The Angel of Contingency
Daniel Barbiero
June 2020
A New Angel
It isn’t very large. At 31.8 x 24.2 centimeters, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil-transfer drawing produced in 1920, is only a little bigger than a standard 8.5” x 11” piece of paper. Nor is the picture’s image particularly elaborate. It consists of a single figure apparently floating in a void. The figure is almost a doodle—a line drawing of an oddly hybrid creature with human and avian features.
The title of the piece identifies the figure as an angel—a “new angel.” Its novelty consists in part in its strangeness. Klee’s angel defies popular conventions of what an angel is supposed to look like. It isn’t especially elegant or graceful, or endowed with the slender ethereality one might expect of an angel. Instead, we find a rather strangely proportioned, thinly-rendered creature with a blocky physique facing us with a bland expression and eyes looking slightly to the side and past us. The wings are thrown upward; they are thick and resemble arms more than anything, particularly since they culminate in what clearly appear to be hands held open and flat beside the figure’s head. The legs are unmistakably bird legs; a curving, vaguely triangular form at the bottom of the angel’s torso could be either the end of a skirted garment or a bird’s tail. The angel’s hair is tightly curled, giving him a curious resemblance to Harpo Marx, whose time was yet to come when Klee’s work was created. And unlike the silent Marx the open-mouthed angel appears to have been caught in the act of speaking. This is the most angelic thing about him.
Minor Transposed to Major
By virtually any standard, Angelus Novus would be considered a minor work. But its peculiar history of ownership has made it perhaps one of Klee’s best-known and most-discussed works. The picture was purchased in 1921 by essayist Walter Benjamin, for whom it inspired a famous paragraph in his set of aphoristic, fragmentary “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which were completed shortly before his death by suicide in 1940. The circumstances surrounding the theses’ writing and completion gave them a poignancy and pathos that couldn’t help but reflect back onto the interpretation Benjamin made of Klee’s angel. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus Novus was the Angel of History, a horrified figure turning his back to the future and facing the past in order to bear witness to History, which Benjamin characterized as “one single catastrophe.” For Benjamin, whom many saw as a martyr to that same History, Klee’s almost childishly depicted angel turns deeply tragic, its insubstantial form taking on the weight of History as a leaden, recurring nightmare of violence and destruction in an eternal cycle—an eschatology without an exit.
Although Benjamin’s reading of the Klee drawing was highly influential, it represented an arbitrary flight of the imagination. There’s nothing in the picture to suggest that the angel is reacting to a disaster; his posture and expression don’t seem to signal horror, and the surrounding void he occupies gives no evidence of the wreckage wrought by human action taking place in time. Instead, Klee’s angel seems to have served as a kind of open variable that could take any value, or a blank page on which could be written any narrative. The picture’s very sketchiness could be argued to have done much to license an imaginative interpretation. The angel is a figure without a context—ironically, in light of Benjamin’s reading, it is a figure without a visible history. He is lacking any surrounding objects or depicted events or supporting symbols or any other kind of iconography that could establish some sense of a narrative. There is nothing in the picture except a strange being that itself seems strangely balanced between avian and anthropic forms. This isn’t to say that Klee’s image shuts down any attempt at interpretation; it’s clearly labeled as an angel, and is shown doing something that is hinted at from its posture and expression. Look at him and he looks back, at once obliquely and absently. Most significantly, though, his mouth is open, as if he’s about to speak or has been caught in mid-speech.
What Is New Is What Is Old
In depicting his angel as speaking or about to speak, Klee at least tacitly acknowledges the angel’s traditional function as messenger. This function is encoded in the DNA of the word “angel”: etymologically it derives from the Greek “ángelos” (“άγγελος”)—literally, “messenger.” By itself, the word’s Greek prehistory implies nothing of the divine, but in naming the function it implies a relationship of intermediation. The messenger is a kind of third term between two others, an intermediary or go-between relating the message’s sender to its receiver. This intermediary function speaks directly to the matter of the bridging nature of the angel’s status as a divinity; it is precisely as a divine being that the angel mediates between the human and divine worlds. The carrier of messages from the divine to the human serves as a bridge anchored in the former, and it is this anchor that provides the ground for the possibility of the angel’s function as messenger.
