Melancholy, Down, and Historicity

Paul Klee - Angelus Novus/Angel of History (1920)

Albrecht Dürer Melancolia I (1514)

Thinking today about the treatment of Durer’s Melancolia I engraving and Paul Klee’s etching Angelus Novus in Giorgio Agamben’s “The Melancholy Angel” (from The Man Without Content) I ended up running into and remarking upon the somewhat slippery, ill-defined and shifty temporal qualities of melancholy.

On the one hand melancholy seems to be very clearly sandwiched inbetween the accumulated past and the unknowable future. Agamben quotes Walter Benjamin’s treatment of Klee’s etching in his “Theses on the Philosophy History” 

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History 1940, p. 249)

Melancholia is therefore very clearly marked by an inescapable and inexorable existence in the here and the now of the present. While, today, this is normally conceived of as a positive attribute, for the angel of history (both Durer’s and Klee’s) this seems to be a weighty and burdening proposition. Durer’s angel is looking towards neither history nor the future but is instead compelled to dwell on the present in a dreamlike trance. Most notably the gaze of the angel is sideways, not forward or backward, neither focused on the future nor the past, but instead a downward-focused gaze towards the side and a certain blankness that suggests an introspection that is another element of the pensive nature of melancholia. 

This downwardness is represented in the engraving by the heaviness of all objects in the engraving, the sheer weightiness and flightlessness of the corporeal figure of the seated angel and numerous other symbols and signs of melancholy. There is a potentiality of all objects in the scene but all are static. For example, there is the octagonal(or more?) stone that seems poised on the edge of rolling, like a dice, but has exhausted its supply of potential physical force to come to a rest on this precipice of its own face. 

Now that we have firmly situated Melancholia as firmly residing in and being concerned with the present perhaps we can begin to parse out its relationship with related terms along a sort of melancholia-historicity axis. 

Melancholia and Historicity Axis

The axis can run temporally alongside the major three chronological assignments of past present and future:

past————————present—————————future

nostalgia—————melancholia————————apathy

At the moment this is about as far as my thinking on this quality/dimension of melancholy has reached. I have become aware of the ‘presence’ of melancholia in the ‘present.’ I think this is useful to distinguish it from the related term of nostalgia, which is most often associated with a longing for the past or a sort of rosy-retrospection leading one to pine for an imagined golden age (although it is important to keep in mind that the original meaning of nostalgia was a very physical and geographical sickness of the pain of soldiers’ longing to return home). And finally an analog of melancholy in the future could be seen as a sort of apathy. It has been suggested by some such as Patrick Wright that melancholy in the present can be brought about by a certain lack of collective political will or clear direction for the future and at these certain points in time there is a noticeable difference in the attitudes and predispositions of urban society and the objects of adulation. The future component of melancholy like all future components seems to be more variable and less definitively stated though. 

Other question when thinking about melancholy certainly arise. 

How do we distinguish and separate melancholy and depression and is it important to do so?

Are melancholy and down really such exceptional sources of inspiration and revelation in our hypermediated digital environment?

In what ways do we seek out melancholy? Has it perhaps become an even more important concept precisely because of its scarcity and/or stigmatization by the frenetic information culture that surrounds us? Perhaps a resurgence of cultural respect for the concept of melancholy could be included as part of the larger trend towards Internet vacations and even the most recent ode to quiet by Pico Iyer in the New York Times.

 Is it possible to imagine such a thing as technomelancholia? We are normally so starkly opposed in views of the future — utopic or dystopic, can there be a “stasis in progress” (as Gunther Grass describes Melancholia in The Diary of a Snail) in relation to attitudes toward technology, a sort of dwelling on the present in the fast-paced world of technology.

Also, as postmodernists we purport to have abandoned a unidirectional sense of progress as the arrow of time inexorably leading us, or propelling us, forward in the march of time. Therefore, if we embrace this tenet of postmodernism and are willing to apply this to the attitudes and dispositions towards technology in society, there must be some sort of illustration beyond binaries like dystopia/utopia, beyond embrace/rejection, beyond Luddism/Technophilia that can illuminate a technomelancholic perspective. 

Perhaps some of these could account for recent historical revisionist projects such as the counterfactual histories of RCA graduate Sascha Pohflepp described here or the “retroprojective” visions of the Vancouver design  for their Roundabout Vancouver Project in 2011 could become to describe tecnhomelancholia, or at least a retroactively forward-thinking melancholia.

Goodweather Design Collective, “Roundabout Vancouver” Part of a Larger Project found here

These questions and more will be the subject of my inquiry into melancholia over the next few weeks as I explore these thoughts and findings publicly and welcome any and all feedback.