We have no problems with using the term ‘culture’ in such phrases as ‘Polish culture’,
‘German,  French,  British, Japanese  culture’. In  the  sense assigned to the  concept  of culture  by Johann  Gotffried  Herder  at the end of the 18th century – culture  is a way of life developed by some community (people,  nation).  But already in the case of the European  culture,  problem  emerges.  This is fully justified as for Herder  the  major element of culture, making it distinctive against other cultures, was language. Is the traditional  Herder’s  concept  of culture  (can  be called sociological one)  still useful in the contemporary  world where the dominant  figures are emigrants,  refugees, tourists, urban wonderers, players?   Should not we look for some other concept of culture assuming, as a starting  point,  that  the  concept  of culture  is not  merely a descriptive concept but also an operational  one and therefore  has a significant impact upon our perception  of the world and our activity in the world? In each culture we can identify three  levels of enculturation:  the deep level which naturalizes  certain ways of thinking and behaving; social level – when the culture is experienced by individuals as symbolic violence; and  finally the  level which depends  on individual choices, sometimes called a taste. This third level can be called art in opposition to culture. Art stands for whatever unique and original; culture – whatever collective and traditional.  Art is the engine of culture. This dynamic aspect of culture was not reflected in Herder’s concept of culture, while this is the  most important  feature  of today’s  global culture  prevailing in large cities where languages, habits and religions mix, where all, including native inhabitants, feel somewhat  deprived  of their  roots  and  forced  to search  for new roots,  and  who become radicant  people – artists who teach us how to live in today’s culture.
 

In  his remarks  on the  Western  culture,  Theodor  Lessing pays much attention  to a problem  of Western  people’s attitude  towards history. His critical judgments of the culture are usually compared with Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought (whose philosophy exerted much influence on Lessing’s writings). However, it seems that Lessing’s remarks on a part which history plays in the Western culture may be related  also to a theory of a later  thinker  – Mircea  Eliade,  presenting  mythology’s  role  of imposing a definite attitude  towards history on a society. What  is to be remarked,  is that  Lessing’s ideas allow a conclusion that the source of the Western people’s attitude  towards history, themselves and the surrounding reality – may be searched in myths and religion that underlie  their culture. That is because Lessing perceives the Western culture’s attitude towards history as based on a sense-and-purpose-seeking social mythology, derived from Christian  inspirations.  This conclusion, derived from his writings, is related  to Mircea Eliade’s theory of “coping with” history in the traditional conceptions of the eternal-return and also in Judaic and Christian  heritage.

For many years, Aby Warburg had been widely known and unread,  and it was only in the 1980s that the situation radically changed. The present paper addresses the issue of Aby Warburg’s present-day popularity. The scholar turned his attention  to tiny, heterogeneous   details  that  flawed the  purity  and  unity of works of art  (inanimate accessory forms, draperies  and  hair,  or  figures composed  all’antica).  An  interest  in margins is characteristic of the postmodern  way of thinking, one sensitive to otherness, to the deconstruction  of seemingly coherent narrations  and microhistories. Ernst Gombrich emphasised the fact that Warburg was a man of the nineteenth  century. The key evidence of that was to be his concept of culture, derived directly from the evolutionism. Yet,  the  Warburgian  vision of culture  cannot  be understood  merely as a dead, historical idea. The notions of Pathosformel and Nachleben der Antike embrace problems that are fundamental  for all aspects of cultural studies. Warburg investigated, how old values are  transformed  into  new ones.  Nowadays memory, as a social and cultural phenomenon,  is one of the most important  subjects of research, whereas before World War II this problem, with the exception of the research of Warburg and Halbwachs, was hardly explored. Therefore  the concepts of the Hamburg scholar are still interesting and inspiring also in that regard. Additionally, the expansion of the scope of scholarly interest  to embrace  all manifestations  of visuality is in keeping  with the  postmodern pictorial turn or iconic turn. German  Bildwissenschaft, too, grows out directly from the ideas of Warburg. The scholarly discipline pursued by the Hamburg intellectual may be called ‘cultural seismography’: while finding in old and contemporary paintings symptoms of shakes contained in the recurrent  Pathosformel filled with ever new contents, he discerned the imminent threats,  and from the height of his observatory tower – that is, the refuge of his vast library – he was able to pass the diagnosis on.

