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Front Matter
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997)
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Critical
$8.00 Inquiry
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Critical
Inquiry
Autumn 1997, Volume 24, Number 1
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1 Harlem on Our Minds

Michael Fried 13 Thoughts on Caravaggio
Andreas Huyssen 57 The Voids of Berlin
Brigid Doherty 82 "See: We Are All Neurasthenics!" or,
The Trauma of Dada Montage
James A. W Heffernan 133 Looking at the Monster:
Frankenstein and Film
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 159 Blankness as a Signifier

Robert Pogue Harrison 176 The Names of the Dead
Jeffrey T Schnapp 191 The Fabric of Modern Times
Fredric Jameson 246 Culture and Finance Capital
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Harlem on Our Minds
Author(s): Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Source: Critical Inquiry , Autumn, 1997, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 1-12
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Harlem on Our Minds
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him.
The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate
him. Then, if he is wise, he will go away, any place-yes, he will even
go over to Jersey. But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until
the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums
and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hope-
less, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his
romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and
the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the
rest of humanity.
-PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
It was loving the City that distracted me and gave me ideas. Made
me think I could speak its loud voice and make the sound human. I
missed the people altogether.
-TONI MORRISON
The idea of a black renaissance has a long and curious history in Ameri-
can culture.
Writing in Lippincott's Magazine in 1889, an anonymous reviewer, la-
menting the absence of the Great American Novel, predicted that a truly
sublime American literature would be created not by a man but by a
woman, and an African American woman at that:
Fate keeps revenge in store. It was a woman who, taking the wrongs
of the African as her theme, wrote the novel that awakened the world
Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997)

? 1997 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/97/2401-0002$02.00. All rights reserved.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:46:38 UTC
2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Harlem on Our Minds
to their reality, and why should not the coming novelist be a woman
as well as an African? She-the woman of that race-has some claims
on Fate which are not yet paid up.
This artist, the reviewer went on to predict, would emerge at the forefront
of a bold new movement in the arts, a veritable renaissance in blackface.
With Toni Morrison's receipt of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature and
the unprecedented number of black artists at work in so many genres
today, it is difficult not to recognize the signs that African Americans are
in the midst of a cultural renaissance.
Today's African American renaissance is the fourth such movement
in the arts in this century. It is also the most successful and the most
sustained. The first occurred at the turn of the century. In 1901, the black
Bostonian William Stanley Braithwaite, a distinguished critic and poet,
argued that "we are at the commencement of a 'negroid' renaissance ...
that will have as much importance in literary history as the much spoken
of and much praised Celtic and Canadian renaissance." At the end of a
full decade of unprecedented literary productions by black women-who
published a dozen novels and edited their own literary journal between
1890 and 1900-and precisely when the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the
novelists Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt, and the essayists
W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper were at the height of their cre-
ative powers, a critic in The A. M. E. Church Review in 1904 declared the
birth of "The New Negro Literary Movement," likening it, as had Braith-
waite, to the Celtic renaissance.
It was Booker T. Washington who first hoped to institutionalize the
cultural and political force of this New Negro. In 1900 Washington en-
listed several of his fellows (including his nemesis, Du Bois) to construct
an image unfettered by the racist burdens of the past, a past character-
ized by two-and-a-half centuries of slavery and nearly half a century of
disenfranchisement, peonage, black codes, and legalized Jim Crow-not
to mention the vicious assault on negro freedom and political rights en-
acted in literature, in theater and on the vaudeville stage, and through-
out the popular visual arts, in the form of a blanket of demeaning
stereotypes of deracinated, ugly, treacherous, hauntingly evil Sambo im-
ages. At the beginning of the century, families could encounter these
images throughout their homes from the time they turned off their
alarm clocks in the morning and sat down to their egg cups or tea cosies,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humani-

ties at Harvard, as well as director of Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
for Afro-American Research. He is the author, most recently, of Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), coeditor, with Kwame Anthony
Appiah, of Identities (1995), and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1997 3
napkin rings or place mats at breakfast, to the time they spent in the
evenings playing parlor games, reading advertisements in magazines, or
addressing U.S. government postcards. Such an onslaught of stereotypes,
reinforced subliminally in advertisements and on trading cards, in pulpits
on Sundays, and even in the law, demanded resistance and an organized
response. "We must turn away from the memories of the slave past,"
Washington demanded, no doubt with this proliferation of negations of
black humanity in mind. "A New Negro for a New Century," he argued,
would be the answer.
This New Negro movement, which took at least three forms before
Alain Locke enshrined it in the Harlem Renaissance in 1925, drew its
artistic inspiration from across the Atlantic in Europe. First, Anton Dvo-
rak in the early 1890s declared spirituals America's first authentic contri-
bution to world culture and urged classical composers to draw upon them
to create sui generis symphonies. A decade later, Pablo Picasso stumbled
onto "dusky Manikins" at an ethnographic museum and forever trans-
formed European art, as well as Europe's official appreciation of the art
from the African continent. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-7)-
the signature event in the creation of cubism-stands as a testament to
the shaping influence of African sculpture and to the central role that
African art played in the creation of modernism. The cubist mask of mod-
ernism covers a black Bantu face. African art-ugly, primitive, debased
in 1900; sublime, complex, valorized by 1910-was transformed so dra-
matically in the cultural imagination of the West, in such an astonishingly
short period, that the potential for the political uses of black art and liter-
ature in America could not escape the notice of African American intellec-
tuals, especially Du Bois, himself educated in Europe and cosmopolitan
to the core, and Locke, the Harvard-trained philosopher, who went to
Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1907, the year after Picasso stumbled un-
cannily onto the African sublime, and who studied aesthetics in Germany
in the heady years of the modernist explosion. If European modernism
was truly mulatto, the argument went, then African Americans could save
themselves politically through the creation of the arts. This renaissance,
the second and most famous in black history, would fully liberate the
Negro-at least its advanced guard.
The Harlem or New Negro Renaissance was born through the mid-
wifery of Locke, who edited a special issue of Survey Graphic magazine
entitled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" in March of 1925, which
was followed by the 446-page anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation,
replete with illustrations by the German expressionist Winold Reiss and
the African American Aaron Douglas. Writers such as Langston Hughes,
Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston-
the fundaments of the black canon today-came of age at this time, lead-
ing the New York Herald Tribune to announce that America was "on the
edge, if not already in the midst, of what might not improperly be called

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a Negro renaissance." Locke liked the term, too: part 1 of his anthology
is called "The Negro Renaissance." Locke even urged young black visual
artists to imitate the European modernist, so heavily influenced by sub-
Saharan African art. "By being modern," Locke declared, with no hint of
irony, "we are being African."
For Locke and his fellow authors, the function of a cultural renais-
sance was inherently political: the production of great artworks, by
blacks, in sufficient numbers, would lead to the Negro's "reevaluation by
white and black alike." And this reevaluation would facilitate the Negro's
demand for civil rights and for social and economic equality. Stopped
short by the 1929 stock market crash, which hurt the white patrons upon
whom the Renaissance was so dependent, the Renaissance writers (a tiny
group, numbering perhaps fifty), whom Locke thought of as "the Negro's
cultural adolescence," were never able to nurture black art to its formal
adulthood, nor were they able to usher in the new world of civil rights
through art.
The third renaissance was the Black Arts movement, which lasted
from 1965 to the early seventies. Defining themselves against the Harlem
Renaissance and deeply rooted in black cultural nationalism, the Black
Arts writers saw themselves as the artistic wing of the Black Power move-
ment. Writers such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez saw
black art as fulfilling a function, primarily the political liberation of black
people from white racism. Constructed on a fragile foundation of the
overtly political, this renaissance was the most short-lived of all. Yet many
of the artists who have come of age in the decades since were shaped or
deeply influenced by this period. By 1975, with the Black Arts movement
dead (Baraka had become a Marxist in 1973), Black Studies departments
in peril, and a homogenized disco music on the rise, many of us won-
dered if black culture were not undergoing some sort of profound iden-
tity crisis. A decade later, however, black writers, visual artists, musicians,
dancers, and actors would enter a period of creativity unrivaled in Ameri-
can history.
Critics date the current renaissance variously, some tracing its origins
to the resurgence of black women's literature and criticism in the early
eighties, especially in the works of Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, Al-
ice Walker, and Toni Morrison. These women and their successors were
able, simultaneously, to reach a large, traditionally middle-class, white
female readership plus a new black female audience that had been largely
untapped. The growth of this community of readers has resulted in an
unrivalled number of novels by and about black women since 1980, as
well as an unprecedentedly large African American market for books
about every aspect of the black experience. While it is always arbitrary to
try to date a cultural movement, it seems reasonable to note an upsurge
in black creativity in 1987, the year in which August Wilson's Fences pre-
miered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published her masterpiece, Be-

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loved. Both would receive Pulitzer Prizes. In that same year, PBS aired
Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize, the six-part documentary of the civil
rights era; Cornell scholar Martin Bernal published Black Athena, a bold
revisionist history that locates the origins of classical Greek civilization in
Africa. As Nelson George says in his Buppies, B-boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes
on Post-Soul Black Culture, T-shirts with slogans such as "Black By Popular
Demand" and "It's A Black Thing, You Wouldn't Understand" spread
across the nation from predominately black colleges. Moreover, the rap
revolution was well under way at about this time. Meanwhile, Spike Lee
and Wynton Marsalis were establishing themselves as masters of film and
jazz. Since that year, the production of cultural artifacts in virtually every
field and genre has been astonishing.
The grandchildren of Du Bois's "Talented Tenth," those who were
able to profit from the affirmative action programs implemented in the
late sixties that are facing such a harsh onslaught today, have thus for the
past decade been in the midst of a great period of artistic productivity,
much of it centered in New York. The signs of cultural vibrancy are un-
mistakable: in dance, Bill T. Jones and Judith Jamison; in literature, Toni
Morrison and Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley and John Edgar Wideman;
in drama, August Wilson; in poetry, Rita Dove; in opera, Anthony Davis
and Thulani Davis; in jazz, Wynton Marsalis and Cassandra Wilson; pub-
lic intellectuals such as Cornel West and bell hooks, Greg Tate and Lisa
Jones; the visual artists Martin Puryear and Lorna Simpson; the rap mu-
sicians Public Enemy and Queen Latifah; the filmmakers Spike Lee, Julie
Dash, and John Singleton-the list is stunningly long. From television to
op-ed pages, from the academy to hip-hop, never before have so many
black artists and intellectuals achieved so much success in so very many
fields. Do their efforts amount to a renaissance?
"It depends on how you define 'renaissance,'" Cornel West has ar-
gued. "The rebirth by means of a recovery of classical heritage, I wouldn't
call it that. What we do have, however, is a high-quality ferment, a prolif-
eration of a variety of new voices that are transgressing the boundaries in
place. These artists exhibit a certain kind of self-confidence, a refusal to
accept the belief that they have to prove themselves. Artists such as
Wright and Baldwin clearly wrestled on a different terrain."
A different terrain, indeed. Since 1968, when the civil rights move-
ment, a century old, ended so abruptly with the murder of Dr. King,
affirmative action and entitlement programs have dramatically affected the
black community's collective economic health. Not only has the size of
its middle class quadrupled since 1968 but, according to the 1990 cen-
sus, almost as many blacks between the ages of 25 and 44 are college
graduates as are high school dropouts, whereas "just twenty years ago,
there were five times as many black high school dropouts as college grad-
uates in the workforce," as Sam Roberts reported in the New York Times
on 18 June 1995. Between 1970 and 1990, moreover, the percentage of

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blacks who had attended some college increased from 9.1 percent to 33.2
percent, of those graduating from college from 5.1 percent to 11 percent,
the highest in history, and of those with some postgraduate work from
1.2 percent to 4.1 percent. By 1989, 1 in 7 black families were middle
class (earning $50,000 or more), compared to 1 in 3 white families. 'Just a
generation ago," Roberts writes, "only 1 in 17 black families" could claim
middle-class status; the increase is clearly the result of governmental
"prodding." For African Americans, however, it is the best of times and
the most worst of times. While part of the black community has experi-
enced two decades of unprecedented growth, another part lags dramati-
cally behind. Black America has simultaneously the largest middle class
and the largest underclass in its history. And the current renaissance of
black art and culture-with its inherent schisms and tensions-is un-
folding against this conflicted socioeconomic backdrop. Let us pursue
this paradox.
Despite their remarkable gains, a certain sense of precariousness
haunts the new black middle class and the art that it consumes. Its own
economic uplift remains perilously novel. An ambivalent romance with
the street and b-boy culture-an intimacy, a freshness, but also a sense
that one could go back "there" at any time-haunts much contemporary
black literature, film, and hip-hop. The partition between the classes, in
the minds of many blacks, is as thin as rice paper.
But because the shtetl memory, as it were, is still so very recent, the
romanticization of the ghetto is accompanied by its demonization. The
movement to censor gangsta rap, for instance, can be seen as part of
the black bourgeoisie's anxiety, its deep-seated fear that it, too, is just one
or two paychecks away from the fate of the underclass. The black middle
class defines itself by consumption, but it is never free from the past and
presence of racism. In fact, it often defines itself against this very history.
The nature and size of the new black middle class is significant here
because of what it implies about patronage and the economics of black
art: whereas the Harlem Renaissance writers were almost totally depen-
dent upon the whims of white patrons who marketed their works to a
predominately white readership, the sales of some of the most phenome-
nally successful black authors, such as Terry McMillan, the Delaney
sisters, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, are being sustained to an un-
precedented degree by black consumers. The same is true, if to a lesser
extent, in the other arts. Thelma Golden's "Black Male" exhibit, for in-
stance, dramatically lifted annual attendance figures at the Whitney Mu-
seum by attracting a large number of new black patrons. The rise of the
black middle class is, thus, simultaneous with the rise of black art, espe-
cially the black novel. And black novelists-black women novelists in par-
ticular-seem to owe a large part of their appeal to their capacity to
express the desires and anxieties of this new middle class more freely
from the inside than any previous generation could possibly have done.

