Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany The Chatter of the Visible "The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany has all the intellectual makings of becoming a major go-to and reference for Wei- mar culture studies written in English. It is one of the theoretically most ac- complished studies in that field, which will simultaneously fulfill a comple- mentary need for more historically oriented scholarly work in the area and era. This is the case for literary scholarship as well as for culture and visual studies, to all of which this book is of eminent importance." -Rainer Rumold, Northwestern University "Patrizia McBride's seminal study examines the relationship between mon- tage and narrative in Weimar Germany. In its masterful analyses, the book provides a detailed presentation of the various facets of montage narratives as an interface of technology, perception, and materiality. In doing so, it devel- ops a theory of narrative that spans different media and discourses and is thus pathbreaking for Literary Studies oriented toward the history of knowledge and media studies." -Elisabeth Strowick, Johns Hopkins University "Patrizia McBride's study impressively complexifies our understanding of montage. Without simply rejecting its modernist conceptualizations as a pri- marily antinarrative force of rupture, the readings presented show how in response to the contemporary crisis of narrative sensemaking, Weimar au- thors and artists profiled montage as an innovative, phenomenological means of narration." -Claudia Breger, Indiana University "Reconstructing the complex ecology of old genres and new media in the interwar years, McBride develops a striking vision of montage as a practice of storytelling native to the modern technological surround. Against one-sided interpretations of montage as a strategy of deconstruction and protest, The Chatter of the Visible reminds us that every montage cut also entails a suture, and that political interventions can be found not just in critique but in con- nection and correspondence as well." -Devin Fore, Princeton University "This is by far the best book written on the topic of montage and narrative in Weimar culture so far. It establishes historical and theoretical parameters one will have to work with in the future. McBride states that the aesthetic means of montage appeared as a most fitting correlate to the multiple traumas wo- ven into the historical fabric of Weimar Germany." -Paul Michael Lutzeler, Washington University The Chatter of the Visible Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany Patrizia C. McBride University of Michigan Press 9 Ann Arbor Copyright © zoi6 by Patrizia C. McBride All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and io8 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America O Printed on acid-free paper 2019 2018 2017 2oi6 4 3 2 I A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McBride, Patrizia C., author. Title: The chatter of the visible : montage and narrative in Weimar Germany / Patrizia C. McBride. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [zo16] 1 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 20150319931 ISBN 9780472073030 (hardcover : acid-free paper)1 ISBN 9780472053032 (pbk.:acid-free paper)1 ISBN 9780472121700 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Photography-Germany-History-1918-1933. Classification: LCC TR73 .M43 zo16 1 DDC 770.943-dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031993 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Humboldt Foundation for a generous grant that allowed me to spend summer 2o1o conducting research at various sites in Berlin. At the Free University I am especially indebted to Peter Sprengel, whose help and advice has been invaluable in completing this project. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ralf Burmeister and Christian Tagger at the Berlinische Galerie for their support in accessing the Galerie's holdings on Hannah Hoch. I am also grateful to the staff at the Bauhaus Archiv and the Staatsbib- liothek in Berlin for their help and assistance. This side of the ocean I would like to thank Tim Shipe, curator of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa Libraries, for his help and kindness over the years. Special thanks also go to the anonymous readers who reviewed the book for the Uni- versity of Michigan Press. Their generous, incisive feedback was crucial in helping me sharpen central arguments in this study. Last but not least, I have tremendous gratitude for the colleagues and graduate students in the De- partment of German Studies at Cornell University. Their conversations and intellectual engagement have sustained my work in countless ways, not least by reminding me of how rewarding and fun it can be to work together on a common undertaking. Two chapters of this book have appeared in earlier versions. A shorter incarnation of chapter S was published as "Narrative Resemblance: Weimar Germany's Photography and the Modernist Photobook of Hannah Hoch;" New German Critique 115, 39.1 (Winter zoiz): 169-97. A version of chapter 6 appeared as "The Game of Meaning: Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters' Merz" in MODERNISM/Modernity 14.2 (April 2007): 249-72. Parts of chapter 6 have also appeared in "Montage and Violence in Weimar Culture: Kurt Schwitters' Reassembled Individuals" in Violence, Culture, Aesthetics: Germany,1789-1938, ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engel- vi " Acknowledgments stein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2oII): 245-65. I thank the publishers for grant- ing permission to include these materials. Every effort has been made to find the copyright holders of the images reproduced in this book. . I dedicate this book to Brent and Giovanni.,Amori miei, grazie. Contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction I 1 " Weimar-Era Montage: Perception, Expression, Storytelling 14 2 " The Narrative Restitution of Experience: Walter Benjamin's Storytelling 41 3 " Storytelling in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Benjamin on Film and Montage 62 4 " Narrating in Three Dimensions: LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy's "Vision in Motion" 83 5 " Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook III 6 " Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters 148 Conclusion: Montage after Weimar 178 Notes 183 Works Cited 21 Index 231  List of Illustrations Hannah H6ch, The Multi-Millionaire, in Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film (1967; 19 25, 1927) Hannah H6ch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919). Photomontage and collage on paper 17 John Heartfield, "Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages!" A.L.Z. 9.6 (1930) 23 American tire advertisement, from LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film (1967; 1925, 1927) 94 LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy, advertisement for a garden exhibition (1930), in Rasch and Rasch, eds., Gefesselter Blick 96 LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy, first and second two-page spread from Dynamic of the Metropolis, in Painting Photography Film (1967; 1925, 1927) 100, 102 From Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, From Material to Architecture (1929) 109 Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis, advertisement for metal containers (1930), in Rasch and Rasch, eds., GefesselterBlick 120 Albert Renger-Patzsch, selected photographs from 123-127, Die Welt ist schin (1928) 132-133 Hannah H6ch, Deutsches Mdchen (1930). Photomontage and collage on paper 136 Page from Hannah H6ch, Album (1933-34). Photomontage 139 Two-page spread from Hannah H6ch, Album (1933-34). Photomontage 142 Two-page spread from Hannah H6ch, Album (1933-34). Photomontage 143 x " List of Illustrations Hannah Hdch, Album, final two-page spread (13-3) Photograph '45 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Oil and mixed media 157 Kurt Schwitters, Mz 232 Miss Blanche (1923). Collage 159 Kurt S chwitters, selections from "S chacko," in lerz 2,i (19 31) 166-168 Introduction One of the most striking pictures featured in L aszl6 Moholy-Nagy's Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film, 1925-27) is without a doubt Hannah Hdch's The Multi-Millionaire, from 1923. Tucked in Moholy's exten- sive compendium of the new visual modes of expression made possible by photography and film in the first decades of the twentieth century, Hdch's photomontage has an eye-popping quality that well documents her gift for laying bare the conventions of contemporary visual media and debunking gender and class stereotypes with compositions of uncommon virtuosity and mordant wit. At first sight the image evokes an unhinged world made of in- tersecting, jagged shapes and objects. The eye of a man staring out of the picture helps to anchor the viewer's wondering gaze. His truncated face-the image features only half of his frontal portrait-towers over an incongru- ously diminutive body clad in a formal suit. At his right-hand side another elegantly dressed man is also missing part of his head, his face appearing in an abridged profile. The men's silhouettes, which form the image's vertical axis, protrude out of a backdrop comprising incongruously scaled objects. A bird's-eye view of a factory compound, the image's horizontal axis, is placed against an oversized tire whose tread serves as a lane for a toy-proportioned truck. The men are striding atop the aerial shot of a fairground complex that also features monumental buildings and a stadium. Their heads are set against two gigantic double-barrel shotguns with open firing chambers. One of them holds a large metal tool, which visually echoes other mechanic objects scat- tered across the picture. Some elements-the men's heads, the barrel of one gun, the squat factory building-project out of the circle formed by the rounded shape of the composition, summoning a centrifugal movement that visually counteracts the picture's boundedness and endows it with tension. At the same time, the larger fragments function as visual signposts that an- 'The multi-millionaire' Photomontage: HANNAH HOCH The dual countenance of the ruler. 106 Hannah Hoch, ihe Multi-Millionaire, in Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photogra- phy Film, 1925, 1917, trans. Janct Scligman (London: Lund Humnphrcys, 1969). (Copyright 20N Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /VG Bild!-Kunst, Bonn.) Introduction * 3 chor and direct the gaze as it roams the picture plane. They provide spatial coordinates for connecting one point to the other and piecing together a story, thus turning the image into a puzzle of sorts whose fragments promise to make sense if properly matched.1 By presenting elements in close proximity within an anti-illusionistic space, the image compels the viewer to actively attribute meaning to objects that have been yanked out of their familiar environments. These objects function as bearers of a meaning that is foisted onto them. For instance, the metal rod dangling from the hand of the man on the right defies what would be a conventional reading of the object as a work tool. Its association with the elegantly dressed figure and the menacing guns rather makes it look like an improper weapon, conjuring the threat of violence. When read in conjunc- tion with the verbal caption, the picture seems to take aim at the ruthlessness of industrial magnates who blithely tramp over the urban environment they exploit, their willingness to use violence symbolized by the outsized guns sticking out of their heads. The image tells this story by compelling viewers to forge a path through the seemingly incongruent composition, indeed, to re- store a measure of congruence to it by ascribing meaning to the fragments encountered along this path in an allegorical procedure that treats each ele- ment as the component part of an emblem. In so doing Hdch's allegorical composition challenges those contemporaries who celebrated the use of photography for its ability to represent experience in an objective fashion. As Bertolt Brecht once noted, photography's exact reproduction of the visible surface of things does not necessarily provide objective information about a given state of affairs, and Hdch's allegorical manipulation of photographic fragments seems to make just this point.2 This reading of Hdch's image well summarizes the ways in which the cut- ting and pasting of montage has been viewed within the broader horizon of Weimar Germany. The Dadaist iconoclasm that marked the onset of Ger- many's short-lived democracy made of montage a convenient umbrella term for practices of disarticulation and recomposition that defied established canons of representation and media boundaries while registering the trans- formative impact that photography and film exerted on the media landscape of the early 192os. Especially the startling disfiguration of avant-garde photo- montage thematized the lure of photography's evidentiary power while chal- lenging the dubious claim to objectivity often associated with it. Practiced in this way photomontage embodied a new way of seeing, in Matthew Teitel- baum's words, one that actively reshuffled the orders of the real rather than passively registering its hierarchies.3 More generally, montage practices up- ended the uninspected conventions of a traditional, print-based culture that 4 " The Chatter of the Visible neatly separated visual from literary modes of communication, demanding instead that words be viewed like pictures and images decoded like signs. In so doing they also signaled the resurfacing of the physiognomic belief that the visible surface of reality speaks to us in a language of sorts, and that this chatter of the visible discloses insights into its essence or being. In harnessing the shock of antinaturalistic compositions, the aesthetics of montage further liquidated the demand that art conform to values of harmony, wholeness, reconciliation, and beauty as disclosed by the immersive, contemplative re- ception demanded by a late-idealistic aesthetics. The violation of montage appeared as a most fitting correlate to the multiple traumas woven into the historical fabric of Weimar Germany-its foundation out of the ashes of the Kaiserreich at the end of World War I, its struggles with democratic mass politics and the dislocations of socioeconomic modernization, its end at the hand of fascist illiberalism. As Ernst Bloch put it in his retrospective medita- tion on the Weimar years, montage could both embody traumatic forgetful- ness in its heedless embrace of modern fragmentation and offer a critical tool for denouncing modernity's diremptions.' The unhinged world evoked by Hdch's image well supports Bloch's ac- count of montage as a poetics of traumatic contemporaneity bent on season- ing its allegorical narratives with the jolt of disfigured experience. Yet the image's impact is not exhausted by the story it relays or the shock effect it produces. After piecing together a narrative about the iniquity of industrial capitalism, one continues to be struck by the strangeness of its intermingling forms. While the image's odd coupling of human and machinic parts could be interpreted as a token of the avant-garde's ambivalence toward a world transformed by technology and assembly-line production, such speculation about the composition's psychological motivation fails to explain how it works at a formal level. By imitating forms in various registers of interpene- tration and juxtaposition the image conjures a nonillusionistic, yet plausible, perceptual space that is at once engrossing and unsettling. In breaking up the integrity of familiar forms and grotesquely manipulating scale, the human figures and the other objects of the composition are made to enter relations that open up unsuspected experiential realms. The image does so by engaging in physiognomic play, that is, by manipulating the trusted perception of forms and producing effects that are situated at a level separate from that of allegorical accounts. In very basic terms it asks how one is to draw physical boundaries in a space littered with animate and inanimate objects whose shapes can seemingly be modified at will through imitative engagement. Its power seems to rest on its ability to engage this formal level without letting the perceptual moment become completely absorbed in the allegorical ac- Introduction * 5 count it serves to harness. It thus hinges on separating the moment ofpercep- tion from that of meaning in order to enlist the former in an enthralling play of forms whose dynamic exceeds the sum total of the allegorical messages the image may conjure. Such physiognomic play gives a new spin to the tradi- tional understanding of physiognomy as premised on the ability of outer ap- pearances to grant insight into the essence of things or a person's character. Physiognomic play here rather captures the outwardly projected expressivity of the visible world. It is not about devising the proper hermeneutic proce- dure that will disclose the hidden truth of the visible because a distinction between surface and inner being, outside and inside can no longer be drawn. Physiognomy here is rather a set of practices bent on manipulating percep- tion by enlisting the ability of new mechanical media to replicate visible forms. As technologies like photography and film make the visible world newly portable and manipulable, physiognomic play seeks to harness its non- conceptual expressivity, indeed, the peculiar chattering through which its forms trigger perception.5 This interlacing, yet also noncoincidence, of physiognomic and allegori- cal levels accounts for the distinctive effects produced by photomontages like Hdch's. Moholy-Nagy described them as follows in the influential pedagogi- cal treatise that features The Multi-Millionaire: They are pieced together from various photographs and are an experi- mental method of simultaneous representation; compressed inter- penetration of visual and verbal wit; uncanny combinations of the most realistic, imitative means that cross over into an imaginary realm. They can, however, also be concrete, tell a story; more veristic "than life itself."6 Moholy's characterization of composite images sketches the general outlines of the multifarious practices that fell under the label of montage at this time, whose brash novelty resided in assembling artifacts out of the disparate ma- terials found in everyday life. As Moholy suggests, their intermingling of dis- parate media and codes foregrounds the conceptual framework that drives these compositions, foiling any attempt at reading the artifacts in a referen- tial, let alone illusionistic, mode. At the same time Moholy stresses the holis- tic quality of their perceptual gestalt, that is, their ability to evoke a para- doxical sense of coherence that hinges on the effect of simultaneity generated by their synthesis of disparate materials. In other words, these compositions are for him no simple aggregates of discrete elements; instead their fragments enter relations whose overall effect exceeds the mere sum of their component 6 " The Chatter of the Visible parts. In spite of their perceptual compression, montage artifacts are not in- compatible with the work of narrative. As Moholy insists in the closing sen- tence, these works can be "more veristic than life itself" in virtue of their blend of concreteness and narrative power. As one can extrapolate, their abil- ity to trump the vividness of actual experience resides in their manipulation of the evidentiary force of perception. This does not involve producing hy- perrealist compositions that would achieve their impact through the imme- diacy of represented reality. Instead perception is thematized as an indepen- dent factor, a source of evidence that is never completely subsumed under the images' representational content. Their narrative force thus lies in the possi- bility of having perception and signification converge while showcasing them as distinct moments. . This study examines the paradoxical interweaving of perception and meaning that marks the montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity, outlining the unorthodox notion of narrative that at times authorizes it. The idea that montage at this time may have offered ways for rethinking narrative would have struck many con- temporaries as counterintuitive. After all, montage artifacts like Hdch's con- spicuously lack the basic ingredients of traditional narrative: obvious causal- ity or motivation, logical concatenation, or a stable perspective. Instead, they present a world splintered in a cacophony of ill-fitting fragments that are barely held together by makeshift connections. In this world the parts do not amount to a whole but rather engender a disorienting game of endless per- mutations, one that seems refractory to the ordering principles of narrative. Images like Hdch's may well have been what led contemporaries like Sieg- fried Kracauer to associate montage with the collapse of both traditional forms of storytelling and belief in reality as a knowable whole. In an essay from 1923 Kracauer related what he saw as the contemporary atrophy of nar- rative imagination to the experiential degradation of the Great War, which made it impossible to construct stories that could be validated by some dis- cernible order of the real. This explained for him the proliferation, in the early 192os, of historical and biographical narratives authorized by the crude facticity of past events. Kracauer deemed these narratives an exercise in es- capism, seeing them essentially as a tool for the educated bourgeoisie to en- gage, in the mode of disavowal, a modern condition experienced as an indif- ferent accumulation of objects and events. He found a testimonial to this condition in the gargantuan montage of photographic material that circu- Introduction * 7 lated in the illustrated press of his day, which for him well dramatized a world splintered in a myriad of bits and pieces devoid of essential ties. Meanwhile the novel as the foremost narrative form of bourgeois moder- nity appeared to many doomed by what novelist Jakob Wassermann dubbed Entfabelung, that is, a weakening of the fable as the basic glue that made the disparate ingredients of storytelling grow together organically. In an essay from 1926 Wassermann bemoaned the sprawling structure and conspicuous lack of closure of prominent novels of his day, noting that their component parts-setting, characters, motifs, and plotlines-never came together into a rounded whole replete with evident meaning. Because this narrative cohe- sion was irremediably lost to the present, however, contemporary attempts at emulating it had to be dismissed as dishonest Kolportage, that is, as derivative narrative fare obtained by mechanically fitting together basic modules of sto- rytelling in the uninspired and greedy ways of commercial entertainment.8 Like many contemporaries, Wassermann thus saw in the formal splintering of contemporary novelistic writing the index of a modern malaise. His diag- nosis, however, also pointed to the impasse in which contemporary narrative found itself, as torn between the postulates of organicity and closure that had informed traditional narrative genres and a modern experience that made these demands impossible to fulfill. A few years earlier Georg Lukacs had described this very phenomenon by pointing to the novel's essential, yet also unfulfillable, disposition to totality, which he took to be a symptom for mo- dernity's "transcendental homelessness" that is, its lack of ontological grounding and immanent meaning.9 Not everyone wrung his or her hands over this perceived crisis of novelis- tic writing. In his 1913 "Berlin Program" Alfred D6blin gleefully welcomed the demise of a realist paradigm predicated on narrative causality and psy- chological motivation, demanding with characteristic avant-garde brashness that such bland writerly routine be supplanted by a cinematic style bent on capturing the cacophony, speed, and disunity of contemporary experience. D6blin's plea for a new narrative practice did not simply invert the terms of Lukacs's and Wassermann's diagnosis by embracing what they deemed prob- lematic, namely, reality's irremediable disjointedness and lack of immanent meaning. Rather D6blin radically reframed the terms of the discourse by lik- ening narrative to a concrete activity akin to building and making, which made it possible to wring out of language artifacts endowed with utmost plasticity and vividness.10 In so doing he rejected the hermeneutic postulates that governed traditional discourse on narrative: that storytelling is primar- ily about endowing experience with meaning; that sense-making is premised 8 " The Chatter of the Visible on ability to grasp reality as a totality; and that this totality is presented in narrative through a set of formal devices that conjure a semblance of organic- ity and closure. In its emphasis on rapid-fire juxtapositions, the treatment of language as found material, the suppression of psychology and authorial in- tention, and the abdication of anthropocentrism, Ddblin's futurist-inflected poetics foreshadows Moholy's celebration of the disparateness, compression, and vividness of montage narratives. In Ddblin as later in Moholy, the late- idealistic demand that experience be grasped as a totality through narrative- and thus therapeutically made whole by it-is replaced by a poetics of per- ceptual simultaneity. One should note that Moholy did not altogether reject Lukacs's belief that modern narrative is tasked with conjuring a sense of total- ity. The sense of wholeness Moholy endorsed did not, however, have to do with a meaning to be disclosed by narrative but rather with a making that narrative both performs and engenders in stimulating the body's perceptual capabilities through a montage aesthetics. . While it is customary to relate montage to strategies of interruption and disarticulation that challenge basic narrative criteria of consistency and continuity, an examination of the discourse and practice of montage in the 1920s and 1930s shows that its imitative strategies were often a means for re- thinking narrative beyond the conceptual and experiential constraints im- posed by the novel and other literary genres bound to the print media. What at first comes across as a disruption of narrative is instead a strategy for har- nessing the evidentiary force of perception in an operation that enlists it in the service of signification without altogether subsuming it under it. This disjunction of perception and signification elicits shock effects that range from basic perceptual jolts to cognitive bewilderment. Especially after 1923 much of this aesthetics cannot be seen as a response to Weimar's traumatic horizons, whether understood in terms of the recent upheavals of the war or as symptomatic of larger dislocations of modernity. Rather shock was de- ployed in the context of distinctive narrative strategies that unconventionally mixed objects and media, straddling the line between the manipulation of things' expressivity and the allegorical operations of traditional narrative. If grasped this way, montage practices appear to exploit the perceptual and cog- nitive surplus engendered by interaction between the human sensory appara- tus and new technologies of mechanical reproduction, granting new atten- tion to the material features of the media that carry narrative. This emphasis on perception shifts the focus away from narrative sense-making understood as a key operation through which consciousness negotiates experience. Ac- Introduction * 9 cordingly, narrative's fundamental objective is no longer to "represent" real- ity through artifacts that are endowed with meaningful semblances, but rather to produce experience altogether by shaping the encounter between individuals and the forms of the incarnated world. In downplaying the issues of representation and hermeneutics that bedeviled established narrative genres like the novel at this time, this phenomenological aesthetics allows for reconceptualizing narrative as an exploration of the limits and potential of embodiment unfolding as an exteriorized repetition and manipulation of objects and forms. With the exception of Walter Benjamin and Alfred Ddblin, none of the artists and thinkers examined here contributed directly to debates on the cri- sis of narrative or thought systematically about the issue. Their reflection and practice rather started from the question of how to seize on the potential of montage beyond the iconoclastic praxis associated with Dadaism in the early 192os. ErzAhlung, that is, narrative or storytelling, is the term they often used in framing their inquiries. In following their terminological lead I have pro- duced an account that for the most part does not draw on categories that may seem indispensable to a discussion of narrative, including emplotment and narrative causality, meaning and interpretation as cognitive and rhetori- cal practices, and mimesis as a principle of correspondence between narrative and experience. This makes for an admittedly idiosyncratic account of narra- tive, so much so that one may well ask whether it makes sense to use the term at all. In addressing this question it will be helpful to recall Marie-Laure Ry- an's discussion of two basic ways for approaching narrative. The first aims for descriptions that answer the question "What does narrative do for human beings?" This type of inquiry is driven by pragmatic considerations that dis- courage absolutizing pronouncements and rather allow for different ac- counts to exist side by side. Narrative can thus be described as a discursive practice that enables humans to negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a culturally specific form of cognition. The second mode of investigation, by contrast, takes a systemic approach, seeking to define narrative by identifying its essential features. Unlike descriptive accounts, definitional approaches tend to frame their questions in exclusionary terms that pit one account against the other, for instance by asking whether narrative is based in cogni- tive universals or in culturally specific practices."1 My study follows the descriptive route in raising the question of the nar- rative effects that contemporaries ascribed to montage practices in Weimar Germany. Within the discursive framework of montage narrative was con- ceived as a vital mode of behavior that manipulates experience not by engen- 10 " The Chatter of the Visible dering stories whose meanings disclose different perspectives on it, but rather by producing objects that cause a direct realignment in reality's relational network. These objects can well assume the form of accounts that display features usually associated with narrative-for instance, emplotment as a strategy for forging causality through the manipulation of a temporal se- quence, or specific modes of meaning production and decoding. If asked what narrative does for humans, however, the artists examined here would have first pointed to the distinctive type of experientiality they aimed for in deploying montage practices, and only secondarily, if at all, to specific strate- gies of sense-making or interpretation. I borrow the term experientiality from Monika Fludernik, who uses it to describe the effects of narrative beyond the strictures of plot-driven accounts. In her framework, narrative is not primar- ily about constructing stories that deliver a meaning based on the forward movement of plot, but is rather about the human ability to draw on the cog- nitive parameters of shared embodied existence in order to treat texts as sto- ries. For Fludernik thus narrativity "centres on experientiality of an anthro- pomorphic nature" and rests on the ability to portray the operations of consciousness in engaging the incarnated world.12 While I am interested in appropriating the category of experientiality for a notion of narrative that does not hinge primarily on the teleology of plot-driven structures, my own use of the term severs the nexus of embodiment, anthropomorphism, and consciousness that sustains Fludernik's account. In the depsychologized framework that informed montage practices in the 1920s and 1930s, the pa- rameters that define experientiality are set by interaction among bodies, technologies, and the forms of the incarnated world. Narrativity is the ability to perceive the relational structures engendered through repetition of em- bodied forms as constitutive of communicable experience, and thus as laying the foundation for forms of intersubjectivity not primarily defined by con- sciousness and other psychological categories used to circumscribe the hu- man. Some artists attached an inchoate utopian hope to the possibility of transcending the bounds of individual consciousness through this distinctive mimetic play, though they were also generally unwilling or unable to give specific conceptual contours to this utopian horizon. * Any study of Weimar-era aesthetics has to contend with the fact that much of the artistic practice and theoretical reflection of the 1920s and 1930s relates in some measure to montage. Artists and critics alike have frequently relied on the term to describe phenomena as diverse as the early poetics of film, drama's shift to an aesthetics of performance and critical engagement, Introduction * 11 and diverse endeavors to create new epic and lyric forms. Scholars have often focused their analysis on individual media and genres in order to cut a swath through this rich and sometimes confusing constellation. In treating mon- tage as the discursive pivot for rethinking narrative at the intersection of technology and perception, my study is not bound by the aesthetics and po- etics of specific media. At the same time, I do not aim to offer a synthetic account of the plethora of discourses and practices relating to montage in Weimar Germany. Instead, I follow the lead of those theorists and artists who drew on the montage principle to reconceptualize storytelling as a world- making activity that enlists diverse technologies and practices in order to engender bonds of reciprocity among individuals. Chapter i outlines the anthropological vision that drives the montage practices examined in this study, and that relies on a distinctive interplay of perception, expression, and storytelling. It starts by unfolding the conceptual and aesthetic ties that link the antirepresentational and antinarrative strate- gies of Dadaism to the conspicuously structured, and at times openly figura- tive, compositions that prevailed in the mid-192os in the aesthetics of Con- structivism and the New Objectivity. This in turn provides a frame for describing the mechanisms of analogy and parody that undergird the imita- tive behavior presupposed by montage. At stake is an understanding of mi- mesis that moves beyond the conventional logic of representation, under- stood as a practice aimed at transposing content into a linguistic code or producing images that correspond to experience in an allegorical or func- tional way. The phenomenological materialism of montage jettisons the cri- terion of congruence that authorizes established representational modes, re- placing them through strategies of recombination that emphasize the medium's physical ability to directly alter the orders of the real. Chapters 2 and 3 sharpen the conceptual contours of the ties between montage and narrative profiled in chapter i by outlining Walter Benjamin's reflection on storytelling and montage against the backdrop of Weimar-era debates on the crisis of the novel and the rise of film as the new narrative medium of the masses. Benjamin's inquiry into the relation between story- telling, perception, and oral and print media owed a great deal to his engage- ment with Dadaism and Constructivism and is thus especially helpful in staking out the terrain for my investigation. Through readings of his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technologi- cal Reproducibility" (1935-39) as well as several shorter texts, I show how his account of filmic montage unexpectedly reprised key elements of the waning mode of storytelling he mourned in "The Storyteller." This allows me to elab- orate the central features of montage storytelling: its antihermeneutic qual- 12 " The Chatter of the Visible ity and mnemonic properties grounded in the rhythms of the working body; its dependence on technology's ability to augment perception; its outward, noncontemplative orientation and propensity for forging bonds of reciproc- ity among individuals. Chapter 4 turns to the reflection and practice of montage of LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy, a leading representative of Constructivism whose work deeply influenced Walter Benjamin. The chapter focuses on the pedagogical pro- gram Moholy developed between 1923 and 1928 in his capacity as an instruc- tor at the Bauhaus, Germany's pathbreaking school of applied arts. In analyz- ing Moholy's revolutionary concept of creative forming or Gestaltung, I outline the narrative contours of his agenda to revitalize communication in the print media and altogether reimagine the forms of everyday objects. This rested on a montage principle that aimed to augment perception by develop- ing a noncontemplative "vision in motion." As I show, Moholy's vitalist un- derstanding of perception and imitative behavior ultimately fell short of his ambition to revolutionize the experience of space and thus renew human existence. It nonetheless spurred an innovative notion of narrative as a prac- tice devoted to remaking experience through enlivened perception rather than to representing it based on a principle of resemblance-an understand- ing that resonates directly with Benjamin's belief in a structural homology between experience and narrative. Chapter S reprises key questions from chapter 4 concerning photogra- phy's exactness and narrative power, by focusing on the montage strategies that shaped the modernist photobook. In responding to the innovative use of photography in contemporary newspapers and illustrated magazines, the- orists of the visual such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Roh rejected the frequent association of photographic precision with truth and instead emphasized the rhetorical and narrative potential residing in the contemporary combination of photography with other visual and verbal de- vices. The latter part of the chapter draws on these debates to analyze two emblematic Weimar-era photobooks, Albert Renger-Patzsch's The World Is Beautiful(Die Welt ist schin, 1928) and Hannah H6ch's Album (1933), show- ing how their montage narratives enlist straight photography in contrasting pedagogies of vision that exemplarily deploy visual analogy as a mode of sto- rytelling. Chapter 6 examines the work of Kurt Schwitters, a close associate of H6ch's and Moholy-Nagy's, as emblematic of an influential strand of Weimar-era montage that was less concerned with the negotiation of photo- graphic technology and more directly indebted to cubist and Dadaist collage and assemblage. While scholars have amply documented Schwitters's path- Introduction * 13 breaking work in a variety of visual media, I especially focus on his literary practice, which imaginatively uses nonsensical language in order to display and estrange the mechanisms of everyday communication. Close readings of literary texts from the 1920s and 1930s allow me to appraise Schwitters's for- malist understanding of intransitive literature, which engenders a narrative mode that scrutinizes everyday communication by mimicking its structures through parodic repetition. The conclusion considers the role that montage played in burnishing the legacy of Weimar-era modernism during the so-called Expressionism debates of the 193os. As it unfolded in the shadow of fascism, much of the discussion about montage espoused an understanding of artistic engagement that placed a premium on meaning and interpretation. This hermeneutic premise serves as a valuable foil in profiling the distinctive antipsychologism and phe- nomenological materialism of the montage practices at the center of this study. 1 * Weimar-Era Montage Perception, Expression, Storytelling The terms montage and collage have become synonymous with the radical experimentation that altered the status and physiognomy of art in early twentieth-century Europe. They encompass a wide array of practices pre- mised on quoting, combining, and juxtaposing materials that straddle the bounds of old and new media-from literature and stage drama to painting, sculpture, photography, film, and radio. Common to these practices is the exuberant transgression of the canons of normative aesthetics, coupled with an often belligerent contempt for the institutions of academic art and an op- timistic willingness to draw inspiration from the world of consumer culture, advertisement, and the mass media. Montage, the term that emerged in Ger- man as the overarching category encompassing diverse procedures of dissem- blage and recomposition, marks the confluence of two distinct strands of experimentation. One was inspired by the turn to collage of cubism and the intermingling of verbal and visual expression within Italian futurism, as in- fluenced by the experiments of artists like Apollinaire; this strand also in- cludes the linguistic practice of the Expressionist Wortkunst circle around August Stramm and precursors to concrete poetry like Christian Morgen- stern. After the mid-192os crucial impulses came from the reception of So- viet film and photography, especially given the centrality ascribed to mon- tage in the film poetics of pioneering experimental directors like Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Eisenstein. While in a German context the initial inspiration for experimentation with visual and verbal collage may well have come from cubism's "pasted-paper revolution;'it is significant that terms like Klebebilder and geklebte Bilder (pasted images) were soon supplanted by the generic term montage. To the radical artists associated with Dada and Con- structivism, montage appeared preferable to the clumsy translations of the French collage because it directly evoked the world of machines, industrial 14 Weimar-Era Montage " 15 production, and mass consumption, thus emphasizing the constructed qual- ity of artifacts and their reliance on found materials and ready-made parts.1 The iconoclasm and antiestablishment streak of interwar montage prac- tices have long been associated with an all-out assault on traditional notions of representation and narrative. In undermining the integrity of the artistic object, montage challenges the idealist premises that governed aesthetic dis- course in the nineteenth century, first and foremost the requirement that the artwork display a character of unity and organicity and thus allow for a her- meneutic mode of reception based on the congruence between the whole and its component parts. Montage hinges on yanking elements out of their trusted environments and inserting them into new contexts. It thus deploys them as signs that acquire new valences depending on the relations they enter with surrounding objects, while never completely suppressing their link to the contexts from which they were taken. The ensuing semantic interferences produce an undecidability that dramatizes the split nature of the sign and arbitrary mechanism of signification, calling into question the possibility of transparent meaning, stable reference, and trustworthy representation. Espe- cially in the early practices of futurism and Dada, montage works ranging from visual collages to opto-phonetic compositions and sound poems de- monstratively flouted the established conventions that framed narrative in verbal and visual media-the need for hierarchically ordering space and time, construing a stable point of view and motivated sequence of events, and establishing clear extratextual references that would aid in disambiguating meaning.2 Yet by the mid-192os the Dadaist assault on representation gave way to more structured compositions bent on manipulating perception by imitating forms in a variety of media and genres. These compositions aimed to elicit modes of interaction whose peculiar expressivity was at time associ- ated with an unorthodox notion of narrative. At stake was a type of perfor- mance that no longer hinged on trading meanings extracted from stories through acts of interpretation but rather directly reshuffled the ties that ex- isted among objects. In this chapter I will trace the general contours of this link between expression and narrative, describing the anthropological un- derpinnings of the imitative behavior it presupposes, the mechanism of anal- ogy and parody that propels it in a montage aesthetics, and its distinctive phenomenological materialism. . Berlin Dada makes for a useful point of departure in tracing the de- velopment of the nexus between expression and narrative that fueled the aes- thetics of montage in the 192os. Montage artifacts figured prominently at the 16 " The Chatter of the Visible First International Dada Fair, the Dadaists' sardonic take on the contempo- rary art exhibition that opened in Berlin in June 1920. Wieland Herzfelde, the brother of John Heartfield and a prominent member of Berlin's Club Dada, penned the introduction to the exhibition's catalog, which is tasked with laying out Dada's response to contemporary art-including its reasons for worrying about art in the first place-without betraying the Dadaists' signature belligerence and self-undermining gesture. Dadaism emerges from Herzfelde's portrayal as an iconoclastic dilettantism that ditches conven- tional aesthetic standards and privileges mechanical media like photography. Especially the cut-and-paste art this medium makes possible poses a deliber- ate challenge to the contemporary art establishment: The Dadaists say: When in the past colossal quantities of time, love, and effort were directed toward the painting of a body, a flower, a hat, a heavy shadow, and so forth, now we need merely to take scissors and cut out all that we require from paintings and photographic represen- tations of these things; when something on a smaller scale is involved, we do not need representations at all but take instead the objects themselves, for example, pocketknives, ashtrays, books, etc., all things that, in the museums of old art, have been painted very beautifully indeed, but have been, nonetheless, merely painted.... Any product that is manufactured uninfluenced and unencumbered by public au- thorities and concepts of value is in and of itself Dadaistic, as long as the means of presentation are anti-illusionistic and proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world, which already finds itself in a state of disintegration, of metamorpho- sis.... The Dadaists acknowledge as their sole program the obligation to make what is happening here and now-temporally as well as spatially-the content of their pictures.3 The passage well captures the benefits Herzfelde and his fellow Dadaists as- cribed to montage. Its incorporation of unsublimated objects- "pocketknives, ashtrays, books"-appears as an authentic and efficient way for engaging experience, one that saves the artist the pesky labor of represen- tation. Using scissors to mercilessly cut around reality's fabric is also a fitting response to the brutality and ethical bankruptcy of the newly established German republic, as telescoped by the commentaries placed at the end of the introduction and devoted to composite artifacts exhibited at the fair, which paint a bleak portrayal of an immediate postwar period marked by the dehu- manizing treatment of war veterans, the moral and ideological decay of the : t !"S)CIh a')! p c _ A T / _-4 , '74L il' O ,e. Sao ' s / i 3 r k L.A1 IL A II Ii F Lt Hannah Hoch, Schnitt, nit dern K/iichewnesser Dada Blurch die letzte Weimarer Bier- bauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knif2' Dada through the Last Weinmar Beer-Belly Cultural F~och 1..I ute;n ~ ? rn i:01 liu tllu on r.wuiltCc r Qu I1,,lv unI tcil dlt. itch> 1 flunmiou , -ii: er-A .il .ulutint-IA Itlhlu de .izltlchklcc cllucjclt w-cilclc will1. 