Warburg's Trans-disciplinarity: the iconographic and technical apparatuses

Aby Warburg is a key example of a scholar who developed a trans-disciplinary methodology from within the field of art history that by the end the end of the 19c had become a discrete discipline within German universities and later in a wider European and American context. The nature of trans-disciplinarity that was a stake for Warburg is evident in the name he attributed to his research centre that he established in Hamburg in 1925, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, roughly translated as the Warburg Library of Cultural Studies. His interest in fields such as philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics and fashion were directed at forming a comprehensive sense of cultural analysis. This would not just offer up localised contextual frameworks from which to analysis specific works of art but would map panoramic temporal spaces and attempt to understand major cultural transitions. For Warburg, this was most famously the case in the transition from the pagan to the renaissance serving his interest in examining pagan culture's nachleben; its survival, after-life or metamorphosis, within the renaissance.
For Warburg Nachleben was in part an engrammatic process, acting like biological vestiges, acting as gestures to ward off danger, inscribed in images within ever unfolding contexts. At the root of this is the iconological imperative. An image detaches from its originary support and context and enters a topological space that Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas essentially attempted to map.
Trans-disciplinarity here is at once a question of how different disciplines can equally act upon such images and topological schema but is also dependent upon how successive technical apparatuses enable and define transcription, delocalisation and the mobilisation of images. Warburg's methodology offers clues as to how trans-discplinarity resides within an entanglement between the iconographic and technical apparatuses and which this paper will aim to discuss.