Powszechnie uznaje się, że między myślą Aby’ego Warburga i Waltera Benjamina ist- nieją rozliczne powinowactwa. Obaj są zainteresowani  pamięcią kulturową, ale analogię można zarysować także między metodą  dialektyczną Benjamina  a ikonologią Warburga, którą nazywał „ikonolgią interwału”l. Pod wieloma względami renesans  zainteresowania Warburgiem  można  w istocie zawdzięczać wciąż rosnącej  roli Benjamina  jako krytyka kultury. Ujawnia się w tym pewien kontrast w odniesieniu do sytuacji sprzed siedemdzie- sięciu lat, kiedy Benjamin  – dostrzegając  brak  możliwości realizacji tradycyjnej kariery akademickiej – szukał dojścia do wpływowego kręgu badaczy związanych z Kulturwissens- chaftliche Bibliothek Warburga.  Motywacją zakończonych niepowodzeniem  starań  Benja- mina był nie tylko potencjał prywatnej instytucji, ale stanowiło ją również poczucie pew- nej wspólnoty celów. Podobieństwa  między dwoma badaczami można nakreślić na wiele sposobów, zamierzam zatem skupić się na jednym wybranym aspekcie ich myśli: propo- nowanej przez obu autorów analizie nowoczesności, a zwłaszcza na roli pojęcia mimesis. Jak pokażę, ich ujęcia nowoczesności cechują znaczące podobieństwa, nie tylko tam, gdzie idzie o istotną ambiwalencję wobec „postępu” osiągniętego w tej epoce. W przypadku obu autorów źrodeł tych pokrewieństw można szukać w XIX-wiecznym zainteresowaniu teorią empatii i mimetyzmem. Rozpocznę zatem od tego zagadnienia, by w następnej kolejności przyjrzeć się roli, jaką odgrywa ono u Warburga  i Benjamina.
 

21st century. Every part of the article referes to different manner of using landscape according to current  cultural needs. In accordance with Warburg’s thesis no distinction was made between paintings being included in order  of the so-called highbrow art and images taken  from  mass media  and  popular  culture.  Such an  approach  enabled  to underline  general accompanying purposes for image production  both in historical ages as well as in our  times. The  article  emphasizes  the  ceaseless necessity of the  human kind for presenting  its most immediate  environment,  willingness to keep or to create determined  images of cities, as well as various forms of using landscapes arisen currently or in the past. Being based on a method implemented  by Warburg that is, juxtapositing various images together within individual boards, the article shows its possible applications enabled  by new technologies  in order  to bulid a hiperlinkes  structures  which connect images not only within one board but also in between them. It results in production  of hyperlinked  arrangements  that  once again confirm tha  fact that  Aby Warburg  should be perceived not only as the father  of modern  art history, but also as the founder  of visual studies.

The article investigates the discourse of contemporary visual culture studies informed by the paradigmatic  shift in the field of humanities,  known as pictorial turn.  Drawing upon  the  concepts  outlined  by William J. Mitchell and Mieke Bal, the  author  argues against the  possibility of ahistorical  simplifications that  might occur when thinking in terms of pictorial turn comes into a growing prominence  within the discipline. Certain comparison  is drafted  as a warning; employing the  field of visuality as the  universal theoretical  basis, without taking into account the specificity of the historical experience, would be parallel to the poststructuralist  hegemony of textuality. Similar argument addresses the examples of discourse on visuality built upon models of primarily textual analysis. Therefore,  the  author  emphasizes  the  necessity to  reach  out  to  the  earlier modern theory on visual culture proposed  by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, who were investigating the themes (or emplying the methods) that has been largely overlooked and / or shifted to the margins.

The article presents  the evolution from Kunstwissenschaft to Kulturwissenschaft was included in the project of Aby Warburg in The Anthropology of Image by Hans Belting and Visual Culture Studies. The author tries to find new research areas of visual culture. In Belting’s sensibly the project of Warburg is the basis for much of his interest  in the images than in the case of other  art historians.
The context of evolution from Kunstwissenschaft to Kulturwissenschaft can to find in
the  social formulation  of visual culture  and  the  social theory  of visuality, which are symptoms the paradigm of phono-logo-centrism.  However, this paradigm to point out the direction of human recognition: from visual forms and talk and theorise and achieve understanding  of those forms though mental  constructs.
According to described tendencies, the project of Warburg is appeared  in the development  of visual culture  studies, which emerge  from the  postmodern  reflection on the  history of art  (visual studies).  The evolution from Kunstwissenschaft to Kulturwissenschaft returns in terms of the interdisciplinary study of visual culture (visual culture  studies).
 