236 From Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Vn Material/zu Architekiur (Horn Material to A4rchi- Lecture), 1929. (Copyright 20f5 Artists Rights Socieiy (,I-RS), New York/ VG Bi/l-Kunst, Bonn.) 110 " The Chatter of the Visible volumetric objects. Yet the imperative to dynamize space that drives Moho- ly's discourse is so patterned on vision that it ends up assimilating the com- plex perceptual dynamics of bodies in space to vision's perceptual coordi- nates. Rather than actively harness the stratified experience of the organs of touch, which is the task with which From Material begins, Moholy substi- tutes vision's synthetic grasp for it in an operation that leaves actual touch behind. In this respect, it is no coincidence that his final remarks on the ar- chitecture of the future best describe his own abstract sculptures, whether made of light or solid material, that are meant to engage vision rather than be touched. One can legitimately ask whether these artifacts truly offer a blue- print for complementing existing space by enhancing its livability or alto- gether postulate its overcoming instead. While Moholy fails to deliver a plausible account of a desirable, dynamic engagement with space that substantively involves all the senses, he still offers a provocative understanding of participatory vision as an active behavior that turns the individual outwardly. This behavior is narrative in a broad sense of the term, in that it hinges on forging new relations among the perceptual ele- ments of the phenomenal world so as to construct novel versions of it. As dramatized by the assembled landscape featured in Gefesselter Blick, this en- gagement exploits the mimicry made possible by new visual technologies like photography, whose exactness is tied to a new type of immediacy, one that springs from the self-evidence of the perceiving body rather than from the force of self-emanating truth. Photomontage thus both dramatizes and en- courages vision's narrative ability to forge a path through the visible so as to reconfigure its relations. The question of how to harness this participatory vision in negotiating the truthfulness and exactness ascribed to the photo- graphic medium will be further explored in the next chapter, which focuses on the narrative strategies developed in exemplary picture books of the Wei- mar period. 5 * Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook It would be difficult to overstate the impact of technologies of mechanical reproduction on the visual culture of Weimar Germany, as a flood of images from photography and film upended conventional models of cultural liter- acy following the media boom of the early 192os. Within this context film has attracted far greater attention than photography because of its explosive potential as a mimetic medium that can convey a sense of unfolding time and engender fresh modes of collective reception. Yet the photographic image was an even more ubiquitous and flexible instrument of visual dissemination because of the unprecedented proliferation of newspapers and illustrated magazines. Contemporary debates on the use and value of photography ini- tially went through the moves of a conventional aesthetic discourse bent on asking whether photography could claim a place among the arts or should not rather count as mere technology, but eventually ran aground on a seem- ingly intractable aporia. On the one hand, photography emerged as the me- dium that beat painting at its own game of verisimilitude, thanks to its ability to reproduce appearances in an exact fashion. On the other, this exactness turned out to be a skin-deep affair that lent itself to all manner of ideological manipulation. This aporia, it soon became clear, was not inherent in photog- raphy itself, but instead was produced by the discourse's own outdated con- ceptual terms, which equated mimesis-the faithful representation of the experiential world-with verisimilitude and illusionism and placed the label of truthfulness over the whole equation.1 Photography's aporia begged the question of how to harness the medi- um's aptitude for exact reproduction without conflating exactitude with truth. This question engendered a fresh exploration of vision and its techno- logical mediations in a variety of practices ranging from New Vision photog- raphy to photomontage. While Dada artists had already deployed photogra- 111 112 " The Chatter of the Visible phy's realism in ideologically charged photomontages during the war, postwar newspapers and photomagazines enlisted photography as but one powerful tool in a semiotic arsenal that assembled a variety of visual and ver- bal devices-type, iconic symbols, the manipulation of space and scale be- sides titles, captions, and other textual inserts-to produce highly complex narratives. In this montage of codes and devices, the realism of the undoc- tored photograph was often used as a glossy veneer of documentary truth overlaid upon the rhetorical moment of narrative. In reflecting on this devel- opment, key theorists of the visual came to identify this rhetorical moment- and the montage aesthetics required to unleash it-as the repository of pho- tography's truth. This chapter traces the surprising turns of this investigation as it unfolded in the modernist photobook, a hybrid genre that placed pho- tography's realism in the service of narratives crafted through montage. At issue are especially the pedagogical programs that often underwrote the pho- tobooks, and that aimed to train vision in negotiating the truth claim of me- chanical images. In juxtaposing Albert Renger-Patzsch's celebrated photo- book Die Welt ist schin (The World Is Beautiful, 1928) to the scrapbook assembled by montage artist Hannah Hoch around 1933-34, I will outline two diverging models for enlisting resemblance, the staple of a traditional aesthetics of verisimilitude, to manipulate the relation between an image and its referent. . At the beginning of his 1927 essay on photography Siegfried Kracauer subjects a hypothetical reader of illustrated magazines to a test designed to illustrate how images function in the complex interplay of knowledge, time, and memory. When asked to identify two photographs, one of a famous diva and the other of the reader's own grandmother as a young woman, the reader, Kracauer surmises, will readily recognize the diva but puzzle at his grand- mother's image. Because he has no personal recollection of the grandmoth- er's youthful appearance, Kracauer explains, the reader will be at pains to draw a connection between the photograph and the image he can access through memory, while he can promptly recognize the diva because he has encountered her innumerable times in the media. In other words, the view- er's ability to recognize the divas photograph depends on his previous knowl- edge of the original's appearance as mediated through a variety of sources. Her photographic image thus functions as an "optical sign" that can activate preexisting knowledge or memory; without this aid it would be unable to generate any insight about the diva. By contrast, the grandmother's photo- graph appears as a "ghost;' a spectral sign devoid of semantic resonance, be- Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 113 cause her appearance as a young girl belongs to a past that is inaccessible to the viewer's memory.2 As Kracauer further maintains, the spatial continuum of the instant de- picted in the grandmother's photograph comes across as a medley of meticu- lously captured details-the crinoline, the old-fashioned gown, the hair tied up in a knot-that are eerily devoid of sense because they cannot be placed in any meaningful context. Rather than convey a "knowledge of the original" these pedantically reproduced details depict "the spatial configuration of a moment."3 In a clever discursive move Kracauer turns the tables on the pic- tures he has been comparing, using the blank meticulousness of the grand- mother's photograph to indict the photographic images that circulate in the illustrated magazines. The fastidious reproduction of images for which view- ers lack meaningful references substitutes the exact but empty depiction of objects, places, and individuals for substantive information. The blank preci- sion of the photograph is thus elevated to a standard of truth that preempts and replaces the work of memory and the historical narratives that are key to thoughtful interpretation and judgment. As visual saturation becomes syn- onymous with thoroughness and truth, Kracauer concludes, the glut of im- ages that propel the illustrated magazines succeeds in obfuscating the world it purports to reveal.4 Kracauer's indictment of the role played by photography in the print me- dia is echoed by Bertolt Brecht, who repeatedly denounced the evidentiary claim of the photographic material used by the press as empty and dishonest, noting that faithfully reproducing the appearance of objects seldom provides valuable insights into a given state of affairs. In a laudatory gloss on the photo-reportage of the left-leaningArbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung Brecht went a step further as he chided the bourgeois press for the pernicious misuse of images in the contemporary photo-reportage, concluding that "the camera can lie just as well as the typesetting machine."5 Brecht's statement targets the deception perpetrated by the mainstream press, which in his eyes deliber- ately exploited the evidentiary force of photography in order to conceal the truth of a state of affairs. Yet it is not immediately clear what one should make of his claim that the camera itself has the ability to lie, as opposed to the deliberate manipulation one could ascribe to the photographer or the editor of the illustrated magazine. In other words, what does it mean for the camera to lie when it produces nonposed, undoctored photographs? To answer this question it will be helpful to first flip it around and ask what it means for the camera to tell the truth, or what is the nature of the truth the camera tells. In his analysis of the different semiotic layers that intersect in the photographic image, Clive Scott draws on a long line of reflection on pho- 114 " The Chatter of the Visible tography's authenticity to maintain that the basic truth claim of the photo- graph lies in its indexical status, specifically, in the moment of contiguity that ties the photographer, and by implication the photograph, to what is being photographed. To use Kracauer's example, someone took a picture of the grandmother, and that encounter, which is materially inscribed in the mo- mentary exposure of light-sensitive film stock, grounds the authenticity of the photographic document. But this authenticity, Scott argues in paraphrasing Roland Barthes, simply boils down to the statement "This was then"; it lacks any temporal depth or extension.6 In other words, if the photograph succeeds in making the past present by providing an unassailable record of it, it does so by witnessing to an instant that is utterly singular and does not allow for dura- tion. Because it does not automatically conjure up a temporal sequence into which it could be inserted, this instant is essentially antinarrative. In the case of Kracauer's grandmother, there exists a temporal gulf between the viewer and his grandmother's youthful portrait that the photograph per se is unable to bridge. Or, to put it differently, the image confronts the viewer with the statement "This was then" but fails to provide a narrative as to the identity and the meaning of the "this;' so that it remains unclear how the viewer should relate to the specific "then" whose details appear alarmingly blank. One could conclude that the photograph's moment of authenticity is empty. On its own it is unable to vouch for the state of affairs the photograph depicts, namely, that this is in fact the viewer's grandmother. The indexical moment does not, however, exhaust the signifying proper- ties of the photograph, which is also the repository of narratives nestled at the iconic level, which aim to identify what is depicted based on likeness and resemblance, and at the symbolic level, which is concerned with interpreta- tion and evaluation. For Kracauer's viewer, the unsettling moment grows out of an incongruity at the iconic level, as the young woman depicted in the photograph fails to resemble the grandmother he knows from memory. Be- cause the youthful grandmother flunks the resemblance test, her image is unable to function as a sign that activates available knowledge, in spite of the viewer's awareness that this is, in fact, his grandmother. The spatial context that surrounds young Grandma thus defies further symbolic operations and fails to coalesce into a meaningful whole. Instead, it unravels in the meticu- lously depicted details of an indifferent spatial continuum. But Kracauer's viewer presents further reasons for bewilderment, which are rooted in a per- ceived disjuncture between the indexical, the iconic, and the symbolic. As Scott explains, the iconic and the symbolic levels, the moments of identifica- tion and interpretation, open the photograph up to a semiotic game that far exceeds the evidentiary guarantee of the "This was then" while surreptitiously Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 115 feeding on its authenticity. The multiple options and potential for manipula- tion this game entails make it impossible to insist on the photograph's claim to unmediated truthfulness, which, however, is always there thanks to the indexical moment. In the case of the diva the three moments overlap seam- lessly so that the viewer has no reason to question what he sees; but for the grandmother the authenticity claimed by the indexical and filled with the information about the woman's identity is at odds with the viewer's recollec- tion of her appearance. This incongruity endangers the photograph's authen- ticity claim and accounts for its haunting quality. It is because of this incon- gruity that one could argue, with Brecht, that the photograph, the camera's untampered product, can lie. Or, to put it differently, such incongruity demonstrates that photography's authenticity, while real, does not vouch for the identity or meaning of the objects it depicts. This meaning is articulated rhetorically and embedded in a context that must be illuminated. When Brecht polemically remarks that the camera can lie, he has in mind the gulf between the claim to truth underlying photography's indexical moment and the complex weaving of the iconic and the symbolic moments, of identification and interpretation of what the pho- tograph portrays. As he suggests, contemporary photo-reportage surrepti- tiously deploys the evidentiary moment of photography as legitimation for narratives that affirm or obfuscate the status quo rather than shed light on it. The mendacious potential Brecht attributes to photography then lies in this manipulation of the symbolic level, specifically, in denying the narrative/ideo- logical moment at work in the way the press uses photographs and the active work of interpretation this moment demands of the viewer. As has by now become clear, neither Kracauer's nor Brecht's indictment of the use of photographs in the press is driven by a traditional distrust of mimesis, that is, by the age-old wariness toward reproducing the world of appearances, which is repudiated for being a deceptive veil cast upon the true essence of things. Rather they are animated by awareness that photography's potential does not lie in its ability to reproduce appearances in an exact way. If anything, insisting on this ability as a path to truth lends itself to ideologi- cal distortion. In his essay "The Author as Producer" (1934) Walter Benjamin chided the rosy-eyed agenda of some photographers of the New Objectivity, whose proclivity to authorize photography through its aptitude for exactness wound up glorifying the given, so that even abject poverty could be turned into a "object of enjoyment" available for consumption. Benjamin especially singled out Albert Renger-Patzsch's successful photobook Die Welt ist schin (The WorldIs Beautiful, 1928), a compendium of stunning images of both the natural world and contemporary industrial society that documented Renger- 116 " The Chatter of the Visible Patzsch's faith in photography's capacity to transfigure objects by reproduc- ing them with utmost fidelity. Turning Renger-Patzsch's reasoning on its head, Benjamin treated photography's touted fidelity as a hindrance because its putative objectivity could be used as a mystifying tool for affirming domi- nant narratives about experience. He thus recommended critically formu- lated captions as an antidote to the manipulative claim to objectivity.7 Cap- tioning, Benjamin explained at the end of his "Little History of Photography" (1931), helps shatter the automatized associations attached to reproducible images. It not only makes it possible to take control of and change the natu- ralized narratives in which images are embedded; it also exposes photogra- phy as partaking in what Benjamin, drawing on Brecht, called the "literariza- tion of the conditions of life,' that is, as a powerful tool in weaving the narratives that authorize contemporary material and social relations.8 Benjamin's final remarks in the "Photography" essay suggest that photog- raphy's eminently reproducible, though temporally extentionless, exactitude is an explosive force that needs to be harnessed in the militant construction of truth, even if it itself should not be mistaken for objectivity or truthful- ness. The medium or structuring principle of this construction was for Ben- jamin montage, a strategy for producing novel accounts of experience that reshuffle materials culled from everyday life and thereby unsettle its domi- nant narratives. Benjamin's emphasis on the montage principle recalls the closing of Kracauer's essay on photography, though Benjamin gives a differ- ent spin to his colleague's insights. For Kracauer, the clutter of photographs in the illustrated press formed a gargantuan collage whose arbitrary configu- rations marked the historical endpoint in consciousness' alienation from na- ture. In its very indifference and disarray, the photographic patchwork spoke volumes to a consciousness that could no longer glimpse intrinsic meaning in the experiential world.9 In other words, Kracauer's account did not empha- size photography's ability to depict specific conditions, as Benjamin does, but rather focuses on the medium as a material witness to the latest stage of the history of being as consciousness. As a result, photographs in magazines tell the same overdetermined story over and over again, regardless of what they show. Benjamin by contrast echoed key tenets of Constructivism in foregrounding the potential for new, emancipatory narratives to be told through the creative assemblage of photographic material. In mid-192os Germany the valorization of montage's rhetorical and narrative properties became associated with a move away from the disjointed compositions produced by the Dadaists after the war and toward a renewed Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 117 interest in figuration as a means of storytelling. This reflected the new legiti- macy accorded to montage practices, which went along with their growing normalization and commercialization in the press, especially the illustrated magazine. After 1925 one observes an increase in single-image montage works with clear figurative themes or works that combine single photographs in more or less explicit narrative series, often encased in a grid. It would be mis- leading to see in the return to figuration and the ostensibly untampered pho- tograph solely a retrenchment carried out in the interest of advertisement and propaganda. At stake was rather a more sophisticated understanding of the narrative potential of montage as inscribing the experience of a com- plexly articulated field of vision traversed by diverse modes of encoding (ver- bal language, manually and mechanically produced images, type, and the al- ternation of blank and filled spaces).1 The rise of the photobook in mid- and late-192os Germany reflects an interest in exploring the narrative properties of photography, often through explicit reference to a montage aesthetics." This new genre aimed to show- case photography's ability to fulfill old and new representational needs by focusing on a broad array of themes-the utopian horizons of modern archi- tecture in Erich Mendelsohn's Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Amer- ica: Photobook ofan Architect; 1926); the marvels of natural and human envi- ronments in Karl Blossfeldt's Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature; 1928) and Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schin (The World Is Beautiful; 1928); Germany's social stratification in August Sander's Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time; 1929); the contemporary range of photographic technol- ogy in Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold's Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye; 1929) and Wer- ner Griff's Es kommt der neue Fotograf (Here Comes the New Photographer; 1929). At the same time photobooks offered a media-specific tool for a theo- retical and pedagogical reflection upon photography's potential that could not take place in photo-reportage or the illustrated magazine. What distin- guished the photobook is not simply that it provided accounts of the world that privileged visual over literary strategies. Rather its images were endowed with a performative quality, that is, they were meant to demonstrate the rep- resentational strategies proper to the photographic medium, which the pho- tobook sought to foreground and reflect upon. In other words, if the deploy- ment of photographs in the press and especially in photo-reportage adopted the realist conceit of the story that tells itself and thus concealed the medi- um's rhetorical ability to shape the act of narration, the photobook made this very moment a part of the stories it told. LIaszl6 Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film (1925-27), one of the foundational texts of New Vision photography, is often regarded as the pro- 118 " The Chatter of the Visible totype of the photobook, displaying several of the features that define the genre in interwar Germany: imaginative layouts that would encourage a mode of perception predicated on simultaneity and the viewer's ability to actively combine various kinds of information; the inclusion of a variety of images that would spur multiple kinds of visual engagement, from distracted glancing to intense scrutiny; the rejection of a strictly linear or causal se- quencing of the pictures, which were instead arranged in associative groups suggesting multiple combinations and competing narratives; and the inclu- sion of methodological and didactic considerations-often relegated to in- troductory sections-designed to emphasize the distinctive expressive power of the photographic image.12 As Moholy's volume well exemplifies, the re- shuffling of elements enabled by montage did not stop at the manipulation of photographic material within a single image, but rather heralded a radical reorganization of the visual field-in his case, the double-page spreads of his photobook-that jettisons traditional rules of encoding and freely juxta- poses the semiotic codes of disparate elements-mechanically reproduced images, type, iconic symbols, and blank and filled spaces. Thus conceived montage fulfills and expands Benjamin's principle of captioning by situating objects in new, surprising contexts and thereby altering the narratives that give them meaning. It does so by harnessing photography's mimetic power while relinquishing conventional modes of seeing tied to illusionism. Spe- cifically, its combinatory logic makes it possible to insert the antinarrative instant of the photographic fragment into contexts that give it narrative depth, while making it clear that the story is a constructed one. Paraphrasing Benjamin, one can assert that exposing narrative artifice makes it possible to exploit photography's evidentiary power while steering clear of the equation of exactitude with objectivity or truth. Far from taking away from the force of the photographic image, this operation opens it up to a rich play of signi- fication that yields novel insights into a state of affairs.13 Moholy's example suggests that the expressive possibilities of the photo- book were intimately tied to a montage procedure by which single photo- graphs are juxtaposed to verbal and visual information that enable them to tell stories, that is, complement their indexical muteness by adding layers of identification and interpretation. In other words, if the photobook emerged as the medium for a self-reflexive inquiry into a field of vision saturated by mechanically reproducible images, montage named the grammar of this in- vestigation. The narrative potential of assembled images was not lost on prac- titioners of photomontage, who often drew on film's narrative quality as a means of comparison. A case in point are Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis's ob- servations in a gloss published in Gefesselter Blick (Captivated Gaze), a 1930 Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 119 anthology of programmatic statements by some of Europe's cutting-edge graphic designers. In describing two photomontage ads featuring the pro- duction of massive metal containers, Domela compares photomontage to film and concludes that film would be more effective in rendering the multi- tude of details that make up the production process, which in his assembled image is intimated by juxtaposing large-scale images of the containers and smaller-scale depictions of assorted machinery. As he maintains, "A whole film is here captured in one image. Significant perspectives from the 'film' are placed in a spatial relationship to each other, so that the instantaneously roaming eye of the viewer receives an absolute plastic impression. He is set in motion and finds himself in the thick of things."14 The shared ground, yet also the difference, that marks the narrative potential of photomontage and film lies precisely in the kind of movement that sustains their narratives, as intimated by Domelas remarks. In the case of film, movement denotes the unfolding of a fixed sequence of shots, while for photomontage the move- ment is that of the viewer's gaze. In Domelas example, the film sequence would immediately suggest the correct unfolding of the production process. Given the conventionless simultaneity of photomontage, however, it is far more difficult to determine the direction of the eye's motion once the viewer is plunged "into the thick of things." This is why film would be the more ef- fective medium for telling the containers' story. One can conclude that the potential plurality of the narratives engendered by photomontage make it a more ambiguous medium, one that is in need of being contained more than film.15 In contrast to film, the montage of still images can empower viewers by teaching them that seeing is not a passive registering of visual stimuli but an act of piecing together. Thus, it is inherently narrative, if by narrative one understands constructing accounts whose unfolding along potentially mul- tiple paths enables observers to actively bestow meaning on experience. In this way, photomontage claims a truthfulness for itself that is not about exact reproduction but rather lies in the active encounter between an observer and an object given to perception. This truth is contextual, plural, and dynamic. For Domela as for many graphic artists of his day, montage in static forms thus required structuring the visual field through mixed-media devices that served to contain and direct the viewer's roaming gaze so as to support a spe- cific content. These devices included the verbal information contained in ti- tles and captions as well as the visual conventions that photography had adapted from the traditional genres of painting (eye-level portrait, landscape, etc.) A further resource lay in the abstract graphic devices developed within the New Typography movement: lines, dots, and arrows deployed to demar- cate textual space; the emphatic or painterly use of boldface and font size; the Fotomrontagen ir einen Prospekt Ober Rurths-Speicher. Die FuIle rnteressanter Einzelre Inn, die bei der Fabrikation ersichrtlich sind, Iie~an Bich narOr ch anm bequemnsten in -nren Fier zriqen Men wendert um doe Dinge her-r, sieht sie von ellen Seiren, sieht iheen Aofbau und ihin Wirung. Hier wurde denrentsprecnnnd errn ganzer Fire in e in B id gebent. Wionlige Srendpunrre nun denn Filem' s ed in r'urnlinhe Beejehong -ceinander gestelir, sodas den blileertig rnandernde Auge des Bescelners einen ibsoluten plentischen Einoruck _ gnonnt Er rird in Beweogung ye setztnd befiedet Bich emitten °- - unter den Dingen. 45 Ceser Domela Ccsar Domela-Nicuwenhuis, advcrtiscment for metal containers. Photomontagc. From GefesselterB/ick, ed. Heinz Rasch and Bodo Rasch (1930), 45. (Copy'right 20f5 A4rtists Rights Society (ARS), New Yrk /ADAGPl Paris.) Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 121 alternation of blank and filled space in pointedly asymmetrical arrangements; and the nonnaturalistic use of color.16 Of special interest in this context was the valorization of resemblance as a way of establishing ties among disparate visual material and articulating a specific relation to an image's referent. At issue was especially the suggestive use of abstract resemblance patterns, whose deployment was linked to the renewed emphasis on form as the trigger for perception and the repository of nondiscursive modes of orientation. Barbara Stafford has emphasized the constructive moment that inheres in grasping and deploying resemblance, which she describes as an imaginative analogical practice that relies on the evidence of sensory perception to weave "discordant particulars into a partial concordance." This practice depends in great measure on the incarnational nature of vision, which brings together similarities gleaned from manifold dissimilars in acts of "sympathetic thought."17 Stafford especially emphasizes the participatory quality of analogical operations, which do not so much consist in gleaning patterns objectively given in the phenomenal world as in constructing them actively by drawing from a multi- plicity of sensory data and giving them shape in the event of perception. Vi- sual analogy thus epitomizes the ways in which humans as embodied beings make sense of an incarnated world by situating themselves firmly in its midst and shaping it through mimetic operations that valorize the visual surface of things.18 Precisely this ability to link orientation to embodiment made of vi- sual analogy a powerful instrument for montage artists, further playing an important role in the pedagogy of vision that unfolded in contemporary pho- tobooks. In the remainder of this chapter I will examine Albert Renger- Patzsch's Die Welt ist schon and Hannah Hdch's Album as emblematic for con- trasting pedagogies of vision that enlist straight photography in montage narratives structured in part through visual analogy. When it appeared in 1928, Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schon was immediately hailed as a paradigmatic achievement for the aesthetics of the New Objectivity and a compelling example of new trends in photogra- phy. Comprised of one hundred uncaptioned black-and-white images of the natural and industrial worlds, including flowers, animals, landscapes, cul- tural monuments, commodities, and industrial sites, the photobook at once celebrates photography's revelatory power and the awe-inspiring forms of everyday objects. The images' mode of presentation is designed to harness the evidentiary force of straight photography in ways that seem antithetical to contemporary, experimental uses of the medium, first and foremost pho- tomontage. Each photograph takes up the recto of a double-page spread and 122 " The Chatter of the Visible faces a blank verso, demanding in its isolation an immersive mode of recep- tion that plunges the viewer right into the object. Yet the images' unconven- tional perspectives and radical use of cropping, their conspicuous decontex- tualization of the depicted objects and emphasis on abstract formal patterns clearly inscribe them in the horizon of what has become known as New Vi- sion photography. Their unadorned directness is further testament to its agenda of developing a visual idiom specific to the photographic medium over and against the conventions of art photography, which sought to endow mechanical images with the aura of art by emulating the visual styles of paint- ing. Renger-Patzsch openly endorsed this objective, pointedly rejecting any attempt at assimilating photography to art and rather insisting on the pho- tographer's duty to exploit the cameras mechanical exactitude, what he called its objectivity, in providing a record of the phenomenal world. Objectivity, however, meant more to Renger-Patzsch than the banning of a photographer's subjective effusions. For him photography's ability to cap- ture the visible surface of things entailed a fidelity to the object that allowed for disclosing its essence beyond the moment's contingency.19 This ability grounded for him in the distinctive mimetic power of photography, which allowed for reproducing the essential physiognomy of things by purging them of the transient and the redundant. As Thomas Janzen has noted, Renger-Patzsch often achieved this effect through an innovative use of crop- ping, which he deployed to magnify an object's details in order to at once convey a plastic sense of its materiality and foreground its abstract formal patterns. This emphasis on the paradigmatic aspects of the visible world and disavowal of transience accounts for the peculiarly static quality of Renger- Patzsch's photographs, which endow things with hieratic presence by down- playing or altogether erasing temporal markers, be they clues to an object's environment or movement and shadows that would indicate a specific mo- ment in time.20 Renger-Patzsch's aesthetics thus postulated that essence and transience are both inscribed on the visible surface of things, ready to be told apart by the camera's objective eye. This objectivity was rooted for him in photogra- phy's distinctive mimicry, understood as the ability to produce copies that enable humans to reach through to things' essential being. Its implicit dis- avowal of transience accounts for the peculiar mood that suffuses the photo- graphs collected in Die Welt ist schin, which often recall still-life painting in their blend of lush physicality and embalmed fixity. Indeed, the depicted objects often appear incomparably vivid and peculiarly lifeless at one and the same time, the beauty of their forms turned into enigmatic ornamental pat- terns. This is especially conspicuous in the rare images featuring human fig- ,r, r : ;. ,A , te r'.L ( r \ t ^,a ON A- : ti ti U t A h tit Ui 0 jrj 3: From Albert Rcngcr-Patzsch, Die J'Vet ist s(ehn (The WorldlIs Beautiful), 1928. (C'opy right 2 ofs A/bert Renger-Patzsch Jrchiv AInn u. J/irgen Wi/ce, ZIi/pich Artists Rights Society (ARS9, New York.) P 31 From Albcrt Rcngcr-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schin (The Worlls Beautfu), 1928. (Copyright 201 J lbert R enger-Patzsch Irchiv A nn u. Jurgen Wilde, Zii/pich Alrtists Rights Society (ARS), New York.) From Albert Renger-Patzsch, D~ie Welt ist schon (The World Is Beautiful), 1928. (copyright zois Al1bert Renger"-Patzsch Archiv A2nn u. Jiihgen Wiilde, Zfllpich Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Yrk.) -~ , -14k ~ * 4. ~ ~ -4- \ \\ ~ From Albert Renger-Patzsch, fDie WrJ'%t 1si schdn (ihe World Is Beauti/id), 1928. (Copyright 2 ois Al1bertlRenger-Patzsch Archiv I2lnn u. Jiirgen Wilde, Zilpich A~rtists Rights Society (ARS), New York.) 128 " The Chatter of the Visible ures, five out of the one hundred that make up the collection. Four of them are clustered in a sequence that starts with the faceless silhouette of a fisher- woman draped in a fishing net, proceeding on to the eye-level portraits of a woman staring to one side and a Somali child whose shiny skin looks like polished material, and closing with the mummified head of a Maori warrior, which reinforces the overall sense of hovering in a peculiar undead zone. The fifth image, situated toward the end of the collection, features the detail of a Pieta sculpture depicting the martyred body of the dead Christ. The image's evocation of the Christian narrative of redemptive death serves to further underwrite the link between lifelessness and essential being.21 It is not hard to see why the book became such a lightning rod for critics like Walter Benjamin, who took it as confirmation that the aesthetic trend dubbed as the New Objectivity ultimately rested on the dubious conflation of the world's visible factuality with the truth of a state of affairs. Critics found this conceptual sleight of hand epitomized in the volume's very title, Die Welt ist schin, which was lampooned for its unabashed celebration of a creaturely world whose ostensive beauty reduced eloquent visual records of abject poverty and industrial anomy to a beautiful play of forms. Thus for many the book came to epitomize the dishonest invocation of photography's exactness in the underhanded attempt to prop up the status quo in Weimar Germany.22 Other contemporaries, who were not as invested in social com- mentary and shared in principle Renger-Patzsch's faith in photography's physiognomic power, took objection to other aspects of his aesthetics. The most notable case is Franz Roh, whose celebration, in Nachexpressionismus, of the interplay between perception and the forms of the material world strongly resonated with Renger-Patzsch's valorization of photography's abil- ity to conjure the magic of things.23 Roh, however, decisively parted ways with Renger-Patzsch in emphasizing the constructive moment that marked the encounter between the object and a technologically enhanced percep- tion. For him the contingent open-endedness of this interplay authorized the imaginative use of photography, which was to be deployed as a tool for aug- menting perception and simultaneously remaking a phenomenal world caught in a relentless process of becoming. This was quite different from Renger-Patzsch's insistence on photography's objectivity as a portal to an ob- ject's nontransient being, which valorized the phenomenological encounter between form and perception only to downplay the transformative power harbored by its contingency and open-endedness.24 The immersive mode of reception demanded by the individual images and their depiction of conspicuously decontextualized objects raised addi- tional questions for the book as a whole. Taken together, the images may well Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 129 convey the sense of a world made up of things transfigured in splendid self- sufficiency, but this is just as well a world without depth and hierarchies, which is only structured by the repetitive "and then. . . and then. . ." of parataxis. The volume's introduction, which was penned by art historian Carl Georg Heise, openly counteracts the latent atomism of this arrange- ment by imposing a symbolic order onto the sequence of images, which, it suggests, are divided up in eight thematic groups-plants, animals and hu- mans, landscapes, materials, architecture, technology, the manifold world, and the symbol. This sequential arrangement allows for inserting each ob- ject, understood as paradigmatic for its class, into larger conceptual groups and thus building thematic relations that counterbalance the lurking sense of randomness suggested by the heterogeneity and disconnectedness of the im- ages. Heise's discussion of the "symbol" in the introduction's final section further suggests that the book's overall order is shaped by a movement or progression of sorts, which imparts to it a sense of narrative unfolding. This lies in the simultaneous discovery of the symbolic power of everyday objects and of photography's role as a catalyst in disclosing their power: They [the last pictures in the book] are true pregnant images. How- ever, we certainly should not forget that at bottom it is nature and formed life that carry such symbolic power in themselves for every beholder, that the photographer's work does not create the pregnant images but can only make them visible!25 This passage seizes on Renger-Patzsch's insistence on photography's objectiv- ity, which it implicitly conflates with the medium's transparency, in order to celebrate its self-effacing role in making visible the symbolic power of ob- jects. The point of photography is, in other words, not to create symbols but rather to help reveal the symbolism intrinsic to the forms of everyday life. This is tantamount to disclosing an essential dimension that is itself static and nontransient, the very opposite of the contingent and dynamic interplay of forms celebrated by Roh. While it may well be that Renger-Patzsch him- self did not endorse the final symbolic twist Heise gave to his introduction, its dominant place as the volume's framing narrative has the effect of suggest- ing an essentialist and static view of his aesthetics, which strongly downplays the complex physiognomic play presupposed by the images' formalism in order to better foreground their symbolic meaning. In so doing it links Renger-Patzsch's photography to a vague and suspect spirituality, turning its claim about the medium's hard objectivity on its head and most certainly contributing to the book's notoriety in progressive circles. 