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(In this way, McMillan's role within black culture is similar to that of Defoe
and Richardson in the eighteenth century.) Quite often, too, these black
writers have black editors and black agents, and their books are reviewed
by other black authors, assigned by black teachers, and sold in black
bookstores.
This new presence and authority of blacks in cultural institutions,
largely a result of affirmative action programs and the active recruitment
of minorities, is unprecedented in American history. And signs of the cul-
tural flowering that define a renaissance are everywhere. On two occa-
sions in the past two years, no less than three black authors appeared
simultaneously on the New York Times best seller list (one author, Toni Mor-
rison, appeared in both the fiction and nonfiction categories). "All black
books these days are trade books," commented Erroll McDonald, a Yale
graduate and vice president at Pantheon Books. "The 'one-nigger syn-
drome' is dead." Black authors have won an unprecedented number of
prizes in the last decade, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Critics'
Circle Awards, National Book Awards, and PEN/Faulkner Awards. The
culmination of these achievements, of course, was Toni Morrison's No-
bel Prize.
In addition, traditionally white cultural institutions such as the Whit-
ney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum,
and the Lincoln Center Theater have integrated their boards of directors,
and jazz has become a part of the canon of American music as defined by
both the Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian Institution. Black Studies
departments have never had larger enrollments or a stronger, more solid
presence at America's premier research institutions. Public intellectuals
representing a wide array of ideologies, such as Gerald Early, Cornel
West, Stephen Carter, Derrick Bell, Lani Guinier, Stanley Crouch, Mi-
chele Wallace, bell hooks, Trey Ellis, Shelby Steele, Randall Kennedy, and
Patricia Williams, publish their opinions regularly in a variety of national
journals. George Wolfe's appointment as the director of the New York
Public Theater is symptomatic of the growing "crossover" authority that
blacks increasingly have come to possess within broader American cul-
tural organizations. And, perhaps most dramatically of all, black film-
makers, following the lead of Spike Lee, have never been more numerous
or better funded than they are today. If we add television shows such as
The Cosby Show, A Different World, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and The Oprah
Winfrey Show to the mix, it is clear that the black presence in American
society has never been more prevalent and more widely consumed.
One reason for the newest renaissance is that the generation that
integrated historically white institutions in the late sixties and early sev-
enties has now, two decades later, returned to those very institutions to
occupy positions of power and authority. Never before have so many
black creative artists produced so much art, in so many genres, for such
a diversified, integrated audience. Case in point: hip-hop, once the

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marching music of a defiant oppositional culture, is now the music of the

white suburbs, the American Bandstand of the 1990s, the premier Ameri-
can music.
The current renaissance is characterized by a specific awareness of

previous black traditions, which these artists echo, imitate, parody, and
revise, self-consciously, in acts of riffing or signifying or sampling. As the
jazz and opera composer Anthony Davis puts it, "There are three differ-
ent strains in the black music revolution today-classical jazz (such as
Wynton Marsalis), avant jazz (such as Anthony Braxton), and the fusion
of hip-hop and jazz (such as the compositions of Steve Coleman). What
each shares, however," he continues, "is a common attempt to rediscover
the past." Davis's opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) is a prime
example. "What this is, is a renaissance of postmodernism, and postmod-
ernism, in America, is quintessentially black," he concludes.
This concern with the black cultural past and the self-conscious
grounding of a black postmodernism in a black nationalist tradition are
accompanied by a kind of nostalgia for the Black Power cultural politics
of the sixties and the blaxploitation films of the early seventies. Unlike
the earlier periods, however, the current movement defines itself by a
certain openness, a belated glasnost that allows for parodies such as
George Wolfe's play The Colored Museum (1986); Robert Townsend's Holly-
wood Shuffle (1987); Keenen Ivory Wayans's blaxploitation parody, I'm
Gonna Git You Sucka (1988); and, more recently, Rusty Cundieff's Fear of a
Black Hat (1994), a satire about the hip-hop generation.
The art of this period is also characterized by its deep self-confidence
in the range and depth of the black experience as a source for art. Rich-
ard Wright once predicted that if "the Negro merges into the mainstream
of American life, there might result actually a disappearance of Negro
literature-as such." As a Negro, he continued, he was "a rootless man."
Few black writers today would agree with Wright on either point. In fact,
the opposite seems to have occurred: black writers and artists seem to
have become more conscious of the specificities of their cultural traditions
rather than less conscious. Toni Morrison has frequently stated that she
is a black writer first, a writer second, effectively reversing decades of
attempts by black writers to make their work "universal" by writing about
whites. These artists presume that black experiences are universal experi-
ences. If, as Wright once put it, "the Negro is America's metaphor," this
generation seems to maintain that the experiences of African Americans
are metaphors for the entire human condition, with America itself stand-
ing as a metaphor for much that has been liberating as well as horrendous
in black and human history.
"What defines this renaissance, unlike the others," says the novelist
Jamaica Kincaid, "is that people like us are just getting started. Somebody
told me recently that literature is dead. But it's not that literature is dead;
it is that English literature is dead. It is as if someone has removed the

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hands from over our mouths, and you hear this long, piercing scream.
There really isn't much that is new to say about being a white person."
This art, she continues, is appealing not just because of its content but
because of its forms, "its ways of looking at the world, the way the world
has forced us to look at it. And what we, as artists, are saying is: 'this is
what it looks like.'"
Traditionally, black art has fallen into two large schools of representa-
tion. One we might think of as a lyrical, quasi-autobiographical modern-
ism (as found, say, in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), in which a questing protagonist succeeds
against oppressive racist odds. The other we can call realism or natural-
ism (as found, for instance, in Richard Wright's Native Son or Ann Petry's
The Street), in which a protagonist's life choices, and hence fate, are deter-
mined by forces, such as racism or capitalism, which are insurmount-
able-that is, unless the entire system is transformed by violent and
dramatic revolution.
In black postmodernist writing, much of the fiction being created by
black women in particular consists of coming-of-age tales in which racial
politics takes a secondary role to the unfolding of a sensitive, gendered
consciousness. Today, a politicized naturalism is more likely to be found
in black film, such as John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood, and, of course, in
gangsta rap, such as the dada vorticism of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation
of Millions to Hold Us Back, or in the rap-meets-poetry movement. The
most subtle and sophisticated of this art, however, such as Toni Morrison's
masterpiece Beloved, or Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, brings both tenden-
cies together, creating a new form, which we might think of as a lyrical
super-naturalism.
All renaissances are acts of cultural construction, attempting to sat-
isfy larger social and political needs. And the African American postmod-
ern renaissance is no exception. In their openness, their variety, their
playfulness with forms, their refusal to follow preordained ideological
lines, their sustained engagements with the black artistic past, the artists
of this renaissance seem as determined to define their work freely within
a black tradition as they are to consolidate a black presence within Ameri-
ca's corporate cultural institutions. "There are many neighborhoods in
what we might think of as a larger cultural community," Anthony Davis
muses. Given the sophistication of so much of this art, and given its dem-
onstrated power to turn a profit, it is highly likely that the achievements
of this renaissance will be the deepest, the longest-lasting, and the most
appreciated by the larger American society. "Today the white people want
to be colored," Jamaica Kincaid asserts. "There is no longer such a thing
as an 'American' culture. It's all black culture."
What lessons from the Harlem Renaissance can we draw upon to
critique our own?
Many critiques have been made of the Harlem Renaissance's putative

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faults and purported limitations, which range from overdependence on

white patronage to pandering to debased white taste in the form of primi-
tivistic depictions of black sensuality and hedonism in the literature, art,
music, and dance of the period. We can debate these claims and even
accept some, with enormous qualifications, as true, despite the fact that
all artists are dependent upon patronage (and all renaissances especially
so) and despite the fact that the literature created during the Harlem
Renaissance-especially the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, Langston
Hughes, and Sterling Brown, and the fictions of Jean Toomer and Zora
Neale Hurston-drew upon African American vernacular musical and
oral traditions to create sui generis African American modernist forms that
today, three-quarters of a century later, are judged to be canonical even
by the most conservative keepers of the American canon. What's more,
the literature created by these fifty-odd brave souls, black inscriptions on
a near tabula rasa, proved to be the fertile ground out of which emerged
writers such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, to
list just a few artists who use the Renaissance writers as their silent sec-
ond texts.
Harlem as a site of the black cultural sublime was invented by those
writers and artists at the turn of the century determined to transform
the stereotypical image of Negro Americans as ex-slaves, members of an
inherently inferior race-biologically and environmentally unfit for
mechanized modernity and its cosmopolitan forms of fluid identity-into
an image of a race of culture-bearers. To effect this transformation, the
New Negro would need a nation over which to preside. And that nation's
capital would be Harlem, that realm north of Central Park, centered be-
tween 130th and 145th Streets.
Since the earliest decades of this century, then, the lure of Harlem
has captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politi-
cians around the world. Stories are legion of African American and Afri-
can pilgrims progressing to Manhattan, then plunging headlong into the
ultimate symbolic black cultural space-the city within a city, the "Mecca
of the New Negro" (as Alain Locke put it)-that Harlem became in the
first quarter of the twentieth century. Fidel Castro's recent journey up-
town, recalling his famous sojourn at the Hotel Teresa thirty-five years
ago, is only the most recent of a long line of such pilgrimages into Ameri-
ca's very own heart of darkness. The list of pilgrims is long and distin-
guished, including Max Weber and Carl Jung, Federico Garcia Lorca
and Octavio Paz, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Kwame
Nkrumah and Wole Soyinka, Marcus Garvey and Malcom X, Ezekiel
Mphaphlele and Nelson Mandela, and so forth. "Harlem was like a great
magnet for the Negro intellectual," Hughes wrote, "pulling him from ev-
erywhere. Once in New York, he had to live in Harlem." Harlem was not

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so much a place as it was a state of mind, the cultural metaphor for black
America itself.
What does seem curious to me about the Harlem Renaissance-and
relevant to us here-is that its creation occurred precisely as Harlem was
turning into the great American slum. The death rate was 42 percent
higher than in other parts of the city. The infant mortality rate in 1928
was twice as high as in the rest of New York. Four times as many people
died from tuberculosis as in the white population. The unemployment
rate, according to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was 50 percent. There was no
way to romanticize these conditions, but Locke and his fellows valiantly
attempted to do so. Even James Weldon Johnson, one of the most politi-
cally engaged of all the Renaissance writers in his capacity as the first
black secretary of the NAACP, wrote Black Manhattan to create the fiction
of Harlem as a model of civility and black bourgeois respectability, rather
than as an example of the most heinous effects of urban economic exploi-
tation and residential segregation. For Johnson, Harlem was "exotic, col-
orful, sensuous; a place of laughing, singing, and dancing; a place where
life wakes up at night." Moreover, he continued, "Harlem is not merely a
Negro colony or community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro
city in the world. It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart of
Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections
of the city." Locke, always an optimist, whom Charles Johnson called "the
press agent of the New Negro," declared Harlem the cultural capital of
the black world: "Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem
has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin had for the New
Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia. Harlem, I grant you, isn't
typical-but it is significant, it is prophetic." The "Harlem" of literature
and the Harlem of socioeconomic reality were as far apart as Bessie Smith
was from Paul Whiteman. The valorization of black rhythm, spontaneity,
laughter, sensuality-all keywords of depictions of blacks by blacks at the
time-contrasted starkly with Harlem's squalor and the environmental
or structural limitations upon individual choices such as those finally de-
picted in Wright's Native Son (1940) in part as a reaction against what he
felt to be the Renaissance writers' bohemian decadence.
The Renaissance's fascination with primitivism, one could argue, has
today found a counterpart in three arenas of representation: the recon-
struction of the institution of slavery; the valorization of vernacular
cultural forms as a basis for a postmodern art; and the use of a lyrical
voice-of-becoming in fictions that depict the emergence of black female
protagonists with strong, resonant voices and self-fashioned identities.
Subjects heretofore to be avoided-such as slavery and the female tale of
the transcendence and emergence of the self-and vernacular linguistic
forms have all emerged like the return of the repressed as dominant
themes in African American literature. What remains to be explored,

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however, in the written arts of this renaissance, are the lives and times of
the grandchildren of the Bigger Thomases and Bessie Mearses of Native
Son, which by and large have been of interest primarily to young black
filmmakers, who far too often seem to be caught in the embrace of a
romantic primitivism, navigating us through the inner city more for sex-
ual titillation than for social critique. Given the stark statistics that we all
know so well describing the nightmare reality of black inner-city life-
one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 in prison, on pro-
bation, or on parole; 46 percent of all black children born at or beneath
the poverty line-one is forced to wonder where this generation's Bigger
Thomas is. Until this subject matter finds a voice as eloquent as that voice
of the newly emergent and aspiring middle-class black self, today's renais-
sance runs the risk of suffering the sorts of critique that we level against
the Harlem Renaissance seven full decades later. For there are two na-
tions in America, and these two nations, one hopeless, one full of hope,
are both black. African Americans live a hyphenated life in America. Mor-
rison's Beloved explores what the hyphenation of race costs. It is incum-
bent upon our artists now to explore what the hyphenation of class costs.
Perhaps it is no accident that the most interesting rendering of the
tension between the myth of Harlem and its social reality is to be found
not in a text produced in that period but in Morrison's Jazz, which is set
in Harlem in 1926. In this novel Morrison succeeds in creating a protago-
nist whose fate is as shaped by her environment as by her actions, in a
curious kind of stasis or equilibrium that seeks to resolve the tension be-
tween the naturalism of Richard Wright and Ann Petry on the one hand,
and the lyrical modernism of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Ralph Ellison on the other. "Word was," Morrison's narrator tells us, "that
underneath the good times and the easy money something evil ran the
streets and nothing was safe-not even the dead." It is in this novel that
the Harlem Renaissance finally finds its most sophisticated voice and its
most pointed critique, the newest renaissance grounding itself in the mir-
ror of the old, bridging that gap between the shadow and the act, the
myth and the reality, the fiction and the fact. Morrison's ultimate message
would seem to be a warning, a warning that it is only when our artists
today speak the city's "loud voice and make that sound human," avoiding
"miss[ing] the people altogether," in all their complexity, that this renais-
sance can claim to be the renaissance to end all renaissances. Much de-
pends on whether we get it.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:46:38 UTC
Thoughts on Caravaggio
Author(s): Michael Fried
REFERENCES
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
Thoughts on Caravaggio
Michael Fried
To someone like myself coming to Caravaggio studies from outside, it's

surprising to realize that during the past twenty-five years or more the
most discussed canvas by the master has probably been an early work
(actually a work from the later phase of his early period), the Boy Bitten by
a Lizard of circa 1596-97 (fig. 1). (The date just given follows the consen-
sus of recent opinion. Also, there are two versions of the Boy Bitten by a
Lizard, one in the National Gallery in London-the picture I shall be
working with-and another in the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Flor-
ence. Recent opinion is divided as to which is the original and which the
early copy; in fact both are superb and might well be by Caravaggio him-
self. Happily, connoisseurship in a technical sense isn't my concern in this
essay; what matters is that, in the present state of our knowledge, both
This essay was first drafted as a lecture for a symposium in honor of the late Louis Marin
held at Johns Hopkins University on 12-13 November 1993. Since then I have presented it
also at the University of California, Berkeley (as the first of two Una's Lectures), the Johns
Hopkins Villa Spelman in Florence, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the
Walters Art Gallery, Tufts University, Aalborg University, the Getty Research Institute for
the History of Art and the Humanities, Iowa University, Ohio State University, Humboldt
University in Berlin, the National Gallery in London, and the Temple Program in Rome.
On all those occasions I profited from postlecture discussions, but two follow-up seminars,
at Berkeley and at the Getty, were particularly stimulating. My thanks to Tom Laqueur and
Michael S. Roth respectively for arranging them, and to T. J. Clark and Richard Wollheim
(at Berkeley) and Roth and Salvatore Settis (at the Getty), among others, for helpful com-
ments and suggestions. I also owe special thanks to my Johns Hopkins colleagues Elizabeth
Cropper and Charles Dempsey for supporting my work on Caravaggio from the first. Elena
Calvillo, an advanced graduate student in the Johns Hopkins department of the history of

13

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
14 Michael Fried Thoughts on Caravaggio
canvases may be taken as faithful to Caravaggio's intentions.)' One of the

earliest mentions of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard is by Giovanni Baglione,
writing around 1625, roughly fifteen years after the artist's death. Bagli-
one reports how the youthful Caravaggio arrived in Rome from the town
of Caravaggio in Lombardy. "Then he moved into the house of the Cava-
liere d'Arpino [a successful painter] for a few months," Baglione writes.
"From there he tried to live by himself, and he painted some portraits of
himself in the mirror. The first was a Bacchus with different bunches of
grapes, painted with great care though a bit dry in style. He also painted
a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could al-
most hear the boy scream, and it was all done meticulously."2
art, gave me expert assistance with the notes, for which she has my gratitude. Finally, in the
course of preparing this essay for publication I reread after nearly fifteen years an unpub-
lished paper by Professor Sheila McTighe of Columbia University, written when she was a
graduate student at Yale, entitled "The Mirror of Narcissus: Beholder and Beheld in Cara-
vaggio's Early Work," in which she argues that various early paintings by Caravaggio, includ-
ing the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, were intended to function as virtual mirrors that would fix the
viewer before his image-at once shocking the viewer "into a single, timeless moment of
wonder" and "[absorbing him] into the study of naturalistic detail." This is significantly
different from my claims in the present essay, but we are in agreement as to the centrality
of the mirror "analogy" (her word) or dispositif (mine) in Caravaggio's art.
1. The version of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard now in the Longhi Foundation was pub-
lished (and later purchased) by Roberto Longhi in 1928 and 1929; see Longhi, "Quesiti
caravaggeschi: I, Registro dei tempi" and "II, I precedenti," Pinacotheca 1 (July-Aug. 1928):
17-33 and (Mar.-June 1929): 258-320; republished together in Opere complete di Roberto Lon-
ghi, 14 vols. (Florence, 1956- ), 4:81-143; see pp. 85, 114, 124. The other widely accepted
version, now in the National Gallery of London and the focus of my remarks in the first
part of this essay, was first published by Tancred Borenius, "An Early Caravaggio Rediscov-
ered," Apollo 2 (1925): 23-26. Although only the London picture appeared in the 1985
Caravaggio exhibition, both versions were discussed in the catalog entry by Mina Gregori;
see The Age of Caravaggio (exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5
Feb.-14 Apr. 1985; Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, 12 May-30 June 1985), pp.
236-41; hereafter abbreviated AC. Richard E. Spear's "The Critical Fortune of a Realist
Painter" in that catalog (pp. 22-27) provides a helpful discussion of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard
in relation to recent Caravaggio scholarship. For Caravaggio's biography according to the
extant documents and a thorough catalog of his surviving paintings, see Mia Cinotti, Michel-
angelo Merisi detto il Caravaggio: Tutte le opere (Bergamo, 1983). Cinotti prefers the Longhi
Foundation Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the London version; see pp. 435-37. The dates of indi-
vidual works given in this essay are drawn from recent scholarship on the painter, but in
many cases the question of dating remains open.
2. Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de' pittori, scultori, et architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII
del 1572 infino a' tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, ed. Jacob Hess and Herwarth Rdttgen,
Michael Fried is Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns

