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Architecture/Landscape/Political EconomyScapegoat Issue 02 Materialism
Architecture/Landscape/Political EconomyScapegoat Issue 02 Materialism
cell. In the ellipsis bisecting the image from top right to
bottom left, a telescopic view replaces the microscopic one.
The viewer is confronted with the enormity of the universe
and its celestial bodies. In the centre of the image sits a
worker with hands on a set of controls. Wearing overalls
and heavy gloves, he turns his eyes upward and assumes a
posture that suggests devotional painting, socialist realism,
or both. Caught between the poles of natural and human
history, the telescopic and microscopic expanses of the
universe, and the antithetical terms of the class struggle all
contracted to a single point, Rivera’s Man occupies a space
of absolute tension and non-resolution. Rendered in its
barest schematic form, the mural looks something like this:
Considered in this way, Man at the Crossroads abides
by the dialectical image’s defining characteristics. For
Buck-Morss, such images “can perhaps best be pictured in
terms of coordinates of contradictory terms, the ‘synthe-
sis’ of which is not a movement toward resolution, but
the point at which their axes intersect.”9 The image’s
accumulated tensions cannot be resolved by teleological
fiat. Instead, the task falls to the viewer who comes to
realize that the moment of reckoning cannot be suspended
indefinitely.
But while the formal confluence between Rivera’s
image and Benjamin’s conception is striking, the mural’s
initial impact owed less to its composition than to the fact
that it was denied an audience in the lobby of the Rock-
efeller Center. “Rockefellers Ban Lenin in RCA Mural and
Dismiss Rivera,” announced The New York Times on April
10, 1933. Almost immediately, diverse sections of civil
society began to mobilize. According to historical journal-
ist Pete Hamill, responses included “protests, picket lines,
fiery editorials,” and “press conferences.” For his part,
“Diego made an impassioned speech at a rally in Town Hall”
while “liberals drew parallels between the brainless censor-
ship of Stalin’s ‘socialist realism’ and that of the Rockefell-
ers.”10 On June 15, 1933, the socialist newspaper Workers’
Age ran a photo of the mural along with an article by
Rivera. At that moment—and as Benjamin predicted a
dialectical image might—Rivera’s mural threatened to
Matter’s Most Modern
Configurations: Rivera,
Picasso, and Benjamin’s
Dialectic Image
by AK Thompson
II
In Convolute N of The Arcades Project and in his essay on
the concept of history, Walter Benjamin provided a brief but
compelling account of the dialectical image.1 According to
Benjamin, images became dialectical when they produced a
moment of historical cessation in which a viewer could come
face to face with “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the
oppressed past.”2 By constellating the fragments of historical
memory, these images enjoined the viewer to consider what
would be required to act upon history as such. Here, the
promise of finally fulfilling the desire for happiness and the
means by which that fulfillment might be achieved become
visible all at once.
For Benjamin, dialectical images reveal how the
unrealized promise of the past—a promise often conceived
in mythic or religious terms—might come to fruition
through action upon the profane conditions of the present.
And, as Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, such a vision of
reconciliation is “an ur-historical motif in both Biblical and
classical myth.” However, unlike other forms of engagement
with mythic anachronism, dialectical images do more
than rediscover past themes “symbolically, as aesthetic
ornamentation.” Instead, by impelling profane reckoning,
they enjoin the viewer to actualize unrealized promise by
forging a constellation between the past’s wishful motifs and
“matter’s most modern configurations.”3 Thus it was that Neil
Armstrong set foot on the moon under the sign of Apollo.
In what follows, I consider Diego Rivera’s Man at the
Crossroads (1933) and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) to
highlight how they intuitively gave Benjamin’s conception
a concrete visual form.4 To be sure, these images did not
produce the cessation of happening that Benjamin had hoped
for. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of formal analysis, they
are coherent visual approximations of the dialectical image.
As such, they are useful reference points for those seeking
to illuminate—and thus to make vulnerable—the properly
architectonic dimensions of late capitalism’s ersatz depthless-
ness. And, once this has been accomplished, we can begin to
directly consider how an image worthy of Benjamin’s concept
might be produced today.
