Also, recalls an e-lit work titled “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein,” although it doesn’t quite exemplify the fullness of the ideas here.

http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/clark_wittgenstein.html

Cheers,
Mike

Tim mentioned Benjamin’s On the Concept of History and actually the German word ‘Konstellationen’ is commonly used in academic circles, especially historical ones. So much so that in Duden, the first meaning of Konstellation is, “an overall state which arises out of the meeting of various circumstances or relationships”. (In the OED there is a minor subsense of constellation which goes rather weakly, “a group of associated or similar people of things”.)

In the last two decades Konstellationen has been used in various contexts in German research. A major one is to describe the type of historical-philosophical research developed by Dieter Henrich in order to understand the complex set of influences which led to German Idealism developing out of the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century (http://bit.ly/aROB7z; http://bit.ly/9UFFsh). Another is Constellation Analysis (Konstellationsanalyse), which is an analytical method that acts as an interdisciplinary bridge in complex, technical research fields (http://bit.ly/9ney4k).

Enough of that. What is common among these is that a constellation represents a whole that emerges from the relationships between phenomena rather than from the individual phenomena themselves. Must these individual phenomena be distant in time like in the constellations of astronomy and Benjamin? Not necessarily. It is notable that Tim’s emphasis on mere appearance (or “lies”) is not present in these (post-Benjamin) German uses of constellational thinking. In fact for them it is the opposite. Constellational thinking is a way of getting at the truth: mapping the system of influences and relationships to deepen our understanding of the overall phenomenon.

So it seems there are two distinct ways of thinking about constellations: those involving phenomena which are actually distant in time but are brought together by one’s current vantage point; and those that involving phenomena that actually are interacting in the same time frame. Thinking about the second kind in terms of constellations may be truth revealing rather than a beautiful lie.

Even constellational thinking which brings together phenomena from different time frames may be truth revealing. This is because there really is an actual relationship between those things in any given moment that they are brought together to affect a single person. This kind of constellational thinking may not directly reveal truths about the phenomena involved; but indirectly, through truths about the psychology of the person doing the constellational thinking. A constellation of things from different time frames can reveal truths about the psychology of the person who is affected by them (think stars, perception; think history, thinking). These truths about a person’s psychology can in turn be used to reconsider the constellation and discover truths about it.

After all, Copernicus could only start from his perceptions of constellations, an arrangement of things which, from his vantage point, stood in a particular relation to one other.

My blog about constellational thinking in a social psychological context is forthcoming here: joelhooper.tumblr.com

The idea that we see through a glass, darkly, is not new, but I think the idea that it was a useful and necessary way of seeing is new, and was pioneered by Vonnegut. Each of us sees such a slender slice of this stupendous universe, for such a short time, and augments that sparse understanding by reading 26-letter encoded linear descriptions from the perspective of other views through dark glasses dotted through time…

Mind-bending.

I’ve got a pet theory that one reason Pound’s approach and Benjamin’s seem so similar, even though they pretty clearly didn’t (and couldn’t) know much about each other, is that they both got it from Jacob Burckhardt, who more or less invented it in his Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), albeit in a much less fragmentary, more essayistic style.