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Theory, Culture & Society

0(0) 1–19
The Denkbild (‘Thought- ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415598628

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Monique Tschofen
Ryerson University

Abstract
This article examines an experimental genre of philosophical writing known as the
Denkbild (‘thought-image’) practiced by members of the Frankfurt School to show
how it is resurrected in the Augmented Reality installation of the artist-scholar
Caitlin Fisher. It argues that Circle (2012) renews the Frankfurt School’s project of
reaching to art to find a way for critical theory to bring about ‘a transformation of
consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’. However, as a material
and virtual artifact that produces a unique circuit of exchange, the digital artwork is
able to provide a sharper picture of that reality, positing community as the context
and goal of philosophical thinking. Through a complex sculpting of its form, content,
and image of its own thoughts, Fisher’s Denkbild strives to create a fluid, ‘discon-
nected and non-binding’ form capable of building what Adorno described as a ‘shared
philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience’.

Keywords
Adorno, Augmented Reality, Benjamin, Denkbild, digitality, feminism, new media

Thought-images are . . . parabolic evocations of something that

cannot be said in words. They do not want to stop conceptual
thought so much as to shock through their enigmatic form and
thereby get thought moving, because thought in its traditional
form seems rigid, conventional and outmoded. (Theodor W.
Adorno, ‘Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse’)

This structure is what I’m calling the thought sculpture – the invis-
ible intellectual labor that demands a new kind of literacy and one

Corresponding author: Monique Tschofen. Email: monique.tschofen@ryerson.ca

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

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2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

that risks remaining unintelligible to readers. . . . And so . . . we

must . . . explore ways to teach ourselves to . . . theorize its contours,
its grammar, its possibilities . . . its poetry. (Caitlin Fisher,
‘Electronic Literacies’)

In the preface to New Media Poetics, Adalaide Morris refers to early

20th-century literary and contemporary digital texts that experiment
with form, describing them as ‘machines for cognition’, or, in the
words of Ted Nelson, as ‘thinkertoys’ (Morris, 2009: 2). Nelson’s
‘thinkertoys’ were ‘for tinkerers who want to go beyond the linear rigid-
ities – the mental rods, logical connectors, conceptual end caps, pulleys,
and spools – in place since Euclid, Newton, and Descartes’ (Morris,
2007). Caitlin Fisher, an award-winning new-media artist who is the
co-founder of the Future Cinema laboratory at York University in
Canada, has created such a ‘thinkertoy’ using the new digital medium
of Augmented Reality. In her installation Circle (2010/2013), she offers a
sustained and radical attempt to use new media as a ‘machine for cog-
nition’ that thinks beyond traditional epistemologies.1
Fisher takes up an experimental genre of philosophical writing known
as the Denkbild (‘thought-image’) that was popular among the members
of the Frankfurt School, who published them in German newspapers and
in loosely-connected collections. Writers such as Benjamin, Adorno,
Kracauer, Bloch, and others took cues from the early 20th century’s
culture of improvisations and collages, film and photography, cabarets
and panoramas to develop an experimental philosophical form able to
reconnect the abstract realms of ideas with the subjective realms of social
subjects and objects. Despite Richter’s suspicion that the Denkbild is
poorly suited to the contemporary digitized global era (2007: 22–3),
Circle, as I argue here, moves the ‘thought-image’ off the printed page
directly into digitally-augmented environments, where new modes of
thinking about the abstract and concrete, the idea and the thing, are
made possible. Circle renews the Frankfurt School’s project of reaching
to art to find a way for critical theory to bring about ‘a transformation of
consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’ (Adorno,
1998: 243). However, as a material and virtual artifact that produces a
unique circuit of exchange, the digital artwork is able to provide a shar-
per picture of that reality, positing community as the context and goal of
philosophical thinking. Through a complex sculpting of its form, con-
tent, and an image of its own thoughts, Fisher’s Denkbild strives to create
a fluid, ‘disconnected and non-binding’ form capable of building what
Adorno described as a ‘shared philosophy from the standpoint of sub-
jective experience’ (Adorno, 2005: 18).
At first glance, Circle does not look like philosophy. Circle is an
Augmented Reality installation that was installed, among other places,
at the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference Media Art

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Tschofen 3

show in June 2012, as well as at ‘Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online