130 " The Chatter of the Visible Heise's discussion of the symbol in this section also makes clear that the last set of objects belongs to a category that exceeds the thematic criteria used for the previous groups. In identifying as symbols the images of assorted ob- jects gathered in this last section, Heise effectively suggests a retrospective reading of all the photographs as symbolic. Indeed, the images in this section include objects drawn from all previous sections: the chimneys of a foundry, the base of a construction crane, standing shoemaking irons, the arched ceil- ing of a gothic cathedral, the stairs to a wing of the Zwinger museum in Dres- den, the lamps of the music room of the Hans Sachs house in Gelsenkirchen, a net hanging from a fishing boat's mast, a mountain fir, the core of an agave plant, and finally, two conjoined female hands. The heterogeneity of these objects suggests that the symbolic is not a class among others, but rather functions as a category that subsumes the previous groups. Its strategic place- ment at the end of the book helps bestow on it a sense of narrative climax and simultaneously an ending. At the same time, the question becomes what es- pecially marks the objects in this section as symbols, in other words, in what way these photographs constitute paradigmatic visual expressions of the symbolic, which is a far less concrete category than the previous ones and arguably harder to visualize. In other words, if it is true that all things appear endowed with symbolic power when beholden by the camera's objective eye, then what do the disparate sights in this last section share that visibly quali- fies them as symbols? Each picture in this last group is dominated by strong verticals that por- tray the depicted objects as either rising or striving skyward, in an upward movement that is often accentuated through unusual cropping (as in the case for the crane and the agave) or unusual bottom-up perspectives (see espe- cially the foundry chimneys and the cathedral) or even the sideways place- ment of the photograph (as illustrated by the image depicting the museum steps, which is placed on its side so as to turn the steps' horizontal pattern into stark vertical lines). By recalling the gesture of prayer, the final close-up of conjoined hands fills the formal signifier "upward direction" with an iden- tifiable symbolic, indeed religious, meaning. This meaning is foreshadowed by some of the preceding images, including the bottom-up view of the cathe- dral's ceiling and the Christ sculpture. By the time viewers are presented with the conjoined hands of the last image they have become well aware of the web of visual assonances that ties the images together, and which intimates that upward direction functions as the visual correlate of the symbolic power harbored by the objects. To be sure, the use of this vertical symbolism to sig- nify (spiritual) ascension may come across as trite, but it certainly proves ef- fective as an abstract device that establishes connections among objects Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 131 across the bounds of the individual photographs without tarnishing their claim to formal self-sufficiency. Upon closer inspection, one can follow the deployment of analogical patterns all throughout the book. For instance, the upward orientation of the conjoined hands in the final image resonates with the downward orientation of the blossoms in the first image, tying the end to the beginning in analogical fashion. Subsequent photographs present differ- ent images from the plant world-the petals of a flower, a bunch of grapes, the leaves of a cactus plant, the thorns on another cactus plant (plates 3-8) as visually symbolizing the unity of the manifold in the one. Plates 68-71 focus on the rounded, organic forms of industrial machinery and power lines, pos- sibly intimating an underlying affinity between natural and technological forms, while images 50-59 portray sets of objects that thematize seriality as a dialectic of sameness and difference. To appreciate the role that visual analogy plays in the book it is helpful to draw on the discussion of Kracauer's essay developed earlier. At issue are es- pecially the difficulties that the grandmother's picture posed to the viewer, who could not reconcile his personal recollection of the elderly woman's ap- pearance with the photograph's momentary record of her youth. This issue does not arise for the beholder of Renger-Patzsch's photographs, as the im- ages' emphasis on paradigmatic form downplays the individuality of the de- picted objects. That is to say that in each case the ostensive generality of the object's form tends to subsume the singularity of the situation, effectively downplaying the image's claim of witnessing to a specific moment in time. In the case of the fisherwoman shrouded in her net, for instance, this means that her contingent appearance is presented under a guise of exemplarity that is designed to foreclose questions about her as a specific individual. Indeed, the image formally articulates the indexical "This was then" as a "This is al- ways," which renders any question about the specific moment in time super- fluous. Since the photograph minimizes the indexical moment, the next step, the moment of identification or recognition, is not to be formulated in terms of "Who was the specific fisherwoman portrayed on this photograph?" but rather as "What human type does this photograph depict?" In case of the image of the fir tree featured toward the end, one could say that it does not ask the viewer to identify an individual tree that a photographer might have encountered at a specific time and location, but rather wants to be read as the visual record of a fir tree's paradigmatic appearance. Heise's introduction re- inforces this operation by suggesting that the third moment, that of the at- tribution of meaning, likewise exceeds the contingent meaning that may be ascribed to each individual object. As he intimates, the interpretive moves demanded by the photographs circle around grasping the object's symbolic A fA c, 4 From Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die W~elt istschdn (The W>ordIs Beautiful), 1928. (Copyr-ight zo'- Alb)ert Renger--Patzsch, A-chiv Ann u. ]iurgen WVide, Zi/ipich/ Artists Rights Society (AR S), New Yrk.) a-. From Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schiin (The W'orldIs Beautiful, 1928. (Copyright 20f5 A/bert Render-Patzscb Arch/v /Ann u. Jugen Wi/d, 7ilpich AIrtists Rights Society (ARS), New York.) 134 " The Chatter of the Visible valence as revealed by the camera's objective eye. The final effect is that the three levels that carry the photograph's semiotic operations-the indexical, the iconic, and the interpretive/symbolic-end up stacking up in a neat hier- archical order, which preempts the kind of incongruity that plagued the grandmother's beholder in Kracauer's essay. Indeed, the viewer soon realizes that she needs no information about the specific objects other than being able to recognize their formal patterns as paradigmatic, and the interpretive moment is likewise taken care of through reference to an unspecified sym- bolic valence inherent in the thing itself. Visual analogy plays an important role in cementing the neat congruence of the three moments. It not only provides the decisive visual signifier, "up- ward movement;' for the symbolic valence of objects in the last section, but also serves as a tool for producing narrative cohesion, for instance by linking disparate objects through visual assonances and smoothing abrupt transi- tions. To be sure, Renger-Patzsch's formalist approach is not atypical for the photography of his day, and his work resonates with that of contemporaries like Moholy-Nagy and Werner Griff in its emphasis on form as an abstract trigger for perception. Like theirs, it lends itself well to exploiting visual anal- ogies, and one often finds analogical patterns deployed in modernist photo- books as a means for bestowing cohesion on images presented as a sequential visual montage that dispenses with disambiguating verbal information. What makes Renger-Patzsch's photobook striking, however, is that its em- phasis on the evidentiary force of photography endeavors to suppress the main challenge that arises when one takes photography seriously as a me- dium in its own right. This is its indexical quality, that is, its ability to bear witness to a singular moment in time, which is, however, a blank moment of authenticity. In the narrative spun by Renger-Patzsch's photobook that mo- ment of authenticity is filled with the claims of the paradigmatic, in a move that requires taming the indexical by subsuming it under the iconic and the symbolic. Visual analogy is what produces the tight articulation of the three levels so as to ensure that each photograph will be understood as representing not just any object, but "the" object in its essential form. This makes for a vi- sual narrative that feels predictable and regimented after a while in spite of the images' arresting beauty. . Sometime between 1933 and 1934 Hannah Hoch pasted 421 images taken from German-language and foreign illustrated magazines onto two is- sues ofDie Dame, the most successful fashion periodical of the Weimar era.26 The images survey many popular themes that dominated the visual culture of Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 135 the by then defunct Weimar Republic: the cult of fitness and the body, film stars, the New Woman and its attendant ideal of femininity, the marvels of the natural world and contemporary technology, exotic landscapes and peo- ples, travel, and the joys of children and pets (especially cats). Notably absent are references to the political and economic turmoil of the last Weimar years, to inflation, mass unemployment, and street violence. Hoch left no state- ment as to the purpose or even the title of this work, which she saved until her death. While it bears some resemblance to the archive books used by contemporary photographers to organize pictures for future use, it has been customarily treated as a scrapbook of sorts that documents Hdch's private enjoyment of the lures of consumerism and the reveries of Weimar culture.27 Based on this psychological reading, the scrapbook was for Hoch an escape valve that enabled her to indulge the disingenuous promises of a market- driven mass culture even as she was busy deconstructing these very promises in her merciless photomontages.28 I believe that the rise of the modernist photobook in Weimar Germany provides a different context for appraising Hdch's scrapbook, one that fore- grounds the inquiry it unfolds into the construction of visual meaning and the complex narratives made possible by the montage principle.29 Following photobook conventions, Hdch's scrapbook primarily contains undoctored photo-reproductions, though there are a few examples of visibly cropped im- ages. While most photobooks of the time featured one photograph per page, however, Hdch's scrapbook typically arranges three to eight photographs on a given page, usually in a grid format that recalls the conventions of the il- lustrated press. Unlike the commercial photobook, Hdch's scrapbook has no title that would suggest an overarching theme; it furthermore lacks page numbers or other systems of reference, as well as any explanatory apparatus. Finally, many images have no caption or title and are unattributed. Where captions are present, they are generally printed in a small font and often in gothic type, which makes for limited legibility. The idiosyncratic arrange- ment of these textual inserts often complicates what appears to be an already crowded layout rather than help in its disambiguation.30 It is important to address at the outset the seemingly affirmative quality that for many critics suffuses the scrapbook's montage of images, and which forms a stark contrast to the biting incisiveness of Hdch's photomontages. If the scrapbook appears to lack the critical force of the latter, this is because the montage principle at work in the photomontages is predicated on a different semiotic strategy than that of the scrapbook. Hdch's photomontages exploit to the fullest the disjointive quality of the montage procedure, which they enjoin in the service of an allegorical operation. They generally consist of  11/. Hannah Hoch, DeutschesMifdchen (German Girl) (1930). Photomontagc and collage on paper. (Photo court esy of Berlinische Ga/erie, Berlin. Copyright 2015 Irlisls Rights Society (J4RS), New York / VG Bi/d-Kunst, Bonn.) Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 137 what is supposed to pass for one coherent image, yet is comprised of frag- ments that clearly do not belong together. For example, Deutsches Mdchen (German Girl), a collage from 1930, promises the portrait of a wholesome German young woman, which however turns out to be a jarring composite of disparate elements. A case in point is the girl's hair, which is tightly knotted in a dark bun and turns out to be the hair of a Japanese woman. As Maud Lavin has noted, Hdch's portrayal of German femininity appropriates the traditional hairstyle of a Japanese woman in order to signify "tradition;' thus suggesting that the visual culture of 1920s Germany lacked a signifier for tra- ditional femininity.31 The critical force of this operation lies in the disjointive power of allegory, which allows for contextually attaching the signified "tra- ditional German femininity" to the signifier "traditional Japanese woman's hairstyle" while foregrounding the artificiality of this move. Because allegory emphasizes the difference of the terms it unites, it pointedly depicts the evo- cation of traditional German womanhood as resting on a problematic exotic fantasy, one that is bound to seize signifiers and images from a different cul- ture or era to compensate for what is lacking in one's own context. As this brief discussion indicates, Hdch's single-image photomontages engage an allegorical mode of signification that emphatically invests the col- laged fragments with a meaning that does not inhere in them, thereby fore- grounding the constructedness and incongruity of the whole composition. By contrast, her scrapbook arranges single photographs in grids of various formats. Though cropping and overlaps are conspicuous at times, the single photographs are generally allowed to stand alone and demand to be read as self-contained units of a narrative series, thus discouraging an allegorical in- terpretation.32 Because virtually all of the images suggest a positive reading of their subjects, which are often lionized by foregrounding their aesthetically flattering aspects or endearing sentimentality, critics have tended to read the pictures as a deadpan celebration of Weimar's dazzling visual culture. Indeed, the book looks like a compendium of the most arresting sights of contempo- rary print culture. These are thematically arranged in convenient grid layouts that are occasionally complicated by small irregularities but otherwise sug- gest a linear reading of the double-page spreads from left to right and top to bottom. At closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the neat grid layout is only a superficial means of orientation laid upon an intricate web of analogical references that tie images together at various levels-single page, double-page spread, and across several pages. It is the narrative power of this analogical network that the scrapbook harnesses and performatively com- ments upon. This inquiry is not propelled by the demystifying critique that drives Hdch's allegorical photomontages. Instead what is at stake is how vi- 138 " The Chatter of the Visible sual meaning can be rhetorically produced by means of a montage procedure that ties photographs together into complex analogical networks. I will draw on one exemplary page from the scrapbook to begin discuss- ing the dynamic play it stages with visual analogy. The page at issue appears toward the middle of the scrapbook and features three images connected by a number of visual allusions.33 The picture in the upper-left corner depicts a flower's pistil photographed at extremely close range, which makes it look like a pillowy, alien plant. The image is flanked at the right-hand side by a photograph featuring the feet of an elegantly dressed couple taken from a skewed top-down angle. The imprints left by the woman's feet on the sandy terrain suggest that she is walking away from the man. A plant outside the field of vision casts its shadow between the two pairs of feet and recalls the flower's pistil at the right, whose rounded protuberances are also echoed by the woman's rounded footprints. These two images rest, as it were, on a large photograph of two pumas, which takes up the whole bottom half of the page. This is a frontal portrait of the animals that are dubbed "Jungverheira- tete Pumas (Zoo Hannover)" ("Newlywed pumas, Hannover zoo") by the only caption on the page. The pumas' heads form a diagonal line that tra- verses the image bottom-up and right to left and parallels the diagonals formed by the woman's footprints and the flower's pistil. Paraphrasing Moholy-Nagy, one could maintain that this assemblage of disparate images foregrounds unsuspected mutual relationships grounded in analogy. The parting human couple stands in ironic counterpoint to the newlywed pumas, whose anthropomorphizing portrayal invests their presumed union with the full force of matrimonial obligation. The flower at the top might then allude to a nuptial celebration, but everything on the page looks skewed, from the abstract depiction of the flower's stem to the equally abstract portrayal of the parting couple, of whom only the feet are visible, and on to the safe realism of the newlywed pumas, whose hammy portrait looks like a sentimental cari- cature when compared to the boldness of the two photographs with which it is associated. The complex analogical play engendered by both visual and textual ele- ments on this first page introduces several themes and strategies that unfold in the pages that follow. To begin with, the juxtaposing of the three images calls attention to the redundancy of the caption accompanying the pumas' portrait. Clearly the caption states the obvious-the animals look like mates-but precisely this redundancy forms the caption's revealing trait, in that it calls attention to the fact that the pumas resemble a married couple because their photo recalls the conventions of the newlywed portrait. In other words, the caption may not say anything of substance about the ani- - TcI 4K" ; 0 R Hanniah Hoch, Album (13-3) ed. Gunda Lyuken (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004), I (6o). (Courtesy o fBerlinisehe cuierie, Berlin. Copyright 2ois Artists Rights Soeiety (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunsi, Bonn.) 140 " The Chatter of the Visible mals, but it does highlight the fact that their presumably realistic portrayal is based on an anthropomorphizing perspective enshrined in photographic convention, which endows the animals' otherness with human attributes and thus domesticates it.34 More generally this example shows how captions in the scrapbook are not meant to provide information regarding a photo- graph's subject but rather to shed light on the different relationships captions can establish between the viewer and the viewed. Second, the eye-level portrait of the pumas derives its force from the in- tensity of the animals' gazes. This point is further underscored in the juxta- position with the faceless photograph of the human couple. Both pumas face the camera, although the larger one looks upward past the camera and to the side, while the other engages the camera-and by implication the viewer- directly. The viewer's gaze is thus provided at least two different paths for roaming the page: one involves following the upward movement of the puma at left, while the other entails returning the smaller puma's gaze in an act that thematizes the relationality of seeing and vision. In a similar way, the move- ment and direction of individuals', animals', and even dolls' eyes is a preemi- nent feature in the arrangement of many double-page spreads, often offering analogical trails along which the viewer's own gaze is invited to bounce in contravention to the linear order of the grid. In keeping with Stafford, one could say that this emphasis on the gaze highlights how vision is a privileged instrument of analogical discovery. Finally, the analogical juxtaposing of the human couple and the pumas has a dereferentializing effect that is crucial for the scrapbook. It is as though the indexical, iconic, and symbolic levels, which one can still piece together in purveying the individual images, had come unglued as a result of the im- ages' assemblage on the page. For instance, the pumas' humanizing character- ization, which the caption emphasizes, accentuates the depersonalizing pre- sentation of the human couple, of whom only the feet are shown. The combination of the two images raises the question of what kind of relation- ship the pumas might actually have, a question one is bound to ask of the human couple as well. In other words, the associations one might initially martial to decode the individual images are suspended or placed into ques- tion by the images' montage on the page. As the automatized steps of identi- fication and interpretation seem to run aground, what is left is the images' indexical presentness. That is, the montage procedure divests the individual images of their conventional status as "optical signs" and turns them into blank signs, while opening up their indexical blankness to the play of visual analogy. Hdch's montage strategy thus achieves two objectives. On the one hand, it unmoors the individual images from the iconic and symbolic mo- Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 141 ments in which they have become entangled. On the other, it invites new symbolic operations, this time as a commentary on and an inquiry into the mechanisms of seeing. Its use of analogy could not be more different from the practice that unfolds in Renger-Patzsch's photobook, which deploys it to reinforce the ties among the three levels and to promote an immersive mode of reception. This is emblematically illustrated by a double-page spread that features images of African women analogically tied by the theme of progression from childhood to adulthood and motherhood (Album 2o-21). This narrative is complicated by the photograph of a young European woman in an artistic nude pose, which does not seem to fit the "passage to adulthood" theme, yet appears connected to the other images by a different set of analogical asso- nances. Her photograph occupies the bottom-left corner of the left page, which includes two identical portraits of an African girl at the top identified as "Fulbe girl" ("Fulbe Midchen") by the caption. The bottom-right corner has a head-and-shoulder portrait of an African girl looking away from the camera. The doubling of the Fulbe girl at the top suggests that the two images at the bottom-the naked European woman and the African girl in profile- can also be read as doubles. An equivalence is thus established between the demure African girl, whose shoulders are exposed, and the European woman, who smiles into the camera while chastely draping a cloth across her womb. The latter photograph's soft focus and stylized ornamental background, as well as the girl's staged pose, level an artistic claim that tempers the potential offense of her nudity, her bare breasts both recalling and forming a contrast to the exposed breasts of an African woman shown while chatting with other men and women on a photograph on the adjacent page. The images of female nudity on this two-page spread document the ways in which Weimar visual culture negotiated the taboo of nudity and the perils of the pornographic by investing the nude body with connotations of beauty, naturalness, and innocence. Hdch's scrapbook contains an extensive reper- toire of such images, which range from naked children and adults exercising in the outdoors to non-Western peoples captured in their "natural" way of life and images that recall the centuries-old tradition of the female nude por- trait. In all cases the sensuality of the naked-primarily female-body is transfigured and sublimated in an aesthetic operation designed to fore- ground the body's innocence and intrinsic beauty. Yet on this spread the jux- taposing of the naked bodies of the European girl and the seated African woman at the top of the right-hand page is jarring. The latter is talking while sitting in a slouched position, her elongated breasts draped across her belly, the ordinary quality of her demeanor preventing aestheticization or idealiza- 142 " The Chatter of the Visible {. *-3U N Hannah H6ch, from Album, zo-r. (Courtesy ofBerlinische Galerie, Berlin. Copyright 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) tion. This makes the European woman's pose seem all the more contrived, casting doubt on the pretense of artistry and innocence that authorizes it. It compels the reader to inspect more closely the narrative suggested by the two pages, which involves a progression from the virtuousness of girlhood to the experience of motherhood in the last picture of a Somali woman holding a young child. Are the moments of innocence one can glean from these depic- tions constitutive of the lives of these African women, or are they rather con- structed through the conventions of the photographic medium, as is the case for the European woman in the nude? Does the narrative of untainted girl- hood and motherhood apply to these African women at all or is it a Western fantasy determined to find in the exotic and the primitive what it has pre- sumably lost at home? Another double-page spread raises similar questions by its visual explora- tion of the themes of movement, dance, and sports (Album 18-19). It fea- tures a sequence of eight photos arranged on a grid, which starts at the top left-hand corner with an image of the popular dancer Gret Palucca captured in an athletic jump and ends with an iconic image ofJosephine Baker in one Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 143 4i Hannah Hoch, from Album, 18-19. (Courtesy ofBerlinische Galerie, Berlin. Copyright 2015 Artists Rights Society (AiLS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) of her exotic costumes. The visual assonance of the two women's crouching position bookends, in sequential order, the image of a man pole-vaulting, another shot of Palucca engaged in a sideway leap, an image of dancer Vera Skoronel in a statuary pose,; two images of a Balinese young girl in ceremo- nial costume executing a trance dance,36 and a photo of two sumo wrestlers in a hold position-this latter image is captioned "Sumo: Beinstellen ist er- laubt und eine ganze Reihe von Griffen, welche bei unserem Ringkampf streng verpbnt sind" ("Sumo: tripping and a whole array of moves that are censured in our wrestling are here allowed"; Album 19). The sequence is har- nessed by a web of analogical references that link the visual and the concep- tual in far-reaching associations. The leap of the pole vaulter resonates di- rectly with the athletic jumps of the female dancers. In addition, Vera Skoronel's concentrated expression echoes the stupor of the Balinese dancer at right. The dancers' and athlete's physical prowess on the left page finds an incongruous resonance in the wrestlers' heavy-set bodies on the facing page. Their athletic embrace whimsically recalls ballroom dancing, but also resem- bles Baker's coquette dancing squat at right. Her sexually inviting expression 144 " The Chatter of the Visible and skimpy exotic costume in turn forms a counterpoint to the men's partial nudity, which appears far less appealing by the aesthetic standards implied by her portrayal. On the whole, the analogical relationships created by the images illumi- nate the ties existing between the fields of sports and dance, while also fore- grounding the specific cultural and normative horizons that regulate them, as alluded to by the reference to the distinctive rules of sumo wrestling found in the caption. This in turn raises the issue of how one is to sort out the allu- sions to aestheticized bodily prowess, religious enrapture, exoticism, and sexuality found in the images. To what extent is sumo wrestling a dance? To what extent is modern dance a kind of wrestling? What is one to make of the fact that the focused expression of one of the wrestlers recalls that of the Ba- linese child dancer? Is modern dance analogous to the child's ritualized movements? If so, what kind of religiosity is implied in both? And what is its relationship to the sexualized body celebrated by mass culture? While it might be possible to answer these questions so as to reconstruct, by means of conjecture, the commentary Hoch intended to provide on these issues, what interests me more is that the questions are raised at all via an analogical procedure that exposes often surprising ties among images. The consistency of this operation makes the scrapbook's last image, a panoramic view of Berlin's iconic Potsdamer Platz spread across two pages, all the more striking. When compared to the dizzying mosaic of images the viewer has been asked to make sense of, the oversized single photograph of Berlin's most bustling square looks disarming and almost cozy in spite of the monumental scale of the environment it encompasses. The conventions of the panoramic photograph endow it with a sense of surveyable place and familiar moder- nity that binds together and embeds the variety of experiences offered in the scrapbook. In wrapping up its journey through all manner of defamiliarizing perspectives and visual experiences, Hdch's scrapbook seems to end by visu- ally producing the very context that encompasses the modern medley of vi- sual stimuli. But the image's disarming simplicity fails to fully convince after the hermeneutic acrobatics imposed by the montage narratives of the pre- ceding pages. At the very least, the montage of images has chipped away at the mystique of the straight photograph, with the result that the viewer can no longer take at face value its instantaneousness and putative self- containment. In other words, the paradoxical sense of quotidian familiarity and anonymous metropolitan life conjured by the photograph becomes a riddle that requires an active work of decoding. The mode of this decoding forms the very crux of Hdch's scrapbook, as foregrounded by the placing of this photograph at its very end. It is the only Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 145 Hannah Hoch, A/buin, final two page-spread. (Courtesy ofBerlinische Galerie, Berlin. Copyriht 21o Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bill-Kunsi, Bonn.) image that occupies an entire double-page spread and is thus allowed to stand alone in the field of vision delimited by the book. It is as though the viewer were now invited to test the viewing skills honed while negotiating the scrapbook's visual medley on an image presented in a more conventional fashion. Indeed, the conventional reception of this photograph would in- volve an act of identification or recognition of what the image depicts, an act that requires matching the depicted with a referent based on resemblance.?7 This is, at bottom, the likeness test flunked by Kracauer's youthful grand- mother. After experiencing the montage of images presented in the scrap- book, the viewer is, however, less likely to ask a conventional question such as "What object or place in real life does this image resemble ?" but will rather puzzle over what other images the photograph possibly recalls, how it over- laps analogically with other sites (and sights), and what this visual overlap might say about the depicted referents. In other words, resemblance in H6ch's scrapbook is no longer about the mimetic relation between an image and a referent, let alone the claim, leveled by Renger-Patzsch, that an image can embody an object's essential physiognomy. In heeding, as it were, the 146 " The Chatter of the Visible cautionary discourse of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Brecht, the book no longer enjoins resemblance to illusionism and verisimilitude as warrants for the truthfulness of the photographic image, but rather turns it into a medium for multiple analogical comparisons among ostensibly unrelated images. These are, to paraphrase Benjamin, operations of mutual captioning that cast a new light on the relations among the depicted referents, allowing for the active construction of narratives that lay claim to truth. " My analysis of Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schin and Hdch's scrap- book has focused on the pedagogy they unfold through their exploration of visual analogy. In both cases the pedagogical moment is not consigned to theoretical statements, but rather to a performative investigation of photog- raphy's narrative and rhetorical power. If in Renger-Patzsch's volume formal resemblances allow for tying together the diverse semiotic layers that medi- ate reception of a given photograph, then Hdch's Album is rather concerned with the pedagogical yield of undoing these ties. In her scrapbook the mon- tage procedure strips photographs down to their indexical status, exposing the indifferent spatial continuum of their visible surface. This is not to be taken as an early statement about a reality in which the possibility of truth has been supplanted by an endless play of simulacra. Hdch's work instead valorizes images by taking seriously their indexical moment, the fact that they refer back to an instant in time that grounds their authenticity. At the same time it makes clear that this instant is semiotically blank because the context that frames it cannot be supplied by the photograph itself. The peda- gogical moment lies in practicing attribution of iconic and symbolic infor- mation outside of automatized routines, in asking how much images can "say" if one exercises vision's capacity for establishing analogical connections. After the first couple of pages the viewer becomes used to the double va- lence of each photograph, which is both allowed to stand alone as a self- contained indexical statement and to enter into relationships with other photographs and textual material. These relationships are based on thematic and formal resemblances that suggest multiple possible accounts, but the work of filling in the dots ultimately falls to the viewer. In these operations the familiar and the exotic, the proximate and the distant, the natural and the civilized, the animate and the inanimate are mixed up in analogical networks that complicate their antonymic relations without altogether undoing them. As the montage procedure turns something into its opposite-the familiar becomes exotic, the animal human, the human inanimate, and so on-the point is not to destroy distinctions per se, but rather to show that they are Narrative Resemblance and the Modernist Photobook " 147 not inherent properties of objects, but rather heuristic tools of perception whose deployment depends on contextualization. What the assembled pho- tographs withhold from the viewer in terms of critique or affirmation serves to underscore the open-endedness and empowering moment of the montage procedure, which mimics the ways in which seeing analogically pieces to- gether elements of the real. The debates about photography I described in the first part of this chap- ter ultimately boiled down to the question of how one is to orient oneself in a world saturated by mechanically reproducible images. What is one to do with those images that purport objectively to present a state of affairs for which we have no context? And what about those images that, under the pretense of mediating knowledge of the strange and the exotic, only reflect back to us our biases and uninspected beliefs, so that the image's ostensive moment of discovery and recognition winds up strengthening the blinders that occlude our vision? Hdch's scrapbook twists the terms of the debate by turning the issue of truth-as presumably vouchsafed by a photograph's ex- actitude and objectivity-into an investigation of resemblance. The photo- graph's potential for truth then hinges on the multiple analogical relations it can enter into with other information, whether visual or verbal. Where Renger-Patzsch uses analogy to transfigure objects, removing them from the mundane and contingent, Hdch's scrapbook deploys it for acts of discern- ment guided by the question of what else I am able to see if I reshuffle the conventional orders in which images appear. In a world where meaningful seeing is often coterminous with recognizing, and where recognition is sus- tained by media images whose endless resemblance creates the impression that we actually know what we recognize, the task her scrapbook undertakes involves turning resemblance, the endless mirroring of images in the media, into a tool for active seeing. 6 * Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters Perhaps no other artist has offered as comprehensive and layered an explora- tion of montage as Kurt Schwitters, whose imaginative engagement with strategies of disarticulation and assemblage over four decades casts a long shadow on the art of the twentieth century.1 Working in a variety of media, Schwitters pushed the bounds of montage with a single-mindedness that is only matched by the doggedness with which he interrogated the enabling conditions of his artistic practice. Yet precisely his reflection on montage as a fundamental aesthetic principle has presented a formidable stumbling block for Schwitters scholars ever since the rediscovery of his oeuvre in the 1950s. For all the inventiveness and boldness of his work his notion ofMerz, or ab- stract montage, appears curiously esoteric, seemingly revolving around a rig- idly formalist understanding of autonomous art. One can hardly imagine a greater mismatch than the one separating Schwitters's idea of art as a domain that transcends quotidian affairs, especially politics, and the exuberant trans- gression of boundaries-of the canvas, of the text, of different media and codes-staged in his work, which rather suggests the exhilarating embrace of a messy and incoherent everyday. If one adds to this Schwitters's keen busi- ness sense and baffling willingness to deploy the same principles he saw at the heart of autonomous art in his successful commercial ventures, one will eas- ily understand the distrust, even chagrin, expressed by some of his contempo- raries, who dismissed him as a cynical self-promoter and a betrayer of the avant-gardists' ethos. Critics have openly wrestled with the uncomfortable mix of visionary boldness, naive idealism, and conceptual inconsistencies in Schwitters's profile and endeavors, often concluding that his pathbreaking work was incongruously propelled by a nostalgic understanding of art as a site of transcendence bound to offer the harmony and order sorely missing in Weimar Germany.2 148 Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 149 While it is true that Schwitters's writings befuddle readers by mixing the grating irreverence of Dada with the mystical rhetoric that suffuses strands of De Stijl and Constructivism, a close examination of his work shows that his understanding of art's transcendence was not tied to belief in a metaphysical realm opposed to everyday experience. Rather it related to the possibility of realizing abstraction in art through strategies of juxtaposition and quotation that aimed at subverting the relations among objects in everyday experience. Far from forsaking the everyday, abstract art was called to explore its bounds by making its signifying structures perspicuous. This chapter examines key literary works from the 1920s and 1930s to reconstruct Schwitters's under- standing of intransitive art, which hinges on separating ordinary sense- making from the linguistic structures that enable it. Intransitivity in this con- text is a strategy that disassociates perception from meaning in order to make its enabling structures apparent. This allows for grasping their singularity and contingency and for highlighting their being susceptible to transforma- tive manipulation. This understanding of communication is explored in nar- ratives that performatively enact the very structures they set out to explore. In so doing they provide test cases for a mode of storytelling that draws on montage to explore intransitivity as the negative side of ordinary meaning, in an operation that aims at embracing and expanding the reach of everyday communication. * Schwitters's aesthetic practice turns on his program ofMerz, a theory of montage that supplied him with both an analytic framework and a brand label for his diverse artistic pursuits.3 He developed and promoted this pro- gram in numerous essays that appeared over the course of the 1920s in avant- garde publications and in his own journal Merz. These texts reflect his deter- mination to shape the debate on contemporary art so as to create a discursive environment favorable to reception of his work. Schwitters found himself fighting on two fronts in promoting his art in the early 192os. On the one hand he took on the art critics associated with the cultural establishment, whose bourgeois pretentions and chauvinistic narrow-mindedness he tirelessly lampooned. On the other, he vied for the recognition of, and simultaneously competed with, the artists that belonged to the self-proclaimed progressive camp, especially Dada. With this camp he shared a marked aversion for aesthetic decorum and the desire to anchor ar- tistic practice in everyday life. At the same time he vehemently rejected the political engagement of Dada's militant phalanx, a position that placed him on a collision course with activists like Richard Huelsenbeck and George 150 " The Chatter of the Visible Grosz. Not coincidentally, Schwitters's first comprehensive discussion of Merz is found in a 1921 essay that sketches his response to the politicization of Dadaism following the establishment of the Berlin Club Dada in 1918. The text marks the culmination of his feud with Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the founders of Dada in Berlin who had vehemently opposed Schwitters's mem- bership in the group. Schwitters's manifesto is a rebuttal to Huelsenbeck's charge that his championing of abstraction was at bottom an escapist posi- tion, one that failed to take a robust political stance vis-a-vis the conservative retrenchments of postwar Germany while indulging the discredited idealism of Expressionism.4 The dispute with Huelsenbeck forced Schwitters to ar- ticulate the paradox at the heart of his project. That is, art's distinctiveness from other practices lies in its abstraction, that is, its nonreferential, non- communicative quality; yet this very intransitive quality is the foundation of its transformative impact on experience. How can a practice that only points back to itself, one may ask, relate productively to the environment in which it unfolds and even help change it? The 1921 Merz manifesto opens by detailing Schwitters's reasons for re- nouncing naturalistic representation in painting, which, as he maintains, is an academic skill that can be learned by anyone who is not color-blind. Art is a practice of a different order, Schwitters insists, one devoted to coordinating given elements. Its aim is not to transpose reality's semblance into illusionis- tic representation; it rather pursues Ausdruck, an absolute mode of expres- sion that serves no purpose. With the mobilization of the termAusdruck the essay moves onto conceptually unorthodox, and at times seemingly incon- gruous, terrain. A key term in the aesthetic discourse associated with Expres- sionism, Ausdruck had played a central role in Kandinsky's influential paean to abstract painting in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), and Schwitters seems to at first borrow from the Russian's conceptual arsenal in his own de- fense of abstraction. Yet if in Kandinsky's discourse "expression" was a path to disclosing a suppressed spiritual reality by translating the vibrations of the artist's soul into a pure language of color and sound, Schwitters's idiosyn- cratic use of the term relieves it from the task of rendering inner states of mind, or, for that matter, anything at all. As he puts it, "expression" does not translate anything and only marks an aesthetic assemblage whose intransitiv- ity is the hallmark of all art.5 Such emphasis on art's intransitivity may at first resonate with the aes- thetic ascetism championed by Clement Greenberg, who saw in the mod- ernist disavowal of illusionism a token of the artist's refusal to engage with a contemporary experience defiled by materialism, greed, and corrupt power.6 This refusal, Greenberg maintained, drove a self-reflexive inquiry into the Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 151 expressive qualities of a medium whose quest for truth pushed beyond the appearance of the material world. Yet for Schwitters art is not about explor- ing the possibilities of a specific medium in an ascetic quest for purity. Quite to the contrary, it endeavors to establish connections encompassing all kinds of materials, no matter how lowly or degraded their status may be in everyday life. Thus any object can be yanked out of its customary environ- ment, divested of its purpose, and treated at a par with color and line on the canvas. This is possible because art is, fundamentally, about the operation of giving form: The material is as unessential as myself. The only essential thing is giv- ing form. Because the material is unessential, I use any material the picture demands. By harmonizing different types of materials among themselves, I have an advantage over mere oil painting, for besides playing off color against color, I also play off line against line, form against form, etcetera, and even material against material, for example wood against burlap. I call the worldview from which this mode of artistic creation arose "Merz." (pppppp 215)7 Art is thus about juxtaposing all kinds of materials in order to create rela- tional configurations. Schwitters's repeated downplaying of the properties of given elements is meant to preempt the notion that montage practice is about producing additive concoctions whose effect lies in the sum total of their component parts. Instead he insists that the works' formal configura- tions arise from the contrastive logic of given juxtapositions. In setting wood against canvas, for instance, the point is not to combine the physical proper- ties of those two materials but to exploit the effect of their relational inter- play. If one juxtaposes wood to a piece of metal, different aspects of woodness will come into play. Wood is thus not valuable for the absolute qualities it may possess, but rather for its ability to interact differently with different materials-in Schwitters's own words: "All values exist exclusively through the mutual relationships they establish."8 Artistic "forming" consists of ma- nipulating these relational interactions, as exemplified by the very term Merz. A syllable culled from the word Commerzbank ("commerce bank"), Merz does not possess any recognizable qualities when treated in isolation. Once inserted into Schwitters's discourse, it enters relationships with other terms that endow it with specific functions. In creating relational patterns, montage artworks add to the web of rela- tions that makes up reality. Their relational structures do not mirror or re- produce the semblance of the relational network of experience, but rather 152 " The Chatter of the Visible possess distinctive configurations, what Schwitters calls "rhythm" appropri- ating a key term that circulated in the discourse of Expressionism and Con- structivism. Rhythm denotes relationships that are not random or coinci- dental, but rather ground in a properly aesthetic logic that differs from the communicative and utilitarian dynamics that links objects in nonartistic realms. For this reason the patterns created by artistic relations are quintes- sentially self-referential.9 The dispensation from having to relate to external reality grounds art's autonomy from the