The need for such a production arises not solely from the
fact that—as Frederic Jameson has noted—it is now easier to
imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of
capitalism.5 With the dialectical image, the very conception
of “anti-capitalism” reaches a point at which the habit of posit-
ing resistance as a merely logical negation of the constituted
world is repudiated once and for all. Because it forces us to
recognize the extent to which everything is already present
(the extent to which the problem is not one of “matter,” but
of its configuration), the dialectical image enjoins its viewers
to confront the decision demanded by politics from a point
wholly intrinsic to their own desires for freedom. Here, the
collective subject of history finds its nominating “we” first and
foremost through the encounter with an experience of lack
that—though experienced individually—remains universal
right up until the moment of its dissolution.
III
Man at the Crossroads was an enormous mural that stood
nearly 5 meters tall and 11.5 meters wide. Gathered on the
right side of the image are the forces of socialist revolution.
Workmen look on from the bottom quadrant. Marx, Trotsky,
and others gather behind a banner exhorting the workers
of the world to unite. Immediately behind these figures, the
viewer confronts a statue of Caesar holding a broken column
emblazoned with a swastika. The statue’s head has come off
and the workers are using it as a stool.
In the top right quadrant of the image, peasant women
line up alongside workers carrying red flags as they march in
procession.6 In the space behind the statue, demonstrators
confront soldiers in gas masks. Suspended mid-ground, a
group of athletes looks leftward with determination and élan.
In the bottom left quadrant of the mural, seated specta-
tors gaze into a kind of looking glass. Behind them sits a
statue of Jupiter with its hands cut off. The lightning that
these hands once wielded has been channeled into a machine
displaying an x-ray image of a human skull. Beside the x-ray
stands Charles Darwin surrounded by animals. Congregated
on the same mid-ground as Jupiter, a group of men stand
about pensively. Behind them, a conflict unfolds between
demonstrators and police riding horses. A line of soldiers
wearing gas masks consumes the top left quadrant of the
image. Above their heads flies a squadron of bombers similar
to those that will destroy Guernica in 1937—three years after
Rivera’s mural was itself destroyed.
In the middle of the image stands the time machine.
Evoking the liberating potential of technology, the time
machine also calls to mind Ezekiel’s Old Testament vision,
in which the development of productive forces is anticipated
in dream form. According to Ezekiel, “when the living crea-
tures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the
living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose.”
This was because “the spirit of the living creatures was in
the wheels.”7 Under capitalism, this dream would find a
perverse—but potentially liberating—concretion.
The time machine is set in a circular form bisected by
two ellipses that divide it into four quadrants. In the bottom
quadrant, plants from different parts of the world reach
roots into the exposed geological substratum of natural
history. The top quadrant comprises the bulk of the time
machine’s machinery. It appears to be assembled from
components derived from different technological phases in
the history of production. Occupying opposite poles, natural
history is counterposed to the “new nature”8 of human
history while simultaneously being connected to it through
the mediating figure of Man. In the left quadrant, represen-
tatives of the idle rich play cards and sip martinis. Opposite
these figures, workers representing different races gather
together with Lenin.
The ellipsis bisecting the image from top left to bottom
right contains the microscopic elements of the world. Near
the bottom of the ellipsis, a human fetus gestates inside a
I
When engaging in materialist analysis, conventional wisdom instructs us to pay
attention to bread and butter, bricks and mortar. This is no doubt important;
however, a more nuanced understanding of the precise attributes of “matter”
demands that we come to terms with the fact that solid objects are—for the most
part—empty spaces bound together by energetic relays. Such relays are at play in
history as well. There, people struggle to assemble material fragments so that they
might actualize the desires with which they’ve become infused through the course
of the struggle for freedom. Foregrounding such relays does not put us at odds
with materialist analysis. Quite the opposite: when properly understood, they reveal
themselves to be constitutive of it.
Human history is like paleontology. Owing to a certain
judicial blindness even the best intelligences absolutely
fail to see the things which lie in front of their noses.
Later, when the moment has arrived, we are surprised to
find traces everywhere of what we failed to see.
—Karl Marx
(Letter to Friedrich Engels, March 25, 1868)