Archive of New “Born Digital” Literature’, a media art exhibit held in
conjunction with the MLA Convention in Boston in January 2013. A
suitcase sits on a tabletop, filled with old domestic objects such as tea-
cups, lockets, coasters, beads, and other seemingly trivial everyday
things. The viewer must take a hand-held screen such as an iPad and
hold it up to the objects in any order so that on-screen, ghostly digitally-
augmented images of a range of domestic storage-media such as photos,
slides, home-movies and videos, and books appear to emerge from the
objects that are being viewed. The passage of the screen over each object
also activates an audio fragment in which a woman’s voice reminisces
about her past. Part boıˆte-en-valise, part Wunderkammern, part collec-
tion, part life-writing, history, home movie, family album, slide-show,
and technological novelty, the archival and diaristic piece seems intimate,
quiet, and everyday. However, its tinkering with thought itself makes it
social, dialogic, and powerful.
Before discussing how Circle manufactures new shapes for thinking, it
is important to understand the philosophical genre Fisher resurrects and,
in particular, the ways it reached to the everyday and the aesthetic to
resolve the problems of philosophy’s treatment of thought. One of the
central topics the members of the Frankfurt School considered in their
works was the question of thinking. Philosophy, they determined, had
long ago ossified to the point where it no longer could be a tool in the
important task of critiquing modernity. It was imperative for philosophy
to develop new forms for itself because only the new kinds of thinking
that these forms would facilitate could make possible the kind of trans-
formation necessary to challenge the alienating forces of modernity. The
particular urgency these writers faced grew out of their analyses of
Enlightenment thinking, which they argued used abstraction and formal-
ism to turn thought into an instrument, a thing, that distanced subject
from object and reduced cognition to repetition, ultimately diminishing
thought to ‘mere tautology’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972: 25, 13, 27).
As an alternative to philosophy’s traditional kinds of thinking, which
were totalizing, rationalist, and reliant on the separation between
thought and being, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno,
and Siegfried Kracauer, among others, proposed the Denkbild or
‘thought-image’. A ‘thought-image’ was a poetic or aestheticized frag-
ment – a lyrical-philosophical miniature that took the form of ‘con-
densed, epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots . . . usually without a
developed plot or prescribed narrative agenda, yet charged with theoret-
ical insight’ (Richter, 2007: 2). Described by Bloch as ‘the strangest form
in which ideas have ever been cast’ (Bloch, 1979: 95), these textual frag-
ments were designed to ‘conjoin “the world” with “figures of know-
ledge”’ by ‘proceeding from those images and figurations in which the

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4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

act of thinking is performed and in which history, reality, and experience

find their structure and expression’ (Weigel, 1996: 51).
The lines between the Denkbild and other condensed philosophical
forms were sometimes blurry, particularly since the writers of
Denkbilder also wrote aphorisms, essays, and other fragments. One
form with which the Denkbild shared many qualities was the essay.
Benjamin and Adorno and Lukács agreed that the essay’s fragmentary
nature ‘reflects accurately the immanent loss of meaning in the world’
(Wolin, 1982: 85). These writers considered the form capable of grasping
‘truths which lie dormant in the void between symbolic and conceptual
modes of representation’ (Wolin, 1982: 86). Yet however much the genre
of the essay resembles the ‘thought-image’ in its intent, the differences
between it and the Denkbild are significant. The essay is explanatory,
while the ‘flash’ of insight the ‘thought-image’ was to yield was never
explicit. The essay reaches for a kind of closure, while the ‘thought-
image’ embraced open-endedness.
The Denkbild shared even more qualities with the aphorism.2 Like the
aphorism, the Denkbild offered the Frankfurt School members ‘pluralist’
(Deleuze, 2006: 31) and ‘anti-systematic’ thinking (Früchtl, 1997: 169).
However, two main characteristics distinguish the Denkbild from the
aphorism. The first has to do with the way the Denkbild consistently
plumbed the banal and everyday for subject matter. Objects like train
windows, clothes, spoons, antiques, a fan, a sewing box, a telephone and
a statue became points of entry into and epistemological foci of the brief
written fragments. The genre’s attention to the disconnected objects
plucked from everyday life represented a desire to address what
Lukács described as the loss of the ‘character of things as things’, that
is, the distortion of the material world by its commodity character
(Hansen, 2012: 20). The attention to objects also represented a desire
to approach history differently. The Denkbild scoured the city for the
raw materials of the everyday in order to make possible theoretical
insights about – and firmly anchored in – what Kracauer described as
a ‘reality that is filled with incarnate things and people and that therefore
demands to be seen concretely’ (1995: 140).
The second difference between the two philosophical modes of writing
concerned the unique relationship the Denkbild held with visual culture.
That philosophy should have a relationship to vision is no surprise.
Martin Jay has traced the persistence of the ‘noblest sense’ in philosoph-
ical language from the Greeks through to contemporary philosophy (Jay,
1993). However, the Denkbild genre not only inherited the traditional
philosophical lexicon around seeing, imagining, reflecting, illuminating
and insight; it also advanced it by rooting these epistemological concepts
in ubiquitous contemporary visual cultural practices.
The reviews the Frankfurt School wrote about each other’s Denkbilder
articulate an encyclopedic interest in visual cultures – high, low, and