The angel as we know it has significant precedent in, and to an extent is prefigured by, the Greek figures of Hermes and Iris. Both served as the gods’ heralds and were given the title of άγγελος; they set the template for the angel as a means of transmission between two worlds. A more direct prefiguration of the angel may be found in the daemon which, by contrast to the gods Hermes and Iris was considered a minor or lesser deity. The daemon was a sometimes ill-defined element in Classical ontotheology, but as a lesser divinity it did play a mediating role between the human and the divine. As it appeared from Homer forward, the daemon was something of a multivalent being. A daemon could represent a god’s intervention in human affairs when undertaken in a certain obscuring manner, or it could represent an honored person’s status after death. From Plato onward, though, the daemon begins to look more specifically angelic as it takes on the role of a guardian or tutelary being. In Book X of the Republic, Plato describes the daemon as a kind of benevolent bridge between the human and divine; the third century Neoplatonist Plotinus adds the crucial point that these intermediary beings speak with voices.
Klee’s figure of the Angelus Novus, with its brusquely outlined form, lacks volume and heft. Its bodily insubstantiality recalls Plotinus’ bodily insubstantial yet still material beings. If the daemon represents the prehistory of the angel—if the daemon is, in effect, the reverse to the angel’s obverse, a reverse made a reverse precisely for the historical and theological reasons that have been buried or elided–one can follow Klee’s line and imagine it connecting the angel to its daemonic ancestor. Klee’s image seems to illustrate the outcome of a process of refiguration and distortion through which genealogy is both obscured and carried forward in still-recognizable form. The very pseudo-primitive way in which the Angelus Novus is portrayed is in effect an invitation to recall the angel’s origins and to see it as one in a complementary pair of inseparable elements that both illuminate and obscure each other. What is new about the Angelus Novus is what is old: the traces of its history made visible.
The Angel’s Alterity
As an intermediary between the human and divine worlds, the angel bears a functional resemblance to the oracle. Not only are both figures purported to be go-betweens, but the kinds of mediation both provide are closely akin. They both serve as channels of communication linking the two worlds; specifically, as conduits of directed messages. But where the oracle is caught in an ontological dilemma—she is human and thus by nature is limited by the finitude of human mortality while being at the same time at least provisionally and temporarily granted a vision of the god’s perspective of eternity—the angel is not. It is a divine being, even if of a lower or inferior order. It may share in some human traits, but in the final calculation it is other than human. Its relationship to the human world is one of alterity in spite of its being, like the daemon, susceptible to human impulses and affections.
The Angelus Novus, with its strange mixture of human and avian features, casts the angel’s alterity with hybrid qualities peculiar to Klee’s way of imagining them. His angel embodies its alterity in an explicit, if—assuming that the avian takes on a symbolic weight to the extent that bird flight is analogous to the upward pull of the divine or the intelligible—indirect, manner. In fact its peculiarity is its alterity. In its ontological undecidability, in its neither-this-nor-that, it is both itself—whatever we may think “itself” is—and not itself. Neither human nor avian, neither corporeal nor ethereal. Like an angel or daemon it seems to be pulled in both directions: upward, by its outspread wings, or downward, to settle on its bird feet.
An Annunciation
Its ontological strangeness aside, the action the Angelus Novus is engaged in is clear. He is speaking, or is about to speak. Does his face provide any clues as to the nature of the speech? Possibly. His expression seems to signal preoccupation or absorption in something other than the interlocutor presumably standing before him (standing, conveniently enough, in the place where the viewer is standing). At least it seems that way, given his posture of facing the viewer/interlocutor full on while directing his eyes slightly to the side—out of modesty, timidity, or an attentiveness to what he’s saying, we don’t know. But it does look like the kind of expression someone making a recitation might wear. We could reasonably speculate that he’s making an announcement—and it’s true that Klee’s angel, with his bland, open-mouthed look, bears more of a resemblance to the Angel of the Annunciation than to a horrified Angel of History.
What is it that Klee’s angel could be announcing? We don’t know, and it’s really impossible to say. The rest of the picture provides no context, and therefore no clues. In this secular age we could imagine that he’s announcing that there is no announcement other than news of the withdrawal of the divine and the abandonment of human being to its own care and its own meaning. With the withdrawal of the metaphysical ground of the divine—or any other transcendent order, for that matter—the human self-understanding of its place in the world would be a matter of self-generated meaning. Or rather of meaning self-conscious of its self-generation and thus aware of its situation within the moving current of ongoing interpretation.