prescriptions of mimetic representa- tion and the pressure to infuse the artwork with some explicit ideological message. While the artwork does not point beyond itself to an outside refer- ent, it is not an utterly blind monad, for it presupposes recipients who are able to grasp its relational pattern at a nondiscursive, perceptual level. This blend of perceptual perspicuousness and semantic/conceptual blankness is what Schwitters calls abstraction. In his discourse, abstraction grounds an artistic practice that reassembles elements culled from experience by means of a logic that disregards the mutual relations of objects in everyday life. Its underlying montage principle allows a dramatic extension of the possibilities of any given art form, since the range of materials that can be used is virtually limitless. Within this frame, traditional boundaries among art forms become irrelevant; indeed, they come to represent an indefensible obstacle to artistic practice. Hence Merz allows for producing a total work of art, one that imag- inatively hybridizes media and genres, while also blurring the conventional distinction between art and nonart as it lays claim to appropriating any given element of reality for artistic practice (pppppp 216-i8).10 Within this frame art is no longer about representation. Instead, it constitutes a concrete inter- vention into experience, an operation that directly adds to its fabric. * Schwitters's integration of sundry elements from everyday experience defuses Huelsenbeck's charge of escapism by fulfilling his demand that artis- tic practice embrace the cacophonous stuff of modern life. Schwitters shrewdly seizes on this central demand of militant Dadaism to portray his own principle of Merz as being more radical and broadminded toward con- temporary experience than Huelsenbeck's exclusionary discourse, which he discredits as an attempt at constraining art's transformative potential by sub- jugating it to political aims (Werk 5:77-78). His early stories "Die Zwiebel" ("The Onion") and "Franz Miillers Drahtfriihling" ("Franz Muller's Wire Springtime") further continue the showdown with Huelsenbeck by trans- posing it onto the plane of grotesquely comical narratives. Notably, they probe the relation of art to politics by juxtaposing two different understand- Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 153 ings of montage, which allows Schwitters to deliver a caustic commentary on the narcissism and cynicism of politically engaged Dadaists. "The Onion" published in 1919, is a surreal tale of disemboweling and reassemblage cheerfully told in the first person by its protagonist and sacrifi- cial victim, Alves Bisenstiel.11 The event, which Bisenstiel has helped orches- trate, transposes religious ritual and juridical execution onto a gory slaugh- terhouse setting. A surprising turn occurs when the king, the star guest at the event, which is also witnessed by an unspecified Volk, greedily ingests Bisen- stiel's eyes and dies. The king's daughter hastily orders that his scattered parts be put back together so that he can be resuscitated and save the king. The newly collaged Bisenstiel, however, refuses to comply and seals the king's demise. His character's ambiguity in "The Onion" is dispelled in "Franz Mill- ler's Wire Springtime" which functions as a sequel of sorts to the first narra- tive.12 In three chapters, the text tells of the revolutionary uprisings unleashed by the subversive behavior of one Franz Muller, an artist whose indifference to the questioning of well-situated citizens and a policeman first sparks street riots and then prompts the convening of the country's parliament. Bisenstiel makes his appearance as an opportunistic politician who wantonly accuses Muller of seditious conduct (Werk 2:41).13 The story's various episodes, which are strung together without much regard for continuity or motiva- tion, are capped by a happy ending of sorts consisting of Muller's erotically charged encounter with a young woman, whose white clothes he symboli- cally soils. Taken together, the two stories offer an erratic allegory of the tur- bulent months following the demise of the German Kaiserreich and the es- tablishment of the Weimar Republic. Their stock descriptions of political actors driven by the basest human instincts-greed, dishonesty, grandstand- ing, and power-mongering-deliver at best a cranky and trivializing record of events during and after the war. Yet they stand out for the centrality they ascribe to montage as both an allegorical framework and a formal principle for exploring competing understandings of assembled identity. Both narratives unfold in theatrical settings that underscore the impor- tance of acts of watching and witnessing-the slaughterhouse/gallows/sacri- ficial altar in "The Onion"; the street and parliament chamber in "Franz Muller's Wire Springtime." In "The Onion" the self of the first-person narra- tor exists primarily as the object of an other's perception, including its own as filtered through the first-person narrative. In "Franz Muller's Wire Spring- time" Muller's unwillingness to acknowledge bystanders by looking back at them becomes a transgression that ultimately sparks street riots, forming a stark contrast to the conduct of all other actors, which is patterned on a dia- lectics of watching and being watched in return. This prominence of the the- 154 " The Chatter of the Visible atrical makes the stories into early dramatizations of the culture of exteriority that for Helmut Lethen distinguishes Weimar Germany from the Kaiser- reich. In his Verhaltenslehren der Kdite Lethen paints a vivid portrait of post- war Germany's new culture of exteriority, which displaced the ideology of inwardness that had authorized influential cultural discourses up to Expres- sionism.14 In this cultural framework subjectivity is formed through indi- viduals' interaction with their environment and in the reciprocal gaze they exchange with others. The emphasis here lies on shaping and controlling the ways in which an individual is perceived, because perceived being is all that counts in a culture that no longer believes in essential identities. Bisenstiel, the character that connects the two stories, is a paradigmatic example of the cold persona described by Lethen, which in his account forms the desirable cultural type bound to emerge in a social setting dominated by appearances and simmering violence. A paragon of cold conduct, Bisenstiel embodies a mode of agency that hinges on asserting oneself by exerting the utmost con- trol over one's body. His cold acquiescence to his dismembering empowers him to a most radical political act, namely, regicide, and contributes to sub- verting the tale's political order. The implications of this befuddling turn of events become apparent if one recalls Helmut Plessner's phenomenological account of the constitution of subjectivity in the reciprocal interaction with others, which plays a key role in Lethen's reading of Weimar culture. Schwitters's story cannily drama- tizes the dual role that the body plays for Plessner in the subject's constitu- tion, as both the incarnated locus of the self and one of many tools on which the individual draws in his interaction with the environment. As an interpo- lation of body and environment, the self thus comes into being as a phenom- enological given that is intimately tied to the body but not fully contained by it. This points to the expectation of a reciprocal interaction between indi- vidual and environment that forms the enabling condition of selfhood for Plessner.15 In "The Onion" this expectation is illustrated by the narrator's puzzling ability to recount the process of his disemboweling even after his skull has been cracked open and he is effectively dead. The possibility of nar- rating his own dismembering allows him to assume the role of the observer and the observed at once, turning the narrative into a medium of reciprocal interaction that enables the observing narrator to paradoxically survive after he has witnessed his own killing. The crucial role played by reciprocity is further documented by the king's pitiful demise, which is brought about by his greedy determination to devour the narrator's eyes. This Oedipal fantasy of castration can also be read, with Plessner, as an attempt at suppressing the reciprocal interaction on which the ruler depends to constitute selfhood and Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 155 thus ground his authority. In other words, the king's cannibalistic act is an attempt at suppressing, with the narrator's gaze, the very alterity that makes reciprocity and selfhood possible. In this respect it is significant that the king's ingestion of the narrator's eyes does not so much free him from the reciprocal bond that ties him to his subject as destroy the very precondition of selfhood, killing him. The reciprocity of seeing and the theme of bodily incorporation also play a prominent role in "Franz Muller's Wire Springtime." Muller's unwilling- ness to interact with bystanders can be read as a cipher for the incommunica- tive quality that distinguishes art for Schwitters. If his passivity winds up unleashing riots and thus recalls Bisenstiel's lethal acquiescence, he also em- bodies a montage principle that is very different from the one dramatized in the earlier narrative. If Bisenstiel's paradoxical self-assertion lies in his sub- mission to a gory spectacle that involves being physically dismembered and reassembled, Muller's montage practice is markedly nonviolent and grounds an unorthodox, antiheroic mode of artistic agency.6 As it turns out, Muller's attire and public persona are assembled from trash gathered from the gutter, as confirmed by his last name, which recalls the word for garbage, Mull(Werk 2:34-35). Muller's clothes even resemble the collages of refuse created by Schwitters as the self-identified narrator/author, and this makes of him a strolling Merz sculpture. But trash is also Muller's favorite food, a circum- stance that provides for some humorously disgusting digressions. The con- trast to Bisenstiel could not be more striking. Bisenstiel's ostensive willing- ness to feed the king by immolating his own body proves toxic. Muller, on the other hand, is willing to eat refuse, that is, to draw nourishment from the debased domains of everyday life. While this entails engaging experience in a nonviolent manner, the humorously repulsive description of his behavior prevents any idealization or heroization of his character. Indeed, Muller's propensity for eating rotting garbage makes him no more a point of identifi- cation than Bisenstiel. He is neither a hero nor a savior, but simply a practi- tioner of Merz, the montage principle advocated by Schwitters. Muller's un- heroic and repulsive behavior thus challenges the late-idealistic narrative that makes art into a domain for transfiguring everyday life and instead portrays both the artist and the artwork as made of the same smelly and unflattering stuff of ordinary experience.17 Schwitters's narratives thus put forth distinct models of montage that map on contrasting notions of subjectivity and agency. If Bisenstiel's sacrifi- cial montage literalizes the warmongering discourses of the 1910s that prom- ised the birth of a new man through the violent sacrifice of the old one, Mul- ler exemplifies the results of transposing onto the body a nonviolent, artistic 156 " The Chatter of the Visible practice that operates by embracing any material from everyday life, includ- ing refuse, through physical incorporation. While violence is integral to the unnatural disassembling and reassembling of Bisenstiel's body and is instru- mental to his empowerment following the king's death, for Muller the incor- poration of disparate elements, which artistic montage symbolizes, does not produce violent effects per se but rather occurs via the ordinary bodily func- tion of eating. This recalls the material acts of incorporation Walter Benja- min described in his glosses on writing and reading, which undergird his re- flection on storytelling as a practice that is not primarily centered on discerning meaning but rather hinges on mobilizing the body and its rou- tines. The two narratives leave little doubt as to which version of montage Schwitters embraces. If Bisenstiel, Huelsenbeck's doppelganger,18 comes to symbolize the self-serving and destructive conjunction of art and politics in Dada's activist groups, then Muller appears as a stand-in for Schwitters's own understanding of an abstract art, whose intransitivity is paradoxically linked to the unprejudiced embrace of experience in its entirety.19 . Schwitters's debunking of Huelsenbeck's position in the two narra- tives I just discussed helps to flesh out some of the arguments on abstract montage that unfold in his Merz essay but also leaves crucial questions unan- swered. What do recipients get out of the abstract artworks Schwitters champions if not some conceptualizable meaning? And what is the function of intransitive art, exactly? At issue is, specifically, the transformative inter- vention of montage artworks. Paraphrasing a 1925 remark by German art historian Franz Roh, Christo- pher Phillips describes the impact of visual montage as the confluence of two crucial tendencies in modern visual culture, namely, modernist abstraction and the realism of the incorporated fragments.20 Phillips's remark also echoes Clement Greenberg's discussion of Picasso's and Braque's turn to collage in their cubist work, which for Greenberg revolves around staging a contrast between the abstraction of cubist painting and the literalness of the collated elements. One may think in this context of Picasso's iconic Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), which juxtaposes painted objects made unrecognizable by cubist stylization to a hyperrealist, faux chair caning glued directly onto the canvas. The possibility for playing abstraction off against realism relies on the double signification engendered by montage techniques, which operate via a transfer of materials from one context to another. In this transfer, mate- rials become functional parts of the new context while maintaining allusions to the previous one(s). Hence, Picasso's fragment of chair caning, while being Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 157 Pablo Picasso, Stil L fe with Chair Caning (Spring 19i2). Oil on oilcloth over canvas edged with rope. Photo: R. G. Ojeda. Musee Picasso. (Copyright RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY Copyright 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.) one of several still-life objects on the canvas, exceeds the painting's frame of reference by metonymically evoking the chair from which it was taken. This metonymic reference to the "real object" playfully mocks the conventions of illusionistic representation, which are brought into sharp relief through con- trast with the cubist rendering of objects that make up the rest of the compo- sition.21 In short, the hyperrealism of the chair caning accentuates the anti- illusionism, or abstraction, of the overall composition. At the same time, the unsublimated fragment explodes the boundedness of the canvas by stub- bornly pointing back to the whole to which it once belonged. In this way it dramatizes the ability of montage fragments to evoke the contexts out of which they were extracted as though they were affected by an incurable se- mantic cross-eyedness.22 This semantic and referential double-coding makes for the jarring quality and lack of closure of montage artifacts and accounts for their critical poten- tial in the practice of Dada. Yet this subversive moment is distinctively absent 158 " The Chatter of the Visible in Schwitters's discourse on Merz. His understanding of art's intransitivity is predicated on stripping materials of former contextual valences so as to make them fit the artwork's self-contained relations. This entails suppressing the realist orientation of the collated elements, that is, their ability to point to a context extrinsic to the artwork.23 As it turns out, Schwitters's radicalization of the hybridity and messiness of montage has the paradoxical effect of but- tressing a most intransigent claim to artistic autonomy, and it is not difficult to imagine the chagrin of artists like Huelsenbeck and Grosz, who cringed at witnessing a most incisive avant-garde practice being appropriated for a posi- tion that was indistinguishable in their eyes from the academic elitism Schwitters claimed to despise. But Schwitters's position seems to be unten- able at an even more fundamental level, which has to do with his apparent determination to suppress the double talk of montage by blocking the out- ward orientation of the incorporated materials. If one were to take his claims about the artist's ability to "dematerialize" materials at face value, one would have to conclude that the fragment of the cigarette ad used in his collage Miss Blanche can completely sever its ties to the world of advertisement and act as a blank signifier whose function derives solely from the relationships it enters into with other collaged elements.24 Yet it appears doubtful that the cross- eyedness of montage fragments can ever be entirely suppressed. The simple- mindedness of Schwitters's pronouncements in this regard has stymied many scholars, lending credence to his reputation, bolstered already by many con- temporaries, as an artist whose collage practices are boldly experimental, but whose concept of art as a self-contained realm of order and harmony is at bottom escapist and nostalgic.25 Upon closer scrutiny, the essay on Merz offers a more nuanced analysis than the contention that one can fully divest materials of their allusions to previous contexts. Key to this more layered understanding of montage is Schwitters's discussion of Merz-Dichtung, that is, the unfolding of Merz in language. Schwitters's engagement with literature has received far less atten- tion in English-language criticism than his work in visual media in spite of the fact that it was as important to him as the latter, witness his copious liter- ary output over four decades. Indeed, while his 1921 manifesto starts out with a narrative outlining his development as a visual artist, the text shifts to the domain of language when it comes to explaining in detail the functioning of Merz, both as a word fragment and the label for abstract montage. This leads to thematizing the insuppressible semantic ambivalence of montage: Poetry arises from the playing off of these elements against each other. Meaning is only essential if it is to be used as one such factor. I play off Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 159 M~iss Bla Egypti Ciae ARE OBTAINABLE -I REE FLA' _.-UA.LITY ~, PRICE FINE ' SU"E"F a3 . BOUQU 3 F. IV Kurt Schwitters, Mz 231. Miss Blanche (192,3). Collage. (Collection Dr: Werner Schnalenbach, Diissel- dorf Copyright 2015 Art- ists Rights Society (,IRS), New York / VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn.) sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter. I pity nonsense, because until now it has been so neglected in the making of art, and that's why I love it. (pppppp 215)26 Much like Merz painting, Merz poetry is abstract in the sense that it aims at establishing unconventional relationships among the broadest range of ma- terials. This is obtained by playing words off against each other, as well as any available, preformed linguistic units, which represent the equivalent of the sundry materials Schwitters used for his visual collages. Schwitters implicitly acknowledges that such materials-phrases, slogans, cliches-come with at- tached, contextual meaning. After all, it is their very formulaic character that makes them into discrete units to be treated as ready-made objects. While it is not possible to fully desemanticize words and phrases, that is, to com- pletely suppress the meanings that adhere to them, one can treat such mean- ings as one factor among others in assembling linguistic units. Since the pri- ority lies in expanding the range of artistic expression, non-sense is as good a material for Merz poetry as is sense. Indeed, what Schwitters terms Unsinn 160 " The Chatter of the Visible can be seen as the linguistic counterpart of the refuse Schwitters fervently collected for use in his collages.27 It is precisely the juxtaposition of Unsinn with conventionally signifying language that accounts for the production of abstraction in literature. Abstract montage thus understood serves to dis- close the fundamental mechanisms that govern everyday communication by scrutinizing its flip side, namely, linguistic intransitivity. This is to say that Merz literature does not represent processes of communication by summon- ing virtual worlds that simulate real-life communication, but rather mimics the structure of communication through a parodic performance that calcu- latingly refuses to replicate the logic of conventional meaning production. I now turn to examining the reach of this parodic play by focusing on some of Schwitters's early essays and short stories. " Schwitters's programmatic description of Merz in literature suggests that literary abstraction lies in suppressing the ties that conventionally bind linguistic materials by establishing new connections in which the common meanings attaching to linguistic units are played off against the non-sense produced by unconventional combinations. An enlightening example of this practice is found in his Tran-Texte (literally, "fish-oil texts"), the caustic essays Schwitters wrote in response to negative reviews of his works. These are more than personal attempts at getting even with pesky critics. If the Merz essay from 1921 discussed above marks a key moment in Schwitters's campaign against the exclusionary sanctimoniousness of politically engaged artists, then the Tran essays engage the other main front line of the discursive war- fare Schwitters conducted in the early 192os, which targeted the smugness and incomprehension of those art critics who belittled contemporary art in the pages of established literary and cultural magazines. These early prose texts weave humorous patchworks collaging Schwitters's attacks on the crit- ics, quotations from the critics' own reviews, and seemingly unrelated lin- guistic material ranging from simple phrases to complete sentences, which are usually set off by parentheses-their bold linguistic and textual experi- mentation amply documenting the influence of futurism and Dada. The fol- lowing passage, which is drawn from an essay published in the Berlin avant- garde journal Der Sturm in 1920, exemplifies their primary textual strategy: For a moment today, let us "take up" Mr. Felix Neumann. "Nothing kills faster than ridiculousness" he writes. But dear Sir, you are com- mitting suicide! Didn't you read your article of January 6, 1920, in the Post? Sheer suicide! (Nothing kills faster than ridiculousness.) ... You Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 161 say I'm gnawing with a thousand like-minded comrades at the roots of our strength. (A pretty picture.) Don't you mean: your strength? No, a million times, no, I'm not gnawing, put your mind at ease. I am no rat and you are no tree. I wouldn't have the first clue where to find the roots of your strength. Besides, I would prefer to gnaw my way alone, if you please, without thousands of co-gnawers. But I am no rodent. On the contrary; I am the one being gnawed on. Undoubtedly you will cease gnawing on me any moment now; otherwise I will make you ridiculous, rest assured! Otherwise I will make you ridiculous. Don't you know, that kills.... All I need to do is copy what you yourself have written; that is enough.28 This passage seizes on two offhand remarks in the critic's review, the proverb- like motto "Nothing kills faster than ridicule," used to disparage Schwitters's poetry in the volume Anna Blume Dichtungen (Anna Blossom Poems, 1919), and the charge regarding Schwitters's presumed detrimental influence on contemporary audiences: "He gnaws at the roots of our strength with a thou- sand like-minded souls." The critic's hyperbolic style is mocked by Schwit- ters, who seizes on the metaphorical "pretty image" of the harmful rodent gnawing away at the roots of a tree, and humorously unfolds it as though it had been meant literally. This allows him to debunk the chauvinistic insinu- ation entailed in the critic's image of a hoard of rats chipping away at the healthy roots of "our" strength, by suggesting that at issue must rather be the critic's own strength: "You mean your strength?" Second, Schwitters turns the degrading image of the gnawing rodent against the critic himself, claim- ing that, if anything, he is the one being attacked in a parasitic and insidious way ("gnawed on"), while also protesting the suggestion that he is just one of an entire hoard of artists who are doing exactly the same things he does. Fi- nally, the text makes its own strategies manifest in the last comic death threat launched against the critic. If, as the critic had pompously stipulated in re- viewing Schwitters's collages, "nothing kills faster than ridiculousness" then Schwitters threatens to simply reuse a few sentences from the critic's own review, whose preposterousness renders them a lethal weapon. The whole re- view, Schwitters establishes at the beginning, is tantamount to suicide by the critic's own standard that "nothing kills faster than ridiculousness." This excerpt well illustrates Schwitters's strategy of seizing on words and phrases from the critic's review and recycling them by "merz-ing" them, that is, adapting them for a new context. One strategy exemplified above includes removing a term, "gnawing," from its syntagmatic context and exploring its paradigmatic relations to other terms. This forms an equivalent to exploiting 162 " The Chatter of the Visible the cross-eyedness of collaged fragments in Picasso's StillLife, for the seman- tic valence of the verb "gnawing" is not allowed to exhaust itself in the actu- alization of the meaning suggested by the critic's sentence. Rather, the word is made to look outside the sentence in search for other meanings that could be actualized within the linguistic context of the citation. This leads to a slip- page from metaphorical to literal meaning, so that "gnawing" is interpreted as concretely pointing to the activity of rodents. A whole new context is con- structed around the sentence to support this new, actualized meaning, giving way to a humorous juxtaposition between the new literal image (this painter is a rodent who is eating away at the roots of our tree) and the charge entailed in the critic's puffed-up metaphor (this painter is a persistent, though not immediately visible threat to the health of our nation's art and culture). Ar- guably, the non-sense that is produced in this way makes a lot of sense as a weapon of ridicule turned against the critic. The humor is compounded by the fact that it is the critic's own claims, in their recycled form, that help to expose his pompousness and smugness.29 Schwitters's montage principle entails an assault on the linear unfolding of discourse, which is constantly interrupted by parenthetical inserts that ei- ther provide a commentary or contain seemingly unrelated linguistic mate- rial. This practice casts into sharp relief Schwitters's understanding of mon- tage as a process that establishes novel, unconventional relations among linguistic elements that are treated as found material. The nonsense produced in this way does not make the impression of chaos but unfolds in a highly methodical fashion, engendering a coherent, parallel universe to sense.30 This is very different from the assault on poetic coherence that marks the Wort- kunst ("word art") tradition endorsed by the avant-garde circle around Her- warth Walden's Der Sturm, which Schwitters had initially followed. This poetic model revolved around stripping language to the bones, allowing for an ecstatic feeling to replace grammatical structure. The result is texts domi- nated by paratactic constructions and word chains, as exemplified by the po- etry of August Stramm, its most celebrated representative. If Stramm's lan- guage is set in motion by releasing the unstructured intensity of feeling, then Schwitters's linguistic experimentation hinges on exploring alternatives to its ordinary use, which is thus exposed as conventional. In this context non- sense does not represent a negation of sense through the polemical display of gibberish. Rather non-sense appears contiguous to sense, as a parodic ma- nipulation of available material that is close enough to sense to be deciphered as the other of conventional meaning, but outlandish enough to be recog- nized as lying outside of the established automatism of signification.31 Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 163 Schwitters's description of how Merz functions in the domain of lit- erature resonates closely with Helmut Lethen's account of the cultural shift that shook postwar Germany, away from a conception of meaning as essen- tially given and toward understanding communication as grounding in mod- els of conduct designed to protect individuals in a potentially hostile social arena. Within this frame communication is not about expression of some inward substance. Rather, as suggested by Schwitters's juxtaposition of sense and non-sense, it is an outward practice that functions through the manipu- lation of existing materials and signs. In this context, one should note the dispassionate, cold terminology, to use another of Lethen's categories, that structures Schwitters's discourse on art, and that decisively sets it off from the "incandescent;"late-idealistic pathos of Expressionism. "Evaluate" "play off," "given parts;' "materials, "factors" are the central concepts denoting artistic practice. This language conveys an understanding of experience as a rela- tional network defined by contingent, shifting practices rather than as or- ganic totality. Art represents an intervention on these practices that playfully manipulates existing elements to obtain different relational configurations. In so doing, it prides itself with recycling even those elements that have lost their original purpose, such as refuse, or those linguistic segments that do not make sense in the conventional system of communication, and are thus des- ignated as non-sense. Lethen's discussion also accounts for the unapologetic agonism that dis- tinguishes Schwitters's replies to his critics, which can easily cross into the vituperative. They can be seen as carrying out the exteriorized "shaming ritu- als" that took the place of the inner control of conscience in the new "culture of shame" described by Lethen.32 Schwitters's texts stage these rituals by drawing on the tool of parody. That is, their main shaming strategy lies in debunking the critics' credibility and authority by repeating their statements with some key modification so as to cast ridicule on them, a strategy that is explicitly thematized in the passage quoted above. Yet parody for Schwitters is not simply a strategy of mocking criticism, but rather discloses the funda- mental way in which communication functions and as such plays a key role in his understanding of montage, as documented by its ubiquity in his oeu- vre. Bernd Scheffer has extensively discussed Schwitters's use of parodic prac- tices of (self-)quotation, which is especially conspicuous in his early literary work and finds a paradigmatic example in his "An Anna Blume" ("Anna Blos- som"), one of the most successful poems of the Weimar Republic. The text does not just parody the tradition of erotic poetry, mocking yet also embrac- ing the Western discourse that celebrates erotic experience as an ecstatic mo- ment of subversive unboundedness while domesticating it through senti- 164 " The Chatter of the Visible mental cliches so as to render it morally palatable. Anna Blossom is a protean trope that gains a life of its own in Schwitters's texts, returning in a variety of incarnations that traverse his early oeuvre. That is, Schwitters reuses Anna Blossom as a conceptual image, a linguistic pun, an emblem of poetic prac- tice, and an ideogram in visual compositions.33 This practice is not limited to Anna Blossom, the phantasmagoria of erotic love to whom Schwitters owed an unexpected celebrity and which he unabashedly exploited. Schwitters sys- tematically recycled elements from his own works ranging from single char- acters to titles of prose texts and entire textual fragments.34 What makes this practice notable is the extent to which the recycled materials remain fully recognizable as inserts, never completely losing their tie to the context from which they were extracted. The link that ties Schwitters's parodic practice to montage can best be elucidated by drawing on Linda Hutcheon's nonderogative understanding of parody. For Hutcheon, parody goes well beyond the traditional practice of imitating a text or an object while injecting the imitation with some humor- ous difference aimed at casting ridicule on the original. To be sure, Hutcheon echoes the traditional definition of parody in seeing the relation between the model and the parodied text as one of "ironic inversion." However, she stresses that the irony is "not always at the expense of the parodied text;" but rather serves to mark the moment of difference, that is, to make clear that the imitation is at variance with the original. Hence parody consists for her of a "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similar- ity."35 When considered within the context of Schwitters's montage prac- tices, parody is a strategy for recycling materials where the moment of recy- cling or imitation is made explicit by the ironic variation on the original. Reusing materials derived both from his own work and that of others, Schwitters weaves a complex patchwork of relations in which texts are never fully contained in themselves, but always point outside their contingent boundaries to allude to other texts. In its manifest double-coding, parody functions as an overt intertextual strategy that foregrounds the signifying mechanism proper to montage. This practice challenges conventional no- tions of authorship and the bounded text while at the same time establishing a high degree of coherence in Schwitters's oeuvre. It is a type of coherence that is predicated not so much on the repetition of specific content or mate- rials as on the formal relations that repetition establishes. This understanding of parody is paradigmatically enacted in "Schacko;" a story from 1926 that probes the reach of abstraction in literature.36 The sto- ry's title refers to its central figure, a parrot whose illness and untimely death constitute the narrative's primary focus. Most of the story is told in the first Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 165 person by the parrot's owner, a woman mourning the recent death of her husband. "Such a naked tiny animal" she repeats tirelessly. As she explains, the bird compulsively pulled all its feathers during the time spent with the ailing man (Werk 2:289). The vet has now been summoned to save the bird, who becomes afflicted in tight sequence by constipation due to a hernia, a sudden, disastrous attack of diarrhea, and, finally, by fluid in its lungs, which causes its ultimate demise. The story ends, quite humorously, with the fear- less woman performing an improvised autopsy to ascertain the bird's cause of death. She then lovingly buries its corpse at the feet of her husband's grave, thus fulfilling his last wish. In a preface to the 1933 reprint of the story Schwitters explicitly thema- tizes the role of abstraction in literature: It is very difficult to realize abstraction in literature. I would like to point to the structure of "Schacko;" to its abstract law of composi- tion. I have heard Schacko's story myself told from a woman, word for word, the whole tale ... this brought the material closer to me from a human standpoint; but as such it was not yet an artwork. The mat- ter became an artwork only through form: how the woman's state- ments are juxtaposed to each other, how they are repeated, comple- ment each other, how they anticipate or confirm each other, how they hang together as a whole so as to make ever more manifest the wom- an's love for her husband, an abstract concept, and her desperation, yet again an abstract concept, and this is the content of this story. You can analyze all my texts in this way and you will have to admit that their form is always abstract in this way: statements are juxta- posed to each other. (Werk 2:431-32)37 According to this passage, the narrative is based on a true story its pro- tagonist related to the writer of the preface. While the story is not made up, it is also not a faithful recording of the tale told by the woman. Rather the narrative recycles materials supplied by the model by rearranging them within the medium of literature. Its artistic attributes, that which distin- guishes it from the woman's narration, lie in its distinctive form, what Schwit- ters calls its abstract law of composition. Form in this context concerns the way in which the woman's statements, which are made more poignant by their disarming ordinariness, are merzed/collaged, that is, repeated and jux- taposed so as to bring to the fore what are essentially abstract constructs, namely, her feelings of love and desperation. This abstract content calls for the deployment of formal abstraction, which in this case denotes the refusal 166 a The Chatter of the Visible von nebenan durds die Wand ohne sick groB~ was dabei zu denken. Morgens war ihr erster Weg zur Kiidhe; sie muilte waten, denn die ganze Wohnung stand unter Wasser. Tische and Stihie kamen ihr entgegengeschwommen. Die Schranke waren dick aufgequollen, wie Pappe. Von den Wanden waren die Nagei abgerostet, and alle Bilder nebst Wandschmiicken lagen unten im Wasser, dos ihr bis ans Knie ging. Sie dachte: .Wenn's nur dem Tierchen gut geht, darn bin ich's ja gern zufriedenl" - Aber dinner Scinreck. Denken Sin, wie sie in die Kiche kommt, Ilegt dos Tier tot. En ist ganz dick aufgequollen und mull wohi ertrunken sein. Den Kopf hatte es hod, unter den Gaskandelober gehangt, aber das Wasser muf'.te in der Nadht wohl hoher gestanden haben, und da war es offenbar zu lange unter Wasser gewesen. Und nun dos oufgequollene Tier wieder herouszukriegenl Frau Sch~nwetter stellte gleich den Wasserhahn ab, dens nun hatte en keinen Zweck mehr, dos Wanner loufen zu lansen. Und nun sah man erst, win die Three gequollen waren, und als dos Wanner abgelaufen war, waren die Fullboden no sdhlommig und weich, win die Feldwege im Winter. Und dane dos Gewicht des Tieres! Ein normalen Fiutlpferd wiegt nach Herders Konversations- lexikan, dritte Auflage, reich illustriert dnrch Textobbilduegen, Tafeln nd Karten, drifter Band, Eiea bis Gyuilay, Freiburg im Breisgau, Berlin, Karisruhe, Miunchen, Straf3burg, Wien und St. Louin, Mo. Snite 675, bis 2500 Kilogromm. Aber Frau Schonwetter war helle. Sie schnitt einfach dos Tier von hinten In kie Scheiben, die sin nelbst bequem tragen konete, and trug en dann ncheibenweise mit dem Miiieimer in den Wechselsack. So sparte nie wenigstens den Dienstmann. Und nun die Steinb6cke? Angangn schliefen nie ganz ruhig auf dew Fuilende von Gleiwitzens Belt. Aber mitten in der Nacht mui~ten doch wohl Meinungsverschiedenheiten entntanden sein, nd nun ging'n aber losi Sie ranten hintereinander her, and Gleiwitz war auf- gewacht and pfiff mit neiner schrillen Pfeife dazwischen. Und die vier Steinbbcke rasten an den Wanden hoch und warfen aber ouch alien urn. Do wuf3te nich Gleiwitz nicht zn helfen, or nahm sein Taschenmesser und erstach einen nach dem anderen. Und win nun die vier tot dniagen, schnitt sich Gleiwitz die Pulsadern auf und legte sich doneben; denn er hatte don wertvolle Porzellon nie im Leben winder bezahlen konnen. Wamnung: Schreiber dieses hat so ausfahrlich geschrieben, um die eminente Gefahr einer Zoologischen-Garen-Lotterie deutlich zu demonstrieren. Man sollte die onulerordentich~e Gefahr nicht verkennen und die zoologischen Garten so stellen, dafl sie ihre Insasnen standengemail beherbergen konnen: dem Lbwen eine Wilste, deam Nilpferd einen Strom, den Steinb~cken ein Hochgebirge. Dan ist soziale Tierpflege, nd dos ist standengemall fur die Tiere. Schacko Jacco Sin werden sicker denken: ,,Son nackiges Tierche", inner onch. Der hat nich namlich olin Federn oungerisnen. Weii unner Voter dock so hat leiden miissen, ehr dall der slarb; and da hat der abends mmer Licht angehabt, well der nicht hat schlafen konnen; nd do hat done don Tierche ouch nicht schlafen konnen, well der immer Licht angehabt hat, son armen Tierche; nd do hat der nich nus Kummer var oauter Langerweile olin Federn ausgerinnen. Auf seinem kleinen Kopfe, do hatter ja each welche, schon siehter Ija nicht grade aus, non nackiges Tierche. Pfui nchtim dich, Schocko, dreh dich malm um, nd der schamt sich noch nicht email! Aber ich denke: ,Gehster mal mit zum Tierarzt, der kane in ouch nichtn machen." Und do nagich: Herr Doktor, Sin werden sicher denken, non nockiges Tierche, isser ouch. Der hat sich namlich olin Federn aungerinnen. Weil unser Voter dock so hot leiden missn, ehr dal) der storb; nd do hat der abends iminer Licht angekabt, weil der nicht hat schlofen konnen, und do hot don Tierche ouch nicht schlafen konnen, weil der iminer Licht angehabt hot, son armes Tierche; Und do hat der nick nun oauter Kummer vor Langerweile nile Federn aungerisnen. Auf seinem kleinen Kopfe, do hatter ja cock welche, schon siehter jn nicht grade aus, non nackiges Tierche. Pfui, sch~lm dich, Schacko, dreh dich mal urn, nd der schitmt sich noch nicht email" 110 Kurt Schwvitters, "Schacko," 192,6; Merz 2r(1931): 11o. (Courtesy of the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University q1t, owa Libraries. Copyright 2 0-1 Artists Rights Society (AR S), New York VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) to render the woman's state of mind through a mimetic narrative that would draw on conventional psychological observation. Hence, the terms love and desperation are never used in reference to her. Yet the narrative enacts these abstract concepts through its structure and linguistic form, which thus bear further scrutiny. The story is composed of thirteen sections typographically set off by hor- izontal lines. The first nine sections contain the woman's first-person ac- count; the tenth segment bears the title "POSTSCRIPT, for the Reader's Ori- entation" and introduces segments told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, who claims to have heard the story from the woman herself (Werk 1:191). The narrative is patterned after the rapid back-and-forth of vernacular dialogue, which at times contains short descriptive inserts providing a bare minimum of background information. Each section reintroduces and juxta- poses phrases and idioms from the previous sections in an almost compulsive manner, which at once foregrounds the formulaic character of the linguistic Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters a 167 ,40", sogt da der Tierarzt, .,do konn i oudh nichts machen, Ich bin namlich Tlerarzt. Wenn der si alle Federn ausreilM. da do keine wochsen konnen, dann hatter eben keine. Sdion siehter ja nidit grade out, son nockigos Tierche, pfui schdm didi, Sdiacko, dreh dich mal umn, and der sdidmt sidi nodh nidit emal. Auf seinem kileinen Kopfe, do hatter io nodi weldie. Aber do behalten Sien dlodh zur Erinnerung an lhren guten Vater, well der dlodh so hat leiden massen, ehr daft der starb." Und do haob i ihn behalten zur Erinnerung. Und dabei mag sichi dos Tierdie nodi nidit emal, well ich dloth no Frau bin, wells docdiein Weibchen ist, dos riecht der. Dos nennt mon bei den Tieren Instinkt, well man doch nicht Inriecht sagen kann, ober dos riedit der. Went i dem zum Beispiel dos Kopfdien kroule, dann belot der mlch. Wenn Sie dem aber dos Kopfdien kraulen, darn gibt er Ihnen Klf8dien, well Sie dloch emn Mann sind, weils dlodi cit Weibchen ist. Sag mal Schocko, soll Dir der Rudolf mal dos Kopfchen liroulen, oder ist es der Otto? Die alteron Herren nennter namlich: ,,Der Rudolf" die llingeren der Otto, wells dloch ein Popagei ist. Sag mal Schocko, ist es der Rudolf, oder ist es der Otto? ,,Derrr Rruudolf "! t-lren Sic, or sagt: ,,Der Rudolf", son Ilebes ierchel Als utter Voter noch lebte, hob ich gesagt: ~Voter, wenn Du einmal, was der Himmel verhilten mage, Deine Augen fur iminer sclilief3en solltest, was toll dorn aus dem Tierche werden? Der nimmt dloch von mir kein Fetter, well ich dcli ne Frau bit." Da hat unser Voter gesat: .,Wenn icli dereinst einmal, was der Himmel verhuten mage, die Augen fur iminer schliefuen sollte, und der hat kelnen Besseren, dont wird er von Dir sein Futter schson nehmen." Und als utter Voter, was der Himmel verhuten mage, seine Augen far immer gotchlossen haone, und der hatte keinen Betseren, und ich gab dem am anderen Morgen sein Fetter, do hot dcr alles out den Staben telnet Bouers wieder herausgeknlbbelt und dazu liotter gesagt: ,Ssahste, daa hastn", wells dloch cit Paogei it. Aber am onderen Mergen, do hat ders vor Hunger gefressen. Sehen Sic, jetzt maclit der sein Nief3erchen. Gesundlieit, Schackol Selien Sie, utd jetzt welt der. Aber Sic werden jetzt sidier denken: ,,Was hangt denn do eigentlich herunter?" Jo, dos itt namlidi sein Kropf. Dos Tiercho hatten KropflI Der muff dodi wissen, we der seine Karnerdien hintut, went der seine Nahirung zu sidi nimmnt, dazu hot der telnet Kropf. Sic wlrden dos gornidit emal bemerken, wonn der seine Federn noch haltte. Aber die hotter sidi ja ausgerissen. Well utter Voter dlodi so hat leiden mussen, ehr doll der starb, do hot der sidi alle Federn ausgerissen. Auf seinem kleinen Kopfe, do hatter ja nodi weldie, schion tiehit er ja nidit grade out, son nockiges Tierdie, pfui schtm dichi, Schacko, drehi dich mal um, und der scliamt sich tech nichit email Aber Sie werden jetzt tidier denken: ,,Wos hang? denn do nun schon wieder herunter?" - Jo, dos ist namlicli cit Bruch. Dos Tlerche hatten Bruchl Jo, wenns'n Mensch ware, darn wlrde ich sagen: ,,Der mull ein Bruchband tragen" oder wents gar ne Dome ist, Ober der trdgt dcli kein Bruchiband, wells deck ein Papagei ist. Der laI6t sicli on seinem kleines Korper dloch nicht atkommetl Der wllrde sich dos blof3 obknibbeln end sagen: ,Sahste, do hostenl" wells dcli cit Papagei ist. Der hat namlich mal 8 Tago kelnen Stuhlgong gehabt. Do hob icli gedoclit: ,Gohstor mal mit zum Tlerarzt, der kann Ia audh nichts machen". Utd wie ich mit dem Tierche in der Eisenbaohn sitze, von der Aefregung oder von dem Rucken oder so, do kriegt der platzlich Losung, ted do hat der sich dos do alles herausgedrangt. Schon siehit er ao nichit grade out. Do hab icli gesgt: ~Herr Doktor, Sie werden jetzt slcher denken, was liangt dent do ten schon wieder herunter? Jo, dos weiB3 ich namlich ouch nichit. Der liat namlichi 8 Tage kelnen Stuhlgang gehabt, end do desk icli, gehister mol mit zum Tierarzt, der kant ja audi nichits machen. Utd wie ich mit dem Tierclie in der Eisen- bait sitze, von der Aufregung odor von dem Ruckon odor so, do kriegt der plotzlici Losung, and do hat der sick dos alles do herausgedrlingt" ,,Jo"', sogt do der Doktor, ~,do konn Ich ouch nichts machen, Ich bin namlich Tierarzt. Der hot namlich III Kuirt Schwitters, "Schaclco7 192,6; M~erz 21 (1931): 111. (C'ourtesy of the International/Dada Archive, Special Collections, University o/iJowa Libraries. GopyrightzoIs Artists Rights Society (AR S), New York /UG Bild-Ku nst, Bonn.) material and the intensity of feeling that underlies its use. The repetition of and variation on utterly banal, yet affectionate phrases such as "such a naked tiny animal,' "turn aroun~d n ow,' "shame on you, Schacko!" (referring to the parrot's missing plumage and wretched looks) drive the story on toward its poignant, grotesque ending. The parrot's own ability to repeat phrases with small variations provides further insight into the imitative patterns that structure communication in the story. The woman tells the doctor that the bird does not just mimic the sounds it hears, but uses the words it repeats in a deliberate manner. Her apparent delusion adds a humorous and poignant touch to the narration while also drawing attention to the pattern of repeti- tion that structures the communication between the actors of the dialogue. Indeed, the speakers feed off each other's verbal input in ways that recall the communication modeled by the parrot. In their repetitions these speakers do not just "parrot" each other, that is, mindlessly reproduce fragments of so- noric sequences, but rather they modulate them, adding new touches. 