Hopkins University. His most recent book is Manet's Modernism, or, The
Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996). A collection of his art criticism, Art and
Objecthood, will appear this fall.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
~"?"' . :L
:??ii??;i;
:?~??
~::~:??
i ~II?? ? ????~~g~i.?.?. i:??..??r ?i?~;i:.L
;~~~?
?~?:
iii:'
"*""
iiil* "*?
:: ''"':
??a;:
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;r i
::""-:'
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:::?:?
:;*;:?;:??;??
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.~.
FIG. 1.-Caravaggio, Boy Biten by a Lizard, ca. 1596-97. O

lery, London. Photo: Museum.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
Much recent discussion of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard has focused on

the question of its symbolic meaning or lack of it. So for example (merely
to skim the surface of a large secondary literature) several art historians
have insisted that it must be understood in the context of early seicento
poetry; for others its meaning is Christian, the "androgynous" appear-
ance of the youth being "an intentional allusion to Love and Eternity";
another writer sees it as emblematizing the choleric temperament; still
another as representing Touch in a series of pictures illustrating the
senses; and Howard Hibbard, in an important book on the painter, sug-
gests that it should perhaps be read as a vanitas allegory, though he also
feels that "it has probably been overinterpreted," but then he emphasizes
the sexually symbolic connotations of roses worn behind the ear and the
middle finger and adds "there is no avoiding the need to interpret" (C,
p. 44).3 Indeed Hibbard pretty much endorses Donald Posner's view that
the Boy Bitten by a Lizard is one of a number of early works by Caravaggio
whose subject matter--"androgynous youths" in states of partial un-
dress-and mode of presentation-active "solicitations" of the specta-
tor-are explicitly "homosexual" or "homo-erotic."4 This is a tender crux
3 vols. (1642; Vatican, 1995), 1:136:
Poi and6 a stare in casa del Cavalier Gioseppe Cesari d'Arpino per alcuni mesi.
Indi provb a stare da se stesso, e fece alcuni quadretti da lui nello specchio ritratti.
Et il primo fu un Bacco con alcuni grappoli d'uve diverse, con gran diligenza fatte;
ma di maniera un poco secca. Fece anche un fanciullo, che da una lucerta, la quale
usciva da fiori, e da frutti, era morso; e parea quella testa veramente stridere, ed il
tutto con diligenza era lavorato.
The Italian text is reprinted along with an English translation by Walter Friedlaender, Cara-
vaggio Studies (Princeton, N.J., 1955), pp. 231-36, hereafter abbreviated CS; and by Howard
Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York, 1983), pp. 351-56; hereafter abbreviated C. I have followed
Hibbard's translation.
3. For Hibbard's discussion of the painting, see C, pp. 43-46. For Caravaggio's work
in the context of seicento poetry, see Eugenio Battisti, Rinascimento e Barocco (Turin, 1960),
pp. 213-14 n. 3; Luigi Salerno, "Poesia e simboli nel Caravaggio: I dipinti emblematici,"
Palatino 10 (1966): 107; and Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and
Caravaggio," Metropolitan MuseumJournal 26 (1991): 193-212. For a Christological interpre-
tation of the painting, see Maurizio Calvesi, "Caravaggio o la ricerca della salvazione," Storia
dell'arte, no. 9/10 (1971): 93-142, 106-8. For the painting as an emblem of the choleric
temperament, see Leonard J. Slatkes, "Caravaggio's Painting of the Sanguine Tempera-
ment," in Actes du XXIIe congres international d'histoire de l'art (Budapest, 1969); Evolution giner-
ale et diveloppements rigionaux en histoire de l'art, 3 vols. (Budapest, 1972), 2:17-24, 24; and
"Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard," Print Review, no. 5 (Spring 1976): 149-53. For the paint-
ing as a representation of the sense of touch, see Jane Costello, "Caravaggio, Lizard, and
Fruit," in Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch, Lucy
Freeman Sandler, and Patricia Egan (New York, 1981), p. 383.
4. Donald Posner, "Caravaggio's Homo-erotic Early Works," Art Quarterly 34 (Autumn
1971): 303, 304. See also C, p. 44; S. J. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian
Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 54, 59, 72, hereafter abbreviated 1600; and John
Gash, "Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da," in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34
vols. (London, 1996), 5:702-22, esp. pp. 708 and 718-19.

f:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
in present-day Caravaggio criticism; I will only observe, first, that Posner's

treatment of the topic, perhaps inevitably, given when it was written, is
crude and ahistorical (as Spear and others have remarked); second, that
a recent book by Creighton Gilbert argues vigorously against the "homo-
sexual" interpretation on grounds any subsequent treatment of the topic
will have to take into account;5 and, third, that the works in question
nevertheless are sufficiently exceptional in costume, pose, and address to
the viewer for the matter of their sexual connotations to remain an open
question.6 (Gilbert, incidentally, links the Boy Bitten by a Lizard to an epi-
gram by Martial.)7 Finally, scholars as redoubtable as Roberto Longhi and
Mina Gregori explain the picture mainly as a study of extreme expres-
sion, that is, as essentially realistic in intent.8
Another crux concerns Baglione's statement that the young Caravag-
gio "painted some portraits of himself in the mirror." For some commen-
tators, the sitter for the Boy Bitten by a Lizard was plainly Caravaggio
himself;9 for others not;1' and the same question has arisen with respect
5. See Creighton E. Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa.,
1995), esp. chap. 12, "Reports on Sexuality," and the concluding section, "Proposable Con-
clusions." Gilbert is particularly effective in refuting the modern assumption that Caravag-
gio's early patron Cardinal Del Monte was the center of a homosexual circle; see pp. 201-7.
6. See for example Cropper's sensitive discussion of the "sexually ambivalent" character
of works by both Caravaggio and the poet Giovan Battista Marino in "The Petrifying Art."
7. See Gilbert, Caravaggio's Two Cardinals, pp. 252-53.
8. In 1985 Gregori, citing Longhi, wrote that the subject of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard
should be understood
in terms of the attempts to depict psychological reactions-both of laughter and of

pain-that were carried out in Lombardy in the sixteenth century, and which, ac-
cording to Lomazzo, had been of interest to Leonardo. Lomazzo's own theory of
emotions is described in the first chapter of book two of the Trattato dell'arte della
Pittura, Scoltura et Architettura (of 1584), which Caravaggio must have pondered. In-
deed, the contents of this chapter make it clear that Caravaggio's effort to capture
the boy's reaction to the lizard's bite was motivated by an investigative and mimetic
intent. [AC, p. 236]
See Longhi, "Quesiti Caravaggeschi."

9. For example, Friedlaender characterizes the Boy Bitten by a Lizard and the Uffizi
Bacchus as "imaginary portraits" produced by the study of Caravaggio's own features (CS,
p. 84), and Rudolf Wittkower in Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750 (Baltimore, 1958)
expresses the belief, based on Baglione's remarks on Caravaggio's use of a mirror, that the
works in question, along with the Uffizi Medusa, were self-portraits (pp. 22, 335 n. 10).
See also Agnes Czobor, "Autoritratti del giovane Caravaggio," Acta Historiae Artium, no. 2
(1955): 201-14.
10. Longhi did not accept the Boy Bitten by a Lizard as a self-portrait and explained
Caravaggio's use of a mirror as a means of isolating "pieces" or "blocks" of reality, thereby
making them available for intense optical investigation as well as establishing a kind of
parity between persons and things (Longhi, Caravaggio [1952; Rome, 1982], pp. 46-48).
See also Longhi, "Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia," Proporzione 1 (1943): 35 n.
7, where he argues that Baglione's remarks don't allude to a series of self-portraits but rather
signify "that the painter depicted the model not directly but via the mirror; and that for a
technical reason that is familiar to painters and that is linked to a particular 'luministic'

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
to other early works, including the so-called Bacchino Malato in the Bor-
ghese (which in the "Age of Caravaggio" exhibition of 1985 was renamed
Self-Portrait as Bacchus) and the Uffizi Bacchus, in which the protagonist's
facial features seem not to resemble Caravaggio's and yet (as we shall see)
the question of Caravaggio's "presence" in the canvas cannot be ruled
out. Let me say at once that I take the Boy Bitten by a Lizard to be essentially
a self-portrait made with the help of a mirror, but I also agree with those
writers (such as Louis Marin) who urge that we think of the issue of the
self-portrait in Caravaggio's oeuvre in a freer, less merely literal light, and
in any case the notion that the boy may be identified with the youthful
Caravaggio hardly begins to capture the complexities of the painting's
relation to its maker. A further point worth stressing is that the Boy Bitten
by a Lizard has been universally perceived, not without reason, as de-
picting a momentary or instantaneous state of affairs. Longhi, the fore-
most figure in Caravaggio scholarship, saw in it a demonstration of the
artist's skill in rendering "the fleeting moment in which sharp pain is
reflected in the boy's expression,"" while more recently the depicted ac-
tion has been described as "frozen in a fraction of a second, as in a snap-
shot."12 In this regard the painting has been assimilated to what is widely
approach." (Longhi adds that this was suggested to him by the painter Giorgio Morandi.)
In the same vein, Gregori writes that "the supposition that the present painting is a self-
portrait results from an erroneous interpretation of Baglione's remark" about Caravaggio's
use of a mirror (AC, p. 237); she agrees with Longhi that Baglione's reference to the mirror
is "to the widespread practice of employing a mirror as an aid in achieving a realistic repre-
sentation" (AC, pp. 241, 244). Cinotti, too, doesn't believe that the Boy Bitten by a Lizard is a
self-portrait; see her Caravaggio: La vitae l'opera (Bergamo, 1991), p. 25.
Finally, several recent publications confirm Caravaggio's interest in mirrors and opti-
cal phenomena in general even as they minimize the importance of self-portraiture in his
early practice. First, Roberta Lapucci infers from Baglione's statement that the young Cara-
vaggio painted "quadretti da lui nello specchio ritratti" that he made use of an optical device
of a sort described by his contemporary Giovan Battista Della Porta that would have been
capable of throwing a reversed image on a wall or canvas (Roberta Lapucci, "Caravaggio e i
'quadretti nello specchio ritratti,"' Paragone 45 [Mar.-July 1994]: 160-70). Second, Riccardo
Bassani and Fiora Bellini, commenting on a 1605 inventory of the painter's studio in Rome
that mentions "un specchio grande," "un scudo a specchio," and "undici pezzi de vetro"
(possibly lenses), emphasize what they take to have been Caravaggio's quasi-scientific or
experimental interest in light and reflections (Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini, "La casa,
le 'robbe,' lo studio del Caravaggio a Roma: Due documenti inediti del 1603 e del 1605,"
Prospettiva, no. 71 Uuly 1993]: 69-70). See also Bassani and Bellini, Caravaggio assassino: La
carriera di un "valenthuomo" fazioso nella Roma della Controriforma (Rome, 1994), esp. pp. 35-43
(on the Boy Bitten by a Lizard) and pp. 201-5 (on the inventory of 1605). For both Lapucci
and Bassani and Bellini the question of self-portraiture is distinctly secondary. And, third,
Sandro Corradini in Caravaggio: Materiali per un processo (Rome, 1993), a compendium of
documents concerning Caravaggio's life and career, publishes the same inventory as that
cited and discussed by Bassani and Bellini; see pp. 62-64.
11. Longhi, Caravaggio, p. 55; quoted in translation by Spear, "The Critical Fortune
of a Realist Painter," in AC, p. 25.
12. Giorgio Bonsanti, Caravaggio (Florence, 1984), p. 6.

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assumed to be the main temporal register of Caravaggio's art, as in Gre-

gori's statement that he tended to depict "instantaneous and violent ac-
tion"13 or indeed Marin's remark in To Destroy Painting that in Caravaggio's
work "the expression of emotions has been reduced down to the intensity
of a single, instantaneous impression. This reduction amounts to a kind
of 'Medusa-effect"' (this is said in the aftermath of a brilliant interpreta-
tion of Caravaggio's Medusa).'4
So much by way of prologue to my own reading of the Boy Bitten by a
Lizard. Perhaps the quickest way of broaching that reading is by means of
a comparison, one that obviously has no historical force but just for that
reason serves to throw into relief an underlying structure or (to deploy
the helpful French term) dispositif shared by both works. The comparison
I want to make is with Henri Matisse's Self-Portrait of 1918 (fig. 2),15 and
I want to call attention to two points: first, Matisse's use of a mirror has
resulted in an image of the right-handed painter wielding a brush in his
left; and, second, the painter is shown working on a canvas a small sliver
of the edge of which we can just glimpse at the bottom right of the
Self-Portrait. If we now redirect our attention back to the Boy Bitten by a
Lizard, it becomes possible to see that painting as an analogous mirror-
representation of the painter in the act of painting his own self-portrait
but one that has been disguised and distorted just enough (indeed more
than enough) for it to have escaped being understood in those terms until
now. Thus the boy's upraised left hand near the right-hand edge of the
picture, which has always been viewed merely as gesturing with surprise,
makes a different kind of sense, especially with respect to its place in the
13. Gregori, "Caravaggio Today," in AC, p. 37.

14. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (1977; Chicago, 1995), p. 161;
hereafter abbreviated DP Marin goes on to write that "representation [in Caravaggio] rep-
resents but a single moment. This instant is seized the way a snapshot instantaneously cap-
tures a flash of a second. In other words the action is immobilized and made into a statue.
It is stupefied in a Medusa-effect" (DP, p. 163). See also Freedberg's inspired description of

the Capitoline St. John the Baptist with a Ram (which Gilbert believes is a Pastorfriso; see note
50 below) in the course of which he writes:
The artist's seeing of the model and the action of his hand that records the seeing
are absolutely immediate to his brush. His perception has been conveyed to the can-
vas without the intervention, or the consequent deliberation, of any studies in draw-
ing-in this he is unlike Annibale Carracci most conspicuously; and his process of
recording is as intense as it is direct. There is no precedent for this degree either of
intensity or directness in any prior art. The seeing impelled by this intensity grasps its
object and experiences it as if at highest speed, giving the effect of an instantaneous
apprehension of the whole. The act of apprehension is including and integral, a unity
as well as an instantaneity; and in this apprehension optical and tactile experience-
or, more precisely, the sense in the mind of tactile experience-have been fused,
reinforcing one another, absolutely interpenetrating, to make an effect which far ex-
ceeds that of either kind of experience by itself. [1600, p. 54]
15. See Henri Matisse: 1904-1917 (exhibition catalog, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, 25 Feb.-21 June 1993), p. 415. The painting is today in the Mus&e Matisse in Le
Cateau-Cambresis.

