Microblindness and Blindsight

“Contemplation of the sky is the grace and curse of humanity,” Aby Warburg once wrote.1 His remark opens up an abyss. Covering seventy-nine panels, Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, a classically modernist experiment in fragmentation and juxtaposition, aggregated images through complex associative procedures to recuperate the details of primary emotional expressions. Warburg's cataloguing system was labile and enigmatic—and, like Freudian dream work, driven by visual detail and lateral conceptual linkage. Georges Didi-Huberman has called this archive a knowledge-montage.2 Seen today in a more parallactic fashion, however, Warburg's Atlas presents not just a hypertext avant-la-lettre but also a remarkable attempt to integrate affect into iconology.