168 * The Chatter of the Visible n' Bruch. Dos Tierche hatten Bruchl Wenns n' Mensch ware, wOrde ich gesagt haben; der mussen Bruchband tragen, oder wenns gar no' Dame 1st. Aber dos Tierche tragt doc kein Bruchband. Der wOrde sic dos bloB abknibbeln end sagen: ,,Ss6hste, do hasten", weils doch ein Papagei ist. Aber der kann do alt bei werdend Sdan sieht er ja nicht grade aus, son nadkiges Tierche, aber Sie wOrden dos nosh nicht einmal bemerken, wenn der seine Federn noch hatte. Aber die hat or sich ia ausgerissen, well unser Voter doch so hat leiden missen, ehr dal der storb. Auf seinem kleinen Kopfe, do hatter ja noch welche, son nackiges Tierche, pfui sch6m dic, Schacko, dreh dich mal um, und der schdimt sich noch nicht emal. Aber do behalten Sien dod zur Erinnerung I' NACHWORT (Zur Orientierung des Lesers) Der Papagei wohnt in Bad Ems and ist 43 Jahre alt; er heilt Chaco and ist inzwischen gestorben. Er hat namlich Herzwasser gekriegt, und da hat's noch am Morgen so in ihm gekluckert. Aber die Frau hat gedacht: ,Der kann ja doch nichts machen, der is namlich Tierarzt." Und do is sie noch zur Kirche gegangen, weils namlich Sonntag war. Aber der Doktor hat gesogt: ,,Wir kbnnen ihm dos Wasser nic ablassen." Und do hat der noch so gehorcht und hat gesagt: Isser denn so krank, - ja isser denn so kronk?" and hat bis zuletzt noch gesprochen, and dann isser ganz dick geworden, dasser aich mehr auf seine Stbbe sitzen konnte. Und wie sie von der Kirche zuruckkommt, do liegt dos Tierche tot. Er ist ganz dick aufgequollen, und da hats ihm das klelne Herzche abgedrUckt. Der hat Herzwasser gehabt. Und do hat sie ihn selbst aufgesdsnitten, weil sie doc mal sehen wollte, was denn nun eigentlich die Todesursache war, und do is da lauter kares Wasser rousgekommen. Und do hat dann die Frau den letzten Wunsch ihres Mannes erfullt and hat den am FMende von seinem Grabe mit beigesetzt, and do ruht nun Sdhadcko. Die Frau aber weinte noch, als sie es mir erzahlte. Scherzo. (Drifter Teil aus meiner Ursonate.) (DieThemen sind charakteristisch verschieden vorzutrogen.) Lanke trr gil (munter) pe pe pe pe pe Ooka ooka ooko ooka Lanke trr gil pii pii pui ph p1 Zl ka zuuka zGuka zljka Lanke trr gil Rrmmp Rrnnf Lanke trr gll Ziiuu lenn tril? Limpff tOmpff trl Lanke trr gll Rrumpff tillf too Lanke trr gl Ziiuu lenn trIl? Limpff tOmpff tril Lanke trr gll pe pe pe pe pk Ooka ooka ooko ooko Lanke trr gll Pii pii pii pii pii ZGka ziuka zuuka zuuka Lanke trr gll Rrmmp Rrnnf Lanke trr gil Trio. (Auerst langsam vorzutragen.) Ziiuu iuu (gedehnt) ziiuu aauu ziiuu iiuu ziiuu Aoo Ziiuu leeu ziiuu aauu ziiuuu iiuu ziiuu Ooo Ziiuu iuu Ziiuu aouu ziuu iou (Scherzo wiederholen bis Trio.) 112 Kurt Schwittcrs, "Schacko," 1926; Merz 21 (1931): 112. (Courtesy of the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Copyrigh 201 Artists Rights Society (AR S), New York /G Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) The principle of repetition likewise extends to the larger segments that make up the narrative. For instance, sections 7, 8, and 9 each appear to be an expansion of the previous. In barely two lines, section 7 describes the wom- an's discovery that the parrot's intestines bulge out as a result of the hernia. Section 8 picks up on this description, while identifying constipation as the cause of the parrot's bulging parts and recounting the disastrous resolution of the parrot's problem when the bird relieves itself on the train that takes the woman to the vet. In section 9, the scene is relived and amplified in the wom- an's dramatic retelling to the doctor. When considered within the story's overall structure, the sections appear to parrot each other, repeating and modulating elements from the previous ones while also adding new detail. While suggesting a clear sequence of events, the overlapping repetitions dis- rupt the sense of closure and sequential unfolding of traditional narrative. The exuberance and vividness of this seemingly incontrollable repetition har- ness the text's impact on the recipient. Though the expectation of logically unfolding communication is frustrated at every turn, a different kind of in- Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 169 telligibility emerges, one that hinges on understanding communication as a parodic montage of materials. Communication, in other words, is about re- cycling materials that are already out there by inserting them into different contexts and establishing new connections among them. As an enactment of abstract literature, the text parrots the operations of ordinary language by imitating them in an ironic mode. In so doing, it shows that the building blocks of communication are never new, original, untainted, but always en- cumbered with resonances from other contexts. Imitation thus understood is self-referential in that it does not revolve around representing a content that would make the story's narrative backbone conspicuous, but rather enacts the mechanism of communication by mimicking it in a distorted mode. The text's inquiry into the mechanism of communication furthermore enacts the fundamental setting of storytelling in ways that uncannily recall Benjamin's account in "The Storyteller." For Benjamin, storytelling is about transmission of a practical knowledge that presupposes material contiguity and shared bodily routines between storyteller and recipient.38 Much like in Benjamin's antihermeneutic account, storytelling in "Schacko" is about re- telling a story one has once heard, not to elucidate its meaning but rather to relay a content-the woman's love for her husband-by establishing new for- mal relations among its component parts. This is what makes the story into literature, according to the narrator. His way of recounting the story makes clear that the focus of storytelling is not on interpretation understood as the excavation of a character's psyche or the construction of narrative causality and motivation-for instance, what would explain the woman's devotion to an unwanted pet, how her behavior helps understand her love for her de- ceased husband, and so on. Rather at issue is the possibility of presenting her feelings of love and desperation through parodic imitation of her linguistic behavior. This does not mean that the story has no plot or that one cannot ascribe meaning to it. What is at stake, however, is not so much the story as an artifact that holds a sense to be disclosed, but rather storytelling as a spe- cific mode of linguistic behavior that can provide insight into the woman's broader conduct and experience. In other words, the widow as the story's main character is presented as a storyteller whose dialogical, narrative prac- tice in her encounters with the doctor is conveyed by the narrator through parodic manipulation. This focus on storytelling as a specific mode of behav- ior foregrounds the basic framework of storytelling enacted by the text, plac- ing not only the narrator, but also the recipient front and center. As Schwit- ters's preface makes clear, as the text's narrator he has occupied both positions, first having served as the listener to the woman, and then as a storyteller for the reader of the present text. This helps understand the text's structure as 170 " The Chatter of the Visible centered on the woman's own dialogical act of narration, in which she for- mally addresses a recipient that turns out to be the narrator in whose voice the postscript concludes. Finally, the text's abstract content-the woman's love as dramatized by her behavior as storyteller-calls for a presentation that shifts the emphasis away from a traditional interpretive framework by drawing on material de- vices that foreground the separatedness of perception and meaning. This em- phasis on perception as a distinct moment helps foreground the material di- mension of storytelling as a mode of conduct-material is here understood in the sense used by Katherine Hayles, as the interplay between relevant physical aspects of a given medium and available signifying practices. The text was one of Schwitters's most favorite Vortragsdichtungen (performance poems), the pieces he declaimed with exuberant physicality at his soirees. As often suggested by eyewitness accounts, these performances pointedly ex- ceeded whatever "content" the piece was about, and this excess enhanced, rather than trivialized, this very "content," frequently eliciting the audience's spirited response (Werk 2:432). In the text's printed version Schwitters took pains to use various typographical devices to visually mark the interplay and simultaneous separatedness of perceptual and semiotic levels, for instance by placing individual words and phrases in bold typeface and marking para- graph breaks through horizontal lines that rupture the text's linearity. This helps to emphasize the structure of repetition that frames the narrative and foregrounds the narrator's intervention in manipulating textual relations. That is to say, the narrative act of manipulation is underscored at a perceptual level through visual, nondiscursive devices and is thus set off from the wom- an's linguistic behavior, which provides the building blocks for the textual montage. By the same token, one can picture Schwitters's own corporeal per- formance as marking a perceptual plus to the materials he presented, a device that reinforced the act of storytelling by presenting it as marked behavior.39 Understanding communication as depsychologized behavior that re- lies on the imitative manipulation of found linguistic material suggests a par- allel to Helmuth Plessner's notion of expressivity as marking a spiraling mo- dality of interaction between individual and environment through which both are mutually constituted. But it also recalls Marcel Duchamp's experi- mentation with the readymade and the found object in the 1910s and 1920s, with which Schwitters was well familiar.40 While there is much ground shared by the two artists, for the purpose of my analysis it will be instructive to briefly outline the different assumptions that undergird their deployment Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 171 of preformed materials. Whereas Duchamp's recycling of found objects was guided by the question "Under which conditions can this object be pre- sented as an art object?"41-that is, aimed to test the conventions of art by probing the boundary between art and nonart-Schwitters was never inter- ested in placing the status of art in question. In fact, while ransacking all possible media and idioms for his work, he never wavered in his belief in the autonomy of the artistic medium, defined as the possibility of establishing nonconventional relations among everyday objects, which recipients would readily identify as art. If Duchamp sought to challenge the self-adjudicated, exceptionalist ontology of art by exposing its dependence on contextual and institutional factors, Schwitters was more interested in the claim to ordinari- ness of everyday life. In other words, one could describe Schwitters's practice by inverting Duchamp's questions, "What makes art into art? What grounds art's claim to an extraordinary status?" so as to ask, "How ordinary is the nonartistic? What lies behind the ordinariness of everyday objects?" This focus on the ordinary quality of everyday experience recalls Marjorie Perloff's discussion of two competing modernist paradigms for engaging po- etic language. The dominant model, Perloff maintains, is defined by belief in a fundamental "distinction between the 'practical' language of 'ordinary' communication and the 'autonomous' language of poetry."42 This distinction is sustained by a centuries-old reflection on language, conceptual thinking, and art that has been encoded through a variety of oppositions: scientific versus artistic, cognitive versus emotive, denotative versus connotative, literal versus figural, ordinary versus defamiliarizing. Perloff draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein's exploration of linguistic practice in the Philosophical Investi- gations to describe a second strain of modernist poetics. This latter model rejects the distinction between literary and ordinary language and rather views the aesthetic as a realm for scrutinizing ordinary language use, that is, the everyday practices by which we communicate and produce meaning. This examination helps expose the fundamental strangeness of these prac- tices, that is, their situatedness and conventional nature, the fact that they could be organized differently and be just as meaningful. From this vantage point art appears as a medium for grasping ordinary signifying practices by means of a performance that makes them appear unfamiliar. This is the mod- ernist strain that grounds Schwitters's interrogation of the "ordinariness of the ordinary" via a manipulation of its materials.43 Wittgenstein's exploration of language as a rule-guided practice, a set of games whose conventions are rooted in the shared way of life of speakers of- fers an enlightening perspective for assessing Schwitters's manipulation of nonsense in the response to the critic's review discussed above. If, according 172 " The Chatter of the Visible to Wittgenstein, meaning is produced by manipulating signifying elements according to the rules of a game, then Schwitters's strategies in this excerpt consist in engaging the critic's language game while tweaking with its rules.44 Specifically, Schwitters refuses to interpret the image of the "gnawing critter" in the metaphorical sense in which it was intended and instead unfolds its literal meaning, so as to debunk its chauvinistic and debasing implications. This operation raises questions about the ordinariness of this kind of meta- phor. Should the disparaging allusion to pest-bringing rodents be treated as a commonplace way of critiquing artistic experiments one finds objection- able? How innocuous is this mode of critique? And how much does one learn about the object at stake from this kind of insinuation? Schwitters's attack on the critic's uninformative and belittling mode of criticism does not marshal reasoned arguments to make its point, but rather unfolds via a lin- guistic performance that debunks the claim to ordinariness of a slandering metaphor. In "Schacko," the ordinariness of phrases like "Such a naked tiny animal" mutates into its opposite by way of exuberant repetition, which is made to express the intense feeling that propels the utterance. The banal vernacular phrase thus becomes a touching cipher for the tender, inarticulate love that ties the woman to an unpleasant pet she cherishes as a remnant of life with her husband. Furthermore, the linguistic behavior of the characters in "Schacko" presents close affinities to Wittgenstein's understanding of lan- guage games. Their communication unfolds as a chain of overlapping repeti- tions based on mimicking each other's utterances while also infusing them with difference so as to adapt them to their needs. The impression one gains is that of a disorderly patchwork of exchanges that lack a discernible pattern or recognizable rules, but are nonetheless effective in negotiating communi- cation. This is because the speakers are willing to take their cues from their interlocutors; that is, they appropriate each other's phrases while modifying them as needed. Drawing on a central Wittgensteinian trope, one could say that they play a game whose rules they do not just follow, but also adapt and expand in response to contingent configurations.45 The point I want to stress here regards the distinctive understanding of language and communication Schwitters shares with Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Communication in this context is not about choosing one option over another from some deep structure of language that would function as a blueprint for possible games. As Stanley Cavell has noted, the novelty and profundity of Wittgenstein's inquiry reside in the realization "that everyday language does not, in fact or in essence, depend upon such a structure and conception of rules, and yet that the absence of such a structure in no way impairs its functioning" (48). Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 173 This well describes Schwitters's antipsychological understanding of commu- nication as an aggregate of contingent modes of behavior that bind individu- als via a parodic mechanism of repetition. That these individuals are seem- ingly bereft of an inward space by no means curtails their agency, that is, their ability to engage in meaningful practices. . What good is the realization that making and trading sense is not about actualizing some systematic properties of language? What kind of ar- tistic intervention does this realization make possible and call for? In other words, what is the relationship between art and the practices of meaning- production that harness everyday experience in a productively disorderly, unpredictable, open-ended network? To answer these questions in closing, I would like to examine a short story, a parable of sorts that Schwitters wrote in an ironic attempt to educate art critics, and that was published in 1920. The story is titled after its unlikely heroine, Augusta Bolte, an eager young woman whose life becomes unhinged one day when she decides to follow ten people she sees walking on the street. Though they at first seem to be mere strangers, the fact that they walk in the same direction and the sheer round- ness of the number ten convince Augusta that the ten are involved in a mys- terious operation that promises the disclosure of life's wisdom. Certain that her life now depends on solving this riddle, Augusta embarks on a series of adventures that prove to be every bit as absurd as the reasoning that triggered her initial pursuit. The narrative unfolds along a multilayered pattern of repetitions that are enacted at various levels. One such layer consists of the methodic repetitive- ness of Augusta's thought processes, which the narration meticulously ren- ders. Yet the more the narrator praises the young woman for her intelligence, talent, and methodical thinking, the clearer it becomes that Augusta's sys- tematic approach is of absolutely no help in dealing with the events that con- front her. For instance, Augusta becomes comically hung up on the recurring rhyme patterns of her own interior monologue and feels compelled to dis- cern in them some mysterious sense: And now? How now? A scandalous rhyme! How rhymed with now. Beyond that it seemed especially peculiar to Miss Augusta that not only did how rhyme with now, but now also rhymed with how... The rhyme came up her throat like cod-liver oil.... For when something's happening then the most unrhymed things happen to happen. Then all of a sudden what never rhymed before, rhymes. Let's sum up! r, 2, 174 " The Chatter of the Visible 3, 4, S, 6, 7, 8, 9, io people were walking in one and the same direction, now rhymed with how. Something obviously had to be going on. How should Augusta find out? (pppppp 141)46 Augusta's reasoning in this passage is based on a pun involving the German sich reimen, to rhyme, which also means "making sense," "hanging together in a meaningful way"; by the same token, ungereimt ("unrhymed") means in- consistent. So when Augusta detects unexpected rhymes in her self- monologue, she concludes that they must be cues for some deeper meaning. However, the literal rhymes that are involved here are really only a sound pattern.47 They exhibit recognizable formal relationships that are endowed with a specific perceptual distinctiveness, but have no inherent meaning. Even if Augusta ultimately fails to learn the secret of life, her experiences have not been in vain. Every turn of her oddball story is a step forward in an educational trajectory that earns her ever higher academic degrees. In the end she realizes that experience is structured by relationships that have no inherent meaning. One has to invest them with meaning by deciding what to care about, and what to interpret (pppppp 162). This is not at all a nihilistic insight but rather has a liberating effect because it relieves Augusta from the anxious quest for the hidden meaning she believes to glimpse in the random patterns that structure experience. This realization prompts her to make a clean break with her previous life and concentrate on pursuing a young man, who she is convinced makes a worthy husband. This pursuit, however, comes to an abrupt end when the driver of the cab she has enlisted in the chase abandons her in a remote location because she cannot pay the fare. In this way the narrative averts not only a happy ending, but any kind of ending. The only measure of closure is offered by the narrator, who polemically takes cen- ter stage in the last paragraph and addresses the readers so as to preempt their anticipated criticism: The reader might have thought that something would be happening here.... Certainly the reader will think that Miss Dr. Lif would find out who or what is going on, but she finds out nothing. The reader believes that he has the right to find out, but the reader has no right to find out anything in a work of art.... Nope. It's just that the story is over, simply over, no matter how sorry I am no matter how brutal it must sound, there's nothing else I can do. (pppppp 163-64)48 This declaration by the narrator effectively turns the tables on the reader. It becomes apparent that the reader has been tricked into having fun at Au- Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 175 gustas expense only to find out that he or she has been performing opera- tions similar to Augusta's in reading the story. Like Augusta, the reader has tried to make sense of the narrated events by deciphering narrative cues, by ruling out possible readings, and by making predictions on how the story would continue or end. In foreclosing any conclusion that could tie the nar- rative together in a meaningful way, the narrator admonishes the reader that one does not have the right to expect to learn anything from an artwork. There is nothing to understand or learn from this story, because there is nothing to learn or understand from art. In this way, the story establishes a parallel between the contingent structure of experience and art. Everyday experience comprises an array of events one navigates without subjecting them to a systematic logic. Many of them exhibit contingent connections, but do not necessarily make sense. Art is just this kind of event or object. Its connections have no intrinsic sense and yet are not without structure. In spite of the narrator's refusal to supply a meaningful conclusion for the story, the reader does have something to take away at the end. In a way, the story provides a lesson in conduct as described by Helmut Lethen. Specifi- cally, it presents meaning as negotiated through Augusta's linguistic behavior. Augusta's conduct is, however, a negative example, a model of how not to ne- gotiate meaning in everyday experience. As it becomes clear, the flip side of her obsession with random structures is her inability to interact productively with the individuals who cross her path. Her solipsistic determination to de- code structures that supposedly hold the meaning of life is precisely the op- posite of the cooperative behavior of speakers who negotiate communication based on games whose rules are constantly remade through playing. Rather than actively play by ear in the ever-shifting game of signification, Augusta is played by the structure and therefore loses. In the end she may well under- stand that the structures one encounters in experience have no inherent mean- ing, but she never learns to interact effectively with others, including the cab driver who abandons her in the middle of nowhere. With Augusta, the reader comes to see that the practice of ascribing meaning to patterns solely based on their structural regularity is misguided. Meaning is based on patterns, but does not automatically flow from them. In a similar way, art's formal relations do not produce meaning in any ordinary sense of the word, but unfold con- tiguously to ordinary processes of meaning-production, which they present in a defamiliarizing form that questions their ordinariness and thus makes them perspicuous. Schwitters, who has been accused of reducing art to formalist play, delivers a powerful indictment of formalism understood as an empty ma- nipulation of structure all the while providing a compelling enactment of the mode of artistic abstraction he championed. 176 " The Chatter of the Visible Schwitters's montage principle envisions art as a realm for playing with the contingent practices of meaning-production. The abstraction of artistic practice places non-sense alongside sense, not to deny the possibility of meaning but to make the operations of communication apparent by marking at once the separatedness and entwinement of pattern and perception, struc- ture and signification. This is crucial for assessing the value of Schwitters's belief in abstraction and his distinctive brand of formalism. When seen from this perspective, Schwitters's abstraction turns out to be the opposite of the refusal of narrativity that for Rosalind Krauss informs the modernist ten- dency to abstraction. According to Krauss, the quest for formal purity and compulsion of repetition that drives the avant-garde obsession with the grid foregrounds the structure of permanent deferral that characterizes significa- tion. Put in terms of the Saussurian distinction between langue and parole, Krauss focuses on langue as a systematic network of relations that stages an ultimate absence.49 Schwitters's formalism, by contrast, is about the parole aspect of language, about its being a playground for the contingent games of signification. Hence, Schwitters's hybrid verbal and visual collages veer to- ward the messiness of everyday communication rather than toward the pu- rity of a system. By the same token, Schwitters holds on to an emphatic un- derstanding of artistic agency. The artist is not played by structure or beholden to the unfolding of chance, but rather is actively engaged in the game of meaning. This engagement does not translate into a critical practice that aims to redress perceived injustices by challenging established hierarchies of power. Richard Huelsenbeck was right to find Schwitters wanting in this respect and to point to the affirmative impulse sustaining his work. What Schwit- ters's work affirms, however, is not the bourgeois order that it fails to con- demn, but rather the possibility of an experience whose meaning is con- structed and ever-shifting, yet can nonetheless be perceived as whole and consequential. This affirmative moment helps place into perspective Schwit- ters's emphatic insistence on the autonomy of artistic practice, which is held to stand in an intransitive relation to everyday signifying practices while paradoxically feeding off them. While shunning overt political engagement, Schwitters's avant-garde impulse does nonetheless actualize one strong meaning of critique, conceived as the task of probing the presuppositions and boundaries that delimit a given practice. In this sense, art is understood to be a distinct cognitive medium for testing ordinary signifying practices via an investigation that makes them appear unfamiliar. This investigation ex- poses their lack of a supratemporal structure and being driven by parodic repetition instead, which highlights their contingency and manipulability. Abstraction and Montage in the Work of Kurt Schwitters " 177 Such insights are optimistically framed as an opportunity for expanding sig- nification, an agenda Schwitters relentlessly pursued in a range of practices that pushed the bounds of established genres and media. Merz, the principle of abstract montage that undergirds his work, rests on the realization that the intersubjective practice we call meaning is but a restricted set of possible games. Its playful challenge to the "ordinariness of the ordinary" tampers with the ways these games are conventionally played, exhorting players to expand the range of possible moves that will allow them to stay in the game. Conclusion Montage after Weimar Barely twelve years after Schwitters wrote his montage narrative about Au- gusta Bolte, the young woman caught in a solipsistic search for the meaning of life, the question of montage was catapulted to the forefront of debates on art's critical mission by the rise of fascism in Germany and other European countries. The place of modernism in these developments, as telescoped by a montage aesthetics, became a heated point of contention in the exchange that unfolded in the pages of Das Wort, the journal published by German emigres in Moscow as part of the Popular Front's fight against fascism. At issue was how to reconcile the insights and prescriptions of Marxism with the multifarious aesthetic practices of the Weimar years. What kind of aes- thetics could provide an appropriate weapon in fighting the twin menaces of capitalism and fascist dictatorship? Could artistic practice supply a platform for revolution, and if so, what should that look like in the present? What role, if any, had modernist experimentation played in the republic's descent into fascism? This last question raised the concern of how to appraise Wei- mar Germany's aesthetic legacy in view of the present challenges. Much of this discussion crystallized around the proper assessment of Expressionism and surrealism as well as the deeply divergent modernist paradigms staked out by the work of Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann. Considered against this backdrop, the misadventures of one Augusta Bolte and the kind of montage practices associated with Schwitters and other artists would not seem to measure up to the earnestness of the situation after 1933. Yet already in Heritage of Our Time (19 3) Ernst Bloch made of montage a conceptual pivot for reckoning with the legacy of the Weimar Republic. As Bloch argued, the poetics of montage captured the pervasive disaggregation of identities, values, and social bonds that had haunted Weimar Germany, cor- rosively turning the dissecting and reassembling of the free-floating elements 178 Conclusion * 179 of experience into a fashionable mode of distraction, even a lifestyle of sorts. This, Bloch believed, allowed for portraying deracination as freedom and pa- pering over the cracks that capitalism's contradictions drilled into the surface of the real. Bloch, however, also thought that one could separate this unmedi- ated and pernicious form of montage from an analytical, mediated practice that refunctionalized the fragments from the old order in interim construc- tions charged with critical insight-a practice opened up by Expressionism and surrealism and explicitly theorized by Bertolt Brecht.1 In a famous rejoin- der to Bloch, Georg Lukacs handily dismissed his attempt at salvaging the principle of montage for critical practice, charging that its combinatory logic remained beholden to reality's fragmented surface and didn't even begin to fathom the intricate web of socioeconomic relations that enveloped it as ob- jective totality. For Lukacs, montage is what you get when you allow a self- indulgent subjectivity to take the surface of experience at face value, marking the twin triumph of escapist abstraction and a false immediacy. At its best, Lukacs believed, montage gives expression to the individual's existential an- guish in the characteristically ineffective narcissism of bourgeois individual- ism. At its worst, it is a license to noncommittal, formalist play.2 It may be easy to see, with the benefit of hindsight, how Bloch's attempt at acknowledging the shortcomings of montage by distinguishing between a pernicious and a desirable form revealed a fundamental weakness in his posi- tion that played right into Lukacs's criticism. Without insight into an objec- tively given totality that could serve as a dialectical sounding board for the contingent experience of individuals, any distinction between desirable and harmful reassembling of the surface remains bound to experiential immedi- acy. It devolves to a form of voluntarism that is ultimately unable to supply a criterion for distinguishing between those practices that genuinely break free of ideological indoctrination and those that unwittingly do ideology's bid through their ineffectual gesture of protest. If Bloch's position was unable to supply a criterion between good and bad montage, Lukacs's own recommen- dation of a realist paradigm that could tie subjective experience dialectically to objective reality so as to grant insight into the totality of the real was itself sharply rebuked. To paraphrase Theodor W. Adorno's later remarks, Lukacs's "objective totality" was not as capacious a reflection on the thorny question of Marxism's relation to aesthetics. It rather looked more like a strained at- tempt at falling in line with the doctrinaire prescriptions of socialist realism. At bottom, Adorno concluded, Lukacs sealed art's subordinate status in his quest to have it abide by the standards of party politics-a characterization that was correct in principle but seems pointedly ungenerous given the his- torical conditions with which Lukacs had been wrestling.3 180 " The Chatter of the Visible In offering this admittedly cursory review of the barbs traded over the value of montage in the so-called Expressionism debates of the 1930s, my aim is not so much to rehearse the well-known differences that separated the pro- ponents of montage from its detractors as to note how much terrain the two camps actually shared. This common ground unfolded at a significant dis- tance from the understanding of montage described in this book. First, there was the historical urgency and existential anguish that informed critique for all debate participants, driving their quest for a criterion that would allow for sorting emancipatory from reactionary aesthetic practice in the fight against fascism. Further there was a sense of sharpened vision that was bestowed by the historical gulf that had opened up with the traumatic end of the republic. The swift establishment of dictatorship by the Nazis had made the Weimar years appear like an epoch sealed onto itself, granting it an epic closure that was magnified for many by the distance of emigration. It is no doubt a trivial observation that none of the practitioners of montage discussed here bene- fited from this sense of total view during the 192os. More important, this twenty-twenty vision explains how montage could come up as a question of heritage in the first place. As telescoped through the pressing concerns of the 1930s, the discourse on montage was squeezed into monolithic exemplarity, as an aesthetics rendered both contemporaneous and remote by the catastro- phe of Nazism. Finally, there is the hermeneutic paradigm that informed both Lukacs's and Bloch's view of desirable artistic practice. Within this framework art ful- fills its rightful mandate by referencing the symbolic order of its time in an intelligible and consequential way. This presupposes an understanding of form as the repository of symbolic content that is to be disclosed through acts of interpretation, which will in turn shed light on the real and engender purposeful, transformative action. Understandably this mode of aesthetic engagement appeared indispensable in confronting the threat of fascism. Its hermeneutic presuppositions were, however, not ideally suited to grasp the montage practices described here. These practices' emphasis on perception and downplaying of interpretation seemed instead designed to corroborate Lukacs's charge of false immediacy and escapist abstraction, dramatizing the scourge of a formalism that eschewed substantive engagement with the so- cioeconomic and ideological forces at work in the empirical world. Hence Schwitters's droll story about Augusta Bolte, the young woman who fails wretchedly in her attempts at gleaning meaningful structures from the ran- dom patterns of everyday life, may be seen as an unwitting indictment of just the formalist logic that authorizes its humor. In lampooning its own formal- Conclusion * 181 ism, the narrative may confirm for many Lukacs's verdict on the noncommit- tal distortions of a montage aesthetics. To be sure, Schwitters's 1922 tale does not display the intellectual earnest- ness and ideological complexity that would be required in engaging the real- ity of fascism with historical nuance and philosophical depth. In raising the question about the relation between Augustas immediate experiences, the patterns she detects in them, and genuine insight the narrative does, how- ever, dramatize, in a whimsical manner, the basic conundrum of relating thinking and experience, knowledge and action, theory and practice. How can Augusta learn from experience, that is, gain a better-informed perspec- tive that will help her break free of her literal-mindedness and near stolidity? Which parts (and patterns) of experience lend themselves to a codifiable knowledge of life? Augusta goes through life gleaning the repetition of pat- terns amplified by the narrative's montage, yet none of them amount to intel- ligible structures. They just seem to parody each other in an endless mix of repetitiveness and variation. As a result, the distinctions drawn by an aesthet- ics predicated on hermeneutics-surface/depth, appearance/essence, uni- versal/particular-seem to have no traction in her world. This does not make Augusta's world chaotic or incomprehensible, though. One could instead characterize it as "a world of prose" to use the suggestive phrase deployed by Gerald Bruns to describe the relational structure of real- ity that undergirds Viktor Shklovsky's understanding of narrative.' At issue is a narrative mode that conceptualizes meaning as the immanent outcome of relational permutations rather than as correspondence between a specific ar- rangement of experiential elements and a symbolic order extrinsic to it. This narrative mode constitutes a response to a world made up of objects and events that may well be grasped through discourse but are not held together by a discernible symbolic order that would preexist it. Rather than throw one's hands up at their utter contingency, one can confront it head-on by dis- sembling and rearranging the physiognomy of the real in narrative practices that exploit the elements' aptitude for relating to each other. This operation suggests a desirable type of formalism whose understanding of structure is substantively different from that of structuralism, and this difference is illu- minating. If structuralism accounts for the semiotic operations of the em- pirical world by describing the underlying principles whose execution gener- ates particular sense-making forms, the relational patterns of formalism abandon all assumptions about deep structure and general rules, and instead presuppose that sense-making depends on the constantly renewed encounter between contingent forms and the perceptual patterns they trigger. In other 182 " The Chatter of the Visible words, in its concern with supratemporal structure structuralism valorizes those elements of experience that can function as particular instances of a general rule and dismisses the ones whose singularity resists subsumption under larger principles. By contrast, the desirable formalism Bruns has in mind regards structure as a means for grasping the event as irreducibly singu- lar occurrence. This endeavor presupposes a form of reason whose ethical mandate is not "to endow the ordinary with any transcendental sublimity but simply ...]to preserve it as the untranscendable horizon of the singular."5 This understanding of formalism well describes the "ordinary" dimension of montage practices as a contingent and spiraling entwinement of percep- tion, technologies and media, and signifying strategies. The shock, or star- tling effect, produced by the dissociation of perception and meaning serves to preserve the singular without altogether denying the possibility of com- munication. In so doing montage endeavors to grasp a world whose material- ity is not ontologically given, but is rather a dynamic horizon made up of singular objects and occurrences woven together in the event of perception. In emphasizing the central role of perception this account contributes to grasping narrative as a relational web for whose realization issues of embodi- ment are as important as semiotic and discursive aspects. This illuminates the peculiar utopianism that underwrites discourse on montage, and that hinges on a phenomenological understanding of experience as coming into being, as coherent and unitary, through the participatory engagement with a dynamic network of forms. What makes up the unity and purpose of existence at both the individual and collective levels is not an underlying meaning to be exca- vated but rather a making, a poietic activity that produces experience by ex- panding its contingent structures and by anchoring them through bonds of reciprocity. Notes Introduction i. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), io6. See also Malerei Fotografe Film, 1927 (facsimile re- print, Mainz: F. Kupferberg, 1967), 104. Henceforth cited as Painting and Malerei, re- spectively. For a reading of this image that teases out the connections its component parts establish between capitalist exploitation, militarism, and nationalism, see Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions ofthe New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 218-22. See also Maria Makela, "Notes to Plate 1o;' in Photo- montages ofHannah Hoch, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996), 35- 2. See Brecht's remarks on photography in his account of the Three-Penny Trial (Dreigroschenprozef). Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Grofe kommentierte Berliner und Frank- furterdusgabe, vol.21, ed. Werner Hecht (Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 469. See also Brecht's remarks in "No Insight through Photography," in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, Zooo), 144. 3. Matthew Teitelbaum, preface to Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, ed. Mat- thew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 7-18. 4. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 1935, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); see especially the sections on montage as the ideological and cultural cipher of Weimar Germany, "Transition: Berlin, Functions in Hollow Space," 195-208. For secondary literature that links montage to Weimar Germany's trau- matic horizon see Brigid Doherty, "See: We Are All Neurasthenics!; or, The Trauma of Dada Montage;' Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 82-132, as well as "Figures of Pseudorevolu- tion," October 84 (Spring 1998): 64-89 and "The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada;' October Io5 (Summer 2003): 73-92. See also Michael Cowan, "Cutting through the Archive: Querschnitt Montage and Images of the World in Weimar Visual Culture;' New German Critique 40.3 (2013): 1-40; Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages ofJohn Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 5. For an overview of the history of physiognomics and its resurgence in Weimar 183 184 " Notes to Pages 5-15 Germany, see the introduction and chapter 5 in Richard Gray'sAbout Face: German Phys- iognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). See also Sabine Hake, "Zur Wiederkehr des Physiognomischen in der modernen Photographie," in Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen, ed. Ridiger Campe and Manfred Schneider (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), 475-513, and Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als physiognomische Wissenschaft: Kritik einer Denkfigur der 192oer bis I94oerJahre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012). 