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Tschofen 5

everyday – which they drew from to define their projects.3 Adorno

describes the works as ‘scribbled picture-puzzles’ (1992: 323) and likened
them to ‘Expressionism’ (1980: 58, 51), while Bloch compares them to a
‘snapshot’, a ‘photomontage’, a ‘kaleidoscope’, a ‘considered improvisa-
tion’, a ‘cabaret’, a ‘collage of familiar objects and forgotten glances’ and
‘traces’ (1979: 95, 96). The texts themselves developed more of these
kinds of analogies. The ‘loggia’ and the ‘panorama’ (Benjamin, 2006),
the window, the disguise, and the imagination (Bloch, 2006), and even
the still-life (Benjamin, 2006) related to the writers’ larger concepts of the
dialectical image, constellation and mosaic. All captured the startling
qualities of their new modes of inquiry and insight. Thus, even when
the writers were explicit in their critique of the complicity of visual cul-
tural practices in capitalist structures of alienation, they were borrowing
from the creative arts and industries ways of picturing a new kind of
puzzling about modernity’s fractured world which in turn would help
visualize new ways of putting it back together.
What is important to underline here is that, from the intersection of
philosophy and a visual culture that includes both the fine and popular
arts as well as everyday visual experiences, the Denkbild poses a question
about knowledge using a form designed to let the contours of an answer
take shape before the eyes only momentarily. Dismantling the edifice of
totalizing modes of thinking, the writers of the Denkbild offer knowledge
in bursts and flashes that highlight their conception of the provisory
nature of thought, as they capture and put on display the evanescent,
spectacular, fragmented, mobile, flashing, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, pal-
impsestic, disconnected, connected, random, patterned, performative, or
fleeting qualities of the very form of philosophical thinking they propose
to more capably illuminate the social problems of modernity. As Richter
writes, their ‘thought-images’, then, not only mimetically reflect but also
perform the content of a theoretical system (2007: 17). Borne from and
shaped by the everyday, this new system of thinking would never be
entirely abstract or disconnected from the real, as it would bind together
the worlds of things, practices, and experiences.
Two examples reveal how the genre developed a new philosophical
way of knowing. In a fragment of Berlin Childhood around 1900 titled
‘Socks’, Walter Benjamin paints a little scene derived from a childhood
memory about socks, one folded into a pocket made by the other, that he
would repeatedly open up like a ‘present’ (2006: 96). The socks are child’s
play, and the game a visual and tactile performance of anticipation and
reward. However, the real ‘gift’ of the socks and their ‘unveiling’ is epis-
temological, concerning the nature of truth and knowledge. Benjamin
writes: ‘It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are
the same. It led me to draw truth . . . warily’ (2006: 97). From a medita-
tion on an everyday object and gesture flashes insight into a way of seeing
and thinking: it is hesitantly and with great anticipation, from the

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6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

concrete object rather than the abstract concept, that one can extract the
‘gift’. One could say that the gift is an understanding of the inextricability
of verbal form and visual/performative content he was experimenting
with in this work. Yet the fragment underlines that the very process of
peeling away the outside to view the inside undoes the entire project.
Benjamin describes ‘teasing’ the woolen mass out of its pocket until he
observes something disconcerting: ‘I had brought out the “present” but
“the pocket” in which it had lain was no longer there’ (2006: 96). In other
words, it is a gift that keeps un-giving. ‘Socks’ thus aims to offer an image
of a kind of critical thinking that sees, feels, and moves, that turns itself
inside out and then back again. It does not retreat from the material
world but emerges directly from it. It is a kind of thinking that is playful
and yet perhaps also anxiety-provoking, since it can reach for but never
extract truth.
In ‘The Mark’, from Traces, Ernst Bloch seeks a way to speak object-
ively about the importance of ‘little things’ (2006: 5). Bloch treats an
unremarkable everyday sight, a kind of performance/spectacle/scene: a
soldier arrives late for muster and stands out of formation. His skewed
position is only noticed by the officers around him as a vague impression.
Then, according to the narrator, somebody recounts seeing this shard of
the everyday. Oddly, Bloch refers to the ‘amusement’ the story of the
soldier’s stance provides its listener, because nothing else happens. There
is no punchline, no epiphany, just a sight pulled almost at random from
the things one looks at in a day. Yet what might be perceived of as trivial
here is not, for this ‘picture’ of order can be understood as one of fascistic
discipline and control. The soldier who is out of line offers a diminutive
yet potent image and gesture that resists militaristic order, one that
power can sense but not see. When Bloch says that the philosopher
must begin by observing ‘what is slight and odd’, he is providing an
image of ways the western philosophical project might be refashioned
and refocused to retrieve small acts of resistance (2006: 5).
Bloch hints that the key resides in philosophy’s translation of the
visual back to the verbal via an adoption of a story-telling mode. ‘It’s
good to think in stories’, writes Bloch; they point out things that ‘will
have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking’ (2006: 6). In fact,
he suggests that there are ideas or concepts that ‘can be grasped only in
such stories’ (2006: 6). Yet, as we see, the ‘story’ recounted in the
‘thought-image’ only provides a neutral picture of the scene. It does
not explain it. What is happening in this ‘thought-image’ is the presen-
tation of a multidimensional picture of thinking as it thematically repre-
sents as well as formally solicits from its reader a movement from
impressionistic thought to penetrating critical thinking. The critical
thinking it proposes is dialogical. It is shared with an audience like a
story, and hence is social. It is also dialectical, formed and unformed
through a process of seeing, thinking, telling and seeing again. Bloch’s