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?:?I o:? 1:: ? ?? :?
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:i....i
FIG. 2.-Henri Matisse, Self-Portrai

Cambresis. (C) Succession H. Matiss

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composition, if it is seen as a disguised mirror-image of the artist-model's

right hand in the act of wielding a brush (the brush itself having been
omitted); while the boy's right hand, which not only is not shown gripping
a palette but appears to be in the wrong position to do so (that is, palm
down rather than palm up), nevertheless is roughly where it ought to be
in order to be read as an image of the artist-model's left hand engaged in
its necessary though subordinate task. Another conspicuous feature of
the composition, the way in which the boy's upper body turns away from
the viewer, also takes on new meaning if it is seen as reflecting the actual
orientation of the artist-model as he turned from the mirror to his canvas
and back again (it's as though the boy's head remains fixated on the mir-
ror while his upper body swivels toward the canvas), though here too
commentators have been prevented from considering that possibility by
the exaggerated upward thrust of the boy's right shoulder as well as by
the fact that the latter is provocatively bare. As Posner's article makes
clear, nothing has seemed more foreign to the presumably virile agency
involved in the act of painting than the "ambivalent" or "ambiguous" sex-
uality of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard's protagonist.
If the basic terms of my account are provisionally granted, several
points emerge. First, we aren't shown a side view of the canvas itself,
which we therefore understand as being just beyond the right-hand fram-
ing edge. Second, whereas Matisse has portrayed himself looking at the
canvas on which he is working, Caravaggio has represented himself star-
ing, if that is the word, at his image in the mirror, which is why the boy
appears to be looking more or less directly at the viewer standing before
the picture. To generalize my point, modern commentators have rightly
stressed the forcefulness with which Caravaggio's paintings at all stages of
his career thematize or otherwise draw attention to their relation to the
viewer. But what by and large has not been recognized is that Caravaggio
is one those rare painters (Courbet is another) whose paintings must be
understood as evoking a primary, even primordial, relationship to the
painter himself, who afterwards is succeeded, but never quite supplanted,
by other viewers, by the viewer in general, in a word by us. One scholar
who never loses sight of that crucial aspect of Caravaggio's art is Sydney
J. Freedberg in the chapter on Caravaggio in his book Circa 1600.16 But
16. So for example Freedberg writes of the Capitoline St. John the Baptist with a Ram in
the paragraph following the one quoted in n. 14:
The way in which Caravaggio relates to this seen image-but not only to this par-
ticular kind of image, it should be understood-is as if to a love-object. He translates
into his act of art the lover's experience of seeing and touch, which he has galvanized
at that very instant where, in a living situation, seeing would be turned into touching.
Visual sensation is intensely charged, containing a high tension and generating more.
The artist is by nature a voyeur, and here Caravaggio has created a voyeuristic situa-
tion into which the spectator, as he takes the painter's place in front of the completed
canvas, necessarily must fall. The meaning of the picture thus depends not only on
the presence Caravaggio has evoked in it, but on the situation he has now made.

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because Freedberg doesn't treat the self-portraits, he never addresses the

equally crucial question of the relation to Caravaggio of paintings bearing
his image, or rather of the many paintings in his oeuvre that in one way
or another thematize the primordialness of that relationship. And, third,
whereas Matisse's Self-Portrait depicts the artist as occupied or absorbed
in a single protracted action or sequence of similar actions, the Boy Bitten
by a Lizard appears to evoke a sharply distinct moment of pain, surprise,
even shock, as the boy recoils from the unexpected bite. Needless to say,
the evocation of such a moment goes a long way toward masking or dis-
torting what I am arguing is the painting's underlying subject. But there
is another, deeper sense in which instantaneousness, pain, and shock are
inseparable from that subject as I have come to understand it.
Simply put, I suggest that what has been portrayed, what is repre-
sented, in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard is not one but two "moments" in the
production of that work: a "moment" of extended duration, of the paint-
er's absorption over time in the protracted, repetitive, partly automatistic
act of painting (I shall call that moment immersive, to avoid confusing it
with the problematic of absorption developed in my writings on the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, with which it has much in common);
and a second "moment," notionally instantaneous, of separating or in-
deed recoiling from the painting itself, which is to say of no longer being
immersed in work on it but rather of seeing it as if for the first time. The
contrast between the two "moments," we may say, is between the artist's
being "in" the painting or at least "continuous" with it in the ongoing
process by which the painted image was laid down on the canvas; and
finding himself "outside" the painting, of discovering that he has become
"discontinuous" with it, in a point-blank relationship of mutual facing
(also mutual freezing) that first establishes the painted image as an image
and with it the painting as a picture, as fundamentally addressed to a
viewer-in the first instance, to Caravaggio himself. In the Boy Bitten by a
Lizard, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, the second "moment" is dramatized to
the extent of largely eclipsing the first, which I have tried to recover, to
make intuitable, by means of a pointedly ahistorical comparison with Ma-
tisse. Some further comparisons with works by Caravaggio and others will
help bring the first "moment" into sharper focus. But let me say at once
that my larger claim is that precisely such a double or divided relation-
ship between painter and painting-at once immersive and specular,
continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematiz-
ing that act with unprecedented violence-lies at the core of much
of Caravaggio's art. More modestly, I suggest that that relationship
There is no very meaningful action or emotion that occurs within the painting; what
is meaningful comes instead from the relationship established initially between the
artist and the model and then, as we are the surrogate for the painter when we look
at the picture, between the model-image and ourselves. [1600, p. 54]

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intertwines with the seemingly ambivalent or ambiguous sexuality (the

so-called androgyny) of the boy in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard and other
half-length single-figure paintings of the 1590s, or rather with a certain
doubleness or division, as between affective registers (pleasure and pain),
types of action (proffering and withholding), and phenomenological mo-
dalities (the body seen from outside and lived from within), which in the
paintings in question invites being seen in sexual terms.
A few comparisons with works by the nineteenth-century realist
painter, Gustave Courbet, are pertinent here.17 It is often said that the
modern rediscovery of Caravaggio took place under the sign of Courbet's
Realism, which in the early twentieth century was equated purely and
simply with a radical naturalism. My own recent work on Courbet puts
forward a different view of his enterprise, and it was largely on the impe-
tus of that work that I came to understand Caravaggio in the terms put
forward in this essay. Briefly, I see Courbet as one of two culminating
figures, the other being Edouard Manet, in a central antitheatrical tradi-
tion within French painting from the 1750s on. At the core of that tradi-
tion was the demand, first articulated theoretically by Diderot, that a
painting somehow establish the metaphysical illusion that the beholder
does not exist, that there is no one standing before the canvas. In the work
of a succession of major figures from Greuze to Millet this was to be ac-
complished by closing the representation to the beholder, above all by
depicting figures wholly engrossed or absorbed in actions or states of
mind and who therefore were felt to be unaware of being beheld (as
though that apparent unawareness, that perfect absorption of the figures
in the world of the representation, were experienced as curtaining off
or walling off the representation from the beholder). By the 1840s and
1850s, however, the resort to absorption-and a fortiori to drama as a
heightened form of absorption-increasingly fell short of producing the
desired effect; the figures in question were increasingly perceived not as
truly engaged or absorbed in what they were doing but as merely wishing
to appear so, which of course utterly destroyed the ontological illusion of
their aloneness relative to the beholder.
In Courbet's art of the 1840s and after, which I see as responding to
the failure of the Diderotian project in its classic form, the issue of theatri-
cality is differently engaged: by a strategy of the all-but-corporeal merger
on the part of the painter-identified now as the painting's first beholder,
or painter-beholder-with the painting before him, the painting be-
ing realized under his brush. At least with respect to that beholder (the
painter-beholder) the painting would ideally escape beholding com-
17. The discussion of Courbet that follows is based on my book Courbet's Realism (Chi-
cago, 1990), the middle work in a trilogy comprising also Absorption and Theatricality: Painting
and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980; Chicago, 1988) and Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of
Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, 1996).

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pletely; there would be no one before it looking on because the beholder

who had been there was now incorporated or disseminated in the work
itself. One early sign of that endeavor was Courbet's reliance throughout
the 1840s on the genre of the self-portrait. In a strictly conventional
sense, the self-portrait begins by putting the painter in the picture. What
makes Courbet's self-portraits unique are the measures he took to convert
that conventional relationship into a quasi-literal, quasi-corporeal one,
that is, to project himself as if bodily into the painting on which he was
working. For example, in the early and uncharacteristic Desperate Man
(1843?; fig. 3) the aim is one of aggressively, explosively, closing the gap-
undoing the separation--between painting and painter-beholder, as if
the two could be made to coincide and merge in the immediate vicinity
of the picture surface. In another early work, the exquisite Self-Portrait
with Black Dog (1844; fig. 4), the sitter's bodily orientation allows his right
hand to be portrayed in a way that subtly suggests an analogy not only
with the orientation but also with the activity of the painter-beholder's
right hand wielding a brush, here figured by a pipe. Moreover, the land-
scape vista to the right can almost be seen as a picture on an easel, fore-
shadowing the central group in the Painter's Studio of 1855. Or, again, in
the most important self-portrait of the 1840s, the much-darkened Man
with the Leather Belt (1845-46?; fig. 5), the sitter's dramatically lit and
sculpturally powerful right hand and wrist at the center of the composi-
tion have been turned back into the picture-space, with the result that
they are now wholly congruent with-they may be imagined virtually to
coincide with-what we take to have been the orientation and indeed the
action of the painter-beholder's right hand and arm as they reached to-
ward and in a sense into the canvas bearing a brush loaded with paint.
In the Man with the Leather Belt, too, the otherwise inexplicable action of
the sitter's left hand gripping his belt may be read as a disguised or meta-
phorical image of the action of the painter-beholder's left hand holding
his palette. To give no more than the briefest indication of the subsequent
evolution of Courbet's art, his Realist canvases of the late 1840s and 1850s
can largely be understood as expanded and implicit self-portraits of the
painter at work on the painting. So for example in The Stonebreakers (1849,
formerly in Dresden, destroyed in World War II; fig. 6) I see the young
man depicted largely from the rear and bearing a basket of stones not
simply as a figure for or as personifying the painter-beholder's left hand
gripping a palette but almost as continuous with that hand and the effort
it put forth, just as I read the older man raising a hammer almost as
continuous with the painter-beholder's right hand wielding the brush
with which the picture was painted. Note in this connection how the de-
piction of left and right within the Stonebreakers-of the palette-hand and
the brush-hand, as it were-are congruent with left and right "outside"
it-with the left/right orientation of the painter-beholder at work on the

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canvas. This is a general feature of Courbet's art, and its significance with
respect to Caravaggio will become clear shortly.
It follows that Courbet and Caravaggio may be seen as pursuing very
nearly antithetical enterprises. Whereas in my account Courbet (or the
painter-beholder) strives to achieve a relationship of quasi-corporeal
merger with the painting on which he is working, Caravaggio in the sec-
ond, more conspicuously thematized "moment" in the production of his
works finds himself compelled if not actually to seek to remove himself
from the painting then at any rate to dramatize the very movement or
indeed shock of separation from it, thereby establishing the painting, not
exactly as theatrical (the Diderotian problematic of theatricality and anti-
theatricality doesn't yet apply), but in a new and highly polarized relation
to the general issue of spectatordom. (That is what it means to call the
second "moment" a specular one.)
In keeping with this difference of aim, we find in Courbet's and Cara-
vaggio's respective self-portraits antithetical relations to the use of a mir-
ror. For Courbet, the ideal would be to bypass the mirror entirely by
painting himself directly into the picture before him; as I observe in Cour-
bet's Realism, his most characteristic self-portraits give the impression that
a mirror might have been used to give him information about his features
but not at all to guide the movements of his brush across the canvas. One
marker of this is his evident desire to avoid mirror-reversal of right and
left in favor of relations of congruence of right and left between the painted
image and his own bodily orientation, the better to facilitate his virtual
merger with the painting. (I drew attention to such a relation of congru-
ence in the Stonebreakers; in the Man with the Leather Belt, the turning back
of the sitter's right hand into the picture-space allows it to be aligned with
the painter-beholder's right hand, as I have said; but Courbet was able to
devise no comparable solution for the sitter's left hand, which with re-
spect to the impulse toward merger-as an image of the painter-
beholder's left or palette-hand-is exactly where it shouldn't be. As
regards the treatment of right and left, Courbet's breakthrough to the
large, ostensibly more impersonal Realist canvases of the late 1840s
and 1850s enabled him to be truer to his actual bodily orientation than
had been possible within the conventions of the self-portrait.) In con-
trast, Caravaggio's self-portraits, once they are understood as such, seem
openly to acknowledge the presence of a mirror, both by the character of
the figures' gazes and by the painter's evident acceptance of, though not
in all cases insistence upon, mirror-reversal. In fact it's tempting to associ-
ate the mirror-image as such with what I have been calling specularity
and the painting with its opposite, but despite the terminological connec-
tion between mirrors and specularity (a "speculum" is a kind of mirror)is
18. As Herbert L. Kessler forcefully reminded me.

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AM';'
dk???Ra
wi:?
FIG. 3.-Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1843? Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Photo: Bulloz.
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FIG. 4.-Gustave C
Petit Palais, Paris.

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...... ....
FIG. 5.-Gustave Courbet, Man with the Leather Belt, 1845-46? Oil on canvas.
Mus6e d'Orsay, Paris. Photo: @ R.M.N.
the temptation must be resisted: first, because the use of the mirror obvi-
ously cannot be restricted to the second of the two "moments" I have
evoked; second, because there is no reason to think that the painter in
the first of those "moments" was not as immersed in the contemplation
of his mirror-image as he was in the act of rendering that image in the
painting; and, third, because in the end it was of course the painted image
the separation of which from both painter and beholder Caravaggio
found it necessary to dramatize and thereby to enforce. And yet a distinc-
tion between mirror and painting, or perhaps simply a sense of the real
or implied presence of a mirror-image "within" the painted one, seems

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somehow to bear on, to be entangled with, the opposition between im-

mersion and specularity I have tried to show is at work in Boy Bitten by
a Lizard.
Of course, to claim that Courbet and Caravaggio are very nearly anti-
thetical figures in the sense I have just elaborated is also to say that they
were concerned with intimately related issues. For one thing, the self-
portrait, not just in its own right but more importantly in the form of a
disguised or inexplicit mode of self-representation, occupies a privileged
place in both artists' oeuvres. Since they are the two archrealists in all
Western painting, this is, to put it mildly, a deeply interesting fact, the
implications of which will be a vital concern of the short book on Caravag-
gio I am now writing. For another, while I don't wish to say that the first
"moment" in the Caravaggian problematic corresponds to Courbet's ideal
of quasi-corporeal merger-that would make both the opposition and the
resemblance between them far too neat-it is nevertheless striking that
in works by both artists the bottom few inches of the canvas, which is
where the question of continuity versus discontinuity between the world
of the painting and the world "this" side of it becomes most pressing, is a
zone of particular sensitivity. This is not the place to develop the point in
detail, but we might note for example the similarities between the treat-
ment of fruit and drapery in the extreme foreground of the Boy Bitten
by a Lizard and the handling of the leather-bound portfolio and related
elements in the equivalent sector of the Man with the Leather Belt. In addi-
tion both painters favored compositions in which a relatively small num-
Aoo
:; . ... ?j .. .
..
..:
? .. ...
..... ..
.....,
?....~~~ ~:.!i:;
~ ~ ~ii!;:^:T.
~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~ ~ ~?... :. .:?.,...
~ ' n..l,.' -,....?.... ..
?p ..,. .. ?-. ., . . ? ,
, .o ':i" ...: ,., :...,..- .
FIG. 6.-Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849. Oil on canvas. Former

Gemildegalerie, Dresden. Photo: Bulloz.