6. Moholy-Nagy, Painting 36; translation modified. See also: "Sie [die Fotoplas- tiken] sind . . . eine Versuchs-Methode der simultanen Darstellung; komprimierte Durchdringung von visuellem und Wortwitz; unheimliche, ins Imaginare wachsende Verbindung der allerrealsten, imitativen Mittel. Aber sie k6nnen gleichzeitig erzahlend, handfest sein; veristischer, als das Leben selbst." Moholy-Nagy, Malerei 34. 7. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie" and "Photography," in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 1995), ioi-5 and 47-63. 8. Jakob Wassermann, "Kolportage und Entfabelung," Neue Schweizer Rundschau 19 (1926): 362-64. Reprinted in Romantheorie: Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutsch- land seit ISSo, ed. Eberhard Lammert et al. (K6nigstein im Taunus: Athenaum, 1984), 140-43. 9. Georg Lukics, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). io. Alfred D6blin, "An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker: Berliner Programm;' Der Sturm 4 (1913): 158-59. Reprinted in Aufsatze zur Literatur, ed. Walter Muschg (Olten: Walter, 1963), 15-19. 11. Marie-Laure Ryan, "Narrative' in Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 345. 12. Monika Fludernik, Towards a "Natural" Narratology (New York: Routledge, 1996), 26. Chapter 1 1. For a comprehensive overview of the early twentieth-century discourse and prac- tice of montage and collage within a German context, see Hanno M6bius, Montage und Collage: Literatur, bildende Kiinste, Film, Fotografe, Musik, Theater bis 1933 (Munich: Fink, zooo). See also Hanne Bergius, Montage undMetamechanik. Dada Berlin: Artistik von Polarititen (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2000). For a cross-national overview centered on the development of art in the twentieth century see Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Mak- ing ofModern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004). For a brief historical discussion see Francis Frascina, "Collage: Conceptual and Historical Overview' in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 382-84. In the same volume, see also Christine Poggi, "The 'Pasted-Paper Revolution' Revisited" and Marjorie Perloff, "Collage and Poetry" 387-92 and 384-87, respectively. For a dis- cussion of the concept's valences for literary media, see Viktor Zmegac, "Montage/Col- lage;' in Moderne Literatur in Grundbegrifen, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer and Viktor Zmegac (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 259-64. The phrase "pasted-paper revolution" is drawn Notes to Pages 15-20 " 185 from Clement Greenberg's account of Picasso's collage technique in "Collage," inArtand Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 70-83. 2. For approaches that emphasize the antinarrative and antihermeneutic streak of montage aesthetics and poetics, see Peter Burger's "The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art" in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 55- 82, and Rosalind Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso;' in The Orzginality oftheAvant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 23-40. See also Jacques Ranciere's more recent discussion ofJean-Luc Godard's montage practice in "Sentence, Image, History" in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007), 33-67, especially 43. 3. Wieland Herzfelde, "Introduction to the First International Dada Fair," trans. Brigid Doherty, October Io5 (2003): 101-2. See also: Die Dadaisten sagen: Wenn frnher Unmengen von Zeit, Liebe und Anstrengung auf das Malen eines K6rpers, einer Blume, eines Hutes, eines Schlagschattens usw. verwandt wurden, so brauchen wir nur die Schere nehmen und uns unter den Malereien, photographischen Darstellungen all dieser Dinge auszuschneiden, was wir brauchen; handelt es sich um Dinge geringeren Umfangs, so brauchen wir auch gar nicht Darstellungen, sondern nehmen die Gegenstande selbst, z.B. Taschen- messer, Aschenbecher, Bucher etc., lauter Sachen, die in den Museen alter Kunst recht schon gemalt sind, aber eben doch gemalt.... An sich ist jedes Erzeugnis da- daistisch, das unbeeinflugt, unbekummert um 6ffentliche Instanzen und Wertbe- griffe hergestellt wird, sofern das darstellende illusionsfeindlich, aus dem Bedurfnis heraus arbeitet, die gegenwartige Welt, die sich offenbar in Aufldsung, in einer Metamorphose befindet, zersetzend weiterzutreiben.... Die Dadaisten anerken- nen als einziges Programm die Pflicht, zeitlich und 6rtlich das gegenwartige Ge- schehen zum Inhalt ihrer Bilder zu machen. Wieland Herzfelde, "Zur Einfiihrung"; reprinted in Die zwanzzgerJahre: Manifeste und Dokumente deutscherKiinstler, ed. Uwe M. Schneede (Cologne: Dumont, 1979), 31-34. 4. Adorno was quick to emphasize the short-lived impact of this strategy, noting that the shock effect ensuing from its basic undecidability wears out with repeated use and thus opens the door for the rampant semiotic colonization of the montage procedure. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 152-59. 5. For an overview of these debates see Gregory Ulmer, "The Object of Post- criticism;' in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 6. For a discussion of the engagement with language that animates cubist and futur- ist collage see Christine Poggi, In Defiance ofPainting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Inven- tion of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 7. See the prologue in Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Dzgital Sub- jects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2oo6), 1-11, especially 3. 8. For an appraisal of Dada's impact on twentieth-century art see the essays collected in the special issue of October devoted to Dada, vol. Io5 (2003), especially Leah Dicker- man, "Dada Gambits," 3-12, and Helen Molesworth, "From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again," 177-81. See also the essays collected in TheDada Seminars, ed. Leah Dicker- 186 " Notes to Pages 21-25 man and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Zoo5). For a discussion of Dada's multilayered relation toward academic art and mass culture see Sherwin Simmons, "Advertising Seizes Control of Life: Berlin Dada and the Power of Advertising'" Oxford~rtJournalzz.i (1999): 121-46. See also Biro, TheDada Cyborg, and Michael White, Generation Dada (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 9. Hanno Hardt, "Negotiated Images: The Rise of Photojournalism in Weimar Ger- many," in In the Company ofMedia: Cultural Constructions of Communication, 192o-1930s (Boulder: Westview, Zooo), 60-88. 10. Hardt, "Negotiated Images" 73. 11. Hardt, "Negotiated Images" 62. 12. On the new types of narratives developed in advertisement and graphic design through montage techniques, see Raoul Hausmann, "Photomontage" (1931), trans. Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 178-79. See also "Fotomontage' in Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933, vol. 2 (Mu- nich: Edition Text + Kritik,1982), 130-33. See also Alfred Kemeny's critique of the depo- liticization and domestication of photomontage in current advertising and typographic design in the essay he published under the pen name Durus, "Fotomontage, Fotogramm'" DerArbeiter-Fotograf 5.7 (1931): 166-68; for the essay's English translation see Photogra- phy in the Modern Era, 182-85. 13. Sally Stein, "'Good Fences Make Good Neighbors': American Resistance to Pho- tomontage between the Wars," in Teitelbaum, Montage and Modern Life 128-89, here 141-48. 14. See Moholy's praise of the simultaneous presentation of materials made possible by photomontage in the passage quoted in the introduction. For a discussion of the nar- rative deployment of the impression of omniscience conjured by visual, screen-based me- dia, which recalls Moholy's terms, see Johanna Drucker's "Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation," Narrative 16.2 (2008): 121-39, especially 138-39. For a brief historical overview of the development and mainstreaming of montage in visual media in Europe and the United States between the two world wars, see Christopher Phillips's introduc- tion to Montage and Modern Life 20-35, especially 28-29. For an influential account of the return of figuration and narrative in Soviet photomontage, see Benjamin Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography" October 30 (Autumn 1984): 82-119. 15. "Wer Bdrgerblatter liest wird blind und taub. Weg mit den Verdummungsbanda- gen!" 16. See the first line of the text in verse, "Ich bin ein Kohlkopf, kennt ihr meine Blit- ter?" which translates as "I am a cabbage head, do you know my leaves/newspapers"? 17. See Peter Pachnicke's discussion of Heartfield's appropriation of the visual con- ventions of pictorial photography and deliberate evocation of painterly effects for his photomontages in "Morally Rigorous and Visually Voracious;' in John Heartfield, ed. Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef (New York: Abrams, 1991), 44-45; see also Sabine Kriebel's extended reading of this image in "Photomontage in the Age of Technological Reproducibility;' in Revolutionary Beauty 65-103. 18. John Berger, "The Political Uses of Photomontage;' in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon, 2oo1), 221. For an incisive reading of Heartfield's photo- montage practice that focuses on the ways in which similitude and likeness undermine the linguistic semiotic of modernism, see Devin Fore, "The Secret Always on Display: Notes to Pages 25-30 " 187 Caricature and Physiognomy in the Work of John Heartfield'" in Realism after Modern- ism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2o12), 243-304. 19. See the section "Allegory and Tragic Drama" in Benjamin's The Orzgin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), especially 174-82. See also Benjamin's reference to the indexical authenticity of Heartfield's photomontages in "The Author as Producer;' in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 768-82, especially 774-75" zo. Franz Roh, "Mechanism and Expression'" in Photo-Eye: 76Photos ofthe Period, ed. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold (New York City: Arno, 1973) 17. This is a reprint edition of the original volume, which also featured English and French translations of Roh's in- troductory essay. 21. Roh, Photo-Eye 18. For the German term, Wirklichkeitspropfungen, see the Ger- man version of the essay, also in Photo-Eye 7. 22. Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europdischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925). Although Roh does not use the term Neue Sachlichkeit, much of his account of the new art-its coldness, dis- tance, lack of pathos-resonates with the aesthetics identified with the New Objectivity. 23. Roh, Nach-Expressionismus 25-30. 24. Ausdrucksgesdttigkeit in Roh's terms; Nach-Expressionismus 50; see also 47. 25. Roh, Nach-Expressionismus 46. 26. Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen: Eine Untersuchung der Grenzen menschli- chen Verhaltens, 1941, in Ausdruck und menschliche Natur, Gesammelte Schr ften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 235 and 238-40. 27. Helmuth Plessner, "Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewuftsein des anderen Ichs," 1925, in Gesammelte Schr ften 7:112-13. For a discussion of Plessner's understanding of mimic expression as a challenge to the tradi- tional understanding of physiognomy and a possible influence on Walter Benjamin's un- derstanding of mimic behavior see Frederick J. Schwartz's "Mimesis: Physiognomies of Art in Kracauer, Sedlmayr, Benjamin and Adorno'" in Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History ofArt in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2oo5), 137-234, especially Zo5-1o. If traditional physiognomy held that the body's visible forms reveal an individual's inner truth, the depsychologized and exteriorized understanding of expression theorized by Plessner rather sees the body's visible actions as consisting of an outward address to the environment. For an overview of the history of physiognomics and its resurgence in Weimar Germany, see the introduction and chapter 5 in Richard Gray's About Face. 28. Werner Graff, "Here Comes the New Engineer" in G:An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Deszgn, and Film, ed. Hans Richter; trans. Steven Lindberg with Mar- gareta Ingrid Christian; English edition by Detlef Mertins and Michael W.Jennings (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 100. 29. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, "Production Reproduction," trans. Caroline Fawkes, in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era 80. See also "Produktion Reproduktion'"De Stijl 5.7 (1922). A version of this essay appears as a section of Moholy's Painting 30-31; see also Malerei 28-29. 30. See, for instance, Maud Lavin's remarks on the commercial practices of the ring "neue werbegestalter" (association of new graphic designers), the loose group of typogra- 188 " Notes to Pages 30-38 phers and designers that included Kurt Schwitters, Jan Tschichold, Willi Baumeister, Walter Dexel, and Cesar Domela, among others, in "Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers," in Teitelbaum, Montage and Modern Life 37-59. 31. Roh, Nach-Expressionismus 42-52; see also his discussion of his monograph's title in the one-page preface and 22-35. 32. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25. 33. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 16. 34. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity xii. 35. Walter Benjamin, "This Space for Rent' in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. MichaelJennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 476. 36. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 30-31. 37. Stein, "Good Fences" 134-48. 38. For a historical overview of concepts of mimesis within the Western tradition, see Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture Art Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See especially the chapters in section 2, "Mimesis as Imitatio," and section 5, "Mimesis as a Principle of Worldmaking in the Novel and Society." 39. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 21. 40. Taussig cites in this regard the "disorder of spatial perception" memorably de- scribed by Roger Caillois in his "Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia'" 1935, in Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). Imitative behavior, Caillois speculates, is a drive that does not serve the preservation of life (in acts of defensive or predatory mimicry) but rather leads to death as the merging with inani- mate matter. Plessner himself pointed to the pathological split between self and incar- nated body produced by mental illness as evidence of the off-center position of the self, which in healthy circumstances is nonetheless fully capable of negotiating its constitu- tively divided experience of incarnation. Plessner, "Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks," Gesammelte Schrien 7:112. 41. Drawing on Michel Foucault's account, in The Order of Things, of the succession of epistemic paradigms that framed the conditions of possibility of knowledge in the West, one could argue that montage marks the resurgence, in an anxious and often subversive key, of the physiognomic episteme of the Renaissance within modernity's positivist and historical episteme. For an account of Dada montage that draws on the trope of the cy- borg to address some of these issues, see Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg. 42. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, 1985, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Zooo), 6. 43. Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 8. 44. Stafford, VisualAnalogy 23-24. 45. Stafford, VisualAnalogy 8. 46. Stafford, VisualAnalogy 146 and 23 respectively. 47. Hans Blumenberg, "Wirklichkeit und M6glichkeit des Romans'" in Ai thetische und metaphorologische Schrien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Zoo1), 64-68. 48. Blumenberg, Schrien 55-63. 49. In borrowing a trope discussed in Blumenberg's later metaphorological work, one Notes to Pages 39-45 " 189 could say that the correlation between the two structures (narrative and experience) makes the one legible in terms of the other. Though Blumenberg was well aware that the metaphor of reality as a readable text was laced with material assumptions, both his essay on the novel and his work on the legibility metaphor are framed by a semiotic under- standing of textuality as the negotiation of signifying structures that is minimally im- pacted by material factors. See, for instance, his remark, in "Bicherwelt und Weltbuch' that the term evolutio, one of the master tropes of modern scientific discourse, recalls the unrolling of the papyrus scroll; Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 19. 5o. Hayles, Mother 103. 51. Hayles, Mother 103. 52. Hayles, Mother 104. Chapter 2 1. See Beatrice Hanssen's account of "The Storyteller" in Walter Benjamin's Other History: OfStones, Animals, Human Beings, andAngels (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1998), 5-6 and 156-58. For an important reading of the question of the crea- turely in Benjamin that builds on, but also amends, Hanssen's reading, see Eric L. Sant- ner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2oo6), especially 25-27. Howard Caygill also underscores Benjamin's insistence on an ethics of reciprocity, which he, however, reads from the perspective of Hegelian-tinged recognition within a liberal framework. Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), 61-79. On the circumstances surrounding the essay's genesis, see Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 529-32. For discussions that situate Benjamin essay within present-day narrative and media theory as well as the context of the avant-garde see De- tlev Sch6ttker, "Der Erzahler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows'" in Benjamin Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, ed. Burckhardt Lindner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2oo6), 557-66, and Alexander Honold, "Erzahlen'" in Benjamins Begr fe, ed. Martin Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 363-98. For a comprehensive discussion of Benjamin's stance on narrative, see Uwe Steiner, "Reinstatement of Epic Narration'" in Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought, trans. Mi- chael Winkler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2o1o), 126-37. 2. On Benjamin's understanding ofErfahrung and Erlebnis in relation to his concep- tualization of storytelling, see Martin Jay, "Experience without a Subject: Walter Benja- min and the Novel," in Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 47-61. 3. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Les- kov;' in Selected Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-) (henceforth cited as S4), 3:143-66, here 145-46. See also "Der Erzahler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows'" in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schr ften, ed. Rolf Tiede- mann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-89) (henceforth cited as GS), 2.2:435-65, here 441-42. 4. On Benjamin's project for an alternative understanding of history see Hanssen, 190 " Notes to Pages 45-46 Walter Benjamin's Other History. For Benjamin's debt to Jewish mysticism see Stephane Moses, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, 1992 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). On Benjamin's concept of natural history see also Burckhardt Lindner, "Natur-Geschichte: Geschichtsphilosophie und Welterfahrung in Benjamins Schriften7' Text undKritik 31-32 (1971): 41-58, and Eric L. Santner, The RoyalRemains (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 214-16. On intersection of modern historiography with other historical modalities, see also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 5 and 8, and Irving Wohlfahrt, "Re-fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project,' New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986): 3-24. 5. See Benjamin's explicit reference to D6blin's lecture in his review of Berlin Alex- anderplatz, "The Crisis of the Novel" (SW 3:299-304); see also "Krisis des Romans: Zu D6blins 'Berlin Alexanderplatz"' (GS 3:231), which endorses several arguments from D6- blin's "Der Bau des epischen Werks," arguments that are further elaborated in "The Sto- ryteller." They include the observation of the novelist's insularity in contrast to the sub- stantive bond that ties the epic writer to a community; the pivotal role played by the book in displacing the epic as a communitarian practice rooted in orality; the desire to offer a capacious concept of the epic, which is not to be understood in contrast to the lyrical or the dramatic but rather as a counterweight to the novelistic as a form artificially folded onto itself; and the idea of the epic's lasting force in juxtaposition to the sense of transience the novel both summons and attempts to overcome. 6. On the need for overcoming the psychological framework of realism through a depersonalized mode of narration, see D6blin's "An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker"; and Carl Einstein, "Ober den Roman;' Die Aktion 1 (1912): 1264-69, reprinted in Lim- mert et al., Romantheorie 2:1o9-11. On the displacement of the book as a literary me- dium, see Adolf Behne, "Die Stellung des Publikums zur modernen deutschen Literatur" Die Weltbiihne 22 (1926): 774-77, reprinted in Anton Kaes, Kino-Debatte: Literatur und Film z9o9-1929 (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1978), 160-63. On the development of a Tat- sachenliteratur modeled after the journalistic form of reportage see Franz Carl Weiskopf and Kurt Hirschfeld, "Um den proletarischen Roman" (1930); see also the exchange that took place in 1932 between Georg Lukics and Ernst Ottwalt: Georg Lukics, "Reportage oder Gestaltung" (1932); Ernst Ottwalt, "'Tatsachenroman' und Formexperiment" (1932), and Georg Lukics, "Aus der Not eine Tugend." The three essays are reprinted in Lammert et al., Romantheorie 2:185-89; 189-97; and 97-99 respectively. 7. Lukics sees the epic as reflecting the experience of being as a self-enclosed totality in complete harmony with itself. The novel shares the epic's disposition toward totality, yet its aspiration to live up to it at a formal level is stymied by the modernity's open- ended temporality. Lukics, Theory of the Novel 29-35 and 55-56. 8. My translation. See also: "Was macht das epische Werk aus? Das Verm6gen seines Herstellers, dicht an die Realitat zu dringen und sie zu durchstogen, um zu gelangen zu den einfachen grogen elementaren Grundsituationen und Figuren des menschlichen Daseins. Hinzu kommt, um das lebende Wortkunstwerk zu machen, die springende Fabulierkunst des Autors. Und drittens ergieft sich alles im Strom der lebenden Sprache, der der Autor folgt." Alfred D6blin, "Der Bau des epischen Werks;' in Aufsdtze zur Lit- eratur 132. Notes to Pages 47-49 " 191 9. D6blin, "Bau des epischen Werks" 121-31. io. Robert Musil, The Man without ,,ualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 708-9. See also: Und als einer jener scheinbar abseitigen und abstrakten Gedanken ... fiel ihm ein, daft das Gesetz dieses Lebens ... kein anderes sei als das der erzahlerischen Ordnung! Jener einfachen Ordnung, die darin besteht, daft man sagen kann: "Als das geschehen war, hat sich jenes ereignet!" ... die Aufreihung alles dessen, was in Raum und Zeit geschehen ist, auf einen Faden, eben jenen berihmten "Faden der Erzahlung7' aus dem nun also auch der Lebensfaden besteht.... Das ist es, was sich der Roman kiinstlich zunutze gemacht hat: der Wanderer mag bei str6mendem Regen die Landstrage reiten oder bei zwanzig Grad Kalte mit den FGfen im Schnee knirschen, dem Leser wird behaglich zumute, und das ware schwer zu begreifen, wenn dieser ewige Kunstgriff der Epik, mit dem schon die Kinderfrauen ihre Kleinen beruhigen, diese bewahrteste "perspektivische Verkirzung des Verstandes" nicht schon zum Leben selbst geh6rte. Die meisten Menschen sind im Grundverhaltnis zu sich selbst Erzahler. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. 1 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 650. 11. See in this regard the debates on the Entfabelung of the novel, that is, the perceived fading of the fable in contemporary narrative works. The term was introduced by an ar- ticle ofJakob Wassermann, "Kolportage und Entfabelung." The concern with the central role the fable occupies in the epic goes all the way back to Aristotle's definition of mime- sis as imitation of an action that hinges on an analogy between the fable and experience. The fable is what ties events and characters together, endowing narrative with consis- tency and meaning. I2. Musil, Man without,&ualities 709. See also: "daft ihm dieses primitiv Epische ab- handen gekommen sei" (Musil, Mann ohneEigenschaften 650). 13. See also: "ahnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten" (GS z.i:2io). 14. On gambling, see Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" SW 4:329-32 ("Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire" GS 1.2:632-37). See also Benjamin's "On the Mi- metic Faculty" (1933), SW2:720-22 ("Ober das mimetische Verm6gen'" GS z.i:2io) as well as the earlier, longer version, "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), SW2:694-98 ("Lehre vom Ahnlichen'" GS 2.1:204-10), which also touch on graphology and play. For Benja- min's understanding of play see his essays "The Cultural History of Toys" and "Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work;' SW 2:113-16 and 117-21 ("Kulturge- schichte des Spielzeugs" and "Spielzeug und Spielen," GS 3:113-17 and 127-32). See also sections in One-Way Street (especially "Child Hiding' SW2:465-66) and Berlin Child- hood around 19oo (especially "The Sock," "The Mummerehlen," "Hiding Places"; SW 3:344-413; Berliner Kindheit um 9oo, GS 4.1:235-304). For a discussion of the mimetic faculty in Benjamin, see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 262-75 and Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 1-43. 15. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. i, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ix. For Ricoeur, the function of narrative, understood broadly as a practice that encompasses both fiction and historical discourse, lies in overcoming the aporias of the human experience of time by giving it an 192 " Notes to Pages 50-51 order or arrangement that he labels as narrative. See especially the chapters on Augustine and on Aristotle's twin concepts of mimesis and muthos in vol. 1 of Time and Narrative, 5-51. 16. See also: Mithin hat seine [Kafkas] Ausfiihrlichkeit einen ganz anderen Sinn als etwa den der Episode im Roman. Romane sind sich selbst genug. Kafkas Bucher sind sich das nie, sie sind Erzahlungen, die mit einer Moral schwanger gehen, ohne sie je zur Welt zu bringen. So hat der Dichter denn auch gelernt ... nicht von den grogen Romanciers sondern von sehr viel bescheideneren Autoren, von den Er- zahlern. (GS 2.2:679) 17. Here Benjamin takes as his example the Haggadah, the Jewish text that sets the order of the Passover Seder, mapping it on a retelling of the story of the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt. 18. See also: "Kurz, dieser 'roman pur' ist eigentlich reines Innen, kennt kein Augen, und ist somit auferster Gegenpol zur reinen epischen Haltung" (GS 3:232). 19. See also: Die Montage sprengt den "Roman;' sprengt ihn im Aufbau wie auch stilistisch, und er6ffnet neue, sehr epische M6glichkeiten. Im Formalen vor allem. Das Ma- terial der Montage ist ja durchaus kein beliebiges. Echte Montage beruht auf dem Dokument. Der Dadaismus hat sich in seinem fanatischen Kampf gegen das Kunstwerk durch sie das tagliche Leben zum Bundesgenossen gemacht. Er hat zuerst, wenn auch unsicher, die Alleinherrschaft des Authentischen proklamiert. Der Film in seinen besten Augenblicken machte Miene, uns an sie zu gew6hnen. Hier ist sie zum ersten Male fur die Epik nutzbar geworden. Die Bibelverse, Statistiken, Schlagertexte sind es, kraft deren D6blin dem epischen Vorgang Au- toritit verleiht. Sie entsprechen den formelhaften Versen der alten Epik. (GS 3:232-33) 2o. My discussion of Benjamin's engagement with Dadaism and with avant-garde circles in this and the following chapter is indebted to Detlev Sch6ttker's account in Kon- struktiver Fragmentarismus: Form und Rezeption der Schrien Walter Benjamins (Frank- furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), especially 145-93. Sch6ttker's reading emphasizes Ben- jamin's affinity for the aesthetics and poetics of Constructivism, thereby providing a corrective to readings that lay a premium on surrealism's influence on his work. Sch6ttker cites in this regard the Constructivist foregrounding of the artificial and piecemeal na- ture of the artwork, its understanding of poiesis as blurring the line between art and technology, its practical orientation, and its endeavor to articulate issues of interpreta- tion and hermeneutics outside of a framework centered on consciousness as the pivot of subjectivity. For Benjamin's engagement with the avant-garde see also Michael Jennings, "Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde" in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18-34- 21. Wieland Herzfelde, "Zur Einfiihrung7" in the catalog of the Erste internationale Dada-Messe (Berlin: Kunsthandlung Dr. Otto Burchard, 1920); digital reproduction available from the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa (http://sdrc.lib. uiowa.edu/dada/Dada_Messe/pages/002.htm; accessed September 2014). Notes to Pages 52-55 " 193 11. Compare Adorno's reflections in "Der Standort des Erzahlers im zeitgen6ssichen Roman," which owe much to Benjamin's discussion in "The Storyteller." Adorno praises the high-modernist novel for its shattering of the mimetic universe through various nar- rative devices. Adorno understands mimesis narrowly, tying it directly to illusionistic representation. Rejecting the diagnosis of an obsolescence of the novel in the present, Adorno points to the critical role that high-modernist novels play in shattering realism's illusionism, which is bent on conveying a disingenuously coherent image of reality as a totality free of contradictions. In other words, Adorno's target is illusionism, not mimesis per se understood as a narrative's ability to suggest an analogical relation to experience. Analogy for Adorno is not predicated on illusionism but rather on a negative dialectic driven by the blind, monadic quality of the artwork. Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1954). 23. See also: "Erfahrung, die von Mund zu Mund geht, ist die Quelle, aus der alle Er- zahler gesch6pft haben" (GS 2.2:440). 24. "Der Erzahler nimmt, was er erzahlt, aus der Erfahrung; aus der eigenen oder beri- chteten. Und er macht es wiederum zur Erfahrung derer, die seiner Geschichte zuh6ren" (GS 2.2:443). 15. See also: "Die Erzahlung, wie sie im Kreis des Handwerks ... lange gedeiht ... legt es nicht darauf an, das pure 'an sich' der Sache zu nberliefern wie eine Information oder ein Rapport. Sie senkt die Sache in das Leben des Berichtenden ein, um sie wieder aus ihm hervorzuholen. So haftet an der Erzahlung die Spur des Erzahlenden wie die Spur der T6pferhand an der Tonschale" (GS 2.2:447). This passage appears almost verbatim in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" ("Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire"), where it intro- duces a discussion of Proust's attempts at restoring storytelling in the present (SW4:316; GS 1.2:611). 16. See also: [Die wahre Erzahlung] fuhrt ihren Nutzen mit sich. Dieser Nutzen mag einmal in einer Moral bestehen, ein andermal in einer praktischen Anweisung, ein drittes in einem Sprichwort oder in einer Lebensregel-in jedem Fall ist der Er- zahler ein Mann, der dem H6rer Rat weig. Wenn aber "Rat wissen" heute altmo- disch im Ohre zu klingen anfangt, so ist daran der Umstand schuld, daft die Mit- teilbarkeit der Erfahrung abnimmt. Infolge davon wissen wir uns und andern keinen Rat. Rat ist ja minder Antwort auf eine Frage als ein Vorschlag, die Fortsetzung einer (eben sich abrollenden) Geschichte angehend. Um ihn einzuholen, mnfte man sie zuvdrderst einmal erzahlen k6nnen.... Rat, in den Stoff gelebten Lebens eingewebt, ist Weisheit. Die Kunst des Erzahlens neigt ihrem Ende zu, weil die epische Seite der Wahrheit, die Weisheit, ausstirbt. (GS 2.2:442) 27. Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History, 6. 18. See also: "Der Erzahler ist die Gestalt, in welcher der Gerechte sich selbst begeg- net" (GSz.2:465). 29. See also: "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzahlen;" sagt der Volksmund und denkt sich den Erzahler als einen, der von weither kommt. Aber nicht weniger gern hdrt man dem zu, der redlich sich nahrend, im Lande geblieben ist und des- 194 " Notes to Pages 55-57 sen Geschichten und Oberlieferungen kennt.... Wenn Bauern und Seeleute Alt- meister des Erzahlens gewesen sind, so war der Handwerkstand seine hohe Schule. In ihm verband sich die Kunde von der Ferne, wie der Vielgewanderte sie nach Hause bringt, mit der Kunde aus der Vergangenheit, wie sie am liebsten dem Sefhaften sich anvertraut. (GS 2.2:440) 30. See also: "Leskow ist in der Ferne des Raumes wie der Zeit zu Hause" (GS 2.2:441). 31. See also: Es gibt nichts, was Geschichten dem Gedachtnis nachhaltiger anempfiehlt als jene keusche Gedrungenheit, welche sie psychologischer Analyse entzieht. Und je natiirlicher dem Erzahlenden der Verzicht auf psychologische Schattierung vonstatten geht, desto gr6fer wird ihre Anwartschaft auf einen Platz im Gedacht- nis des Hdrenden, desto vollkommener bilden sie sich seiner eigenen Erfahrung an, desto lieber wird er sie schlieglich eines naheren oder fernern Tages weiterer- zahlen. Dieser Assimilationsprozeg, welcher sich in der Tiefe abspielt, bedarf eines Zustandes der Entspannung, der seltener und seltener wird. Wenn der Schlaf der Hdhepunkt der kdrperlichen Entspannung ist, so die Langeweile der geistigen. Die Langeweile ist der Traumvogel, der das Ei der Erfahrung aus- brdtet.... Seine Nester-die Tatigkeiten, die sich innig der Langenweile [sic] verbinden-sind in den Stadten schon ausgestorben, verfallen auch auf dem Lande. Damit verliert sich die Gabe des Lauschens, und es verschwindet die Ge- meinschaft der Lauschenden. Geschichten erzahlen ist ja immer die Kunst, sie weiter zu erzahlen, und die verliert sich, wenn die Geschichten nicht mehr be- halten werden. Sie verliert sich, weil nicht mehr gewebt und gesponnen wird, wahrend man ihnen lauscht. Je selbstvergessener der Lauschende, desto tiefer pragt sich ihm das Gehdrte ein. Wo ihn der Rhythmus der Arbeit ergriffen hat, da lauscht er den Geschichten auf solche Weise, daft ihm die Gabe, sie zu er- zahlen, von selber zufallt. (GS 2.2:446-47) 32. As made clear in an early draft of this section, this type of listening forms the op- posite of the strained attention to meaning demanded by the novel's emphasis on inter- pretation, which tends to shift the focus from the story itself to the storyteller in a way that only serves to flatter his vanity (GS 2.3:1287). 33. See also: Seele, Auge und Hand sind mit diesen Worten in einen und denselben Zusam- menhang eingebracht. Ineinanderwirkend bestimmen sie eine Praxis. Uns ist diese Praxis nicht mehr gelaufig.... Die Rolle der Hand in der Produktion ist bescheidener geworden und der Platz, den sie beim Erzahlen ausgeffillt hat, ist verddet. (Das Erzahlen ist ja, seiner sinnlichen Seite nach, keineswegs ein Werk der Stimme allein. In das echte Erzahlen wirkt vielmehr die Hand hinein, die mit ihren, in der Arbeit erfahrenen Gebarden, das was laut wird auf hundertfaltige Weise stdtzt.) Jene alte Koordination von Seele, Auge und Hand, die in Valerys Worten auftaucht, ist die handwerkliche, auf die wir stogen, wo die Kunst des Erzahlens zu Hause ist. Ja, man kann weiter gehen und sich fragen, ob die Bezie- hung, die der Erzahler zu seinem Stoff hat, dem Menschenleben, nicht selbst eine handwerkliche Beziehung ist? Ob seine Aufgabe nicht eben darin besteht, den Notes to Pages 57-61 " 195 Rohstoff der Erfahrungen-fremder und eigener-auf eine solide, nutzliche und einmalige Art zu bearbeiten? (GS 2.2:464) 34. An explicit contrast between artisanal labor and industrial practice in fostering authentic experience ("Erfahrung") is drawn in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), where Benjamin quotes from Marx's Capital: "'All machine work, says Marx in the same passage cited above, 'requires prior training of the workers.' This training must be differentiated from practice. Practice, which was the sole determinant in handcrafting, still had a function in manufacturing. With practice as the basis, 'each particular area of production finds its appropriate technical form in experience and slowly perfects it.' ... The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by machine training. His work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing in the factory" (SW 4:328-29). See also "'Alle Arbeit an der Maschine erfordert: heift es im oben berdhrten Zusammenhang, 'frihzeitige Dressur des Arbeiters.' Von (bung muff diese Dressur unterschieden werden. Obung, im Handwerk allein bestimmend, hatte in der Manufaktur noch Raum. Auf deren Grundlage 'findet jeder besondere Produktionszweig in der Erfahrung die ihm entsprechende technische Gestalt; er ver- vollkommnet sie langsam.' ... Der ungelernte Arbeiter ist der durch die Dressur der Maschine am tiefsten Entwirdigte. Seine Arbeit ist gegen Erfahrung abgedichtet. An ihr hat die Obung ihr Recht verloren" (GS 1.2:631-32). 35. For Benjamin's interest in psychotechnics see his "Karussel der Berufe" (GS 2.2:667-76); translated as "Carousel of Jobs" by Lisa Harries Schumann, in Radio Benja- min, ed. Lecia Rosenthal (London: Verso, 2014), 283-91. Benjamin's interest in psy- chotechnics as a field that lent itself to describing the practices of reading and writing finds confirmation in a gloss from 1933, "Der gute Schriftsteller" which is part of a set of aphoristic fragments on the question "Warum es mit der Kunst Geschichten zu erzahlen zu Ende geht" (quote from a letter to Hofmannsthal from 1929, quoted in GS 4.2:1011) written between 1928/29 and 1935. On Benjamin's relation to psychotechnics, see Fred- eric J. Schwartz, "Distraction: Walter Benjamin and the Avant-Garde" in Blind Spots 37-101. 36. See also: "Wer einer Geschichte zuhdrt, der ist in der Gesellschaft des Erzahlers; selbst wer liest, hat an dieser Gesellschaft teil. Der Leser eines Romans ist aber einsam" (GS 2.2:456). 37. My translation. See also: ... warum man Romane liest. Romanlesen das ist wie "Essen". Also eine Wollust der Einverleibung. Mit andern Worten der denkbar scharfste Gegensatz zu dem, was die Kritik gew6hnlich als die Lust des Lesers annimmt: namlich die Substitu- tion.... Man hat auch zu fragen, ob nicht "ein Buch verschlingen" in solchem Sinne eine echte, erfahrene Metapher ist.... Nur das kame also auf die paradoxe aber scharfe Wahrheit heraus, daft Romane schreiben heift, den Dingen ihr Egbares, ihren Geschmack abzugewinnen. Vom Essen zum Romanlesen geht eine k o n t i n u i e r 1 i c h e Skala. (GS 4.2:1013) 38. The notes further read: This is the new "theory of the novel." It extracts the symbolic intention of incor- poration and thus a piece of the anthropological symbolic intention from the 196 " Notes to Pages 61-64 magic, hieratic and proves its reality in the profane. Reading is communion through eating in the profane sense. The carnivore element should be especially foregrounded. Flesh-tension. (My translation) See also: Dieses ist die neue "Theorie des Romans." Sie reift die Symbolintention des Ein- verleibens und damit ein Stuck der anthropologischen Symbolintentionen aus dem Magischen, Hieratischen heraus und weist ihm Wirklichkeit im Profanen nach. Lesen ist Kommunion durch Essen im profanen Sinne. Das karnivore Ele- ment ist besonders hervorzuheben. Fleisch-Spannung. (GS 4.2:1014) On the possibility of grounding a new type of experience on carnivore/cannibalistic in- corporation see Benjamin's essay on Kraus, who is presented as an inhuman cannibal ("Menschenfresser"). See Beatrice Hanssen's discussion of Kraus's "other" humanism as seen by Benjamin, especially her reference to the influence of Feuerbach's anthropologi- cal materialism. Benjamin quoted Feuerbach's dictum: "Man ist was man ift." Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History 119. 39. See also: "Ja, man kann weiter gehen und sich fragen, ob die Beziehung, die der Erzahler zu seinem Stoff hat, dem Menschenleben, nicht selbst eine handwerkliche Beziehung ist? Ob seine Aufgabe nicht eben darin besteht, den Rohstoff der Erfahrungen-fremder und eigener-auf eine solide, nutzliche und einmalige Art zu bearbeiten?" (GS 2.2:464). Chapter 3 1. See Miriam Hansen's overview of the argument and its inconsistencies in "Benja- min, Cinema, and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology;" New Ger- man Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179-224, especially 179-86, and "Room-for-Play: Ben- jamin's Gamble with Cinema," October 109 (2004): 3-45, especially 3-5. Beginning with Theodor W. Adorno, critics have pointed to the mechanical quality of the arguments authorized by these binaries, which robs Benjamin's discourse of its habitual subtlety and open-endedness and leads to assertions that would need more careful calibration to with- stand critical scrutiny-for instance, as regards a differentiated analysis of the masses and their relationship to fascism, or the concrete steps that would allow for claiming film as an effective weapon of communist struggle given the fraught political situation of the mid to late 1930s. In addition, the teleological thrust of the discourse seems to support a dubious technological determinism. As implied by the much-quoted dictum of a fascist aestheticization of politics in the essay's epilogue, film is as much a product of techno- logical modernity as the technologically enhanced warfare that fascism was waging in its totalitarian endeavor to endow politics with the attributes of auratic experience. In its ability to shatter the aura of aestheticized war, the essay suggests, film allows for turning technology's destructive potential against itself. Thus film marks the culmination of a historical teleology that leads to the self-induced implosion of technology, with the masses looking more like an unself-conscious tool than a deliberate actor. This unwit- tingly obliterates any space for human agency and relegates the communist mobilization Notes to Pages 64-67 " 197 called for by the epilogue to a sideshow in the iron causality of technological modernity. 2. For the designation "Urtext;' see GS 7.2:662. For the circumstances surrounding the production of the various drafts, see Sch6ttker, Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus 70- 85, especially note 143 on p. 72 and note 147 on pp. 73-75. See also Hansen, "Room-for- Play" 4. As Hansen notes, the Ur-text, or second version, is the one to which Adorno actually responded. As a result many of his criticisms make little sense if one only reads the more familiar, third version. 3. Hansen, "Room-for-Play" 6. 4. See also: "Was ist eigentlich Aura? Ein sonderbares Gespinst aus Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag" (GS 7.1:355). My discussion in what follows also relies on the second draft of the artwork essay, GS 7.1:350-84. Subse- quent references to this version appear in parenthesis in the main text. 5. For the relevant passages in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (SW 4:338-39); see also "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire" (GS 1.2:646-47). 6. This form of apperception, Hansen observes, also contained a precious "element of temporal disjunction" that allows for "the intrusion of a forgotten past that disrupts the fictitious progress of chronological time." Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema" 311. As concerns the nonlinear temporality of aura, see Benjamin's discussion of the auratic properties of early photography as it crystallizes in his example of the wedding portrait of the photographer Dauthendey and his bride, who committed suicide after the birth of their sixth child in GS 2.1:370. For an incisive account of aura that stresses its paradoxical mediatic quality see Samuel Weber, "Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin'" in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76-107. 7. "Wenn die Aura in den frnhen Photographien ist, wieso ist sie nicht im Film?" (GS 1.3:1048). See also Miriam Hansen's discussion of Benjamin's ambivalent relation to the phenomenon he dubs aura in "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience" and "Benjamin's Aura,' CriticalInquiry 34.2 (Winter 2008): 336-75; reprinted as "Aura: The Appropria- tion of a Concept;' in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor WAdorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 104-31. 8. See Buck-Morss's argument in "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered;' October 62 (Fall 1992): 3-41. 9. This amplified apperception is linked in the second version to the ability to thera- peutically discharge destructive psychic energy at a collective level, thus preventing the harmful festering of mass psychoses. The third draft omits this elaboration of the argu- ment, which Adorno had fiercely criticized as reminiscent of Jung's politically dubious arguments about a collective psyche (GS 1.2:500). 