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Tschofen 7

philosophical mode of seeing/story-telling/story-thinking/picture-

thinking thus offers a model for a process that can make visible what
is latent in systems of power and knowledge. This is the very process, the
Denkbild writers agreed, that the philosopher needs to be able to avert a
situation where his own form of knowledge becomes ‘rigid, conventional
and outmoded’ (Adorno, 1992: 323).
Writing about Benjamin’s work, Susan Buck-Morss rhetorically asks:
‘is this philosophy?’ (1995: 216). This is the question that we also need to
ask of Fisher’s installation Circle. Buck-Morss reminds us that
Benjamin’s visual logic, his attention to the after-history of objects,
and their presentation in a ‘lightening flash’ of truth is philosophy, its
experimental form and thematic content fused to form a ‘theoretical
armature’ (1995: 215, 216). These same formal elements, all present in
Fisher’s work, are the key to unlocking her own philosophical project of
constructing a radical epistemology. Indeed, reading her work as phil-
osophy rather than as an example of women’s writing such as memoir or
technological trick or a creative example of the digital humanities (Jones,
2014) makes visible what is most important about her work. The purpose
of Fisher’s ‘shared philosophy’ (Adorno, 2005: 18) is to sculpt thought
into what Shira Wolosky describes as ‘a relational and multidimensional
encounter, interrogation, and renegotiation’ (2010: 573).
Fisher’s indebtedness to the Frankfurt School is no secret. Early on, in
her hypertextual doctoral dissertation Building Feminist Theory:
Hypertextual Heuristics – the first such dissertation in Canada – Fisher
had the explicit goal of using computers as ‘machines for cognition’.
Speaking about this work in ways that evoke the Frankfurt School’s
Denkbilder, Fisher (2002) said she strove to create ‘thought-sculptures’.
She was referring to an invisible structure of hyperlinks whose ‘con-
tours . . . grammar . . . possibilities . . . poetry’ demanded new forms of lit-
eracy specifically attuned to the ability of the technology to be the
‘unconscious of the philosophical line’. The subjects she connected
through an architecture of links emerged from her interest in collecting
and juxtaposing the fragments of everyday culture:

ephemera, the marginal and the relationship of collecting bits and

pieces of identity; Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project; McLuhan; a
fascination with quilting and piecing fabrics and stories, digital
stitching together of all kinds; building blocks and the Eames
houses of cards; collage work and mash-up. (Fisher, 2007)

These early works’ sculpting of thoughts through the hypertexual linking

of textual fragments drawn from everyday life informed the way she later
understood the medium of Augmented Reality as a machine of cognition.
Augmented Reality offered the capacity to combine an architecture of
non-linear linking with a practice of collecting that was anchored in the

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8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

material. AR, in other words, could create concrete sculptures that con-
nected actual objects with concepts. AR could also create, like the earlier
Denkbilder, only now spanning the real and the imaginary, new ways of
connecting concepts to each other.
Augmented Reality is a medium with military origins that has not yet
been used extensively by artists or by philosophers. One could argue that
the medium’s primary function has been to help the techno-logic of late
capitalism to penetrate even further into everyday life. However, possibly
more than other digital media, AR’s unique attributes can provide the
framework for the resistance of digital culture’s instrumentalization of
communicative action.
By itself, the technology is quite magical. When a user holds a web-
linked camera device like a cellular phone or tablet up to a fiducial, that
is, a graphical marker, or an object in the case of the natural object-
tracking AR, what appears on-screen is a fusion of the world before the
camera’s neutral documentary eye and the fanciful digital augmentation,
which could be a still or moving image, sound, text – just about anything
that can be coded and shown on a screen.
What is important for the medium’s use as a tool for philosophy is that
AR always produces, according to Christine Ross, a ‘perceptual predica-
ment’ – a friction at the border between the two ontological registers that
are fused in the same compounded image (2010: 20). The screen image
does not distinguish between the real and the represented. This interpene-
tration of the naturalistic representation of what is before the viewer’s
eyes and in her hands, and the magically illusory augmented representa-
tion, can be used to produce an image of the blurry borders between two
kinds of knowledge.
If the technology of AR permits a kind of complex visualization of
knowledge, it also permits a complex visualization of history and
memory. Through its on-screen suturing of the present tense of the
viewer and what she has pointed her screen at with the past tense of
the flickering digitally-augmented representations that the camera has
activated, the medium is able to create a unique and dynamic texture
of time and its afterlife (in German, Nachleben). Compressing time-past
and time-present is something all storage media do, but unlike photog-
raphy or a museum, for example, AR can recreate the remembered past
through representational strategies that underline how its intangible,
magical, and even ghostly qualities permeate the present. AR is thus
able to represent the complex travelling of memory between past and
present through a technical apparatus that helps visualize this movement.
The medium is thus suited to conjure the history of things that have
circulated through social and cultural fields as well as the history in
things, that is, the ‘crystallization of the anxieties and aspirations that
linger there in the material object’, activated through processes of per-
ception and remembrance (Brown, 1998: 935).

