The emergence of Benjamin’s dialectical image as a literary text, the theoretical writings of Warburg based on the constellations of his Atlas panels, and the arrival of fortuna in the drawings of Kentridge all share a relationship to a mode of ‘...archaeology,’ that Agamben states, ‘is the sole means of access to the present… As Michel Foucault has suggested, the investigation of the past is nothing but the shadow cast by an interrogation directed at the present, and on the following page,’ ... the only place in which the past can live is in the present.’ (Agamben, 2019, pp. 1–2) For Benjamin, the ‘shadow of the past’ was encapsulated in the 19th century Parisian Arcades, for Warburg the dynamograms of his ‘pathos formula,’ or the survival of antique images into the images that circulated in the society of his day, and for Kentridge the pages of out-of-date printed artifacts. In their different ways, the concerns and methods of each were dependent upon the ‘sign vehicle’ of a reflective potential space and physical place. These transitive, reflective, spaces and places, and the achievement of what Benjamin termed the ‘right distance’ and the ‘correct angle of vision,’ are what give rise to a sudden and unforeseen new constellation between past and present in the form of Benjamin's of dialectical image, Warburg’s dynamograms, and the arrival of fortuna in the drawings of Kentridge.
I am keenly aware that for reasons of space, we have only been able to provide a brief overview of aspects of the immensely complex ideas of both Benjamin and Warburg, but my aim has been to assign to the different modes of distance between past and present the common referent of sudden appearance and recognition of a new constellation made possible by each agent's use of reflective potential spaces and the different modes of semiotic concretization these gave rise to. In all three the right distance to their material is crucial because it is what gives rise to something that hitherto did not exist constituting a reversal of, and departure from ideas of creative works as pre-existent in the mind of the agent. I have attempted to show that in each case the materiality of reflective, potential space in the form of artifacts from the past radiate an indeterminate suggestiveness that through the activity of writing, or in the case of Kentridge drawing, allows something unforeseen to move into sudden focus.
There are three further research directions that come to mind. The first would be to discover and document parallel uses of the expendable surface of inscription by other artists and how they compare with the findings of the present paper. A second, albeit more overarching research direction, would be to pursue Agamben’s questioning of the pre-existence of the work in the artist’s mind by the documentation of artistic processes that take as their starting point an object or image in the outside world. A third research direction would be to delve more deeply than has been possible here into what Jan Patočka called ontological motion, or more precisely in the context of artistic and other practices the relationship between physical movement and actualization fundamental to discussions and research concerned with the mind-body relation.