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ber of figures are shown in close proximity to the picture surface, both
worked on a dark ground and made frequent use of effects of strong
chiaroscuro, and both were criticized in their own time for their apparent
failure to master the depiction of action. In any case, the questions raised
by the comparison between Caravaggio and Courbet include: What does
it mean that in the 1590s and early 1600s in Italy and again around
the middle of the nineteenth century in France realism and self-
representation were bound together in these ways? What is the broader
significance of the fact that whereas Courbet's project led him to avoid or
minimize effects of violence, Caravaggio's drove him on the contrary to
produce some of the most terrible painting in all European art? How are
we to understand the role of the body and of the imagination of the body
in their respective oeuvres? And what are the implications of all this for
our understanding of what might be called the history of subjectivity?'9
(Before going farther, let me make two parenthetical remarks of a
theoretical nature. First, what I have been calling two "moments" in the
production of Caravaggio's paintings are not quite to be thought of as
succeeding one another in time. We might say that his paintings invite us
to consider them in that light, and it may be that it is only with the aid
of a temporal metaphor that they can be conceptualized at all. But the
distinction I am after is structural rather than temporal and is best imag-
ined as potentially in play throughout the production and perhaps also
the contemplation of Caravaggio's paintings. In this respect the "mo-
ments" in question are not unlike those in certain psychoanalytic scenar-
ios, to which indeed they bear a certain relation.20 Second, my proposal
19. On the production of effects of violence in Courbet when his art misfires, see the
discussion of the Death of the Stag in Fried, Courbet's Realism, pp. 184-88. And for a sheerly
literary problematic involving two competing modes of seeing or visualization and yielding
effects of violence and shock analogous to those considered in this essay, see Fried, Realism,
Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), chap. 2, "Stephen
Crane's Upturned Faces." The italicized adjective "terrible" is meant to resonate with the
epithet terribilita associated in his own lifetime with Michelangelo, one of Caravaggio's basic
points of reference. It's more than likely that pursuing these questions will entail looking
beyond painting, for example in the direction of Shakespeare and of Stanley Cavell's essays
on his tragedies (gathered in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare [Cambridge,
1987]), and Joel Fineman's book on the sonnets (Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of
Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets [Berkeley, 1986]).
20. See for example Leo Bersani's remarks about a "masochistic" scenario he has de-
veloped out of elements in Freud's "Economic Problem of Masochism" and "Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes":
The chronology is false because of the intersubjective nature of the entire fantasy
process. In the wish to master the other, we immediately encounter a resistance
which redirects the desire for mastery onto the self. It seems likely that we experience
simultaneously the desire to control the other, the desire to control the self, the desire
to be controlled by the other, the masochistic pleasure in being mastered, and the
masochistic excitement of identifying with the other's suffering in our sadistic vio-
lence toward him. The different steps of a process must already be accomplished at

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that the Boy Bitten by a Lizard be viewed as essentially a self-portrait isn't

meant to imply that the boy's facial features are necessarily those of the
painter. Gilbert, for example, invoking a suggestion by Frommel, believes
that the faces of the "soft boys" in certain early Caravaggios, including
the Uffizi Bacchus, the Musicians in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
the two Lizard pictures may all be based on a single model, the young
painter Mario Minniti with whom Caravaggio seems to have roomed in
the early 1590s.21 But this if true in no way tells against the structural
features of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and indeed the Bacchus and the Musi-
cians, that are the focus of my analyses [see below and note 26 for the
latter two pictures]. More broadly, it's not irrelevant to my argument that
Caravaggio, like Courbet 250 years later, unmistakably portrayed himself
in a number of his paintings. But the heart of my argument doesn't de-
pend on that fact, the true significance of which emerges only in the light
of the larger structural considerations with which I am concerned.)
the moment the process "begins"; the various representations along a line of fantasy
are merely the spelling out of an intentionality sufficiently dense to inspire the articu-
lations of a fantasy-drama. [Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, 1977), p. 87
n. 17]
In the same vein but perhaps more to the point, because engaging with a problematic of
narcissism that might roughly be analogized with the "moment" of specularity ("that per-
sonage in the painting is not me, I [the painter, the first viewer] am me"), is the following:
In this connection, we must not let ourselves be misled by Freud's genetic presen-
tation of the concept of narcissism: narcissism does not precede the relation to the
other, and likewise the delusion of grandeur in narcissism is not a return to the
original solitude of a monad walled in upon itself. There is only one "stage" and it
is that of the primary opening (the narcissistic wound), which opens me to myself as
(the) other. So let us not dream, with Freud, of an ego whose existence would
precede sociality (or-and it is the same thing-a sociality that would relate already-
constituted subjects to each other). This would be to theorize with delusion, to specu-
late in line with desire. For narcissism is precisely that: the violent affirmation of the
ego, the violent desire to annul that primitive alteration that makes me desire (my-
self) as the mimetic double. Here we find a sort of instantaneous undertow that
makes desire forgetful of its own origin, as [Rene] Girard sees quite clearly: desire is
mimetic and by the same token narcissistic, and that means that it launches headlong
into a systematic, unreflective forgetfulness of what institutes it. [Mikkel Borch-
Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif., 1988), p. 93]
The next paragraph begins: "It follows that desire is love of oneself, as Freud writes [who
also terms that love "homosexual"]: self-love, love of the proper. It follows too that it is
organized as a vehement rejection of all resemblance, all mimesis. To recognize that I re-
semble the other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire, would be tanta-
mount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being
is over there, in that double who enrages me" (ibid.). My sense of the pertinence of Borch-
Jacobsen's work to my arguments in this essay owes almost everything to the work and
conversation of Ruth Leys. See for example Ruth Leys, "The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender
and the Subject of Imitation," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan
Scott (New York, 1992), pp. 167-214.
21. See Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 253-54. See also Christoph L.
Frommel, "Caravaggio und seine Modelle," Castrum Peregrini 96 (1971): 21-56.

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We have not yet plumbed the depths of the mirror in the Boy with a
Lizard, however. Standing before the painting, our initial impression,
once we begin to see it in the terms I have sketched, is not only that the
painting portrays what the artist saw in the mirror but also that the paint-
ing has replaced the mirror, as if there were space on the wall before us
for one or the other but not both. But if we look more closely-if we
interrogate the painted image for clues as to the circumstances under
which it was made-which is to say if we take the image as a reliable
guide to those circumstances, which of course it may not be (but what
matters is that the painting, seen in these terms, invites us to take the
image as such)-we soon realize that the canvas and the mirror were
never competitors for the same space. According to the dispositif I have
been describing, we are asked to visualize the canvas and the mirror as
having "originally" been at right angles to one another, with the painter
positioned obliquely between them so as to be able to study his reversed
image in the mirror and then to transpose it to the painting gradually
being realized under his brush. Only after the painting was completed
was it hung where the mirror had been; only then did it displace, not
replace, the mirror, "with all that [this] implies by way of instability in
any identity thereby produced," as Jacqueline Rose has remarked in a
different context.22 In other words, the logic of this particular mode of
mirror-representation, which for obvious reasons I shall call right-angle
mirror-representation, is such that the painting appears to insist on its
virtual identity with the absent mirror while at the same time represent-
ing itself-itself "originally," in the process of being painted-as noniden-
tical with the picture surface, indeed as rotated ninety degrees into the
picture space in the immediate vicinity of the right-hand or left-hand
framing edge. It may also be the case, as in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, that
the painting represents itself not only as rotated ninety degrees into the
picture space but also as placed just beyond the right-hand framing edge,
that is, as just barely excluded from the representational field, which how-
ever must be thought of as oriented to that excluded element as to noth-
ing else.
It's in this context that I interpret the placement and treatment of
the glass vase filled with water and containing a single rose, along with
some small white flowers, in the right foreground. More precisely, the
dazzlingly painted vase bears toward its right a complex structure of re-
flections (for want of a better word; refractions would be more accurate
but would sound stilted) that at first glance may seem to be at odds with
the rest of the composition. Whereas the dominant flow of light in the
22. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 228:
"The trope of identification," Rose writes in a psychoanalytic vein of Plath's likening herself
to a Jew in "Daddy," "is not substitution but displacement, with all that it implies by way of
instability in any identity thereby produced."

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painting as a whole is from the upper left toward the lower right (the
vase casts a shadow in that direction), the reflections appear to imply the
existence of a window or skylight not to the left, where logically it should
be, but to the right, where no light is coming from. But in fact the reflec-
tions are perfectly consistent with the presence of a light-source at the
upper left (this can be verified by simple experiment), which is to say that
they are a brilliant and masterly expression of the painter's commitment
to a new, optically acute mode of realism that was perhaps to receive its
fullest development in Dutch still life painting of the seventeenth cen-
tury.23 But despite their accuracy, or by virtue of the way in which the Boy
Bitten by a Lizard makes a point of that accuracy, the reflections also inevi-
tably direct the viewer's attention toward the right, beyond the framing
edge, where the excluded representation of the canvas is implicitly to be
found. (See too the shadowy, jagged-ended strip of drapery that fairly
flies off the boy's left shoulder in the direction of the right-hand framing
edge.) And this suggests that the reflections are perhaps to be read not
simply as an index of a new realism but also as acknowledging, even com-
pensating for, the act of exclusion. In any case, the split nature of those
reflections-the impression they convey of two distinct sources of light-
amounts to a further thematization, within the topos of mirroring, of the
double or divided structure of Caravaggio's enterprise.
By the same token, the marvelously delicate rose surrounded by
dark green leaves that obscures the neck of the vase even as it seems to
draw the light to its own internal articulations may perhaps be seen as
figuring, if not the first, immersive "moment" as such, at any rate a non-
specular relation to the rose as a motif-as if we are invited to imagine
an act of painting that could only render that motif by "blindly" submit-
ting to it, or say by losing itself in its folds. Note too in this connection
the obvious analogy between the other rose behind the boy's ear and,
precisely, the boy's ear. (A thematics of music, prominent in other early
Caravaggios, is not far off.) An unexpected but highly significant fact that
has emerged from the study of X-rays of Caravaggio's canvases is that
he habitually began painting heads by depicting ears, not eyes-as if to
23. Both Friedlaender and Gregori emphasize the importance to Caravaggio of

Northern precedents. In Friedlaender's words: "The reflection of a window in a glass had
been a feature of Northern painting since the period of the van Eycks; the element of still-
life in Caravaggio's paintings undoubtedly has an ultimately Northern derivation, though
of course the result is very different" (CS, p. 142). Gregori also notes that the Lombard
interest in light was "but one aspect of the relationship that begins in the Quattrocentro, if
not earlier, between the artistic ideas of Lombardy and those developed north of the Alps.
Leonardo's still influential example, for evidence of which we need only recall Lomazzo's
Trattato, also helps to explain these motifs" (AC, p. 237). See in this connection the brief
discussion of what Karel van Mander called reflexy-const, "'the art of depicting reflections,"'
in Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's "Schilder-Boeck" (Chi-
cago, 1991), p. 70.

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forestall, to defer as long as possible, a dynamic of the gaze.24 And in

general in his paintings ears are given at least as much prominence as
eyes. (Caravaggio's opposite in these respects would be Frans Hals, for
whom the imagination of an outward gaze from the untouched canvas
was primary, initiatory.)25 This too may seem to align the compound motif
of the rose/ear with the realm of the nonspecular. Again, however, matters
are not so clear-cut. The boy's silent scream, mentioned by Baglione, is an
"aural" impression that contributes powerfully to the effect of separation,
which is to say of specularity at its most vivid, freezing, "Medusizing."
And yet we are not wrong to see the vase and the rose as symptomatic of
a structural division that goes to the core of Caravaggio's art.
Two other works by him of the mid- and late 1590s that relate espe-
cially closely to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard are the Self-Portrait as Bacchus (ca.
1593-94; fig. 7) in the Borghese, and the much-damaged Musicians
(1595; fig. 8) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But rather than exam-
ine those in detail, which would take more space than is at my disposal,26
24. In the words of Cesare Brandi, quoted in translation by Hibbard: "'He did not
draw, because the X-rays have shown that there is no compositional preparation under-
neath, but rather new beginnings, simultaneous and overlapping, with heads that almost
always begin with an ear and that are then abandoned and covered up"' (C, p. 29 n. 9). The
reference is to Brandi, "L"Episteme' caravaggesca," Colloquio 5 (1974): 9-17, 10.
25. This is a large claim tendentiously based on nothing more than my experience of
his paintings. But see Hals's earliest known painting, the panel Portrait of Jacobus Zaffius
(1611) in Haarlem, illustrated and discussed in Frans Hals (exhibition catalog, National Gal-
lery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1 Oct.-31 Dec. 1989; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 13
Jan.-8 Apr. 1990; Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, 11 May-22 July 1990), pp. 130-32.
26. Of the Borghese picture I will simply say that the absence of an extended or up-
raised left arm and hand in no way tells against the kind of reading I advanced with regard
to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard; on the contrary, partly on the strength of my reading of the
latter, I am led to see in the conspicuous absence of such an arm and hand (it's with some-
thing of a shock that one finally notices that the young man's left hand as well as his right
is clutching the bunch of grapes) another kind of disguise for or distortion of the portrayal
of the extended "moment" of immersion in the act of painting. As for the Musicians, the
young man holding a cornet and looking out of the painting has been persuasively identi-
fied as the youthful Caravaggio (see Gregori, Age of Caravaggio, p. 228), but what I want to
draw attention to is that the young man's bodily position and the cornet itself invite us to
see him and it as still another representation of the painter in the act of right-angle mirror-
representation. Later in this essay I shall also suggest that the young man depicted from
the rear in the right foreground bears a relation of congruence to the embodied painter,
which is to say that in the Musicians, as in other works by Caravaggio, the painter is (at least)
doubly "present," as mirror-image and as corporealized surrogate or double, without there
being the least tension between the two (a point the full significance of which I must leave unde-
veloped for the time being).
One other early work might be mentioned in this connection: the wonderful Basket of
Fruit in the Ambrosiana (ca. 1598-1601). In that painting the twig with leaves extending
out of the canvas toward the right (a very odd feature that to my knowledge has never
received the attention it deserves) may be read as alluding to the dispositif of right-angle
mirror reflection (the twig standing in for the painter's mirror-reversed right arm), which

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I want to glance at a remarkable picture by the other indisputably great

figure in the renewal of Italian painting around 1600, Annibale Car-
racci-the Self-Portrait with Figures in the Brera of around 1585 (fig. 9).27
Observe, to begin with, that Annibale has portrayed himself mirror-
reversed, holding the palette in his right hand and wielding the brush
with his left. As is never the case with Caravaggio, however, we are made
aware of a certain strain: the hand holding the palette feels too much like
a right hand (it dominates the other hand not just compositionally but as
if physically, kinesthetically), while the hand wielding the brush seems
insufficiently like a left hand (the identities of the thumb and forefinger
switch back and forth like aspects of a duck-rabbit). This in itself
isn't unusual; mirror-reversal often produces awkward effects as ocular
evidence and bodily experience come uncontrollably into conflict. In
Matisse's Self-Portrait, for example, the depicted painter's right thumb
holding the palette is uncomfortably prominent owing to its size and the
way in which it has been outlined in black, so much so that we are led to
reimagine it as an image of the actual painter's left thumb viewed by the
painter not in a mirror but directly (and not just viewed but felt in all its
lived immediacy). Similarly, the palette, which in the painting tilts im-
probably away from the depicted painter, asks to be reimagined as based
on the actual painter's direct view of the actual palette, which might well
have tilted toward him at approximately the same angle. (All this, of
course, has an intentional character that is absent from the problematic
hands in Annibale's picture, but the intentionalness is, I suggest, super-
added to a sense of difficulty that arose within the situation of Matisse
painting his mirror-reflection.) But what is unusual, what makes the
Brera Self-Portrait with Figures all but unique in its time, is that it is very
nearly the sole example we have of a fully manifest mirror-reversed self-
portrait of the artist in the act of painting before the second half of the
nineteenth century. (In fact the mirror-reversed self-portrait became cur-
rent only around 1860, with the advent in France of a group of artists,
including Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Manet, I have called the genera-
suggests that the Basket of Fruit may indeed have been painted not directly from the motif
but from its reflection according to the dispositif of right-angle mirror-representation (to
that extent supporting the claims by Longhi cited in note 11 above). On the Ambrosiana
picture, see the perceptive essay by Michel Butor, "La Corbeille de l'Ambrosienne," in Riper-
toire III (Paris, 1968), pp. 43-58, which stresses both a certain internal division within the
painting (based on light and shade) and the way in which the basket of fruit itself becomes
an "offering" to the viewer in an all but religious sense (a sense that comes to the fore in
the treatment of the similar basket of fruit in the London Supper at Emmaus).
27. For general information on the Brera canvas, see Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study
in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (London, 1971), 1:21, 2:13. See also
Bologna 1584: Gli esordi dei Carracci e gli affreschi di Palazzo Fava (exhibition catalog, Pinacoteca
Nazionale di Bologna, 13 Oct.-16 Dec. 1984), pp. 180-81.