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Tschofen 9

AR thus offers concrete ways of thinking, bringing together things and

thought, but it does so with a fragile magic that continually lays itself
bare. When users’ hands shake or the camera’s tracking does not work,
the augmentations can flicker on and off. That AR cannot and does not
exclude its noise means that the forms of knowledge it can generate are
always tentative and provisional. While this digital medium is most often
used in highly instrumentalizing and reifying ways in the service of
power, AR’s ability to serve as an agent of resistance rests in the fact
that it offers an immanent demonstration of its own conditionality and
incommensurability. These are the qualities of the medium that Fisher
exploits in her philosophical thought-sculpture, modeled in dialogue with
the German project of the ‘thought-image’.
One of the insights of Benjamin’s Denkbild ‘Socks’ is that form and
content contain one another in such a way that to separate them is to
unravel their significance. It is from their mutual interaction that the gift
of thought is formed. Caitlin Fisher builds multi-dimensional shapes for
thoughts in Circle (see Figure 1), tinkering with form and content in ways
that challenge the philosophical tradition before her, including the work
of the very Frankfurt School she draws from. She produces actual images
we see with our eyes, images of images really, for the digital screen

Figure 1. Caitlin Fisher, Circle, 2014. Reprinted with permission.

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10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

images of people and objects reproduce visual media like photographs

and film clips, offering a kind of media archaeology of visual culture in
the process. Through the soundtrack, Fisher produces verbal ‘thought-
images’: dense, poetic and subjective modes of story-telling/story-
thinking/picture-thinking, each designed to yield sudden flashes of
insight. Finally, she produces a series of images of thought-shapes.
These are abstract visual figures Fisher uses self-reflexively to picture
the kinds of thinking that at one level locate her work in a history of
ideas and at another describe the lines of thought she wishes her work to
initiate. The result is the construction of a Denkbild as a complex, multi-
dimensional and movable ‘scaffolding of ideas held aloft by technology’
(Fisher, 2002).
To understand Circle’s inheritance of the German Denkbild’s mode of
story-telling/story-thinking/picture-thinking, it is necessary to look at the
text’s verbal track. Its content and tone differ starkly from its ancestors’.
Rather than offer a discourse mostly in the third person on public mat-
ters, Circle narrates predominantly in the first person about private mat-
ters.4 The work resembles what Annette Kuhn (2010) calls a ‘memory
text’ that plumbs the history of the lives of girls and women over four
generations in a family. The verbal fragments might be considered merely
subjective and contingent, particularly because their subject matter
relates to women’s lives, which too often are relegated to categories of
irrelevance. However, Fisher’s text is keenly aware of claims like
Adorno’s in Minima Moralia that ‘social analysis can garner incompar-
ably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded’ (Adorno,
2005: 17). Accordingly, it cultivates a form that seems personal and
poetic and yet is constructed around an armature that is philosophical-
critical. Circle thus radically posits that thought is everyday experience as
much as it is a tool that sculpts a new form of puzzling about experience.
Covering the period of second-wave feminism from the 1960s onward,
Circle offers a multitude of snapshots that can be approached in any
order. One set of alignments between the fragments concerns trauma.
Daughters lose their mothers, grandmothers lose their daughters,
mothers lose their sons, and women lose their minds. But these traumas
are imbricated in another set of alignments that pertain to forces of
creativity and connectivity.
The speaker’s mother, who abandons the family to pursue a path away
from feminine conformity and domesticity, is initially presented as a
wellspring of creativity. Like the liberated women of her generation,
she is exhilarating and larger-than-life, capable of animating the every-
day domestic world with color, texture, and excitement:

We have mothers who cry, sleep all day, and weave curtains of
beads we later choke on. We have the kind of mothers who do
not know Heimlich but who will shake us upside down to get

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Tschofen 11

beads or pennies out and when they laugh they spin us around and
around until we are sick. We have mothers who make their own
poisonous pigment and keep vats of mulch on the patio. Mothers
we need to tuck into bed after parties. Mothers we tell to please get
more milk and who’s sleeping in my bed?

The montage sequence of everyday domestic objects and practices such

as beads and composting and free sexuality represents some of the his-
torically-specific cultural constructs characteristic of the moment in the
women’s liberation movement. But their valence is also mythical. These
mothers who have stepped out of the muster of patriarchy are fairies and
witches, their powers alluring and dangerous. In fact, for the children,
these mythic mothers are reckless. Their arts and crafts are choking haz-
ards, their playfulness literally nauseating. Hunger and neglect and poi-
soning lurk on the sidelines of creative freedom, and later abandonment
becomes its inevitable consequence.
Yet the two sides of the ‘thought-image’ are not offered as a binary
consisting of a positive and a negative representation of femininity.
Instead, they demarcate perspectives on female rebellion that takes
shape amidst myriad competing practices and discourses at specific his-
torical moments, in a complex field of interrelationships. Neither histor-
ical/mythic nor subjective understandings of rebellion tell the whole
truth, and so the ‘thought-image’ holds these perspectives in relational
tension with one another in a way that does not resolve with the privile-
ging of either.
One key to understanding the significance of the interrelational dimen-
sion of the ‘thought-image’ about the mother resides in the economy of
making that it invokes. A whole range of exchanges of small quotidian
gestures and everyday things are played out throughout the work as a
whole. These gestures and things represent what Michael Hardt calls
‘caring labor’ – a kind of affective labor that de-instrumentalizes produc-
tion through an economy of exchange based on generosity and reci-
procity (1999: 96). What they do is create a structure of meaning, a
locus of intimacies and sharing that has the capacity to emplace subjects,
that is, to locate them in meaningful (or fractured) personal and social
networks and epistemological frameworks (Malpas, 2012).
The speaker’s mother in Circle lives her life in freedom as though it
were art. Her rebellion is fashioned after a Romantic model of the artist
as solitary genius who must remove himself from the world. This model,
which Robert Currie describes as a ‘pernicious ideology’ associated with
forces like capitalism and individualism, exerts a cost on all involved
(Currie, 1974: 10). In contrast, Jilly, the speaker’s grandmother who
raises the speaker when her mother disappears, offers a different image
of art modeled on the economy of the gift, which is the very antithesis of
commodity exchange. The gift is the inner life of art; it ‘makes a

