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Fleche Droite

WARBURG REVISITED
Ayssar Arida

It took exactly 70 years between the death of Aby Warburg in 1929 and the full publication in English of his oeuvre “The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity” on 9/9/1999 (!) by Getty Publications, effectively delivering his seminal thought from the confines of purely academic research.

Readers familiar with my theory of the “70-year itch” will recognise in the recent rediscovery of the unique mind of Aby Warburg a typical example of a precocious idea the time of which has finally come – 70 years after its first conception.

Warburg had an initial intuition that the history of culture was becoming too atomised, too segregated into mutually exclusive disciplines – too formal and too formalistic. In this short multi-part article, I would like to catalyse a reflection about the context that makes this intuition relevant again, and question what would Warburg’s project be if he were alive today. This will obviously be an excuse to introduce a few asides and to smudge some disciplinary boundaries of our own.

Warburg Tag Cloud

 

 

 

Part 1: Quantum Warburg

 

“By re-reading Warburg, it was realized that every page of his printed articles corresponds to 500 pages of manuscript, thousands of notes and hundreds of books. Slowly people became aware that Warburg must have produced one of the most fascinating archives and complex libraries ever done; and that his work in total was an unparalleled survey of collective memory and its various media.”

Mathias Bruhn – Aby Warburg (1866-1929): The Survival of an Idea.

 


Warburg’s project started with his attempt to bridge the gap between so-called “high” and “low” art, between classical art and popular cultural production. He understood that beyond pure aesthetics, all human cultural production related one way or another to some form of memory, from individual memory to collective memory that transcends time and space, history and geography, and he built a temple to this Mnemosyne: the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, or KBW.

The KBW was imagined as a non-classical library, where books and manuscripts, illustrations and photographs, were disposed in a dynamic ever-changing order, where connections and relationships emerged between volumes based on their position vis-à-vis one another at a particular moment (of time, of study…) more than on a top-down hierarchy.

Non-classical logic, issues of memory, flexible boundaries, relational meanings, dynamic interactions and emergent order… these are all themes at the heart of the Quantum Worldview. Had Warburg been influenced by the fathers of quantum theory nascent in the first decades of the 20th century?