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tion of 1863.)28 The phrase "fully manifest" is meant to distinguish Anni-

bale's canvas from a less than fully manifest mirror-reversed self-portrait
like Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard. But of course my point in compar-
ing those works is to suggest that they have far more in common than at
first seems to be the case, which raises the question of the nature and
relevance of that common ground to the emergence of a new pictorial
regime, call it Baroque realism, circa 1600.29
Another salient feature of Annibale's Self-Portrait with Figures is its in-
clusion of three other personages, who appear to be involved in a com-
plex transaction that has been variously interpreted but that continues to
defeat precise understanding. The man at the right appears to be hand-
ing something-a knife or brush, with some black paint on it?-to the
boy, while the older man at the left looks on, or perhaps looks at the
28. See Manet's Modernism, chap. 5, "Between Realisms," for a discussion of mirror-
reversed self-portraits and related works by all three artists; the secondary literature on
earlier developments is summarized on pp. 601-2 n. 9. The extreme rarity of mirror-
reversed self-portraits before 1860 was first noted by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art
in Antwerp, 1550-1700 (Princeton, 1987), p. 202. Shortly after writing the lecture that be-
came the basis for "Between Realisms" I saw the Boy Bitten by a Lizard in London and realized
that it could be understood as a mirror-reversed image of the painter in the act of painting
a self-portrait. My thinking about Caravaggio began in earnest at that moment.
I might add that "Between Realisms" argues that the embrace of mirror-reversal by
the artists of the generation of 1863 expresses a new, quasi-programmatic fidelity to ocular
perception, which in their work is both conjoined and contrasted with a Courbet-like com-
mitment to a bodily mode of realism; this, however, is not quite the same as saying that I
see a tension between ocular evidence and bodily experience in the treatment of the
depicted painter's mirror-reversed hands in Annibale's Self-Portrait or indeed in Matisse's
Self-Portrait. In Caravaggio's work, as was suggested in note 26, we find an entirely comple-
mentary relation between ocular and bodily modes of experience (to the extent that the
latter distinction captures the difference between the reversed and facing mirror-image and
the positionally congruent double or surrogate). I touch again on this aspect of Caravaggio's
art toward the end of this essay. Compare Freedberg's remarks on the fusion of optical
experience and what he calls "the sense in the mind of tactile experience" (1600, p. 54),
quoted in note 14 above.
29. In general I am persuaded by Charles Dempsey's view that the young Caravaggio
was familiar with the early phase of the Carracci's pictorial reforms. See for example Demp-
sey's catalog entry on Annibale's The Butcher Shop in Christ Church, Oxford, in the Age of
Caravaggio, in which he expressed his agreement with Longhi's proposal that Caravaggio
saw the Carracci's works in Northern Italy (AC, p. 111). In subsequent essays Dempsey
emphasizes Caravaggio's stunned but also immediately assimilative response to Annibale's
St. Margaret in Santa Caterina dei Funari when it was set up in 1599; see Charles Dempsey,
"The Carracci Reform of Painting," in The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting
of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (exhibition catalog, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna,
10 Sept. 10-Nov. 10, 1986; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 19 Dec. 1986-16
Feb. 1987; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 26 Mar.-24 May 1987), pp. 237-54,
esp. p. 253; and "Idealism and Realism in Rome around 1600," in II Classicismo: Medioevo,
Rinascimento, Barocco, ed. Atti del Colloquio Cesare Gnudi (Bologna, 1993), pp. 233-43, esp.
pp. 236-38.

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I'?
5?'
:i
s:
bh;i.9.. .;~c~
FIG. 7.-Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Bacchus, ca.

1593-94. Oil on canvas. Gallerie Borghese, Rome.
Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
A. .. ? .
Ago
FIG. 8.-Caravaggio, The Musicians, 1595. Oil on

seum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1952. Photo

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
. ... ....
f::WJ
OPP
FIG. 9.-Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait with Figures, ca. 1585. Oil on canvas. Pinaco-
theca di Brera, Milan. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.
canvas on which Annibale has been working.30 Whatever the meaning of

the interchange among the figures, however, what I want to emphasize is
the conspicuous elision of the lower part of the face and all of the body
30. Roberto Zapperi in his stimulating book on the young Annibale interprets the Self-
Portrait with Figures as based on the double schemata of the ages of man and the family
portrait in Annibale Carracci: Portrait de l'artiste en jeune homme, trans. Marie-Ange Maire Vi-

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
except one hand of the man at the right. The force of that elision is such
as to give his downcast, absorbed, only partly readable expression and his
almost formal gesture of donation immense pictorial authority, with the
result that his largely occluded "presence" fully rivals if it does not exceed
that of Annibale himself. And because what does the eliding is the edge
of the canvas on which Annibale is shown working (in close proximity
to the edge of the actual canvas), I suggest that the act of elision may
be viewed as linked with and expressive of the powers of painting as dis-
tinct from the automatic and in a sense all-inclusive process of mirror-
reflection-a process with which, in a brilliant, nominally self-effacing
conceit, Annibale on this interpretation associated his portrayal of his
own image. I suggest, in other words, that Annibale's Self-Portrait with Fig-
ures, like Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, implies a distinction between
mirroring and painting. But whereas in Caravaggio's picture the terms of
that distinction remain unfixable and in a sense infinite, Annibale's Self-
Portrait with Figures privileges painting, whose faculty of selective exclu-
sion-also whose thematization of the mental and bodily state I have
called absorption-enables it to engage the mind and the emotions in a
way no merely mechanical process could ever hope to do.3' It's in this
light that I see the famous pictorial riddles (divinarelli pittorici) Malvasia
reports the Carracci delighted in (fig. 10): from left to right, the four
examples he gives represent a stonemason with trowel behind a wall, a
Capuchin preacher taking a nap in the pulpit, a knight in the lists, and a
blind man coming around a corner (the last two are structurally the same
but turned in different directions).32 All depend for their effect on a sche-
gueur (1989; Aix-en-Provence, 1990). Zapperi's argument seems to me attractive but finally
inconclusive. T. J. Clark, toward the end of an essay on Jacques-Louis David's Self-Portrait
of 1794, discusses both Annibale's canvas and Zapperi's reading of it, which he too finds
problematic; see T. J. Clark, "Gross David with the Swoln Cheek: An Essay on Self-
Portraiture," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth
(Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 243-307, esp. pp. 303-6.
31. Annibale's continuing stake in the interplay of painting and mirroring functions is
suggested by a preliminary drawing at Windsor Castle for the late Self-Portrait in the Her-
mitage (a work that depicts a self-portrait on an easel). "At the top of the Windsor drawing,"
Posner writes,
is a study for a portrait of the artist, behind whom is what appears to be an oval
mirror in which seemingly the same sitter appears again, in the same direction, how-
ever, as in the foreground portrait. In the next stage, sketched in below in the Wind-
sor drawing, the portrait is seen on a canvas resting on an easel. Behind is a window
or mirror in which another figure is seen .... The final painting represents a simpli-
fication of the design, and it was painted hurriedly and rather carelessly. [Posner,
Annibale Carracci, 2:65-66]
On the Hermitage canvas, which gives the impression of not being mirror-reversed, see the
brief but passionate remarks by Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style
(Glhickstadt, 1977), p. 73.
32. See Carlo Cesare Malvasia's life of the Carracci in Felsina Pittrice: Vite dei pittori
bolognesi, ed. Marcella Brascaglia (1678; Bologna, 1971), p. 288.

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r~A[j
FIG. 10.-Pic
trice: Vite dei
matic for
a straigh
painting
always be
ration of
be shown.s4
33. Annibale's concern with elision, evident in the use of extreme foreshortening in
early pictures like the Dead Christ in Stuttgart as well as throughout the Farnese Gallery,
is also registered in a drawing at Windsor Castle that parodies or caricatures Tintoretto's
Annunciation in the Scuola di San Rocco. In Tintoretto's picture the annunciating angel,
shown in flight as he enters the room in which the Virgin sits, has his lower legs cut off by
a wall that we view almost end-on (the wall nearest us is mysteriously absent); in his drawing
Annibale mischievously restores the latter wall, with the result that most of the angel is now
obscured from view. "By a witty, relatively small, and not so illogical change in the image,"
Posner writes, "the marvellously expressive spatial configuration in Tintoretto's painting is
transformed into an architectural and presentational absurdity. The drawing thus unmasks
what Annibale considered the underlying indecorousness, that is, the visual and contentual
inappropriateness, of the painting" (Posner, Annibale Carracci, 1:84). An alternative reading
to Posner's is that Annibale saw in Tintoretto's elision only of the annunciating angel's lower
legs a minimalist and therefore trivial use of his own master trope. In the Windsor drawing
in contrast only the angel's lower legs and feet and pointing finger are not elided by the
walls of the Virgin's house; it thereby reverses the terms of Tintoretto's composition to comic
effect but precisely by doing so calls attention to the suggestive powers of elision that Tintor-
etto failed to mobilize. See also Gilbert's brief discussion of Annibale's drawing, which he
places in 1597, in Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, pp. 86-87.
34. Another major work by an Italian artist, in this case subsequent to Caravaggio,
makes a fascinating if ultimately unparsable term of comparison with the works I have been
discussing: Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting of around 1630. The
latter has been studied by Mary D. Garrard, who acutely observes that "no man could have
painted this particular image because by tradition the art of painting was symbolized by an
allegorical female figure, and thus only a woman could identify herself with the personifi-
cation" ("Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting," Art Bulletin 62 [Mar.
1980]: 97). See also Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Ba-
roque Art (Princeton, N.J., 1983), chap. 6, "The Allegory of Painting." Garrard also empha-
sizes the way in which the depicted painter's unruly locks of hair suggest her "guileless
indifference to personal appearance while caught up in the heat of work, a state of mind

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We are now equipped to turn, albeit briefly, to other works by Cara-

vaggio in an attempt both to flesh out my claims so far and to outline
that contrasts sharply with that of contemporary male artists whose self-portraits indicate
their efforts to look like gentlemen" ("Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait," pp. 106-7). An
important difference between Artemisia's self-portrait and both Annibale's Brera picture
and, in my account, Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard is that hers is not mirror-reversed.
Garrard, who doesn't discuss the larger issue of mirror-representation, speculates that in
order to portray herself in near profile Artemisia must have used two mirrors arranged at
an angle of slightly less than 90 degrees relative to one another; she would have been able
to see her own left profile by looking into the mirror on the right (see ibid., p. 109 n. 31).
But of course there is no need to assume that Artemisia did this, or that her painting is
based on her reflection in a mirror in any but the most general way. Indeed, how the paint-
ing was actually made is much less important than how the viewer is invited to understand
the operations it depicts, and this, it seems to me, is unresolvably ambiguous. For example,
are we meant to see the foreshortening of the painter's head and upper body, which allows
us only the most restricted sense of her gaze, together with her seeming concentration on
the task at hand as implying the absence of a mirror, as if all her attention were focused on
the canvas on which she is working? Or are we meant to gather from the strong sideways
lean of her head and upper body that she is looking past that canvas toward a mirror that,
like the canvas, lies outside the representational field? Garrard in her book on Artemisia
writes confidently that "the artist looks into the light, bending around the canvas to see her
model, which is her own reflection in a mirror" (Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, p. 361), but
this is just conjecture. Indeed, it's impossible to be sure about the location and orientation
of the canvas on which the painter is shown painting. Are we to imagine it placed at a right
angle to the actual picture surface in the vicinity of the left-hand picture edge? Or are we
somehow to identify it with the entire brown left three-quarters of the background, in which
case, as Garrard says in her article, "it is curious that ... the depicted canvas should com-
pletely lack physical substance or firm definition" ("Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait," p.
109 n. 31). Then too there is the way in which the painter has been shown applying paint
high up on the canvas before her (whatever we take the latter's limits and orientation to be),
which if identified with the canvas we are looking at would seem to suggest that she is not
portraying herself at the moment of depiction, unless of course she is painting the hand and
brush themselves, in which case using a mirror would be unnecessary. Our uncertainty on
these points is frustrating in that it prevents us from specifying what sort of relation between
painting and mirroring Artemisia's Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting was designed to project.
In any case, there is something almost Courbet-like in the artfully negotiated avoidance of
the depicted painter's gaze as well as in the powerful evocation of her physical nearness and
sheer bodily being.
It scarcely needs stressing that the issue of the relation between painting and mirror-
ing in these and other late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century self-portraits bears
directly on Diego Velisquez's strategy in the most famous of all representations of the artist
at work, Las Meninas (1656); roughly, we may say that by juxtaposing the mirror on the back
wall (in which we see reflected images, the originals of which may be "real" or painted, of
the king and queen) with the portrayal of himself in the act of painting with a brush in his
right hand and a palette in his left (that is, not mirror-reversed), Velasquez distinguished
sharply between mirroring and painting even as he wove the two together in a complex
intellectual and poetic structure the precise meaning of which remains a matter of conjec-
ture and dispute, as readers of this journal are well aware; see, for example, Joel Snyder,
"Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince," Critical Inquiry 11 (June 1985): 539-72. Indeed
the extent to which Velasquez's masterpiece, for all its originality, is not unique in its con-
cern with these matters emerges if we consider Charles Lebrun's ambitious Evrard Jabach
and His Family (ca. 1657-59), formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and today

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some farther reaches of my argument. Consider, for example, perhaps

the most compelling of the early half-length single-figure paintings, the
destroyed, in which-altogether unusually, as I have said-the painter in the act of painting

is portrayed reversed in a mirror toward the left rear of the composition. In that work,
which deserves more detailed analysis than I can give it here, what seems to be a deliberate
tension between the outward gazes of two of Jabach children (toward the composition's
right), the implied perspective of the ground plane and architecture (positing a viewpoint
more or less in front of the left-hand framing edge) and the position of the mirror (also
toward the left but perhaps slanted toward the right) invites comparison with Velisquez's
contemporary manipulations both of the laws of optics and perspective and of the psychol-
ogy of viewing in Las Meninas, to which Lebrun's canvas provides a kind of inspired pendant.
(For an illustration of Evrard Jabach and His Family, see "L'Art du portrait sous Louis XIV,"
Dossier de l'art, no. 37 [Apr. 1997]: 11.)
Finally, I want to cite in this connection a somewhat earlier work, Girolamo Savoldo's
Portrait of a Man with Armor (the so-called Gaston De Foix) of uncertain date (a recent guess
places it between 1515 and 1525) in the Louvre. Savoldo's canvas has always been read in
terms of the Renaissance paragone, or competition between painting and sculpture, which
doubtless is correct as far as it goes. But in the light of my argument in this essay several
additional points suggest themselves. First, the sitter's left and right arms and hands (the
composition's main focus, it seems fair to say) may readily be seen as a disguised mirror-
reversed representation of the painter's right and left arms and hands in the act of making
the painting, the brush and palette having been omitted, as we might expect. The painting
would therefore be structurally a self-portrait, regardless of the actual identity of the sitter.
Second, the principal mirror toward which our attention is largely directed is shown to be
crucially a device for turning left into right-indeed left hand into right hand-and vice
versa. To the best of my knowledge, there is no pictorial precedent for defining a mirror in
those terms. And, third, I see in this a brilliant conceit according to which what until then
had been (and would long remain) a basic but as it were invisible or unacknowledged con-
vention of the self-portrait, the reversing of mirror-reversal in the interests of presenting a
normative image of the sitter, is here attributed to the action of the depicted mirror, as if to
make that convention visible precisely by characterizing it as a kind of mirroring and in
general to inscribe painting and mirroring vertiginously within one another in a way that
anticipates Caravaggio. (Significantly, the note or card tacked to the wall "behind" us that
we see in the mirror bears a writing that is not reversed). The full implications of Savoldo's
astonishing invention require further discussion. For a brief summary of current knowledge
about the Portrait of a Man with Armor, see Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e
Caravaggio (exhibition catalog, Monastero di San Giulia, Brescia, 3 Mar.-31 May 1990;
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 8 June-3 Sept. 1990), pp. 164-67. See also the fine essay by
Mary Pardo on another painting by Savoldo in which the trope of reflection plays a crucial
role: "The Subject of Savoldo's Magdalene," Art Bulletin 71 (Mar. 1989): 67-91. I will only
add that I take Savoldo's canvas not simply as a feat of genius but also as a sign that six-
teenth-century painters were fully and in a sense critically aware of the convention that
impelled them to present "correct," that is unreversed, images of themselves at work on a
painting even when mirrors played an essential role in the act of representation. Indeed,
there are numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century self-portraits that give the impres-
sion of having been based on reversed mirror-images of the artist at his easel, but that by
virtue of not depicting the actual making of the painting (that is, by not depicting the artist's
hands, much less his brush and palette or the canvas on its easel) seem to have been ex-
empted from the need to undo and thereby normalize the reversal of the mirror-image in
the work itself.
For what it is worth, my feeling is that we may be on the verge of learning considerably
more than has previously been known about the use of mirrors by artists of the sixteenth