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12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

connection’ (Hyde, 2007: 73). When gifts ‘circulate’, argues Lewis Hyde,
‘their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its
wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges’ (2007: xx).
The importance of gift-exchange becomes visible in the series of
‘thought-images’ treating the grandmother. Jilly is a cook who lovingly
makes turtle pancakes and emergency brownies. Importantly, Jilly is also
a story-teller whose medium provides continuity and connection. In one
fragment, Jilly draws a room full of children into a fanciful universe,
giving each child the gift of their own personalized story when she
takes them by the hand and leads them, blindfolded, into a space trans-
formed by their own imaginations:

Blindfolded in the hallway until it’s our turn to be led across the
bridge of chairs. The makeshift gymnasium of the living room
turned upside down just for us. No one is scared because that’s
Jilly holding after all, who has their hand, who is telling the story
about the friendly lion hiding just over the next chair, the beautiful
birds overhead. Make-believe story composed on the spot for every
child. Tell me when you close your eyes what is it you like to
imagine the most. She starts there.

If Benjamin used the metaphor of the ragpicker who collects the

material traces of historical constellations, Jilly is the bricoleur whose
mythopoetical activity produces constellations of meaning (Lévi-Strauss,
1966).
This fragment detailing a mythopoetical activity of production has a
counterpart in a fragment that pictures the visit of an older woman, the
‘mad Mrs. Smith’. The young speaker is asked to set up two chairs – one
for Mrs Smith and one for her son Harold – but Harold never appears.
The speaker learns that the boy has died. This arranging of chairs serves
to delineate a space that makes present the dead boy’s absence through
the staging of a performance designed to give substance to a memory that
is pregnant with that which has passed away. The significance of the
performance within the larger ‘thought-image’ it belongs to is, like in
so many of Circle’s ‘thought-images’, that it represents another form
of making that is offered as a gift.
In the Frankfurt School’s Denkbilder, the social always exists on the
horizon, for the genre is fundamentally political (Richter, 2007: 21). The
genre’s purpose was to disrupt thinking in ways that would fundamen-
tally transform and heal the atrophied world. They thought this could
happen because, as Bloch wrote, ‘thought creates the world where some-
thing can be transformed’ (Bloch, 2006: 159). But within the German
texts, the writers are alone. They address social issues from a stance that
is not strongly embedded in the everyday world they address. In contrast,
in the ‘thought-images’ of Circle, the speaker is in her world, and that

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Tschofen 13

world is populated with neighbors, friends, and family members. As she

speaks to us, the viewers/listeners of the piece, she speaks with them. The
‘thought-images’ we receive become even more strongly heterogeneous
because they are articulated from a place where many different practices
of thinking are being shared. More than the Frankfurt School, then,
Circle illuminates how, as the product of both creative and affective
labor, thought initiates not just action but interaction.
There is another important layer of meaning in Fisher’s work that
must be understood to appreciate it as philosophy rather than simply
as art. Fisher evokes a series of abstract visual figures that have been
important to the philosophers her work is in dialogue with. I describe
these sculptural figures as thought-shapes. By this I mean the shapes that
philosophers invoke to describe the path their argument takes. For exam-
ple, the spiral was used to signify the dialectic, while the fold, according
to Deleuze, describes Leibniz’s work. By invoking a series of such images
of thought’s shapes, Circle both situates its own form in a history of
philosophical ideas about the nature of theoretical thinking and also
describes the forms of thinking she innovates.
One of the central ideas from which Fisher claims she took her cue was
Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s notion of the constellation
(Konstellation) (Fisher, 2002). A constellation is formed when observers
draw lines between otherwise random points, bringing what is distant
and disconnected into structures of meaning. Benjamin uses the term to
describe his methods of thinking about history in Passegenwerk, for
example, where he positioned past and present events in relation to
each other in surprising ways, without imposing historicist explanatory
models that merely tell the sequence of events as though counting ‘beads
on a rosary’ (Benjamin, 1968: 263). The concept of the constellation also
served for Benjamin and Adorno as a figure for broader strategies for the
configuration of ideas in art or philosophy in a ‘contingent and transient’
pattern as part of a method for awakening critical thinking (Gilloch,
2002: 20). In either case, as a way of re-figuring historical understanding
or critical thinking more generally, the figure of the constellation pictures
a way to make leaps of understanding possible as new connections sur-
face that were not visible before. Fisher invokes the constellation and its
‘multidimensional form’ to describe her Augmented Reality installation’s
arrangements of fragments that traverse the personal and the collective,
the subjective and the objective, the past and present (Fisher, 2002). The
open structure of her memory-text launches concrete and conceptual
elements into ‘changing trial combinations’, and thus charts a new
kind of course for critical inquiry (Adorno, 1977: 120).
Another thought-shape in Fisher’s work is the circle invoked in the
title. Even more than the constellation, the circle has a long history in
philosophy. Hegel described the whole of philosophy as a ‘circle of cir-
cles’ in which ‘each is a necessary member of the organization’ (1968: 25).