10. The discussion of a second technology appears at the end of section VI in the ur- text and was deleted from subsequent drafts (SW3:1o8; GS 7.1:359-60). 11. These debates are especially hard to ignore if one considers the contested status of film as a mass medium, whose turn to narrative in the early 1920s was seen as challenging traditional narrative genres and exacerbating what contemporaries saw as a long-standing crisis of the novel. For their part, early film theorists warned that film's turn to narrative prevented the medium from developing its own aesthetics, whether based on physiog- nomics (Bela Balizs), the manipulation of light (Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy), or abstract movement (Hans Richter). Benjamin's awareness of these debates is signaled by his cri- 198 " Notes to Pages 67-71 tique, in the essay, of present-day attempts at ascribing auratic properties to film by liken- ing it to ritualistic art or a late-Romantic notion of the oneiric as the gateway to the su- pernatural (GS 7.1:362-63). His discourse also draws on the kind of comparison to stage drama that was a staple in the discussions of his day. For an overview of these debates, see Anton Kaes's introduction to Kino-Debatte 1-35. See also Heide Schlipmann's Der un- heimliche Blick, 199o, trans. as The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema by Inga Pollmann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2z1o), especially the introduc- tion, 1-22. 12. Benjamin explicitly alludes to the practice of the Russian filmmakers in section XIII, in addition to quoting Pudovkin's classic Film Technique and Film Acting in an endnote (GS 7.1:367). 13. See also: "Das Kunstwerk entsteht hier erst aufgrund der Montage. Einer Mon- tage, von der jedes einzelne Bestandstuck die Reproduktion eines Vorgangs ist, der ein Kunstwerk weder an sich ist, noch in der Photographie ein solches ergibt" (GS 7.1:364). 14. For instance, the film actor's performance, which is evaluated step by step by a host of professionals rather than offered to the empathetic view of a live audience, exhibits the dehumanizing moment of testing ("test performance;' SW 3:111; "Testleistung:' GS 7.1:365) to which individuals are inexorably subjected in their daily work routines. 15. See also: "Die Direktiven, die der Betrachter von Bildern in der illustrierten Zeitschrift durch die Beschriftung erhalt, werden bald darauf noch praziser und gebieter- ischer im Film, wo die Auffassung von jedem einzelnen Bild durch die Folge aller vor- angegangenen vorgeschrieben erscheint" (GS-7.1:361). 16. In historicizing key arguments from Kracauer's 1927 essay on photography, this essay maintained that in its early stages photography also partook of a mode of auratic apperception that made it possible to receive the single photograph as a luminous unit of pregnant meaning. Benjamin's observations here draw on Kracauer's discussion of a pho- tographic archive at the end of his photography essay. Kracauer, "Photography," in The Mass Ornament 62-63. 17. Sam Rohdie, "Lev Kuleshov" in Montage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2oo6), 27. 18. See also "Der Nachmachende macht seine Sache scheinbar. Man kann auch sagen: er spielt die Sache. Und damit st6ft man auf die Polaritat, die in der Mimesis waltet. In der Mimesis schlummern, eng ineinandergefaltet wie Keimblatter, beide Seiten der Kunst: Schein und Spiel" (GS-7.1:368). 19. Beginning with the Renaissance, the idea of mimesis as dynamic and processual activity that revolves around a productive mimicry was gradually displaced by a semiotic concept of imitation ("imitatio") predicated on the ability of aesthetic artifacts to serve as replicas of absent objects or duplicate appearances. The shift from a concept of mime- sis based on the functional equivalence between the performance of the mime and its referent to an understanding of imitation as reproduction or doubling up of appearances goes back to the appropriation of the Aristotelian concept in the Italian Renaissance. Yet Aristotle's concept of mimesis in the Poetics emphasizes the dynamic moment of mimesis, its engendering mimetic practice, rather than the moment of semblance or appearance. In this regard see Paul Ricoeur's discussion of Aristotle's understanding of mimesis, which treats the concept of "imitating an action" as a mode of emplotment that does not reduplicate given experience but rather orders events and thereby produces narrative (muthos); Time and Narrative 32-42. For a genealogy of the concept of mimesis that Notes to Pages 71-74 " 199 emphasizes the shifts that took place in the Renaissance see Andreas Kablitz, "Die Un- vermeidlichkeit der Natur: Das aristotelische Konzept der Mimesis im Wandel der Zeiten;' in Die Mimesis und ihre Kiinste, ed. Gertrud Koch, Martin Vdhler, and Chris- tiane Voss (Munich: Fink, 2o1o), 189-211. For a compelling reading of this footnote that foregrounds the centrality of the notion of play in advancing an emancipatory under- standing of technology see Hansen, "Room-for-Play" 19-24. See also my own discussion, in chapter 1, of Benjamin's understanding of a submerged mimetic faculty that survives in the play of children who are drawn to impersonating all manner of objects. 2o. See also: "Was mit der Verkummerung des Scheins, dem Verfall der Aura in den Werken der Kunst einhergeht, ist ein ungeheurer Gewinn an Spiel-Raum. Der weiteste Spielraum hat sich im Film er6ffnet.... Im Film hat das Scheinmoment seinen Platz dem Spielmoment abgetreten, das mit der zweiten Technik im Bunde steht" (GS 7.1:369). 21. See note 21 in SW3:126-27. 22. Arnheim, Film als Kunst 21. 23. Arnheim, Film als Kunst 46. 24. Arnheim, Film als Kunst 21. 25. Arnheim argues that if film elicits an illusionistic effect that is stronger than the illusion of live drama, this is due in part to the abstraction or sensory deficit inherent in the film image, which enables the audience to tolerate the spatial and temporal leaps produced by the creative use of editing. Unlike Benjamin, however, Arnheim believed that in film too the illusion is ultimately partial, that is, that film features aspects from which the illusionary moment can be recognized as such. Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst 34-41, especially 38-39. 26. See also: Das Theater kennt prinzipiell die Stelle, von der aus das Geschehen nicht ohne weiteres als illusionir zu durchschauen ist. Der Aufnahmeszene im Film gegendber gibt es diese Stelle nicht. Dessen illusionare Natur ist eine Natur zweiten Grades; sie ist ein Ergebnis des Schnitts. Das heift: Im Filmatelier ist die Apparatur derart tiefin die Wirklichkeit eingedrungen, daf deren reiner, vom Fremdkorper der-Appa- ratur freier Aspekt das Ergebnis einer besonderen Prozedur, ndmlich der Aufnahme durch den eigens eingestellten photographischen Apparat und ihrer Montierung mit anderen Aufnahmen von der gleichen Art ist. Der apparatfreie Aspekt der Realitat ist hier zu ihrem kiinstlichsten geworden und der Anblick der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit zur blauen Blume im Land der Technik. (GS 7.1:373) 27. For discussion of these different types of immediacy see Sergei Eisenstein's "The Montage of Attractions," in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 29-34. 28. See also: Die Bilder, die beide davontragen, sind ungeheuer verschieden. Das des Malers ist ein totales, das des Kameramanns ein vielfaltig zerstdckeltes, dessen Teile sich nach einem neuen Gesetz zusammenfinden. So ist die flmische Darstellung der Realititfur den heutigen Menschen darum die unvergleichlich bedeutungsvollere, weil sie den apparatfreien Aspekt der Wirklichkeit, den er vom Kunstwerk zu fordern berechtigt ist, gerade auf Grund ihrer intensivsten Durchdringung mit der Apparaturgewdhrt. (GS 7.1:374) 200 " Notes to Pages 75-78 29. Benjamin, "Was ist das epische Theater? Eine Studie zu Brecht," 1931, in GS 2.2:519. 30. Tobias Wilke offers a helpful discussion of the paradoxical nexus between imme- diacy and mediation that drives Benjamin's discussion of film, and which in his eyes draws from Benjamin's debt to avant-garde artists like Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Haus- mann, and El Lissitzky. His reading pivots on Benjamin's use of the word taktisch as a term that combines a notion of tactility with tactical thinking-this latter connotation being linked to the warfare register that characterizes much avant-garde discourse. Wil- ke's concern is ultimately with appraising the repercussions of an avant-garde discourse that relocates the moment of immediacy in the medium itself. Tobias Wilke, "Die Taktik im Medium'" in Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918-1939 (Munich: Fink, 2oio), 189-229, here especially 218-19. 31. The terms Benjamin uses are Versenkung and Ablenkung (GS 7.1:379). 32. See also: Das Bild auf der einen [der Filmleinwand] verandert sich, das Bild auf der andern [der Leinwand des Malers] nicht. Das letztere ladt den Betrachter zur Kontem- plation ein; vor ihm kann er sich seinem Assoziationsablauf Gberlassen. Vor der Filmaufnahme kann er das nicht. Kaum hat er sie ins Auge gefaft, so hat sie sich schon verandert. Sie kann nicht fixiert werden. Der Assoziationsablauf dessen, der sie betrachtet, wird sofort durch ihre Veranderung unterbrochen. Darauf beruht die Schockwirkung des Films, die wie jede Schockwirkung durch gestei- gerte Geistesgegenwart aufgefangen sein will. Der Film ist die der betonten Leb- ensgefahr, in der die Heutigen leben, entsprechende Kunstform. Er entspricht tief- greifenden Veranderungen des Apperzeptionsapparats. (GS 7.1:379-80) The passage appears in note 16 of the urtext. It was partially incorporated in the main text in the essay's last draft, which also contains a quote from Georges Duhamel: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images" (SW 4:267). See also: "Ich kann schon nicht mehr denken, was ich denken will. Die be- weglichen Bilder haben sich an den Platz meiner Gedanken gesetzt" (GS 1.2:503). 33. The Baudelaire essay singles out film as the contemporary instantiation of technol- ogy that trains the human sensory apparatus by imposing, at the level of form, a mode of apperception driven by shock. Hence film mimics at the level of reception the alienated rhythm of labor on the assembly line: "Im Film kommt die chockfdrmige Wahrnehmung als formales Prinzip zur Geltung. Was am Fliefband den Rhythmus der Produktion bestimmt, liegt beim Film dem der Rezeption zugrunde" (GS 1.2:631). 34. As Benjamin puts it in comparing the jolt of film to the shock effect the Dadaists sought to elicit: "Film has freed the physical shock effect-which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect-from its wrapping" (SW3:119; Benja- min's emphasis). See also: "Der Film hat die physische Schockwirkung, welche der Dadais- mus gleichsam in der moralischen noch verpackt hielt, aus dieser Emballage befreit" (GS 7.1:380). That is to say, film's shock effect unfolds at the level of physiology, unlike the provocation of the Dadaists, which did not so much jolt the body as elicit moral outrage. 35. See also: Zerstreuung und Sammlung stehen in einem Gegensatz, der folgende Formulier- ung erlaubt: Der vor dem Kunstwerk sich Sammelnde versenkt sich darein; er Notes to Pages 78-84 " 201 geht in dieses Werk ein .... Dagegen versenkt die zerstreute Masse ihrerseits das Kunstwerk in sich; sie umspielt es mit ihrem Wellenschlag, sie umfangt es in ihrer Flut. So am sinnfalligsten die Bauten. Die Architektur bot von jeher den Prototyp eines Kunstwerks, dessen Rezeption in der Zerstreuung und durch das Kollektivum erfolgt. (GS 7.1:3 80) 36. Benjamin's terms are Gewohnung and Gebrauch (GS7.1:381; SW3:120). Benjamin was adamant in emphasizing the physiological quality of this zerstreut mode, which he pictured as linked to practices of physical incorporation. As he observed in notes jotted down in conjunction with the artwork essay: "Sketch: Theorie der Zerstreuung Zer- streuung wie Katharsis sind als physiologische Phanomene zu umschreiben. Das Verhalt- nis der Zerstreuung zur Einverleibung muff untersucht werden" (GS 7.2:678). "Sketch: Theory of distraction distraction like catharsis are to be circumscribed as physiological phenomena. The relation of distraction to incorporation should be examined" (my trans- lation). 37. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity 25. 38. See Benjamin's "Theater and Radio' "SW2:584-85; see also "Theater und Rund- funk," GS2.2:775. 39. Richard Sieburth, "Benjamin the Scrivener" Assemblage 6 (1988): 6-23. On Ben- jamin's understanding of the dialectical image, see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 73, Zio, and 217-21. See also Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory ofLiterary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 40. Sieburth, "Benjamin the Scrivener" 17. 41. Sieburth, "Benjamin the Scrivener" 14. 42. See Hansen's argument in "Room-for-Play" 42-43. Chapter 4 1. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, "The New Typography;' trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, in Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: DaCapo, 1970), 75- 76. Translation modified. See also: Man k6nnte sagen, daft eine derartige Verwendung der Photographie in kurzer Zeit dazu ffihren muff, einen wesentlichen Teil der Literatur durch Film zu ersetzen.... Eine ebenso wesentliche Veranderung wird durch das Einbeziehen der Pho- tographie bei dem Plakat erzielt.... Die zwei neuen M6glichkeiten fur das Plakat sind 1. Die Photographie, mittels welcher wir heute den gr6ften und frappan- testen Erzahlungsapparat besitzen, 2. Die kontrastierend-eindringlich verwen- dete Typographie. "Die neue Typographie;" in Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923 (Weimar: Bauhaus- verlag, 1923; Munich: Kraus-Reprint, 1980), 140. 2. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Munich: Langen, 1929; fac- simile reprint: Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2oo1). The treatise was translated into English as The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, trans. Daphne Hoffmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938). 202 " Notes to Pages 84-89 3. See "In Defense of Abstract Art'Journal of-esthetics and Art Criticism 4 (1945); quoted in Kostelanetz, Moholy-Nagy 46. 4. Moholy-Nagy, Painting; see also Malerei. 5. For Moholy's association with endeavors aimed at circumscribing new modes of vision in the 1920s and 1930s, see Berndt Stiegler, "Das Neue Sehen7' in Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (Munich: Fink, 2006), 185-214, especially 196-211. See also Devin Fore, "The Myth Reversed: Perspectives of Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy;' in Realism after Mod- ernism 21-74. For a general discussion of New Vision photography, see Christopher Phil- lips, "Resurrecting Vision: The New Photography in Europe between the Wars," in The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars, Maria Morris Hambourg and Christo- pher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 65-108. 6. Theo van Doesburg, Principles of Neo-plastic Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968). 7. See also: "Zunichst ist es notwendig, das Verhaltnis der Fotografie zu der Malerei der Jetztzeit zu klaren und zu beweisen, daft die Entwicklung der technischen Mittel zu der Entstehung der neuen Formen in der optischen Gestaltung wesentlich beigetra- gen ... hat" (Malerei 6). 8. See also "Die Malerei kann sich von nun an mit der reinen Gestaltung der Farbe befassen" (Malerei 7). 9. Moholy makes this argument most succinctly in an essay from 1926, "Ismen oder Kunst," originally published in Vivos Voco V/8-9 (Leipzig, 1926). See "Ism or Art,' trans. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, in Kostelanetz, Moholy-Nagy 34-37, especially 36. For a historical overview of the concepts of Abbild and abbilden see Oliver R. Scholz, Bild, Darstellung, Zeichen: Philosophische Theorien bildhafter Darstellung (Munich 1991; 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009). See also Lambert Wiesing, Art fzielle Prisenz: Studien zurPhilosophie des Bildes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), especially 9-36. 10. This does not mean that Moholy did not appreciate the advantage that photogra- phy's technologically mediated exactness gave it over painting. He nevertheless opposed turning exactness into photography's ultimate reason of being or standard of evaluation. Painting 27-29 and 33-37; see also Malerei 25-27. 11. See in this regard Frederick Schwartz's discussion of the strategic alliance that Mo- holy and other Bauhaus members entered with representatives of the burgeoning field of psychotechnics. As Schwartz shows, while the principles of psychotechnics and funda- ments of a physiology and psychology of perception were indeed taught at the Bauhaus, the extent to which they actually informed working practices was superficial and often contradictory. Schwartz, Blind Spots 66-72, especially 68. 12. For Moholy's understanding of the individual as the interplay of modular func- tions see his essay "Theater, Zirkus, Variete' ("Theater, Circus, Variety Show") in Die Biihne im Bauhaus, ed. Oskar Schlemmer, Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnar, which appeared in 1925 as volume 4 of the BauhausBiicher; here quoted in the facsimile reprint edited by Hans Wingler (Berlin: Kupferberg, 1965), 45-56, especially 48-50. Moholy's vitalism finds expression in his unapologetic praise of the Italian futurists and especially Marinetti, whose emphasis on dynamism and tactility he enthusiastically shared. 13. See also: "'Kunst' entsteht, wenn der Ausdruck ein Optimum ist, d. h. wenn er in seiner H6chstintensitat im Biologischen wurzelnd, zielbewut, eindeutig, rein ist" (Malerei 15). Notes to Pages 89-92 " 203 14. For a discussion of the multiple valences of the term Ausdruck as the crucible of anthropological, psychological, and aesthetic discourses in the interwar period see Helmut Lethen, "The Conduct Code of the Cool Persona," in Cool Conduct: The Culture ofDistance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), especially 52-88. 15. See also "das verlaflichste Hilfsmittel zu Anfangen eines objektiven Sehens. Ein jeder wird gen6tigt sein, das Optisch-Wahre, das aus sich selbst Deutbare, Objektive zu sehen, bevor er nberhaupt zu einer m6glichen subjektiven Stellungnahme kommen kann" (Malerei 26). 16. See for instance the KPD's enlisting of the visual arts and especially photography as a weapon of class struggle after 1925, which fostered the rise of the worker-photographer movement following the foundation of the magazine DerArbeiterfotograf See Wilhelm L. Guttsman, "Communist Aims and Techniques and the Visual Arts," in Art for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 149-70. 17. See also "Man kann sagen, daft wir die Welt mit vollkommen anderen Augen sehen. Trotzdem ist das Gesamtergebnis bis heute nicht viel mehr als eine visuelle enzyk- lopadische Leistung. Das genngt uns aber nicht. Wir wollen planmaig produzieren, da fur das Leben das Schaffen neuer Relationen von Wichtigkeit ist" (Malerei 27). 18. An early version of this chapter appeared in the journal De Stijl in 1922. Here the argument refers to two other media besides photography, namely, the gramophone and film. Quoted in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era 7. 19. See also: "sind die Gestaltungen nurdann wertvoll, wenn sieneue, bisherunbekannte Relationen produzieren .... Da vor allem die Produktion (produktive Gestaltung) dem menschlichen Aufbau dient, mussen wir versuchen, die bisher nur fur Reproduktions- zwecke angewandte Apparate (Mittel) zu produktiven Zwecken zu erweitern" (Malerei 28). Zo. See, for instance, Victor Margolin's claim that Moholy-Nagy "did not confront the division of the world, and particularly the Weimar Republic, into classes of workers and capitalists" in The Strugglefor Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149. Toward the end of his life Moholy countered the charge that his vision lacked a fine-grained reading of contemporary social reality by pointing to the artist's inquiry into "the central problem of visually constituting this world in statu nascendi which, he insisted, made it possible to appraise the transforma- tive impact harbored by the interplay of perception and technology. "In Defense of Ab- stract Art'" 1945, in Kostelanetz, Moholy-Nagy 45. 21. See for instance Kracauer's 1927 essay "Photography;" in The Mass Ornament 47- 63. 22. Moholy's most comprehensive statement on literature's problematic encroach- ment on other media is found in his 1925 essay "Theater, Zirkus, Variete." The term "lit- erature" has here a twofold meaning. In its legitimate form, literature denotes verbal me- dia that creatively deploy language to convey a conceptual content. By contrast, problematic literary practice lies in enlisting nonverbal media to relay a predetermined conceptual content or narrative. A case in point is for Moholy the tradition of narrative drama (Erzihldrama) dominant in the West, which is patterned on literary, epic struc- tures, that deploy the theater as "illustration, subordinated to narration or propaganda" (Schlemmer, Biihne im Bauhaus 49). This is tantamount to suppressing the inherent ex- 204 " Notes to Pages 92-97 pressive features of the theatrical medium. As the essay makes clear, Moholy's pejorative understanding of literature / the literary is not motivated by an all-out polemic against reason or conceptual thinking, but rather aims at a full exploitation of all creative means inhering in a medium, including language. 23. Fotoplastik in the German. As Eleanor Hight points out, Plastik is here synony- mous with the term Gestalt and denotes "a process by which the photographer brings together diverse elements in the formation of an image that has an existence and meaning beyond the individual parts." Eleanor Hight, "Encounters with Technology: Moholy- Nagy's Path to the 'New Vision"' in Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1985), 8-45, here 18. 24. Translation modified. See also: Sie [die Fotoplastiken] sind-aus verschiedenen Fotografien zusammengesetzt- eine Versuchs-methode der simultanen Darstellung; komprimierte Durchdrin- gung von visuellem und Wortwitz; unheimliche, ins Imaginare wachsende Verbindung der allerrealsten, imitativen Mittel. Aber sie k6nnen gleichzeitig er- zahlend, handfest sein; veristischer "als das Leben selbst." Malerei 34. 25. Moholy, Painting 111; see also Malerei 109. 26. In an essay from 1927 Moholy describes his aim in creating photomontages ("Pho- toplastiken") as follows: "My goal is to produce photoplastics which-although com- posed of many photographs (copied, pasted, retouched)-created the controlled and coherent effect of a single picture equivalent to a photograph (with camera obscura). This method allows one to depict a seemingly organic super-reality." Moholy-Nagy, "Photog- raphy in Advertising," in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era 92. See also "Die Pho- tographie in der Reklame'" Photographische Korrespondenz 9 (September 1927): 257-60. 27. For a discussion of Moholy's narrative strategies in Painting Photography Film, see Andrea Nelson, "Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy and Painting Photography Film: A Guide to Nar- rative Montage' History ofPhotography 30 (October 2006): 258-69. 28. Gefesselter Blick, 1930, ed. Heinz and Bodo Rasch (reprint: Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller, 1996), 71. 29. For an analogous appraisal of the potential of photomontage by a prominent con- temporary, see Franz Roh's introduction to Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit, a photobook published in conjunction with the path-breaking exhibition Film und Foto that opened in Stuttgart in 1929. Photo-Eye, ed. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold (reprint, New York: Arno, 1973). 30. See also: "Aus den optischen und assoziativen Beziehungen baut sich die Gestal- tung, die Darstellung auf: zu einer visuell-assoziativ-begrifflich-synthetischen Kontinu- itit: zu dem Typofoto als eindeutige Darstellung in optisch giltiger Gestalt.... Das Typo- foto regelt das neue Tempo der neuen visuellen Literatur" (Malerei 38). 31. For a discussion of the modalities of knowledge afforded by the typophoto that focuses on Jan Tschichold's practice but also has relevance for Moholy's, see Bernd Stiegler, "Jan Tschichold und die epistemologischen Grundlangen des Typofotos'"Foto- geschichte: Beitrage zur Geschichte und jsthetik der Fotografie 28.108 (2008): 3 8-46. 32. See also: "Die Typografie Gutenbergs, die bis fast in unsere Tage reicht, bewegt sich in ausschlieglich linearer Dimension. Durch die Einschaltung des fotografischen Verfahrens erweitert sie sich zu einer neuen, heute als total bekannten Dimensionalitat. Die Anfangsarbeiten dazu wurden von den illustrierten Zeitungen, Plakaten, Akzidenz- drucken geleistet" (Malerei 37). Notes to Pages 97-106 " 205 33. On the full dimensionality produced by the incorporation of photography and abstract graphic devices in the typophoto, see the section "Photography and Typogra- phy" in Jan Tschichold's The New Typography, 1928, trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1996), 87-95. 34. In a preface to the film scenario Moholy dates the project back to 1921-22, noting that the film itself was never made because he was unable to raise the funds needed for production. A note added to the 1927 edition acknowledges the similarities between the project and Walter Ruttmann's Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Symphony ofa Metropolis), which premiered in 1927. Painting 122-23. See also "Dynamik der Gross-stadt'Malerei 120-35. For a discussion that reconstructs the genesis of Moholy's sketch and outlines some of its main themes, see Edward Dimendberg, "Transfiguring the Urban Gray: Liszl6 Moholy- Nagy's Film Scenario 'Dynamic of the Metropolis;" in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor ofAnnette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amster- dam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 109-26. See also Susanne Wehde's analysis of Moholy's typophoto within the context of the avant-garde's experimentation with typog- raphy: "Typophoto: Moholy-Nagy's Dynamik der Gross-Stadt" in Typographische Kultur (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 384-88. 35. For an overview of the development and consolidation of narrative cinema before and after World War I see Miriam Hansen's "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?" New German Critique 29 (Spring-Summer, 1983): 147-84 and Anton Kaes's introduction to Kino-Debatte 1-36. 36. On the contamination of verbal and visual strategies in the paratactical poetics of futurism see Christine Poggi, "Collage Poems: From Words in Freedom to Free-Word Pictures'" in In Defiance ofPainting 194-227. 37. See Frederic Schwartz's suggestion that the abstract rendition of the eye recalls the fatigued vision of the rail station master. Schwartz, Blind Spots 74. For a reading of Mo- holy's typophoto as a reinvention of spatial narrative informed by the experience of sub- way travel see Lutz Koepnick, "Underground Visions'" in Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 127-62, especially 152-57. 38. The volume's pronounced polemical intent renders it more radical than Painting but also more overtly didactic, which translates into a less experimental structure and layout. Its fundamental mode of address hinges on descriptive language and a medley of visual materials (photographs and graphics) that are primarily used as illustrations to support the textual sections. As Moholy polemically sums up the intent of the practices described in the volume (in the introductory section on "tastnbungen"): "mit wissen- schaftlichkeit oder praktischer konstruktionsabsicht haben die nbungen nichts zu tun." Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 1929 (facsimile reprint: Berlin: Ge- bruder Mann, 2001) 21. Henceforth quoted in the text as Von Material. See also: "The exercises have nothing to do with science or the intent of practical construction." My translation. A version of this passage is found in the English translation of the study, which is a slightly revised version of Von Material and includes a new introduction. It appeared in 1938 under the title The New Vision: Fundamentals ofBauhaus Design, Paint- ing, Sculpture, and Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 24. Henceforth quoted in the text as New Vision. For a discussion of the pedagogical tenets informing Moholy's "basic course" at the Bauhaus see Magdalena Droste, "Vorkurse Josef Albers und Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy in Dessau'" in Bauhaus 2919-1933 (Berlin: Taschen, 1990), 140-43. 39. See the reference to Tastkultur ("tactile culture") in the second footnote on page 206 " Notes to Pages 106-111 24 of Von Material: "Es scheint ein paradoxon zu sein, aber die praxis beweist es als wahr, daft neben den direkten tasterlebnissen das auftreten der fotografie-also eines optischen verfahrens-die tastkultur gefdrdert hat. Die dokumentarisch-exakten fotos von mate- rial- (tast-)werten, ihre vergr6ferten bisher kaum wahrgenommenen erscheinungsfor- men regen fast jeden-nicht etwa nur den handwerker-zur erprobung seiner tastfunk- tionen an" (Von Material 24; in quoting from Von Material I retain the typographical choices made by Moholy, including the elimination of uppercase letters.). See also: "It may seem to be a paradox but our praxis shows it to be true, that alongside the direct tactile experiences photography-that is, an optic procedure-has fostered the culture of tactility. The documentary-exact photos of material and tactile values, of their enlarged, heretofore barely perceived formal appearance, stimulate almost anyone-not just the craftsman-to test their tactile functions" (my translation). The first footnote on that page references Marinetti's manifesto on tactilism. Both footnotes were dropped from the English version. 40. See also: "Die von einem ausdruckswunsch her erfolgte zusammenstellung der tastwerte ergibt einen neuen ausdruckswert ebenso wie farben oder t6ne nicht mehr als einzelne farb- oder tonwirkungen da sind, wenn sie in eine bewufte (oder im unbe- wuften zielsichere) beziehungsgemeinschaft gesetzt werden: sie werden umgeschaltet zu einem sinnvollen etwas, zu einem organismus, der aus sich die kraft ausstrahlt, die ein neues lebensgeffihl auszul6sen vermag" (Von Material 24). 41. My translation. See also: "So schafft z.b. der film-das montageprinzip nberhaupt-eine nbung in blitzschneller beobachtung simultaner existenzen auf allen gestaltungsgebieten" (Von Material 15-16). This passage was dropped from the English version. 42. For instance, the pedagogical work of the present-day sculptor lies in training the eye to new forms so that they become part of the available arsenal of experiential phe- nomena and thus become habitual (Von Material 158). 43. As Moholy succinctly puts it: "the mastery of the surface, not for plastic but for clearly spatial ends" (New Vision 86). See also: "Oberwindung der Flache nicht zur Plas- tik sondern zum Raum" (Von Material 90). 44. See also: "raumgestaltung ist heute vielmehr ein verwobensein von raumteilen, die meist in unsichtbaren, aber deutlich spurbaren bewegungsbeziehungen aller dimensionsrichtungen und in fluktuierenden krafteverhaltnissen verankert sind" (Von Material 21I). 45. This section does not appear in The New Vision. 46. See also: "Plastik gleich der weg vom material-volumen zum virtuellen volumen; von der tasterfassung zur visuellen, beziehungsmagigen erfassung" (Von Material 167). 47. See also: "Das innen und das augen, das oben und das unten verschmelzen zu einer einheit" (Von Material222). Chapter 5 1. For a contemporary's account of these debates, see Walter Benjamin's "Little His- tory of Photography" ("Kleine Geschichte der Photographie" 1931) and "The Author as Producer" ("Der Autor als Produzent;'1934), in GS 2.1:368-85 and 2.2:683-701; see also SW 2:507-3o and 768-82. For scholarly discussions drawing on media studies and art Notes to Pages 113-117 " 207 history, see Hanno Hardt, "Negotiated Images: The Rise of Photojournalism in Weimar Germany," in In the Company ofMedia 60-88; Bernd Stiegler, "Photographie und Presse in den i92oer und 1930s Jahre'" in Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (Munich: Fink, 2006), 279-308; Matthias Uecker, "The Face of the Weimar Republic: Photography, Physiognomics, and Propaganda in Weimar Germany;' Monatshefte 99.4 (2007): 469- 84; Bernd Weise, "Fotojournalismus: Erster Weltkrieg-Weimarer Republik;'"in Deutsche Fotografie: Macht eines Mediums 1870-1970, ed. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas (Cologne: Dumont, 1997), 72-87; Christopher Phillips, "From Word to Image'" in KiinstlerischerAustausch /Artistic Exchange, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akad- emie Verlag, 1993), 117-28; MichaelJennings, "Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic' October 93 (Summer 2000): 23-56; and Carl Gelderloos, "Simply Reproducing Reality: Brecht, Benjamin, and Renger-Patzsch on Photography," German Studies Review 37.3 (2014): 549-73. For a historical overview of Weimar Germany's vibrant news media landscape, see Bernhard Fuldas Press and Poltics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," in The Mass Ornament 54; see also "Die Pho- tographie'" Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 29. 3. Kracauer, Mass Ornament 56; see also "die raumliche Konfiguration eines Augen- blicks," Das Ornament 32. 4. Kracauer, Mass Ornament 58-59; see also Das Ornament 33-35. 5. "Der Photographenapparat kann ebenso liigen wie die Setzmaschine'" in Brecht, Werke 21:515. My translation. See also Brecht's remarks in "No Insight through Photogra- phy," in Brecht on Film 144. 6. Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 23-25. Scott draws here on Barthes's discussion of the traumatic image in "The Photographic Message" and of "obtuse meaning" in "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills'" in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15-31 and 52-68, as well as on Barthes's later distinction between punctum and studium in Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 7. Benjamin, SW2:775; see also GS 2.2:693. 8. Benjamin, SW2:527; see also GS 2.1:385. Benjamin used the phrase "literarization of the circumstances of life" ("Literarisierung der Lebensverhaltnisse)" in "The Author as Producer"; see SW2:772; see also GS 2.2:688. 9. Kracauer glimpsed this possibility of reversal in the groping for a new order epito- mized by film's oneiric play of associations; Kracauer, Mass Ornament 62-63 and Das Ornament 38-39. 10. As Franz Roh remarked in appraising photomontage practices of the late 192os, contemporary (photo)montage no longer served as the means for investigating the for- mal properties of a medium or challenging the traditional canons of representation, but rather for rearranging the given into complex accounts. This entailed an imaginative op- eration that charted a path between the illusionistic rendering of appearances, on the one hand, and the freewheeling concoction of a fantasy world, on the other (Roh, Foto-Auge 17-18). This echoes Moholy's brief assessment of the development of montage toward more structured compositions in Painting Photography Film (35-37). Roh's and Moholy's remarks are consistent with Benjamin Buchloh's appraisal of the development of avant- garde montage practices in the Soviet Union, which initially enlisted abstraction in the 208 " Notes to Pages 117-128 effort to scrutinize a medium's formal constraints and challenge traditional conventions of representation but soon returned to iconic functions and to harnessing the power of new technologies in serving the needs of mass society and ideological agitation. Accord- ing to Buchloh, photomontage thus made it possible to reintroduce figuration and mi- metic representation while jettisoning the canons of illusionism. Buchloh, "From Fak- tura to Factography." On the renewed concerned with the human figure in the arts of Weimar Germany see Fore, Realism after Modernism. 11. For an overview of the development of the modernist photobook in the interwar period, see Martin Parr, "Photo Eye: The Modernist Photobook, in" The Photobook: A History, ed. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, vol. i (London: Phaidon, 2005), 82-115. 12,. Hanne Bergius, "Die neue visuelle Realitat: Das Fotobuch der zwanziger Jahre," in Deutsche Fotografe: Macht eines Mediums 1870-1970, ed. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas (Cologne: Dumont, 1997), 88. 13. For a discussion of Moholy's narrative strategies in Painting Photography Film, see Nelson, "Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy." 14. My translation. See also: "Hier wurde dementsprechend ein ganzer Film in ein Bild gebannt. Wichtige Standpunkte aus dem 'Film' sind in raumliche Beziehung zuein- ander gestellt, sodag das blitzartig wandernde Auge des Beschauers einen absoluten plas- tischen Eindruck gewinnt. Er wird in Bewegung versetzt und befindet sich mitten unter den Dingen." GefesselterBlick 45. 15. For a discussion of the advantages and perils of exploiting the ambiguity of photo- montage as documented by the advertising strategies of commercial designers in the United States and Germany during the interwar period see Stein, "Good Fences." 16. See the classic text of New Typography in Germany, Die neue Typographie, pub- lished by Jan Tschichold in 1928. See also Jan Tschichold, The New Typography. 17. Stafford, Visual Analogy 9-10. 18. Stafford, VisualAnalogy 29. 19. See Renger-Patzsch's remarks in his essay "Meister der Kamera;' here quoted in Albert Renger-Patzsch: Photographer of Objectivity, ed. Ann Wilde, Jurgen Wilde, and Thomas Weski (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 167-68. 20. Thomas Janzen, "Photographing the 'Essence of Things;" in Wilde, Wilde, and Weski, Albert Renger-Patzsch 13. 21. The sequence of four images encompasses plates 32-35; the dead Christ is featured on plate 90. The woman looking to the side on plate 33 is identified on the list of images that follows the introduction as Miss Johannsen from Hallig Langenee. 22. In a letter to Franz Roh, Renger-Patzsch sought to distance himself from the title's tackiness, complaining about the commercial pressure that had prompted his publisher Kurt Wolff to impose it over the title Renger-Patzsch had originally chosen, namely, "Die Dinge" ("Things"). Renger-Patzsch's attempt to retroactively blame Wolff's title for the negative critique the book elicited in some quarters seems implausible and opportunistic given the extent to which Heise's introduction seizes on and amplifies its aesthetic claim, strongly suggesting a symbolic reading of the images that could only confirm the critics' misgivings. Quoted in Donald Kuspit, "Albert Renger-Patzsch: A Critical-Biographical Profile," Aperture, special issue on Renger-Patzsch, 131 (Spring 1993), 7. See also Kuspit 5 and 66-67 for an overview of contemporary reactions to Renger-Patzsch's photobook. For a discussion of Renger-Patzsch's project that stresses the convergence between his formalism and a realist epistemology of vision, see Berndt Stiegler, "Die Ordnung der Notes to Pages 128-135 " 209 Dinge und das Amorphe: von der Neuen Sachlichkeit zur surrealistischen Photogra- phie," in Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (Munich: Fink, 2006), 218-54, especially 226-3 8. For a discussion of Die Welt ist schon that stresses the importance of treating the work as a formally construed whole, thus emphasizing its function as an instrument for schooling a new seeing all the while acknowledging its tendency to romanticize the expe- riential world, see Michael Jennings, "Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo- Essay in the Late Weimar Republic'" October 93 (2000): 23-56, especially 46-56. 23. Quoted in Aperture, 48. Donald Kuspit compellingly places the photographic for- malism of Die Welt ist schon within a phenomenological framework by pointing to the estrangement the photographs achieve through their emphasis on details: "But the pho- tograph does more for him: it offers an empathic rapport, fusion, and finally complete identification with the thing. His photographs suggest his deep, extraordinary experi- ence of objects by way of their details, which turns the object into an uncanny process, in turn suggesting the uncanniness of one's perceptual relationship with it.... The phenom- enological transformation of the thing is inseparable from the symbiotic transformation of the self, and has the same result: intuition of the self-sustaining process of immanence that the self is, whether as object or subject" ("Albert Renger-Patzsch" 68). 24. For Renger-Patzsch's statements on photography's realism as a means for revealing the "thingness" of things, see his essays in Die Freude am Gegenstand, ed. Bernd Stiegler, Ann Wilde, and Jurgen Wilde (Munich: Fink, 2009), especially "Die Natur als Kin- stlerin" (87-89); "Ziele" (91-92); "Die Freude am Gegenstand" (107-8); and the fac- simile reproduction of the essay he published in 1928 in the magazine Uhu, "Neue Blick- punkte der Kamera" (97-105). In his introduction to Foto-Auge Roh directly references the aesthetic program ofDie Welt ist schon, which in Foto-Auge is exemplified by an iconic image of Renger-Patzsch. Roh both acknowledged the accomplishments of Renger- Patzsch's photography and rejected the narrowness of his approach, pleading for a more encompassing photographic practice that could also include photograms, photomon- tage, and the combination of photographic material with graphic (painting, drawing) and typographic techniques. Roh, Foto-Auge 5-6. 25. My translation. See also: "Sie [die letzten Aufnahmen des Buches] sind echte Sin- nbilder. Wenn wir es auch gewig nicht vergessen dirfen, daft es im Grunde die Natur und das gestaltete Leben selber sind, die solche Symbolkraft fur jeden Schauenden in sich tragen, daft die Arbeit des Photographen die Sinnbilder nicht erschaffen, sondern sie nur sichtbar machen kann!" Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schon 16. 26. The work, generally referred to as an archive book or scrapbook, is part of the considerable H6ch holdings of the Berlinische Galerie, which has also overseen its pub- lication in a facsimile volume edited by Gunda Luyken, Hannah Hoch Album (Ostfildern- Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004); henceforth quoted in the text as Album. 27. In comparing the scrapbook to the archive book of Karl Blossfeldt, who organized his contact sheets based on thematic subjects, Gunda Luyken notes that H6ch's organiza- tional principles are not systematic but rather associative. Album iv. Benjamin Buchloh briefly discusses H6ch's Album in the context of the notion of a photographic archive theorized by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive" October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-45, especially 118-19. 28. Maud Lavin derives her primary criterion for assessing the scrapbook from H6ch's famed photomontages, which she sees as informed by a mix of pleasure and anger that endows them with a unique critical edge. In her view, the images in the scrapbook lack 210 " Notes to Pages 135-137 this incongruous motivation and rather indulge in a naive utopianism, when they do not altogether revel in capitalism's guilty pleasures. Maud Lavin, "Hannah Hdch's Mass Me- dia Scrapbook: Utopias of the Twenties," in Cut with the Kitchen Knife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 71-121. In her dissertation, Melissa Johnson also chooses to read the scrapbook as Hdch's personal response to contemporary events and an instrument for working through a difficult phase in her personal life marked by illness, professional setbacks, and increasing isolation due to the rise of National Socialism). Johnson sees the scrapbook's highly personal quality confirmed by Hdch's habit of making scrapbooks as a young girl. Melissa Johnson, "On the Strength of My Imagination": Visions of Weimar Culture in the Scrapbook of Hannah Hoch (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2ooi), 99 and iol. As Gunda Luyken notes in her introduction to Hdch's Album, there is ample thematic over- lap between the subjects addressed in the scrapbook and those of the biting photomon- tages that have cemented Hdch's reputation as one of the most incisive visual artists of the Weimar era. In several instances Hoch even used the same images in the photomontages and in the scrapbook. The scrapbook cannot however be considered as preparatory work for the photomontages because it was clearly composed at a later date than most of them. Album vi. 29. Several factors speak for reading the scrapbook as a commentary on the contem- porary photobook. Though the images it comprises date from the years 1919-33, scholars agree that it was not assembled gradually as a repository for images collected over time but is rather a tightly structured project that Hoch executed within a short time span by drawing on her extensive picture collection. In addition, the work includes photos fea- tured prominently in other photobooks, a circumstance that suggests an intertextual dia- logue with the genre. Like the images of a photobook, Hdch's pictures cover a spectrum of schools and styles ranging from the conventional genres of traditional photography (the portrait, the snapshot, the panoramic image) to examples of both realist and abstract New Vision photography. In their lack of reference to specific historical events, the im- ages recall the kind of pictures characteristic of the photobook, which placed a premium on images exhibiting exemplary formal features while shunning the merely anecdotal and time-bound. Finally, Hdch's associative arrangement of popular themes and subjects, al- beit idiosyncratic, is devoid of overt personal accents and instead recalls the exploration of seeing and the photographic medium that unfolds in many Weimar-era photobooks. To my knowledge, Hanne Bergius is the only critic who discusses Hdch's scrapbook in the context of the modernist photobook. Hoch was well familiar with the genre, having published her photos in Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film and in Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold's Foto-Auge, among others. 