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Uffizi Bacchus, also of around 1596-97 (fig. 11).35 Judging by the protago-
nist's facial features, the Bacchus is not literally a self-portrait, though it
has sometimes been taken for one.36 But it has always been viewed as
close in spirit to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and if we think of it in the
context of the general question of mirror-representation, imagining the
mirror this time to have been not at right angles to the canvas but in
effect as coinciding with it (though in fact the "original" location of the
mirror or even whether a mirror was actually used is unknowable; my
point is that unlike the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, the Bacchus does not imply a
right-angled relation of mirror to canvas but rather suggests an impos-
sible conflation of the two), we realize that Bacchus's gesture of extending
his left arm and hand holding a goblet of wine toward the beholder may
be seen as a disguised mirror-image of the painter's right arm and hand
extending directly toward the picture surface and wielding the brush
with which the picture was painted. Moreover, if we look more closely at
the arm, hand, and wineglass (fig. 12), we are struck by what seems to be
(what seems to be; I shall come back to this) a pattern of concentric ripples
on the surface of the wine, a striking detail that brilliantly evokes the
movement of Bacchus's arm and hand toward the viewer. Gregori indeed
has described the ripples as "enhancing the effect of instantaneousness"
(AC, p. 244), and one sees what she means. But I am impressed by some-
thing else as well: the strong analogy between the seeming ripples in the
wine and the concentric folds in the drapery covering Bacchus's left arm,
an analogy I take as suggesting a certain continuity between the two, as
if the ripples are to be seen-are also to be seen-as prolonging the ges-
ture of the arm (indefinitely, as it were) rather than as simply or uni-
vocally signifying the freezing of that gesture in an effect of pure
instantaneousness. To be more exact, and recalling the distinctly nonin-
stantaneous tenor of the depicted Matisse's action in his Self-Portrait of
1918, I see the analogy between the ripples and the folds as evoking the
protracted or repetitive action of applying paint to canvas, which is to say
that I read Bacchus's gesture-not his figure as a whole, but the action
and seventeenth centuries. See in this connection the interesting article by Carlo del Bravo,
"Dal Pontormo al Bronzino," Artibus et historiae, no. 12 (1985): 75-87, which Elizabeth Crop-
per brought to my attention. Her own current work on mirroring and mirror-imagery in
Bronzino, Poussin, and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists will make an im-
portant contribution to the topic.
35. The Bacchus was found and attributed to Caravaggio by Longhi, but was only
universally recognized as autograph after the 1922 exhibition of sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century Italian painting at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence; see Matteo Marangoni,
"Note sul Caravaggio alla mostra del Sei e Settecento," Bolletino d'arte, no. 5 (Nov. 1922):
224. Since then the Bacchus has been considered a principal work of Caravaggio's early
period in Rome; see, for example, Cinotti, Caravaggio, pp. 431-33; AC, pp. 241-46; and C,
pp. 39-43.
36. For example, both Friedlaender and Wittkower regarded the Bacchus, Boy Bitten by
a Lizard, and Medusa as self-portraits; see n. 9 above.

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of his left arm and hand-as evoking what I have been calling the "mo-
ment" of immersion or continuity (of prolongation, one might also say).37
All this may seem to go quite far, but there is a further consideration
whose import is incalculable. I have been insisting that the ripples on the
surface of the wine in the goblet only seem to be there; in fact what we are
seeing-through the wine, not on its surface-are concentric or rather
parallel spirals in the glass bowl of the goblet itself.38 In one sense this
relates the goblet all the more closely to the concentric folds in Bacchus's
drapery. And of course the fact remains that the dominant impression
conveyed is of ripples on the surface of the wine, as Gregori's remarks
attest. But the tension between that impression and the actual relations
between the goblet and the wine introduces a level of complexity that
goes beyond what I have said so far. At the very least, the tension seems
to suggest a split or division within the painted image analogous to that
between immersive and specular "moments," the latter associated with
the "frozen" spirals in the bowl of the goblet, though the fact that Greg-
ori and others have read the apparent ripples as signifying instanta-
neousness-whereas I read them as also signifying "prolongation"--goes
to show that the division in question cuts deeper than the ripples/spirals
ambiguity.
Two additional features of the Bacchus are pertinent to this discus-
sion. First, Bacchus himself seems clearly to wear makeup. Needless to
say, this has often been given a sexual interpretation, but what I want to
37. Prolongation is a term introduced in an analogous context by Stephen Melville in

his review of Courbet's Realism, "Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions" (1991), Seams: Art
as a Philosophical Context, ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam, 1996), p. 190. It might be
noted that the (seeming) ripples are at odds with the reflective properties of the surface of
the wine, a fact I'm tempted to associate with a passage from the introduction to Hegel's
Aesthetics cited and discussed in the last chapter of Courbet's Realism as anticipating theoreti-
cally the antispecular, antinarcissistic import of Courbet's project. To quote again the last
two sentences from that passage:
"Even a child's first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things [as a
means of representing himself, Hegel implies]; a boy throws stones into the river and now
marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something
that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversiform phenomena up to
that mode of self-production in external things which is present in the work of art."
[Fried, Courbet's Realism, p. 276; emphasis added]
Not a Narcissistic mirroring of the self in the undisturbed surface of a pond but a represen-
tation of the self in action (in the action of self-representation) by the disruption of a poten-
tially reflective surface: is it legitimate to read a prefiguring of the Hegelian scenario in
Caravaggio's depiction of Bacchus's arm, hand, and goblet of wine? Even if it is, of course,
that act of reading takes place against the grain of the representational tenor of the painting
as a whole, which as a large secondary literature testifies could hardly be more specular or
discontinuous in its overall effect. (The implications of the above for an assessment of the
famous Narcissus in the Palazzo Corsini in Rome, a picture that may or may not be by Cara-
vaggio, remain to be worked out.)
38. I owe this observation to Charles Dempsey.

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FIG. 11.-Caravaggio, Bacchus, ca. 1596-97. Oil on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Flor-
ence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
emphasize is that the impression of applied or supplementary coloring,

of coloring that is avowedly artificial rather than natural, amounts in this
context to a thematization not of the act of painting as such-of painting
in general, which is how Jean-Claude Lebensztejn reads it39-but rather
of the second or specular "moment" in my conjectural scenario of the
painting's production. And a related detail: for all the elegance of the
39. See Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, "Au beauty parlour," Traverses, no. 7 (1977): 74-94:
"A travers l'histoire de l'imitation," Lebensztejn writes toward the beginning of his article,
"il se repute que la peinture est une cosmitique, mais que la cosmetique est le c6td honteux
de la peinture, sa materialite mauvaise dans l'ordre de la representation" (p. 77).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
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FIG. 12.-Detail
gesture with
his left hand
discover trac
40. A detail not

see also AC, p. 2

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perception of that detail, which takes place only at close range, produces
a tiny effect of shock that reproduces in miniature the distancing effect
of the picture as a whole.
The second feature of the Bacchus that must be mentioned is one for
which no adequate illustration exists: when the painting was cleaned in
the early 1920s a small head was discovered reflected in the convex sur-
face of the carafe at the lower left. According to Gregori, "the reflected
head is that of a male, who wears a contemporary costume with a white
collar; there also seems to be a painting seen from the back, as though
on an easel" (AC, p. 244).41 Not surprisingly, the figure of the man has
been thought to be a self-portrait, but regardless of his actual identity
(assuming for the moment that he was meant to represent a specific per-
son, which isn't certain), the reflection may be taken as acknowledging
not just the self-portrait character of the representation as a whole but
also that what ultimately is portrayed in the Bacchus is the production of
the Bacchus, with everything that that implies.42 Here again it is tempting
41. On an early morning visit to the Uffizi in April 1994, Elizabeth Cropper, Charles
Dempsey, Ruth Leys, and I were able to look at the Bacchus under a strong light, and sure
enough the head was there; the "canvas" was less certain, though there did seem to be a
diagonal mark that might have been the vestige of one. My thanks to Caterina Caneva,
deputy director of the Uffizi, for making our visit possible.
42. The crucial early discussion of the "reflected" figure is by Marangoni in 1922; see
n. 35 above. Marangoni's commentary, quoted first by Lebensztejn in "Au beauty parlour"
(p. 76) and then, from Lebensztejn, by Marin in To Destroy Painting (pp. 134-35), reads:
In the center of the mirror created by the wine in the flask, a recent cleaning has
revealed, as if reflected, the minuscule head of a young man that really does bring
to mind the young Caravaggio's physiognomic traits: large sockets, a broad-based
nose, slightly snubbed, full lips and a half-open mouth. Here we have yet another
reason, if another is needed, for including this work among the first to be painted
by Caravaggio. My friend Carlo Gamba helped me to see the similarity between this
little portrait and the figure that I, in my article in Dedalo, had taken for The Fruit
Vendor cited by Lanzi . . ., a figure that, according to Gamba, could be that of a young
man, and thus a kind of free self-portrait of Caravaggio as a young man.
The likelihood of this assumption could be confirmed by Baglione's testi-
mony, for he claims that after Caravaggio left [the Cavaliere d'Arpino's] "he tried to
support himself by producing some small paintings of himself in the mirror, of which
the first was a Bacchus with clusters of grapes of different kinds, made with great
care, but in a somewhat dry manner." This Bacchus, as Longhi was the first to suggest,
must be the one in the Uffizi, which would thus suddenly become not only an origi-
nal but also a free self-portrait, given its close connection with the Little Fruit Vendor
in the Borghese Gallery. Incidentally, Fiocco made me realize that Bacchus is the rep-
resentation of a figure reflected in a mirror, for he holds the cup with his left hand.
One must conclude, then, that the androgynous type, involving a combina-
tion of individual and ideal traits, that may be found in early works such as Petro-
grad's Bacchus [presumably the Luteplayer in the Hermitage], The Fruit Vendor, The Lute
Player, and in the young man in the Louvre's Gypsy ..., and even, I believe, in the
Uffizi's Medusa, is a product of Caravaggio having used himself as his own model.
What Marangoni doesn't quite say (nor does Lebensztejn or Marin) is that the figure of
Bacchus holding the cup with his left hand represents the painter painting the Bacchus with
his right hand. This does seem to be the implication of Czobor's remark that "in testa [of
the figure of Bacchus] si mette una corona di fronde e di grappoli d'uva e,-per rendere

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to associate the reflection with the "moment" of specularity and separa-

tion (contrasting the carafe of wine with the goblet, which in itself feels
right), but again it is a temptation to be resisted, if only because the paint-
ing on the easel Gregori saw in the reflection was turned away from the
viewer, as if not ready to be viewed.43 More broadly, I want to propose a
generalization that will eventually need to be tested throughout the ex-
tent of Caravaggio's oeuvre. The structural core of his art comprises a pair
of constitutive distinctions: (1) between what I have been calling immer-
sive and specular "moments" within the act of painting, and (2) between
painting and mirroring (or painting and reflecting), but (or and) that the
respective terms of those distinctions cannot simply be aligned with one
another, the immersive "moment" equalling painting and the specular
"moment" mirroring, or vice versa. Rather, I see the two sets of terms as
combining and interacting in subtle and unpredictable ways, often differ-
ently in different portions of a single picture (the Bacchus, for example),
which if I am right would be a major reason why Caravaggio's art, despite
having been the focus of intense scrutiny for decades, has proven so resis-
tant to sustained pictorial analysis.
To underscore the obsessive nature of the structures we have been
tracing, and also by way of indicating how the spell cast by individual
works has obscured relationships between works that are in a sense per-
fectly obvious, I want to juxtapose to the Bacchus a picture in an al-
together different affective tonality from a later, starker, and far more
veristic phase of Caravaggio's career: the David with the Head of Goliath in
the Borghese Gallery of around 1606-1607 (fig. 13).44 Simply considering
the two works together makes a number of points. First, it is clear that
we are dealing with two versions of a single figural dispositif The principal
perfetto il giuoco-depone sul desco levigato, accanto al piatto della fruta, un fiasco di vin
rosso, anzi, nella mano sinistra-poiche con la destra deve dipingere-tiene una coppa
colma di vino rosso" (Czobor, "Autoritratti del giovane Caravaggio," pp. 206-7; this is said
in the course of a discussion of the Bacchus as a self-portrait made with the help of a mirror).
But nothing is made of this by Czobor or anyone else.
43. A further aspect of the contrast between goblet and flask concerns the slight but
palpable temporal separation between the ripples/spirals in the goblet (whether they are
read as markers of instantaneousness or of prolongation) and the tilted surface of the wine
in the flask as well as the tiny bubbles that ring that surface, which together suggest that
the flask has just been put down, that is, that Bacchus a moment ago poured wine from the
flask into the goblet and then placed the flask on the low white tabletop separating him
from the viewer before proffering the goblet to the latter (as Gregori, following Marini,
remarks [AC, p. 241]). What makes the separation of those moments all the more sugges-
tive-what makes it allegorical of the division between immersive and specular "moments"
I have been analyzing-is the tension verging on contradiction between the implied previ-
ous action of Bacchus's right hand (pouring the wine) and its present position and action
(lightly fingering the bow of his sash).
44. For the general history and historiography of the painting, see Cinotti, Caravaggio,
pp. 502-5, and AC, pp. 338-40.

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FIG. 13.-Caravaggio, David with the Head of

Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Res
action in both pictures is essentially the

foreshortened left arm and hand towar
lightly bent at the elbow, and the hand
the severed head of Goliath-in a manne
or implicitly (in the David) proffers tha
hardly needs to be said that I interpret

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as a disguised and in a sense impossible mirror-representation of the act

of applying paint to canvas. The same gesture recurs elsewhere in Cara-
vaggio's art, sometimes mirror-reversed and sometimes not, as for ex-
ample in the London Salome Receiving the Head ofJohn the Baptist, a work
with evident affinities to the David. Unlike the Bacchus and the Salome,
however, the David contains an unmistakable self-portrait; the head of
Goliath bears Caravaggio's features. So that to the extent that we see the
figure of David holding that head as a representation of the painter im-
mersed in the act of painting, the Borghese picture "literally" and shock-
ingly severs that representation from the portrayal of the painter's
features, a division that, whatever else it may be held to mean, invites us
to read it as allegorizing the immersive and specular "moments" in the
process by which the David with the Head of Goliath was brought into the
world. And this suggests in turn that Caravaggio's obsession with images
of decapitation in his art, starting with the early Judith Beheading Holo-
fernes (1598-99), may be understood as thematizing the divided nature of
his practice even as it inevitably stresses the specular "moment" as such,
a "moment" I have characterized as one of separation and discontinuity
and that as early as the Boy Bitten by a Lizard was associated with violence,
pain, and shock.
Finally, another difference between the Bacchus and the David is that
in the latter neither David's nor Goliath's face looks out toward the
viewer; instead, both faces seem as if absorbed in painful thought: David
actually, Goliath ... how to describe not his expression so much as its
existential modality? We recognize that he has been killed (twice over: by
the stone that entered his forehead and by the severing of his head), and
yet there is something in his look that evokes the prolongation of a
thought, or perhaps what we are made to sense is simply the relaying, by
his open, unseeing eyes, of the youthful David's tenderly aversive gaze
(this introduces the topic of the "rhythmic" structure of certain of Cara-
vaggio's compositions, about which more will eventually need to be said).
Put slightly differently, Goliath's expression reflects David's, or perhaps
it's the other way round45 (as is hinted at by the mirrorlike gleam of Da-
vid's naked sword; weapons and armor in Caravaggio's paintings often
connote mirroring),46 which suggests that even as the David with the Head
of Goliath allegorizes the immersive and specular "moments" in their sep-
arateness or distinctness it also allegorizes their boundness to one an-
45. Compare Frank Stella's powerful suggestion that "the glance of David can be seen
as a different, distinct, continuing extension of time at odds with the fading temporal mea-
surement expressed in the disjoined vision of Goliath, where one eye is fixed while the other
forces a last blurred look at what it had experienced as reality" (Frank Stella, Working Space
[Cambridge, Mass., 1986], pp. 104, 109).
46. This in turn helps explain Caravaggio's predilection for gleaming armor in scenes
where it would seem far from inevitable-for example, the Taking of Christ, the Crucifixion of
St. Andrew, the Denial of St. Peter, and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula.