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14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Karl Marx borrowed the figure from Hegel to juxtapose a model of

history as a cyclical pattern of eternal return to a preferred dialectical
understanding of historical change where no return ends up in exactly the
same place. Heidegger later used the figure of the circle to describe a
method of discovery that circumvents the linear modes of thinking of
philosophy and historiography: ‘not only is the main step from work to
art a circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we
attempt circles this circle’ (1971: 18).
Frankfurt School writers also developed the figure of the circle as a
model for thought. In a talk, Fisher explicitly refers to a passage by
Adorno in which he links the figure of the constellation to the circle to
describe the shape and movement of theoretical thinking:

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would

like to unseal, hoping that it will fly open like the lock of a well-
guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single
number, but to a combination of numbers. (Fisher, 2002; Adorno,
1973: 163)

Adorno’s prose about theoretical thought is circling its target, reaching

for a key that will unlock a concept, knowing that the key will never quite
fit. For Fisher, this is an image that figures her project’s own relationship
to a form of knowledge she wants to maintain as fleeting. Moreover, the
image of the key as a combination of numbers has special resonance for
Fisher. Adorno was writing in a pre-digital era, but in the present, the
numerical key can be seen as a figure for the computer code out of which
the work’s thoughts can circle.
However, the thought-shapes of the constellation and the circle used to
both describe the path of the work’s thinking and situate that thinking in
larger patterns of philosophical thought are generalized and impersonal.
Circle’s interrelational aesthetic is intimate. The last, and perhaps most
important, figure or image of thought’s shapes that Fisher’s digital philo-
sophical text proposes is thus the most everyday and the most complex.
Adding to the list of analogies the writers of Denkbilder reached for to
describe their work, Circle subtly proposes one that I describe as the
dynamic sculptural figure of circulation. With this figure, Circle finds a
new emblem and model of its own lyrico-philosophical form that the
writers of the Frankfurt School had not developed.
According to Marx (2000) in the Grundrisse, circulation consists of
two elements: commodities, and a circuit of exchange. In this sense, cir-
culation is well suited to a philosophical text that pictures an alternative
system of gift exchange that propels thought and experience towards a
self-sustaining network of social relations. But in a text that, through its
medium, brings to life static or inanimate matter, circulation takes on
different meanings. Circulation describes the way a screen that pulses

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Tschofen 15

with sound and light is animated by the user. These physical gestures
intervene in the material world of things to bring sounds and images
to life. This is important because, as Circle solicits bodily engagement
with animate and inanimate matter, it puts pressure on traditional phil-
osophy’s order of the symbolic and of language (Kristeva, 1984: 26).
Another aspect of the circulatory system of the work describes the
movements and flows at the site of the installation where objects and
screens circulate among viewers. With these gestures of free exchange
among viewers, Circle forges a robust interconnected system that turns,
as Bourriaud puts it, ‘the beholder into a neighbor’ (2009: 43). The
thoughts move and are moving. Theoretical thinking becomes a com-
pound act that includes listening, looking, touching, moving, and feeling
as well as sharing. Where constellations and circles model ways of think-
ing about the configurations of ideas and the circuitous paths of know-
ledge, the circulatory thought-system brings to these models a notion of
theoretical praxis as a life-sustaining endeavor.
Fisher’s digital Denkbild brings these twinned notions of circulation as
animation and as connectivity together through a fragmented ‘thought-
image’ that describes a heartbeat. The heartbeat is transmitted to the
female figures through the medium of a gold bracelet that is passed
down through the generations. The bracelet is a circle, circulated through
the family, connecting mothers to daughters despite emotional, geo-
graphical, and temporal separation:

My grandmother was raised by her grandmother too. Her mother

has a bad heart and dies when my grandmother was ten. Years later,
my grandmother’s friend convinces Jilly to go see a psychic. My
grandmother is wearing her mother’s gold bracelet. Let me hold
that says the psychic. Whoever owned this had a bad heart. You
can still hear it beating. Thump thump.

