"Mediating" in Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense. MIT Press, 2016 (original) (raw)
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A Critical Illusion: "Expressionism" in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein
The Ideologial Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914–1918, ed. Rainer Rumold and O. K. Werckmeister, 1990
“Expressionism” was not invented as a term denoting a particular style, or formal language, within a plurality of styles, comparable to terms such as neo-impressionism, fauvism or cubism, all of which entered critical usage a few years before it. Nor was expressionism intended to be merely the designation for a stylistically diverse movement within German-speaking Europe, as it is most frequently used today. As originally employed by most critics, the word did not signify a merely German phenomenon, but a pan-European one, and this remained so throughout the period of the theory's ascendancy (a fact that has often been overlooked in the literature on the concept). The catholicity of the term's application was central to its ideological meaning. As used by critics between roughly 1911 and 1920, it manifested a faith in an intelligible teleological coherence within history, and of a longing for the restoration of a unified, integrated culture. This essay examines Wilhelm Hausenstein’s contribution to the theory and his ultimate abandonment of it after the war and his subsequent descent into the darkest cultural pessimism.
This thesis re-examines the life's work of German-American critical theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, to recover abstraction from tacit historical associations with modern fascism. Evoked in critical theory more generally, the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology imagines 20th century fascism as the dialectical fulfillment of modern alienation. Rooting such alienation in the flawed Liberal and Marxist conceptions of monetary relations, critical theorists conduct their aesthetic analyses via ambivalent condemnations of abstraction’s assumed primordial alienation. In the thesis, I critique the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology through an affirmation of neochartalist political economy’s conception of money’s essential publicness and abundance. Drawing from this abstract legal mediation, I trace Kracauer’s various condemnations of abstraction along the terms of his embodied contradiction among the WWII and Cold War fiscal mobilizations to illuminate repressed pleas for abstract mediation within his work and midcentury aesthetic realism broadly. Further, I move from the midcentury moment to the Weimar moment in order to locate potential in Kracauer’s early affirmation of abstraction as a communal medium. I find such affirmations neglected in the Liberal and Marxist responses to the unemployment crises of the Great Depression in Germany. By looking to Kracauer’s Weimar essays on architecture and photography, as well as a reading of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), I pinpoint historical and contemporary promise in their commitment to the inclusive potential of abstraction’s (no)thing- ness, a commitment that was mirrored in the proposed monetary issuance of the WTB public works plan of 1932, which was ultimately rejected by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the lead up to their defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1933 and the Nazis’ rise to power.
Modernist Aesthetics in Transition Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, 2024
How did German aesthetic values change during the Weimar Republic and after its immediate collapse at the beginning of the National Socialist period? Contrary to conventional narratives that depict modernist aesthetics as static, shaping principles of modern art and design, this volume argues for their complexity and ever-shifting nature. Illuminating the vital exchanges that occurred across multiple art forms during a period of unmatched cultural activity, this multi-disciplinary volume explores the cultural transition between Weimar- and National Socialist-era Germany and offers a fresh perspective on the fate of modernism during a time of censorship and social stigma. Featuring essays on architecture, painting, photography, film, sculpture, cabaret, typography, and commercial design, the volume explores competing and comparable themes across German art from 1919-1945 and addresses how modern approaches like New Vision coexisted with more traditional and established artistic modes. Such visual complexity is evident from the volume's eclectic coverage: these include 'sexology' and eroticism, visual grammar in typography and architecture, the reception of Weimar art in the National Socialist period, and the formation and transformation of queer and Jewish identities. The volume encompasses subjects as different as shadow in the animated films of Lotte Reininger, filmic adaptations of Heinrich Zille's social commentary in the 1920s, the photography of László Moholy-Nagy, and depictions of female sexuality in Magnus Hirschfeld's oeuvre. By bridging multiple artistic fields, this highly interdisciplinary work provides a fresh perspective on the ever-changing art and aesthetic principles of early-20th-century Germany.
"Dioramas of a new world": Siegfried Kracauer and Weimar exhibition culture
Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacy of Siegfried Kracauer, eds. by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, 2012
is well known to us as a ‹lm historian, as a theorist of visual and mass culture, and as a literary author in his own right. But alongside ‹lm, photography, and literature, Kracauer ‹ne-tuned his cultural philosophy by attending to exhibition as a medium that profoundly shaped Weimar modernity. Kracauer's lesser-known writings on trade shows, building expositions, and contemporary design invite us to revisit key tropes of his cultural theory such as waiting, ornamentation, or spatial images (Raumbilder) that gesture beyond the constraints of the interwar present. While conceptually linked to other intellectual projects that occupied Kracauer in the 1920s-the theorization of ‹lm, photography and mass culture, or the writing of "modernist miniatures," 1-his exhibition reviews also depart from these writings as they consistently stress the enlightening prospects of this particular mass medium. In a recent article on Kracauer's city miniatures, Andreas Huyssen notes how these texts expose agoraphobia, a fear of empty spaces, and recognize "the disciplining power of a rationalist and abstract regime of visuality that denies agency to the human body as subject of sensual perception." 2 In contrast to, and alongside, this ideology critique, his writings about interwar exhibition culture celebrate the staging of alternative and more livable worlds. The spatial and theatrical aspects of exhibition, Kracauer suggests, hold open the possibility to cut through the "abstract regimes of visuality" and to empower the audience through a form of visual pedagogy. In the displays of futuristic housing models Kracauer detected a more open and democratic society, and he was intrigued by elaborate city models that rendered visible the hidden infrastructure of urban life. None of this, however, meant giving up on the critique of modernism, and Kracauer did not ap-162