30. The visual layout of Hdch's Album recalls at times the analogical arrangement of contemporary art and leisure magazines like Der Querschnitt. For an exemplary discus- sion of the analogical ties that govern the relation of images to text in this magazine see Kai Marcel Sicks, "'Der Querschnitt' oder die Kunst des Sporttreibens' in Leibhaftige Moderne: Korper in Kunst und Massenmedien 1918 bis 1933, ed. Karl Marcel Sicks and Michael Cowan (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005), 33-47. See also Cowan, "Cutting through the Archive;' for a discussion of the deployment of analogy in Weimar-era illustrated press and nonfictional film that pivots on the multifaceted epistemology of the cross- section or Querschnitt. 31. Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife 123. 32. This impression is further reinforced by Hdch's care in covering up the magazine's Notes to Pages 138-148 " 211 pages. As Melissa Johnson notes, except for a handful of cases H6ch pasted white paper in the interstices between images, thus creating self-effacing frames. Johnson, Strength of My Imagination 112. 33. Since the scrapbook lacks page numbers, references in this article are based on a sequential count of pages as they appear in the scrapbook's facsimile edition. The only exception is the page at issue here, which in the Album erroneously appears as p. 1, whereas it figures on p. 6o in the original. The facing page (p. 59 in the original) also ap- pears out of sequence on p. 2 of the facsimile Album. Both misattributions occurred dur- ing production; the facsimile Album is otherwise a faithful reproduction of the original. 34. The scrapbook contains several animal depictions captioned by statements that emphasize the anthropomorphic nature of the portrayal-see, for instance, the "eccen- tric," "phlegmatic" frog on p. 6. 35. The image bears the caption "Starke Geste im modernen Ausdruckstanz [Die Wigmanschulerin Vera Skoronel] Phot. Suse Byk" ("strong gesture in the modern expres- sive dance [the Wigman student Vera Skoronel] Phot. Suse Byk"). Palucca was a student of acclaimed dancer Mary Wigman. 36. The photo of the Bali child dancer is used two other times in the scrapbook, on pp. 29 and 34, in contexts that highlight other aspects of the image, thus engendering differ- ent kinds of associations. 37. The title under the photograph's lower-right corner, "Der Potsdamer Platz, Berlin vom Dach des neuen Columbus Hochhauses gesehen" ("Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. Viewed from the rooftop of the new Columbus House") readily discloses the identity of the displayed site and spares the reader any guess work. Chapter 6 1. Born in Hanover in 1887, Schwitters collaborated with some of the most innova- tive artists of Dada, De Stijl, and Constructivism throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1937 he was forced to flee Nazi Germany and emigrate to Norway and later to Britain, where he died in 1948. In the 195os, avant-garde artists in Europe and the United States discovered in his work a formidable model for blending visual and verbal art forms that opened the way for pop and conceptual art. For a discussion of Schwitters's impact on post-World War II art, see Gwendolen Webster, Kurt Merz Schwitters: A Biographical Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). See also the essays in the volume by Su- sanne Meyer-Bser and Karin Orchard, In the Beginning Was Merz: From Kurt Schwit- ters to the Present Day (Ostfildern Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2ooo). 2. Leah Dickerman points to the incongruous relation between Schwitters's occa- sional recourse to a "rhetoric of purity" in reference to his collages and "the radicalism of [his] formal procedures-its wholesale openness to stuff of the modern world, its assault on traditional concepts of medium, and it reconfiguration of the terms of distribution." Dickerman notes that Schwitters's scholarship has in various degrees subscribed to the assessment of fellow Dadaists like Richard Huelsenbeck, who dismissed him as "someone insufficiently political and overly bourgeois'" thereby lending credence to the image of Schwitters as an artist whose practices were revolutionary, but whose naive, childlike at- titude fueled a propensity for escapist, uncommitted play. Leah Dickerman, "Merz and Memory: On Kurt Schwitters," in Dickerman and Witkovsky, The Dada Seminars 1o5; 212 " Notes to Pages 149-150 see also 123 n. 12. A case in point is Werner Schmalenbach's monograph, the first compre- hensive study of the post-World War II period, which portrays Schwitters as an inno- cent, childlike genius. Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters (Cologne: DuMont, 1967). This image has become especially ingrained in the Anglophone reception of Schwitters's oeuvre. For instance, Huelsenbeck's emphasis on Schwitters's apolitical atti- tude reemerges in Benjamin Buchloh's assessment of his collage practices as marked by "a meditative contemplation of reification;' which Buchloh contrasts with the activist model of "mass agitation" exemplified by John Heartfield's photomontages. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art," Artforum 2i (September 1982): 43-56, here 43. John Elderfield also endorses the evaluation of Schwitters as indebted to a nostalgic late romanticism, an assessment he, however, embeds in a complex, wide-ranging analysis of both his visual and literary oeu- vre that remains an unsurpassed resource for Schwitters's scholarship to date. John Elder- field, Kurt Schwitters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Compared to the reception of his visual work, Schwitters's literary oeuvre has received much less attention. Interest flourished in Germany in the 1970s, when Schwitters was seen as a forerunner of experi- mental literature and concrete poetry. See the 1972 issue of Text + Kritik dedicated to his literary work, as well as the monograph by Bernd Scheffer, Anfange experimenteller Lit- eratur: Das literarische Werk von Kurt Schwitters (Bonn: Bouvier, 197 8). For Anglophone scholarship dealing with Schwitters's literary output, see E. S. Shaffer, "Kurt Schwitters, Merzkiinstler Art and Word-Art," in Word & Image 6.1 (January-March 1990): 100-I18; D. A. Steel, "Kurt Schwitters, Poetry, Collage, Typography;" Words & Image 6.2 (April- June 1990): 198-209; and Michael Webster, Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Mari- netti, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Cummings (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). 3. Schwitters used Merz as a modifier connoting the common principle underlying the wide range of artistic practices in which he engaged: Merz poetry, Merz sculpture, Merz stage, Merz architecture. The term first appears as a word fragment in a collage from 1919 that is known today from photographic reproductions of the original, which has gone missing. Schwitters's use of the term grew increasingly infrequent in the 1930s, in part because it had been forged as part of his contentious engagement with Dada, which made it a relic of past battles. Because the relative eclipse of the term does not re- flect a change in direction in Schwitters's discourse on art, I deploy it as a general concept for discussing Schwitters's practice of abstract montage. 4. The broader context for the feud is the political and cultural turmoil that accom- panied the collapse of Wilhelmine Germany at the end of World War I and the establish- ment of a representative democracy after the suppression of the revolutionary uprisings. Schwitters's essay functions as a belated rejoinder to the manifesto Huelsenbeck deliv- ered at the first soiree of Berlin Dada in April 1918. Huelsenbeck's address was framed by an attack on Expressionism that recapitulated the Dadaists' disenchantment with the prewar avant-garde. In denouncing the escapism and covert commercial mind-set of Ex- pressionism, Huelsenbeck championed Dada as an activist practice that transgressed the safe confines of bourgeois art in order to embrace and shape the cacophony of contempo- rary urban life. Huelsenbeck was determined to keep Berlin Dada free from the affirma- tive, petit bourgeois aestheticism he saw epitomized by Schwitters. In Huelsenbeck's eyes, Schwitters had compromised himself by establishing ties to Herwarth Walden's journal Der Sturm upon arriving in Berlin from Hannover in 1918. Huelsenbeck was es- Notes to Pages 150-155 " 213 pecially harsh in his criticism of Walden, whom he faulted for promoting what he consid- ered to be the fraudulent commercialization of the avant-garde. See the reprint of Huelsenbeck's manifesto in the Dada Almanach from 1920 (English ed. and trans. Mal- colm Green; London: Atlas Press, 1993), 44-49. See also Huelsenbeck's personal attack against Schwitters in the closing paragraph of the Almanach's introduction, 14. 5. Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, 5 vols. (Cologne: Du- Mont, 1973-81), 5:76. Henceforth cited in the text as Werk. Excerpts of this essay have appeared under the heading "From Merz" in the collection of Schwitters texts edited and translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, pppppp: Kurt Schwitters Poems Perfor- mance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, lool), 215-21; texts from this collection are henceforth quoted in the text aspppppp. English translations that are not drawn from this collection are my own. 6. See Greenberg's arguments in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in Art and Culture, espe- cially 3-7. 7. See also: Das Material ist so unwesentlich, wie ich selbst. Wesentlich ist das Formen. Weil das Material unwesentlich ist, nehme ich jedes beliebige Material, wenn es das Bild verlangt. Indem ich verschiedenartige Materialien gegeneinander abstimme, habe ich gegeniber der nur-Olmalerei ein Plus, da ich auger Farbe gegen Farbe, Linie gegen Linie, Form gegen Form usw. noch Material gegen Material, etwa Holz gegen Sackleinen werte. Ich nenne die Weltanschauung, aus der diese Art Kunstgestaltung wurde, "Merz." (Werk 5:76-77) 8. "Alle Werte [bestehen] nur durch Beziehungen untereinander" (Werk 5:84). This passage appears in an essay by Schwitters quoted at length by Otto Nebel in his preface to the Sturm-Bilderbuch 4, from 1921. 9. As Schwitters states in an essay from 1923: "The painting is a self-contained art- work. It does not relate to the outside.... Only in reverse can someone on the outside relate to the artwork: the onlooker" ("Das Bild ist ein in sich ruhendes Kunstwerk. Es bezieht sich nicht nach aufen hin.... Nur umgekehrt kann sich jemand von aufen auf das Kunstwerk beziehen: der Beschauer"; Werk 5:13). For Schwitters's discussion of "rhythm' see also his essays from 1922 and 1926 (Werk 5:99 and 236-40). 10. See also Werk 5:78-79. 11. The story first appeared in Schwitters's own collection Anna Blume Dichtungen in 1919, and was reprinted that same year in the Berlin avant-garde journal Der Sturm. 12. The story was published in Der Sturm in 1922. Hans Arp, who was a close friend of Schwitters in the 192os, claims to have been involved in drafting parts of the narrative (Werk 2:391). 13. Unlike "The Onion," "Franz Miller's Wire Springtime" has not been translated into English. 14. See especially sections I-III in Lethen's Verhaltenslehren der Kalte. 15. For Lethen's discussion of Plessner in Verhaltenslehren, see 75-95, 111-15; see also the essays in Plessner's Ausdruck und menschliche Natur ("Deutung des mimischen Aus- drucks"; Lachen und Weinen). 16. As it turns out, Miller's sprechender Name is not related to the word for mill, Miihle, as one would expect based on the etymology of this common German family 214 " Notes to Pages 155-158 name, but rather to Mull, garbage. In other words, Schwitters's wordplay seizes on the quasi homophone "Mill" to semantically refunctionalize the term as "Mill-er" which in the context of his story acquires the meaning of "garbage man." 17. Numerous statements in Schwitters's theoretical texts make clear that the practice of incorporating refuse in his art is not meant as a polemical debasement of art and the artwork aimed at foregrounding the defilement of the contemporary world. Rather, Schwitters pleads for an expansion of artistic practice beyond the stifling constraints of academic art; the artist is thus free to include all possible materials from everyday experi- ence. By this logic refuse too is admissible material in the creation of art. See Schwitters's 1919 essay "Merz Painting" ("Die Merzmalerei") in Werk 5:37. 18. The political harangue held by Bisenstiel in "Franz Miller's Wire Springtime" pa- rodically echoes the discourse of Dadaist activists like Richard Huelsenbeck. Schwitters draws a shrewd analogy between Dada's militant discourse and Expressionism's ineffec- tual activist pathos by having Bisenstiel recycle Expressionist cliches against the war and for a hackneyed humanitarianism in the form of the acerbic word games perfected by Zurich Dada (Werk 2:39). 19. For an extended reading of the two stories that treats montage as a means for con- fronting the role violence played in shaping models of subjectivity after the trauma of World War I, see Patrizia McBride, "Montage and Violence in Weimar Culture: Kurt Schwitters' Reassembled Individuals;' in Violence, Culture, Aesthetics: Germany 1789- 1938, ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 245-65. 20. Phillips talks specifically of the photographic fragment. Roh's remark, however, refers more broadly to montage practices; Teitelbaum, Montage andModern Life 26, 28. 21. This argument draws on Greenberg's discussion in his famed essay "Collage," in Art and Culture 70-83. Greenberg's analysis foregrounds the layered play with illusion- ism that is engendered by Picasso's and Braque's incorporation of trompe l'oeil elements in their collages. Rosalind Krauss builds on this argument in describing Picasso's collage practice as dramatizing "the representation of representation." Rosalind Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso," in Orzginality of the Avant-Garde 23-40, here 37. For a historical con- textualization of Picasso's and Braque's inquiry into illusionism, see Christine Poggi's "The Invention of Collage, Papier Colle, Constructed Sculpture, and Free-Word Poetry" in In Defiance ofPainting 1-29. 22. See Marjorie Perloff's discussion in "Collage and Poetry;" in Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 384-87, especially 384-85. See also Ulmer's discussion of the philosophical im- plications of the semiotic processes that drive collage and montage practices in his "Ob- ject of Post-criticism," especially 83-94. 23. In later texts Schwitters drew on the Constructivist trope of a calibrated play of opposites suspended in a state of equilibrium to describe the artwork's self-containment. Werk 5:134. 24. On the possibility of dematerializing collage elements, see Schwitters's 1923 essay "Holland Dada" (Werk 5:133-34.) See also D. A. Steel's discussion of this question in "Kurt Schwitters," especially 206-8. 25. This claim is sustained by drawing on Schwitters's occasional invocation of a secularized religious terminology in his discussion of art. To be sure, Schwitters did at times describe art as a sacred realm in his efforts to emphasize art's autonomy with re- spect to extra-artistic domains. These tropes are generally not used to describe artistic practice or the art object per se, for which Schwitters deploys matter-of-fact character- Notes to Pages 159-162 " 215 izations, but are rather deployed in attempts to characterize the sphere of art more generally. In other contexts Schwitters takes recourse to a Darwinian terminology of drives and impulses to connote the naturalness and spontaneity of artistic practice, which forms a stark contrast to the mystical/religious register of the example above (Werk 5:239 and 272). One can conclude that Schwitters's occasional invocation of re- ligious imagery is not meant to suggest a specific understanding of art's ontological status. Rather, these images function as analogies that allow Schwitters to describe art as a medium whose operational logic renders it autonomous from other realms and that should not be deployed instrumentally. 26. See also: Durch Werten der Elemente gegeneinander entsteht die Poesie. Der Sinn ist nur wesentlich, wenn er auch als Faktor gewertet wird. Ich werte Sinn gegen Unsinn. Den Unsinn bevorzuge ich, aber das ist eine rein pers6nliche Angelegenheit. Mir tut der Unsinn leid, daft er bislang so selten kiinstlerisch geformt wurde, deshalb liebe ich den Unsinn. (Werk 5:77) 27. As Schwitters states in an essay from 1922: "Merz bedeutet bekanntlich die Ver- wendung von gegebenem Alten als Material fur das neue Kunstwerk" ("As is generally known, Merz entails the use of available old elements as material for the new artwork"; Werk 5:96). John Elderfield finds in Baudelaire's ragpicker, as discussed by Benjamin, a frame for understanding Schwitters's recycling of material and linguistic refuse. For the ragpicker's activity of collecting is fundamentally elegiac; it takes stock of the reality's transience while attempting to rescue its used-up fragments from oblivion by reusing them in the abstract, narcissistic realm of art. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters 168. This charac- terization of Schwitters's practice seems to be at variance with his utterly unsentimental, matter-of-fact understanding of refuse as artistic material. It is remarkable, for instance, that Schwitters never used the word "Fragment" to describe the building blocks of his Merz works, but rather talked of "Elemente" or "Teile" (elements and parts). 28. See also: So wollen wir uns heute einmal Herrn Felix Neumann "ergreifen." "Nichts t6tet schneller als Lacherlichkeit' schreibt er. Aber mein Herr, Sie begehen ja Selbst- mord! Haben Sie denn Ihren Artikel in der Post vom 6. Januar 1920 nicht gele- sen? Der reinste Selbstmord! (Nichts t6tet schneller als Lacherlichkeit.) ... Sie sagen, ich nagte mit tausend Gesinnungsgenossen an den Wurzeln unserer Kraft. (Ein sch6nes Bild.) Sie meinen wohl: Ihrer Kraft? Nein, millionenmal nein, ich nage nicht, seien Sie unbesorgt, ich bin keine Ratte und Sie sind kein Baum. Ich wnfte auch garnicht die Wurzeln ihrer Kraft zu finden. Augerdem wurde ich auch meinen Weg allein nagen, ohne tausend Mitnager. Aber ich bin kein Nage- tier, sondern man nagt mich an. Wollen Sie wohl gleich aufhdren, mich anzuna- gen, sonst mache ich Sie lacherlich, jawohl! Ich mache Sie sonst lacherlich. Sie wissen doch, das t6tet.... Ich brauche blog abzuschreiben, was Sie selbst ge- schrieben haben, das genngt. (Werk 5:49) 29. This is a strategy Schwitters adopts very deliberately, as he makes clear in a po- lemical essay from 1920, "Berliner B6rsenKukukunst'" where he claims the right to recy- cle just any material for his Merz compositions, including the critic himself. In the text's final section he humorously juxtaposes his own abstract "use" of the critic Kurt Glaser, 216 " Notes to Pages 162-165 which qualifies as "'real" art, to a more conventional, mimetic portrayal of the critic. Werk 5:51. 30. For Schwitters's notion of nonsense, see Scheffer, Anfange experimenteller Litera- tur 75. 31. In this regard, Schwitters's playful use of nonsense is also different from Marinet- ti's poetic practice of "parole in liberth" ("words in freedom"), which oscillates ambigu- ously between abstraction and onomatopoeic rendering of the bustling cacophony of the modern urban environment. See chapter 7 in Poggi's In Defiance ofPainting. 32. Lethen, Verhaltenslehren 23-26. 33. "An Anna Blume'" Werk 1:58-59. For the rhetorical and formal strategies that ani- mate the text, as well as an overview of its reception in Germany from its original publica- tion to the 1970s, see Scheffer, Anfange experimentellerLiteratur 74-90. The poem's sen- sational success was due to Schwitters's ingenious publicity stunt, which involved plastering Hanover's advertising columns with anonymous copies of the poem. This shrewd variation on Dadaist strategies of cultural guerrilla-dom enabled Schwitters to address a far broader audience than the one normally interested in Dadaist events, cata- pulting him to the fore of public debate and bringing him the mix of celebrity and noto- riety he was after. See pppppp 15-17 for the original German version of "An Anna Blume" and the translation from 1942, "Anna Blossom Has Wheels." 34. For instance, "Augusta Bolte," the protagonist of an homonymous story from 1922, makes a brief appearance in "He" ("Er"), from 1923 (Werk 5:ioo); the fairy tale "Der Hahnepeter" (1924) is referenced at the beginning of another fairy tale, "Merfisermar" (1924-25), that humorously thematizes Schwitters's relations to his friends El Lissitzky and Hans Arp (Werk 2:140-46); Revon, a partial palindrome of Hanover first used in the story "Franz Miller's Wire Springtime" (Franz Millers Drahtfrhling" published in 1922) comes up again in a story from 1926, "Horizontal Story" ("Horizontale Ge- schichte"; Werk 5:26o-65). Finally, the text of Anna Blume is collaged in a 1921 text printed in Der Sturm, titled "Appeal" ("Aufruf"; Werk 1:60-63). 35. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 6. 36. The story was first published in the twenty-first issue of Schwitters's journalMerz in 1931. It was subsequently reprinted in 1933 in the Stuttgart magazine Der Zirkel. 37. See also: Es ist in der Literatur schwer m6glich, die Abstraktion durchzuffihren. . . . Bei "Schacko" m6chte ich auf den Aufbau hinweisen, auf das abstrakte Gesetz in der Komposition. Ich selbst habe die Geschichte des Schacko von einer Frau er- zahlen hdren, Wort fur Wort-die ganze Dichtung ... das brachte mir den Stoff menschlich naher; aber es war so noch durchaus kein Kunstwerk. Zum Kunstwerk wurde die Angelegenheit erst durch die Form: wie die Aussagen der Frau einander gegenibergestellt sind, wie sie sich wiederholen, einander erginzen, wie sie vorwegnehmen oder bestatigen, wie sie in ihrer Gesamtheit zusammenstehen, um immer deutlicher die Liebe der Frau zu ihrem Manne, einen abstrakten Begriff, und ihre Verzweiflung, wiederum einen abstrakten Begriff, immer klarer werden zu lassen, und das ist der Inhalt dieser Dichtung. Sie k6nnen in dieser Weise alle meine Dichtungen analysieren, und Sie werden Notes to Pages 169-172 " 217 mir zugegeben, daft in diesem Sinne ihre Form immer abstrakt ist: Aussagen sind gewertet. Werk 2:431-32. The introductory comments are recycled, or "merzed' from a section of the manifesto "Ich und meine Ziele;' which appeared in Merz 21, the issue that also carried the first printing of the story (Werk 5:342-43). 38. Benjamin, GS 2.2:438-65. 39. The use of bold typeface, quite common in Schwitters's fiction and essays, possibly mocks and thus thematizes the use of this typographical device. In the first place, it quotes the typographical convention of foregrounding specific words and phrases and thus signaling important junctures in the story-though in Schwitters's text one would try to identify their special meaning in vain. Second, it creates visual patterns that disrupt the linear unfolding of silent reading, prompting the reader to skim the text along the emphasized segments while moving back and forth from phrase to phrase to make sense of the pattern created by the boldface segments. Here again there seems to be no particu- lar meaning to the direction of the skimming. The fact that this common typographical device of boldfacing runs idle calls attention to its deployment in the text. 40. The Societe anonyme, founded in 1920 in New York by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia, exhibited works by Schwitters throughout the 192os. Dreier and Duchamp visited Schwitters in Hannover in 1928. For Schwitters's reception in the United States, see Karin Orchard, "The Eloquence of Waste: Kurt Schwitters' Work and Its Reception in America," in Meyer-Bser and Orchard, In the Beginning Was Merz 280-89. 41. Yair Guttman (1998) quoted in Marjorie Perloff's "The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp" in 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (Malden, MA: Black- well, zo0 2), 83. For a discussion of Duchamp's exploration of the conditions of possibility of art, see also Martha Buskirk, "Thoroughly Modern Marcel," October 70 (Autumn 1994): 113-25. 42. Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 52. 43. See in particular the introduction and chapter l in her Wittgenstein's Ladder. 44. The Philosophical-Investzgations, published posthumously in 1952, unfold an open- ended, aphoristic mode of inquiry that refrains from offering hard definitions of basic concepts such as the language game, but rather probes their viability within the perfor- mative domain of the text. Drawing on the readings of Wittgenstein's later philosophy developed by Jacques Bouveresse and Stanley Cavell, Perloff highlights the social and cultural basis of the modes of communication connoted by the concept of the language game, what Wittgenstein elliptically alludes to as "forms of life." As Perloff notes in dis- cussing an excerpt from a 1932 Cambridge lecture, "The language game. .. is neither a genre nor even a particular form of discourse; rather, it is a paradigm, a set of sentences, let us say, selected from the language we actually use so as to describe how communica- tion of meaning works in specific circumstances" (Wittgenstein's Ladder 60). For Witt- genstein's discussion of the ways meaning is engendered and traded through the varied modes of behavior he terms language games, see especially sections 23-54 in the Philo- sophicalInvestgations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953). 45. In this context, see Henry Staten's discussion of the status of the rules that govern 218 " Notes to Pages 174-179 the language games. Staten analyzes the Philosophical Investigations as a deconstructive inquiry into philosophical method that questions the assumption of presence and essen- tially given meaning ostensibly guaranteed by self-identical forms. This leads him to em- phasize the utterly singular status of the rules that enable the language games. As he notes, rules in Wittgenstein's understanding of language do not function as an atempo- ral, universally shared system of coordinates that is instantiated in particular cases. This is because Wittgenstein's understanding of rules does away with the assumption of a "self- identical form that marks their boundaries and makes their varying manifestations in- stances of the same. Wittgenstein's account runs counter to those views that see human activities as structured by 'implicit rules'; for him the actual instances of usage are our 'rules.' The instances of usage are spatiotemporal phenomena, and are to be 'applied' to the understanding of new cases, not as a rule conceived as logos or intelligible form is applied, but rather as an actual physical ruler is applied to a swatch of material for pur- poses of comparison." Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 14. 46. See also: Was war nun zu tun? Ein unerh6rter Reim! Nun reimte sich auf zu tun. Es war Fraulein Auguste darnber hinaus noch insbesondere auffallig, daf sowohl nun sich auf zu tun, als auch zu tun sich anderseits auf nun reimte.... Der Reim stie ihr auf. Wie Lebertran.... Wenn namlich etwas los ist, dann passieren die un- gereimtesten Dinge. Dann reimt sich pldtzlich, was sich sonst nicht reimt. Resn- mieren wir! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Menschen gingen in einer und derselben Richtung, nun reimte sich auf zu tun. Also muffte etwas los sein. Wie sollte es nun Auguste erfahren? (Werk 2:72-73) 47. For an insightful analysis of the story that highlights the linguistic logic along which it unfolds see Scheffer, Anfinge experimenteller Literatur 137-47. 48. See also: Der Leser denkt nun, hier wurde sich etwas ereignen.... Jedenfalls glaubt der Leser, hier wurde es Frl. Dr. Leb erfahren, wer oder was los ware, aber sie erfahrt es nicht. Der Leser glaubt ein Recht darauf zu haben, es zu erfahren, aber der Leser hat kein Recht, jedenfalls nicht das Recht, im Kunstwerk irgend etwas zu erfahren.... Is nich. Sondern die Geschichte ist aus, einfach aus, so leid es mir auch tut, so brutal es auch klingen mag, ich kann nicht anders. (Werk 2:93) 49. See Rosalind Krauss's discussion in "In the Name of Picasso," especially 38-39; see also her arguments on the modernist grid in "Grids" (9-22) and "The Originality of the Avant-Garde" (151-70) in Originality ofthe Avant-Garde. Conclusion 1. Bloch, Heritage of Our Times; see especially the section "Transition: Berlin, Func- tions in Hollow Space," 195-208. Bloch's anguished look at the Weimar years comprises texts and glosses written both before and after 1933. However the retrospective, evaluative Notes to Pages 179-182 " 219 frame that guides the text selection places the book squarely in the Nazi period. In seek- ing a term that would serve as the cultural and ideological signature of the by-gone re- public, Bloch significantly avoided the much-debated label "New Objectivity" and in- stead settled on the term "montage." 2. Georg Lukics, "Realism in the Balance," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics: TheodorAdorno. Walter Benjamin. ErnstBloch, BertoltBrecht. GeorgLukacs, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), 28-59. Lukics's essay first appeared in Das Wort in 1938. It constituted a response to an essay Ernst Bloch had also published in Das Wort in 1938, titled "Discussing Expressionism" (Aesthetics and Politics, 16-27). Bloch's 1938 essay became part of the 1962 edition of Heritage of Our Times. 3. Adorno's most comprehensive retort to Lukics in his essay "Reconciliation under Duress" appeared in the journal Der Monat in 1958, exactly two decades after the debates around Expressionism played out in Das Wort-the journal ceased publication in 1939 after a three-year run. This is why the English translation of Adorno's essay has been in- cluded in Aesthetics and Politics as integral to a historical understanding of the debates (151-76). At the same time Adorno's arguments are also a commentary on the geopoliti- cal situation of the 1950s, marked by the Cold War, the process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, and the suppression of the 1953 workers' uprising in East Germany. 4. Gerald Bruns, introduction to Viktor Shklovsky, Theory ofProse, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), x. 5. Bruns in Shklovsky, Theory of Prose x. Bruns sees this understanding of structure clearly at play in Shklovsky's concern with "the historicality of forms rather than ... the rules of how formal objects work' which in turn relates to his attempt at grasping "the historical tension between prose and form." Bruns xii.  Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adorno, Theodor W. Gesammelte Schr ften in zwanzzgBinden. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. 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Index Abstraction, 148-50, 152, 175-77; and montage, 148, 157, 177; escapist, 179- 8o; in literature, 164-66, 169-70 Adaequatio, 36 Adorno, Gretel, 64 Adorno, Theodor W., 18, 64, 179, 193n22 Aesthetic, aesthetics, 66; asceticism, 150; antiorganicist, 3oo; destructive, 19; film, 197nii; idealist, 20; montage, 15, 20, 27, 30, 32-33, 112, 116, 178; norma- tive, 14, 47; practice, i8 o Allegory, 4-5, 18-19, 24, 135-37, 153; ma- teriality and, 25 Analogy, 34-35, 49, 51, 74, 121, 140, 144; in montage narrative, 37-38; visual, 12, 121, 131, 134, 138, 143, 146-47 Anthropology, philosophical, 28, 33, 72, 79, I06 Anthropomorphism, 10, 24, 138, 140 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 14 Apperception, 10, 65-67, 69, 77, 79-80, 196n6, 196n9 Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (-AJZ), 21-25, 113 Aristotle, 30, 47, 198n19 Arnheim, Rudolf: Film als Kunst (Film as Art, 1931), 71-72, 77, 199n25 Aura, 62, 64-68, 71, 75, 122, 197n6 Ausdruck, 27-29, 88-89, I06, 150; Helmuth Plessner on, 28. See also Ex- pression; Expressivity Authenticity, 62, 69; and uniqueness, 62, 64-65; photographic, 114-15, 134, 146 Baker, Josephine, 142-43 Balizs, Bela, 197n11 Barthes, Roland, 114 Bauhaus, 29, 83, 85, 105, 107 Behaviorism, 30 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 11, 25, 30-31, 50, 91, 128, 146, 156; Arcades project (Passagen- werk), 43, 81; Little History ofPhotogra- phy (Kleine Geschichte der Photogra- phie, 1931), 65, 68-69, 116; On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (Uber einige Mo- tive bei Baudelaire, 1939), 65, 77; One- Way Street (Einbahnstrafe, 1928), 31; The Author as Producer (DerAutor als Produzent, 1928), 115-16; The Story- teller (Der Erzihler, 1936), 39-40, 41- 45, 48-61, 62-63, 169; The Work ofArt in the Age of its Technological Reproduc- ibility (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1935-39), 39-40, 41-42, 62-82 Berlin, 144-45 Bildungsroman, 46, 52 Bloch, Ernst, 4, i8o, 218ni; Heritage of Our Time (Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 1935), 178-79 Blossfeldt, Karl: Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature, 1928), 117 231 232 " Index Blumenberg, Hans, 35-38 Braque, George, 156 Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 76, 80, 146; on mon- tage, 179; on photography, 113, 115 Bruns, Gerald, 181-82 Buchloh, Benjamin, 207n10, 2i2n2 Buck-Morss, Susan, 66 Caillois, Roger, 188n4O Capitalism, 90-91, 178-79 Caption, 22, 68-69, 85, 100-102, 108, 112, 116, 118-19, 135, 138-40 Cavell, Stanley, 172 Collage, 14-15, 155, 159-60, 176; photog- raphy and, 116 Communication, 16o, 163, 168-72, 175- 76; everyday, 13, 149, 16o, 176; forms of literary, 4, 83, 95; modes of, 43, 55-56, 84; visual, 21, 85-86, 97 Communism, 79 Constructivism, 11, 26, 29-30, 82, 83, 85, 116, 149, 152, 192n20 Contemplation, 63-64, 76-78, 80, 104 Cubism, 21, 156-57 Dada, 3, 11, 15, 2o, 26, 51, 82, 85, 97, III, 149, 156, 16o; and montage, 157; Berlin, 15-18, 150, 212n4 Dadaism. See Dada Darstellung, 87, 91 Das Wort, 178 De Stijl, 87, 149. See also Neoplasticism Der Sturm, 16o-62 Deutscher Werkbund, 26 Dickerman, Leah, 2iin2 Die Dame, 134 Distance, collapsed, 75, 78-79, 81 Distraction, 78-79, 179 D6blin, Alfred, 7-8, 44; Berlin Alexan- derplatz, 45, 50-52, 58; "Der Bau des epischen Werkes," 45-47 Doesburg, Theo van: Grundbegrffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, 19 25), 86 Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Cesar, 118-2o Duchamp, Marcel, 170-71 Eisenstein, Sergei, 14, 67 Ekphrasis, 99, 103-4 Elderfield, John, 212n2, 215n27 Entfabelung, 7, 19InII Epic, 44, 46-47, 190n5; open-endedness, 52. See also Epic theater Epic theater, 8o Erfahrung, 43 Erlebnis, 43 Erzahlung, 9 Evidence, 8O, 91, 103, 110, 121 Exactness, 12, 27, 83, 89, 110-11, 115, 128, 2o2nio. See also Exactitude Exactitude, 116, 118, 122. See also Exactness Exemplarity, 12, 22, 43-45, 47, 52, 131, 180 Experience, 8-9, 16, 18, 30, 32, 67; aes- thetic, 41, 62; and narrative, 37, 47-48, 50, 79, 81, 92, 119; and photography, 116; art as intervention into, 152; as re- lational network, 163, 174, 176, 182; as shaped by perception, 27, 84, 91; com- municability of (Mitteilbarkeit), 41, 54-55; film and, 74, 77-78, 82; loss of, 41; of space, io8; orders of, 83; re- created through representation, 72; rec- iprocity of, 91, 182; storytelling and, 42, 52-55, 59, 75 Experientiality, io Expression, 35, 88-89, io6, I5o; modes of, 2. See also Ausdruck; Expressivity Expressionism, 27, 83, 85, 150, 152, 154, 163, 178-80 Expressivity, 8, 27. See also Jusdruck; Ex- pression Fairy tale, 54 Fascism, 65, 79, 178, i8o, 196n1 Film, 63-68, 71, 76, 86, 196n1; aesthetics, 197nii; and experience, 74, 77-78, 82; and Mimesis, 71-72, 78, III; and mon- tage, 65, 67-68, 70, 73, 77, 106-7, 118; and narrative, 67, 79, 119; and techno- logical mediation, 74-75; collective re- ception of, 76, III; function of caption- ing (Beschriftung) in, 69-70; illusionism of, 73, 75-76; shock effect in, 76-81; tactile quality of, 78 Index * 233 Fludernik, Monika, io Formalism, 91, 105, 175-76, 181-82 Fragment, 2-3, 18, 33, 81, 95, 158, 179; as- cribing meaning to, 3, 24; photo- graphic, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 66 Functionalism, 88, Io5 Futurism, 15, 26, 85, 99, 16o G (journal of art and design), 29 Gefesselter Blick (Captivated Gaze, 1930), 95-96, 118-20 Gegenstindlichkeit, 27 Geklebte Bilder. See Klebebilder Gestalt, 5 Gestaltung, 28, 83-91, 105-7 Gide, Andre, 5o Gotthelf, Jeremias (Albert Bitzius), 44 Graff, Werner, 29, 134; Es kommt der neue Fotograf (Here Comes the New Photog- rapher, 1929), 117 Greenberg, Clement, 15o-51, 156 Griffith, D. W., 70 Gropius, Martin, io 5 Grosz, George, 149-50, 158 Gutenberg, Johannes, 96-97 Hansen, Miriam, 64-66 Hanssen, Beatrice, 45, 54 Hardt, Hanno, 21 Hausmann, Raoul, 2oon30 Hayles, Katherine, 38-39, 61, 170 Heartfield, John, 16, 21, 24-25, 212n2; Wer Biirgerblitter liest wird blind und taub. Weg mit den Verdumungsbandagen! (Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf Away with These Stultifying Bandages!), 23 Hebel, Johann Peter, 44 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 36 Heise, Carl Georg, 129-34 Hermeneutics, 7, 55, 58, 18o Herzfelde, Wieland, 16-18, 19, 21, 51-52 H6ch, Hannah, 20, 112; Album, 11, 121, 134-147, 2o9-1onn28-29; Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (z9r9), 17; Deutsches Midchen (German Girl, 1930), 136-37; The Multi-Millionaire (1923), 2-3, 5, 19-20, 33 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 149-50, 152, 156, 158, 176, 211n2, 212n4 Hutcheon, Linda, 34, 164 Illusionism, 24, 32, 71, 87-88, 98, 103, 150; of film, 73, 75-76; of photography, III, 146 Illustrated magazine, 112, 117. See also Photomagazine Jmitatio, 32 Immediacy, 21, 72-75, 105, 200n30; artifi- cial, 77-78, 8o-8i; false, 179-80 Immersion, 4, 76, 122, 128, 141 Impressionism, 86 Incorporation, 16, 18, 21, 25, 51-52, 78; physical, 6 o-6i, 81, 155-56 Indexicality, 18, 26, 51; of photography, 114-15, 131-34, 146 Intransitivity, 13, 149-5o, 156, 158, 16o, 176 Janzen, Thomas, 122 Kafka, Franz, 44, 178; Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China, 1931), 49 Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiri- tual in Art (Du spirituel dans lart, 1912), 150 Kinodebatte, 67 Klebebilder, 14 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6, 91, 112-16, 131-34, 145-46 Kraus, Karl, 81 Krauss, Rosalind, 176 Kuleshov, Lev, 14, 69-70 Language game, 172 Lavin, Maud, 137 Leskov, Nikolai, 41-44, 54-56 Lethen, Helmuth: Verhaltenslehren der Kilte, 154, 163, 175 Lissitzky, El, 2oon3 o 234 " Index Lukics, Georg, 7, i8o; on montage, 179- 81; The Theorie of the Novel (Die Theo- rie des Romans, 1914-15), 36, 46, 58 Magical Realism, 30 Malik Verlag, 21, 26 Mann, Thomas, 178 Marx, Karl, 58 Marxism, 178-79 Materialism, 15, i5 o Materiality, 8, 19-20, 25, 122, 182; lan- guage and, 20; of storytelling, 55; of media, 38-39, 61 Mendelsohn, Erich: Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: Photobook ofan Architect, 1926), 117 Merz, 148-51, 155-56, 158-60, 163, 177, 212n3 Meyer, Hannes, 105 Mimesis, 11, 27-29, 31-33, 35-37, 47, 52, 58, 88; and film, 71-72, 78, III; and photography, 122; as imitatio, 32; as mimicry, 28, 37, 39, 42, 48-49, 67, 71, 198n19; distrust of, 115; horizontal un- derstanding of, 37; physiological di- mension of, 31 Mimicry, 27-28, 30-31, 34, 103; of pho- tography, 122 Mitteilbarkeit, 54-55. See also under Expe- rience Moholy-Nagy, Liszl6, 5-6, 8, 12, 29, 83- 110, 134, 138, 197n11, 200on30; Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film, 1925-27), 2, 83-105, 117-18, 207n10; Dynamic of the Metropolis, 98- i05; on narrative, 91-92, 104; on space, 98, 103, 107-8, 110; on vision, 84, 86, 88-9o, 108-10; on visual literature, 97-98, 100, 103; Von Material zuArchi- tektur (From Material to Architecture, 1929), 84, 105-10 Morgenstern, Christian, 14 Musil, Robert: The Man without"Qualities (Der Mann ohneEzgenschaften, 1930- 32), 36, 47-48, 50 Naturalism, 22, 24 Naturgeschichte, 44 Neoplasticism, 86. See also De Stijl Neue Sachlichkeit, 11, 26, 8 5, 115, 121, 128 Neues Sehen (New Vision), 85, III, 117, 122, 210n29 New Objectivity, 11, 26, 85, 115, 121, 128 New Typography, 96, 119-21 New Vision. See Neues Sehen Novel, 7, 35-38, 5o; and remembrance (Eingedenken), 45; and closure, so-52, 59-60; Bildungsroman, 46, 52; crisis of the, 35, 39, 43, 197n11 Objectivity, 83, 89-91, 122 Orality, 39, 42-43, 56, 59-61, 62, i90n5 Organicity, 7-8, 15 Painting, 86-88, i22 Palucca, Gret, 142-43 Parody, 11, 13, 19, 33-35, 37, 162-64, 169, 173, 176, 181 Pasted images. See Klebebilder Perception, 6, 8, 25, 29, 34, 42, 61-68, 72, 82-84, 99, 102-4, 134, 154, 178; and meaning, 170; and technology, 11, 8o, 82, 88, 91; constructive, 27; modes of, 15, 42, 65-67, 118 Perloff, Marjorie, 171 Perspective, one-point, 89, 95, 98 Phillips, Christopher, 156 Photobook, 111-12, 116-18, 121, 134-35, 210n29; and narrative, 118, 134 Photography, 12, 21, 26-27, 42, 68-69, 83-94, 98, io6; and authenticity, 114- 15, 134, 146; and captions, 22, 68-69, 85, 100-102, 108, 112, 116, 118-19, 135, 138-40; and collage, 116; and montage, 117-18; and narrative, 117-18, 146; and truth, 113-14, 147; evidentiary power of, 118, 121, 134; exactness of, 12, 27, 83, 89, 110-11, 115, I28, 202ni0; experience and, 116; illusionism of, III, 146; index- icality of, 114-15, 131-34, 146; mimetic power of, 122; objectivity of, 89-91, 122, 128, 130; physiognomic power of, 128; precision of, 113; realism of, 112; value of, III Photomagazine, 112 Index * 235 Photomontage, 2, 25-27, 32, 86, 92-95, 111-12, 135-37; and storytelling, 118-19; and truth, 119, 121; simultaneity of, 118-19 Photoplastic, 92 Photoreportage, 21, 113 Physiognomy, 4, 5, 33, 35, 145, 181; and photography, 122, 128 Picasso, Pablo, 156; StillL fe with Chair Caning (1912), 156-57, 162 Play, 64, 70-71, 76, 146 ; formalist, 175, 179, mimetic, io, 51, 67, 71-72; parodic, 16o; physiognomic, 5, 76, 129; semiotic, 8o, 118 Plessner, Helmuth, 28, 33, 154, 170 Poststructuralism, 19 Psychotechnics, 58, 2o2nii Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 14, 67 Readymade, 93, 158, 170 Realism: magical, 30; socialist, 179 Reception, 22, 24, 46, 59; collective, 76, III; contemplative, 63-64; immersive, 122, 118, 141; modes of, 15, 31, 61, 64, 76-8o, 122, 128; physical aspects of, 57 Reciprocity, 28, 30, 66, 154-55, 182; of ex- perience, 91, 182; of interaction, 154-55; storytelling and, II-12, 42-43 Renaissance, 32, 198n19 Renger-Patzsch, Albert: The World Is Beautiful (Die Welt ist schon, 1928), 12, 112, 115-17, 121-34, 141, 145-47 Repetition, 9-10, 29, 34-35, 37, 167-68, 170, 172-73, 176; mimesis and, 72, 78, 81; parodic, 13, 37, 164, 173, 176, 181 Reportage, 46, 95 Representation, 9, 11, 15-18, 26, 87, 102, 152; illusionistic, 157; means of, 47; nat- uralistic, 22, 15o; realistic, 21; visual, 86 Reproduction, mechanical, 68, III, 118, 147 Resemblance, 37, 87, 112, 121, 145-47; nar- rative, iii Rhythm, 56, 59, 77-78, 152 Richter, Hans, 29, 98, 197nf11 Ricoeur, Paul, 49, 198n19 Roh, Franz, 25-33, 156; Foto-Auge (Photo- Eye, 1929), 25-26, 117, 207n10, 209n24; Nach-Expressionismus (Post- Expressionism, 1925), 26-27, 128-29 Rohdie, Sam, 70 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 9 Sander, August: Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929), 117 Scheffer, Bernd, 163 Schein, 72. See also Semblance Schoner Schein, 32-33, 47, 66, 71. See also Semblance, beautiful Schwitters, Kurt, 12-13, 148-77, 178, 180- 81, 211nn1-2, 214n25; "An Anna Blume" ("Anna Blossom"), 163-64; Anna Blume Dichtungen (Anna Blos- som Poems, 1919), 161; "Die Zwiebel" ("The Onion,"1919), 152-56; "Franz Millers Drahtfriihling" (Franz Miller's Wire Springtime), 153-56, 213n16; in- transitive art, 149-50, 155, 176; Merz, 148-51, 155-56, 158-60, 163, 177, 212n3; Miss Blanche (1923), 158-59; on mon- tage, 161-62; rhythm, 152; "Schacko" (1926), 164-70; Tran-Texte, 160; Un- sinn (non-sense), 159-63, 171; Vortrags- dichtungen (performance poems), 170 Scott, Clive, 113-15 Semblance, 70-72, 76, 88; beautiful, 32- 33, 47, 66, 71. See also Schein; Schoner Schein Shklovsky, Viktor, 181 Shock, 4, 8, 69, 76-81, 182 Sieburth, Richard, 81 Similarity, 5o, 77 Simultaneity, 5, 8, 95, 118-19; as rhetoric strategy, 22 Skoronel, Vera, 143 Stafford, Barbara, 34, 121, 140 Stein, Sally, 21, 32 Storytelling, 3, 6-7, II-12, 39, 50-61, 65, 79; and experience, 42, 52-55, 59, 75, 80; and history, 44-45; and memory (Erinnerung), 45, 56; and photomon- tage, 118-19; and reciprocity, 11-12, 41- 43; as a mode of linguistic behavior, 169; bodily dimension of, 56-57, 59, 236 " Index Storytelling (continued) 156, 170; demise of, 43-45, 48-49, 54, 57, 61; figuration as a means of, 117; film and, 67, 78; labor of, 58, 61; materiality of, 55; open-endedness of, 5o Stramm, August, 14, 162 Structuralism, 181-82 Surrealism, 178-79 Sympathetic Magic, 31-32 Tactility, 76, 78-79, 104, io6-8, 2oon30, 205-6n39 Taussig, Michael, 31-33, 78 Techne, 29 Teitelbaum, Matthew, 3 Tempo, 22 Totality, 7-8, 179 Tradition, 62-63, 65 Tschichold, Jan: Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye, 19 29), 25-26, 117 Typophoto, 9 5, 9 8; Dynamic of the Me- tropolis (Moholy-Nagy), 98-105 Unconscious, optical, 67, 72, 76 Vanity Fair, 93 Verism, veristic, 92-93 Verisimilitude, 24, 32, 42, 71, 87-88, 93, 111-12, 146 Vertov, Dziga, 14, 67 Visual Analogy, 12, 121, 131, 134, 138, 143, 146-47 Visual Literature, 97-98, 100, 103 Vitalism, 88, 91 Vorwdrts, 22, 24-25 Walden, Herwarth, 162 Walser, Robert, 44 Wassermann, Jakob, 7 Werkbund. See Deutscher Werkbund Wilke, Tobias, zoon30 Wirklichkeitswert, 36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 171-72, 218n45 Wolff, Kurt, 2o8n22 Workers'Illustrated Magazine. See Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung Wortkunst, 14, 162 Zerstreuung, 79. See also Reception Valery, Paul, 57-58, 61