dwell within. A photograph can be nothing more than a thin approximation of a slice of the experience available to the eye. A photograph is flattened in dimensions, compressed in tonality—in essence, a sort of shorthand in much the same manner as language for a boundless world of experience.
Style is a vertical dimension; Barthes claims that it is tied to our corporeal bodies and our position in time. I spoke to the class about this because so many of the people there seemed intimidated by the concept of “art” (as in fine art) in general. Style, the way I prefer to think about it, is not something validated through canonization but rather something that is intrinsic to having a discernable point of view. In other words, everyone has style whether they work to extend it skyward or not. In speaking on this topic, for the first time I began to see a congruence between style and ethos. It was almost a sort of conversion.
Reading Benjamin’s letters, I noticed that in the ecstatic correspondence with Carla Seligson of June 5, 1913 he remarks concerning his memories of a visit to Paris, “a wonderfully consummated experience,” that:
The following truism can be found in Brand [Ibsen’s Play] Here of course, it should not be taken so solemnly.
Happiness is born of loss
only what is lost remains eternal.
I resist assigning much value to silence or loss. Part of it, I think is that Benjamin was under the heady influence of being twenty-one years old. Like Yeats, who wrote most of his “old age” poems in his early twenties, I think Benjamin grew “younger” as he aged. I hope I can do the same.