The  essay, which is a part  of Málek’s book Modern Melancholy. Allegory, Narrator, Death, is an attempt  to analyze and develop the concept of allegory by Benjamin in the context of his interests  in fashion, seen as a main phenomena  of cultural  modernity. Málek starts with describing Benjamin’s metaphor  of allegory as a ruin and compares it with a similar concept  by Georg  Simmel. Then  he appeals  to the famous definition of “modern  beauty” by Baudelaire  (Benjamin’s favourite poet)  which was essential for the concept of modern allegory, especially in Passagenwerke, although Benjamin emphasized rather  the negative (temporal,  passing, destructive) element of this notion. As the author  shows, there  is a lot of passages in the modern  literature  (ex. in Kafka, Mann, Rilke, Bernhard),  where fashion as such, or particular  piece of clothes (as they decay or come out of fashion) play a role of allegories of the time, death, and modern misery. Málek writes also about  another  figure of modernity  in Benjamin’s writings – a woman, often described as a prostitute or even a bitch, as fragments from Passagenwerke, as well as from Proust and Kafka show. For Baudelaire  and Benjamin a prostitute  and a prostitution  are  the  allegory of modern  writer  who is forced  to sell his works and compete  on  the  market  not  only  with  other  artists,  but  also  with  rising  popular culture.

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924–1929) – enigmatically defined by its author  as “a ghost story for truly adult people” – was an archive of approximately one thousand photographs  presented  on forty black canvases, presenting mainly motifs of Western culture, which guided that scholar’s research over the years. Quite clearly, however, Bilderatlas was something more than a simple collection of images. Mnemosyne, like other Warburg’s works, especially his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek  in Hamburg, may appear  to us as a mnemonic system created  for private use – one similar to mnemotechnical theaters projected  in the sixteenth  century  by Giordano Bruno  and Giulio  Camillo.  This dynamic topographic structure may be related  to the  category of Zwischenraum  (interval),  which Warburg  used in his project  of “nameless science”. One may read here about an “iconology of intervals” as a “psychology of oscillation between  the position  of images and signs”. Warburg  clearly presents  here  an idea of inter-media basis for his cultural-historical practice. In Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction was not  merely  illustrative  but  offered  a general  medium  to which all the  figures  (different types of objects  such as paintings,  reliefs  and  drawings)  were reduced  before being arranged on black panel canvases. For this reason some scholars, among them Benjamin Buchloh, drew a parallel between Mnemosyne and the development of photomontage  and photo-archive practices in the 1920s. But it is probably  the  cinema,  as posited  by Philippe  -Alaine  Michaud,  that  may seem  today as a medium most deeply resonating with Warburg’s project. When Warburg  was developing Mnemosyne, he probably discovered  his own “concept  of montage”,  which was capable of transforming hieroglyphs and static figures into live motion and action. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinema (1988–1998) one may find a parallel example of how filmic medium  can  explore  its own past  through  a juxtaposition  of images, montage of collisions and analogies. Video serves here the same purpose as photography in the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In montage appropriation and re-appropriation of images and  worlds, Godard  developed  an  unique  project  of the  cartography  of history and memory. However, while the past is metamorphosed here in the present – all the images begin to signify also cinema’s death.  For  Godard  the  mnemotechnic  art  of quotation refers, most of all, to the temporal depth and the death of the cinemamatography,  which is called by the name Auschwitz.

Georges Didi-Huberman jest jednym z najbardziej oryginalnych historyków sztuki ostatnich lat i to tej statecznej dziedzinie humanistyki dedykuje swoją książkę Obraz płynny. Georges Didi-Huberman i dyskurs historii sztuki Andrzej  Leśniak. Oryginalność myśli Didi-Hubermana polega jednak na tym, że nie mieści się w ramach narzuconych historii sztuki. Autor  Obrazów mimo wszystko celowo i nieustannie  przekracza, narusza i  nadweręża  jej granice, czym nierzadko  naraża  się na krytykę wyznawców „kanonicznych”. Dlaczego tak się dzieje?