The Ground Is an Abyss
Whatever the specific message we may want to attribute to Klee’s angel, its epiphenomenal or meta-meaning will be marked by a certain incommensurability. Incommensurability may not be the meaning of the message itself, but it is an inseparable quality of that meaning, a meaning-within-the-meaning that the message brings along with it like a stone within a fruit. This incommensurability just is a consequence of the angel’s ontological status vis-à-vis human being. Divine beings, even of a lesser or inferior kind, would be presumed to participate in what could be characterized as a pure example of the so-called metaphysics of (epistemological) presence in that the intelligible forms or essences of things would be immediately present to them. This presence just is a consequence of their access to the intelligible world—the world of the pure universal or enduring Being in which beings are known in their fullness and actual reality, undiminished by decay in time or by the other imperfections inherent in the material world of transience and appearance. This transcendent world is, like the divine of which it is supposed to be a manifestation, the condition for the possibility of the angel’s being. It is, in other words, one of the fundamental rules constituting any framework in which such divinities can play a role; it is by that token the ground and source of their function as messenger or herald. Intelligible form is located nowhere in the material world itself but nevertheless pervades it everywhere, like a higher dimension imperceptible to the three dimensional world of everyday human habitation. It is through the ambassadorship of the angel that this world discloses itself as an opening out of itself to the human world—an opening that is transmitted with the angel’s message.
At the same time, though, the content of this intelligible world is ineffable and incommunicable within the limits of human language. Limit is a feature of human language; meaning often escapes it, communicative intentions may be in part opaque to it, and in any event it cannot claim direct contact with any purported extra-linguistic essences. In contrast to the pure Idea or essence, human language doesn’t point directly to naturally occurring categories but instead organizes and simplifies reality in often arbitrary or pragmatic ways. Thus what the angel presumably is privy to is incommensurable with the language he would be compelled to use in communicating it to the human recipient. There is consequently a communicative gap here that cannot be bridged except with provisional materials and partial results. The point at which the angel’s message enters human language is thus a point of slippage and expediency, of inconsistency and coarse reduction, of incompletion and partiality. To the extent that the meaning of the angel’s message is purported to be divinely inspired and to have originated in the intelligible world, his annunciation announces nothing so much as its incompleteness or inadequacy to itself.
Thus if Klee’s angel’s eyes are averted it may be out of embarrassment over the realization that the bridge between the divine and the human that he represents is built over an abyss.
The Angel of Contingency
Klee’s angel speaks, but as he does so, does he know that his message is a compromise between the Ideal nature of its originary intention and the arbitrary and partial nature of its vehicle in human language? That, as a compromise, it is compromised as well? And would it matter if he did? What if, instead of taking him as a symbol of language’s ability or inability to transmit a communicative intention we take him instead as a symbol of language in its contingency—in its use at this given moment, in this given situation? Granted, it’s highly unlikely that Klee’s small drawing carries any such intended meaning. But it just is in the nature of a symbol to point beyond itself, to meanings both intended and—sometimes as in cases like this, where the iconography can reasonably be seen to license it—penumbral.
In simultaneously heralding the presence of the messenger and greeting the recipient of the message the annunciation, as the initiating moment of a relationship between interlocutors, is the exemplary moment in which the angel’s function as intermediary is focused and dramatized. For if it is the function of the angel to act as a vessel of communication, he must first make himself known by calling out to the recipient of the message and in doing so open up a channel of transmission. The seemingly simple greeting represents a complex moment within the communicative relationship: at once a confrontation and an acknowledgement, it initiates an encounter that opens a mutually defined space shared by the bearer and the receiver of the message that is about to follow.
The greeting is only one moment—the first moment—within the larger event of speech that it initiates. The instance of speech is a contingent, essentially existential relationship between interlocutors taking place on the ground of language. Speech is an event of language, embodied in the instance of speaking, as well as a conveyance of meaning; by virtue of its being such an event it creates an opening in which the speaker and listener can coexist as possibilities for each other: possibilities of understanding or misunderstanding, of concord or discord, of cooperation or opposition, of concern or indifference. All of these possibilities are structured by the contingent circumstances of each party to the event, who stand over against and with each other within this common opening. Over and beyond its constituent elements of intention, meaning and reception, the event of speech, and by extension of language, is about this communicative relationship entered into by these participants.
In portraying the angel in the act of speaking, Klee’s Angelus Novus exemplifies and emblematizes the taking place of language as the opening to a purely contingent, existential event that both surpasses and encompasses the apparently simple act of transmitting a message. To the extent that he can serve as such an emblem, Klee’s angel reveals himself to be the Angel of Contingency.
◊
Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases include Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass, Non-places with Cristiano Bocci & their most recent collaboration, Wooden Mirrors.
©2024 ARTEIDOLIA