Thump thump. The pulse in the bracelet is a strong signal from the past
that can only be heard by those who listen differently. Thump thump.
We are reminded that the heart is the powerful instrument driving the
first and ultimate network; listening for it carefully, we can sense a
potent, human alternative to the networked cultures of an information
age.
In a separate ‘thought-image’ the speaker holds her baby – the fourth
generation in this family of women. With a gesture much like that of the
viewer who reaches into the box of the installation to handle artifacts
from the past, the baby reaches for the golden circle with the hidden
heartbeat:

Harriet wants to make words. I know she does. I coo and make
rolling rrrs and gentle purrs near her ears. Harriet waits for me to

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16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

finish and then makes he he sounds. She wants birthday parties with
turtle pancakes and stories made up on the spot I think. She needs
her Jilly. . . . She sits on the lap of her own mad Mrs. Smith. When
did I eat my last turtle pancake? Crying into the brownie batter.
Hoo hoo hoo Harriet says. She grabs my bracelet with the hidden
heartbeat. You can still hear it beating. Thum thum thum tha-
thump.

The mother is holding onto the baby. The baby is holding the bracelet,
which in turn holds the heartbeat of the past. If grasping can be a tactile
gesture or a cognitive one, a practice of the hand or of the mind, this
digital Denkbild proposes a kind of thinking that draws both together in
a circuit.
‘To touch the world’, Esther Leslie offers in an essay on Walter
Benjamin, ‘is to know the world’ (1998: 6). There are different kinds of
knowledge that can come out of touch. The kind of knowledge produced
by the tactile capacities of the Augmented Reality medium can connect
thought to gesture and gesture to action. In Circle, viewers reach into the
suitcase and retrieve pieces of everyday culture. They manipulate these
objects and the screens, passing them to other viewers, inadvertently
sculpting a kind of social space between each other. Touch here becomes
the palliative to the subject-object dichotomy, and the hinge upon which
philosophy opens itself to the world.
There is the knowledge that resides in making. Circle’s story-telling/
story-thinking/picture-thinking returns continually to the theme of cre-
ation. Turtle pancakes and brownies, caressing, purring, cooing, hooing:
all these modes of knowledge conjured in Fisher’s ‘thought-images’
reside beyond the limits of philosophical language. Yet, Circle tells us,
they have the potential to launch new theoretical insights that are at once
subjective and contingent, anchored in the concrete and also powerfully
indeterminate. These practices must be understood as examples of a new
kind of interrelational philosophical praxis – maybe now Handwerk
instead of Kunstwerk, Denkplastik instead of Denkbild – that encapsulates
the radical modes of everyday knowing the text’s image fragments seek to
pass on.
Adorno concludes his Denkbild, Minima Moralia, with the following
injunction: ‘Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the
world, reveal . . . its rifts and crevices. . . . To gain such perspec-
tives . . . entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the
task of thought’ (2005: 247). This is precisely what Fisher’s interrela-
tional philosophy has accomplished. Circle offers an example of how
new media art can intervene in contemporary theoretical debates about
the nature and possibilities of art’s philosophical modes of thinking.
Fisher’s updated Denkbild makes creative use of a new digital medium’s
capabilities of conjoining the material and the virtual in an immanent

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Tschofen 17

demonstration of the conditionality and incommensurability of know-

ledge, estranging the world while drawing it near. Circle’s complex sculp-
tural and dynamic figurations of thoughts are rooted in the everyday,
anchored in individual experience and yet capable of producing shared
experiences through meaningful circuits of exchange. By constructing
what Bourriaud calls a ‘hands-on utopia’ (2009: 9), Circle offers philoso-
phy in a sensuously graspable form, one capable of illuminating not only
the traumas of modernity but also, and more importantly, of animating
points of resistance, resilience, and strength.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Dave Colangelo, Sydney Tyber and Chelsea Olsen for research assistance,
Stuart Murray, Jennifer Burwell, Lorraine Janzen, and Matthew Kronby for reading
drafts, as well as Caitlin Fisher for providing access to the work along with fruitful
discussions of it.

Notes
1. Circle was shortlisted in 2011 for the UK New Media Writing Prize. It was
awarded the ‘Jury’s Choice’ Award at the Electronic Literature Organization
Conference Media Art show in June 2012. For a still photo of the installation
see: http://futurecinema.ca/arlab/?p=175. Video documentation can be
viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9i9jRrolKk.
2. See Georg Simmel’s Aphorisms, published in this journal (Swedberg and
Reich, 2010).
3. Most of the scholarship on the genre has focused on the relationship between
the Denkbild and a restricted corpus of high-art practices such as the baroque
emblem (Kirst, 1994), or on technologies of reproduction such as photog-
raphy (Jennings, 2009, 2011) and cinema (Hansen, 2012). Sieg’s writing on
Kracauer is the only one that underlines the importance of the everyday for
the visual character of the texts, but he does not explore whether this is
characteristic of the work of other Frankfurt School writers (Sieg, 2010).
4. The exception is Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, whose frequently memoiristic
mode of narration has the most in common with Circle’s.

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Monique Tschofen is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson

University. She writes on word-image relations, ekphrasis, cinema, and
digital culture.

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