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other, their mutual intertwining, even their essential inseparableness.

In my book on Caravaggio I mean to devote a chapter to Caravaggio's
epochal discovery of a thematic and dynamic of absorption as a central
resource for painting, focusing on two magisterial canvases, the Incredulity
of Thomas (ca. 1602-1603?) and the Death of the Virgin (ca. 1601-1603, or
later).47 But that is for the future. In the absence of those works let the
David with the Head of Goliath stand as a tour deforce of the representation
of absorption even after violent death.
Various other works clamor for attention here, none more urgently
than the Medusa in the Uffizi (ca. 1597, painted on an ornamental shield;
fig. 14) and the Salome Receiving the Head ofJohn the Baptist in the National
Gallery in London (ca. 1609; fig. 15).48 As was mentioned earlier, the first
has been the focus of a masterly analysis by Marin, who draws a distinc-
tion between what he calls the "sculptural moment," the instant of the
Medusa's petrifaction at the sight of her reflected image in the hero's mir-
ror-shield or rather the fleeting instant just before the petrifaction actu-
ally takes place (DP, p. 136), and the "ornamental moment," when the
severed head of the Medusa is first displayed on that shield, both of which
he claims are "present" in the painting. Without going into the subtleties
of Marin's argument, I will simply say that although our basic concerns
are somewhat different, our readings of Caravaggio converge in the face
of this extraordinary work.49
47. The title of that chapter will be "The Discovery of Absorption," and its argument
will be not that Caravaggio was the first painter to make use of absorptive themes and motifs
(those go back to antiquity) but that around 1600 he made the simple but momentous
discovery that a new, more emphatic mode of absorption, in combination with a new, more
emphatic kind of chiaroscuro (which indeed was required if the former was to be achieved),
could accomplish the tasks previously assigned to composition (compare the Incredulity of
Thomas) and to expression via depiction of the affetti (compare the Death of the Virgin). It's at
that moment also that Caravaggio emerged as the revolutionary realist painter (the painter
of what Bellori and others called the vero) whom Poussin later said had come into the world
to destroy painting, and my further suggestion will be that all the phenomena I have been
discussing or have just mentioned-the distinction between mirroring and painting, the in-
terplay of "moments" of immersion and specularity, the new, more emphatic modes of absorp-
tion and chiaroscuro, and the pursuit of the vero (also the activation of a new, "projective"
subjectivity on the part of the viewer, the dynamics of which will be a central focus of "The
Discovery of Absorption")--are elements in a single representational enterprise the full
import of which has yet to be grasped. On Caravaggio as painter of the vero, see Dempsey,
"Masters of Rhetoric," review of 1600, in New Criterion 1 (June 1983): 87-90 and "Idealism
and Realism in Rome around 1600," p. 238; and Cropper and Dempsey, "The State of Re-
search in Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century," Art Bulletin 69 (Dec. 1987): 494-509.
48. On the Medusa, see Cinotti, Caravaggio, pp. 427-29; and C, pp. 67-69. On the
Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist, see AC, pp. 335-37; Cinotti, Caravaggio, pp.
453-54; and C, pp. 249-51.
49. For example, Marin explains Medusa's somewhat downward gaze by supposing
that at the moment she saw herself in Perseus's mirror-shield the latter
was positioned lower and to the left in relation to the surface of the representational
space. As a result, the viewer who occupies an external position is not in fact located

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As for the London Salome from the last phase of Caravaggio's career,
I see it as glossing the David with the Head of Goliath by the addition of two
other figures who seem almost to share, hence to divide, a single body
(not a unique occurrence in his art): Salome, who even as she holds a
salver to receive the Baptist's head looks away, as if deferring the inevita-
ble "moment" of specularity; and an old woman, presumably her servant,
who gazes down over Salome's shoulder at the head in fascination and
distress, as if still caught up in the "moment" of immersion (of immersive
seeing), though it is also possible to view her as enacting the specular
"moment" before our eyes (albeit in an absorptive register; specularity in
Caravaggio is not invariably a matter of shock and recoil, which is another
reason for distinguishing terminologically between absorption and im-
mersion). Note too the "relaying" or "reflecting" relationship between the
old woman's downward absorbed gaze and the expression of the severed
head, a relationship similar to that between the absorbed "gazes" in the
David with the Head of Goliath or indeed among the personages in The Mar-
tyrdom of St. Ursula (a picture shortly to be discussed). In all these works,
as elsewhere in Caravaggio's oeuvre, reflection or mirroring has been
made part of both action and composition. For his part, the executioner
has been depicted gazing directly out of the painting while holding the
Baptist's head in his right, not left hand; as mentioned above, his gesture
is not a mirror-image of the act of painting, even as it reflects that act in
a general way. At the same time, I see his left hand resting on the hilt of
his sword in the painting's lower right-hand corner as indicating (imper-
fectly but compellingly) what in connection with Courbet I called a rela-
tion of congruence with the painter's actual right hand and brush, and
more broadly with the painter's actual bodily orientation before the can-
vas. The result is not a conflict or even a sense of disjunction between the
world of the painting and the world "this" side of the picture surface but
rather a complex network of accords and complementarities between the
two, as well as between the mirroring and painting functions. I will only
in the position of the real Gorgon. Instead, the viewer is where Perseus was (a mo-
ment before), just after he cut off her head, when his sword was no longer reflected
in the shield. [DP, p. 137]
(Note, by the way, the theme of being killed twice over, as in the David with the Head of
Goliath.) In other words, the moment of mirroring isn't represented from the point of view
of the mirror, which is to say that the Medusa drives a wedge not only between the two
moments of petrifaction and display (the moment of decapitation not being represented as
such), but between the shield/mirror as mirror (Perseus's secret weapon) and the shield/mir-
ror as painting (the artifact painted by Caravaggio and presented by the Cardinal del Monte
to the Grand Duke of Tuscany), a distinction I find highly suggestive in the light of my
thematic of painting and mirroring functions. Compare also Marin's comment that "the fact
that the painting of Medusa is not in any literal sense a self-portrait of the young Caravaggio
does not in any way prevent it from figuring the act of painting and scission that separates
the painting's gaze from the gesture of painting" (DP, p. 132), and his emphasis on the motif
of decapitation in other paintings by Caravaggio and others; see DRI pp. 133-35.

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;id
Bi
:::~ i :
FIG. 14.-Caravaggio, Medusa, ca. 1597. Oil on canvas mounted on an ornamental

shield. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource.
add that the lower right-hand corner of the canvas is often a strongly
marked location in Caravaggio's art, bearing as it does a special relation-
ship to the artist's right or painting hand: see for example the large bow
in the sash of the youth seated in the right foreground studying a musical
score in the Musicians; the dagger, partly concealed playing cards, and
gesture of the seated cardsharp reaching back to extract one of those
cards from beneath his doublet in the Fort Worth Cardsharps (1594-95?);
the elaborate swordhilts in the Rome and, especially, the Paris versions of
the Gypsy Fortuneteller (1594-95); and the incandescent green plant in the
Capitoline St. John the Baptist with a Ram (1601-1602).5o This is also the
50. In Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, Gilbert argues at length that the protagonist
of the Capitoline picture is not St. John (who never is shown with a ram) but rather the

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
..Ak.
FIG. 15.-Caravaggio, Salome Receiving the Head ofJohn the Baptist, ca. 160
vas. National Gallery, London. Photo: Museum.
significance of Caravaggio's Courbet-like penchant for depi

ground figures from the rear, as in the Cardsharps, the Musician
on the Flight into Egypt (1594-95?), the St. Matthew painting
tarelli Chapel (1599-1600), and other works. The larger is
raises cannot be dealt with here.51
youthful Paris (a shepherd), anticipating the erotic adventure to come; see pp. 1-78. Gilbert
also suggests that the painting belongs to a structure of rivalry between Caravaggio and
Annibale, in which each implicitly criticized the other in turn in a series of works including
the Pastorfriso, as Gilbert calls the supposed St. John; see pp. 79-97.
51. See notes 26 and 28 for a brief indication of the sorts of issues I have in mind.
What is distinctly unCourbet-like about some of those works, however, is the way in which
the strategy of turning away from the viewer is combined with that of thereby addressing
or attracting his gaze, as by the concealed cards in the Cardsharps or, more spectacularly, by
the music-playing angel's gorgeous wings and floating drapery in the Rest on the Flight. The
result in both cases, as in the Musicians, is a complex, internally "mirroring" structure in
which the question of an easel painting's essential orientation-does it face the viewer or
does it face away from him (that is, in the direction the painter was facing when he made it
and the viewer is facing as he stands before it)?-is posed more forcefully than at any previ-
ous or subsequent moment in Western painting.

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I Aw
FIG. 16.-Caravaggio, The Marty

merciale Italiana, Naples. Photo:
Rome.
I want to close this essay by looking briefly at Caravaggio's last paint-

ing, a work of overwhelming power, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula (1610;
fig. 16).52 According to legend, the saint, following the martyrdom of her
companions, was killed by the king of the Huns when she refused to
marry him. What makes Caravaggio's treatment of the story so remark-
able, of course, is that the execution-by bow and arrow-takes place at
point-blank range. The painting appears to capture the moment immedi-
ately following the release of the arrow, which has just pierced the saint's
body. The bowstring, we feel, has not ceased vibrating, as Ursula looks
down at her mortal injury in grave surprise. (It's all but impossible to put
a name to the expression of any of the figures in the painting; by now
Caravaggio has passed beyond the range of recognizable modes of hu-
man feeling.) Three other personages crowd the right-hand half of the
52. See AC, pp. 352-53; Cinotti, Caravaggio, pp. 474-76; and C, pp. 252-54. My
thanks to Creighton Gilbert for lending me his photograph of The Martyrdom of St. Ursula
when I was unable to locate one anywhere else.

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composition: a soldier in armor at the right, a man who stands partly

between the king of the Huns and Ursula and whose left hand grips and
perhaps jerks upwards a noose tied around her neck, and finally, immedi-
ately behind the saint and craning his head as if not to miss the moment
of execution, a third man whom we recognize at once as still another self-
portrait of the artist.
I think of the excruciatingly short distance between king (let us call
him rather the executioner) and Ursula as painting distance, by which I
mean to evoke both the making and the viewing of the picture; and I see
the composition as a whole as exploring, seeking to give expression to,
the vertiginous, continually ramifying, indeed unstoppable and unstabili-
zable flow and counterflow, projection and reflection, of violent affect or
feeling within the act of painting as I have depicted it in this essay. (Of
identification and counteridentification.)53 Put slightly differently, in the
Martyrdom of St. Ursula the distinction between "moments" of immersion
and specularity is at once multiplied and dissolved. If we take the execu-
tioner as a stand-in for the painter (as we are encouraged to do not only
by his being the initiator of the depicted action but also by the similarity
between the position of his left arm gripping the bow and the "prof-
fering" gestures of the analogous figures in the Bacchus, the David, and
the Salome)54 and Ursula as a figure-a synecdoche-for the painting
(and here it may not be irrelevant that the noose around her neck sug-
gests a kind of hanging), the portrayal of Caravaggio "himself" behind
Ursula presents him as straining to witness the initiatory pictorial act,
though of course he is also seeing the unreadable response of the open-
mouthed executioner-painter (that is, his own response) to the conse-
quences of that act (the arrow penetrating Ursula's body, which he all but
embraces from the rear, her response to that penetration, and so on). And
as a closer look at the executioner makes clear, the play of reflected light
as well as the embossed lion's head on his shining breastplate (a figure for
the sun,55 hence for light itself, the condition of possibility for vision,
53. Compare the extended reading of Manet's Execution of Maximilian in Mannheim

(1868-69), a work with surprising affinities to the St. Ursula, in Fried, Manet's Modernism,
pp. 346-64.
54. There is even a similarity between the relative positions of the executioner's left
and right arms and those of the startled protagonist of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard-further
evidence, if such were needed, of the consistency of Caravaggio's vision.
55. The sun is the planet that rules the zodiac sign of Leo. Moreover, Ripa in his
discussion of the chariots of the seven planets says that one of the youthful charioteer's
attributes is a bow and arrows; see Cesare Ripa, Iconologia: Overo descrittione di diverse imagini
cavate dall'antichitd, e di propria inventione (1593; Hildesheim, 1970), p. 51. Among the many
illustrations that might be cited in this connection, none is richer than Pietro Testa's etching
Summer (ca. 1642-44), which centrally depicts '"Apollo ... in the sign of Leo within the full
circle of the sun, about to draw an arrow from his quiver to shoot down pestilence on the
earth below. [In this work] Testa shows Leo as a lion in the sky with a woman riding on his
back" (Cropper, catalog entry for Summer, in Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:03 UTC
hence for painting) imply that the entire scene reflects a prior situation,
or perhaps we should say that it posits reflection, mirroring, at the very
origin of the initiatory act.56 At the same time, the scene is framed by, all
the personages are embedded in, a tarlike blackness that seems the nega-
tion not just of light but also of sight (ordinary chiaroscuro too has been
left far behind), as though for Caravaggio the ground of painting, of what
painting had become in his hands, were not only prior to vision but in
some fundamental sense inimical to it.57
In late May 1610 The Martyrdom of St. Ursula was shipped from Naples
to Prince Marcantonio Doria in Genoa; on 18 July Caravaggio, en route
back to Rome, died of fever at Porto Ercole at the age of thirty-nine. No
final work has ever seemed more palpably to mark the limits of an oeuvre,
or of an art.
[exhibition catalog, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 5 Nov.-31 Dec. 1988; Arthur M. Sackler
Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass., 21 Jan.-19 Mar. 1989],
pp. 165-67).
56. Or perhaps one should say that it posits an originary "mimesis" in the sense given
the notion by Borch-Jacobsen in The Freudian Subject, pp. 53-126 and The Emotional Tie:
Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford, Calif., 1993).
57. On realism in Caravaggio (and in Eakins's The Gross Clinic) as a "stunning" or a
"wounding" of seeing, see Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, pp. 64-65. Compare also
Marin's discussion of the role of black in Caravaggio's painting; see DP, pp. 150-64. And
compare Borch-Jacobsen's insistence that "'in the beginning' there is no one to see anything
at all; there is no 'one' to see oneself in front of oneself in a model-image (or, as it is so aptly
put in German, in a Vor-bild, a 'picture-in-front'). . . . Where the ego forms itself in the image
of the other, where it mimes the other, one can no longer speak either of 'form' or 'image,'
either of 'self' or 'other.' Where the id was (neither himself nor myself), the 'I' arrives. And
the id can no longer be expressed in the language of the visible, of perception, of phenome-
nality, nor, by the same token, in any sort of theory of models and images. The other stage
becomes a beyond-stage, a fore-stage of the primary mimesis" (The Freudian Subject, p. 118).
There is something uncannily appropriate in the fact that Lanfranco Massa, the Doria fami-
ly's correspondent and procurator in Naples, wrote to Marcantonio Doria (for whom the
painting was destined) "that he had already received the painting of Saint Ursula from
Caravaggio and was waiting for it to dry. However, exposure of the picture to the sun proved
deleterious, since, according to Massa, Caravaggio employed a thick varnish" (AC, p. 352).
(As if The Martyrdom of St. Ursula touches thereby on a problematic of photography.) Eventu-
ally I shall want to relate The Martyrdom of St. Ursula not only to earlier depictions of violent
death by Caravaggio such as the Judith Beheading Holofernes and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
but also to a recently rediscovered canvas with which it has much in common (including a
similar portrait of the artist), the magnificent and riveting Taking of Christ in the National
Gallery of Ireland. On that painting, see Sergio Benedetti, "Caravaggio's 'Taking of Christ,'
a Masterpiece Rediscovered," Burlington Magazine 135 (Nov. 1993): 731-41.

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The Voids of Berlin
Author(s): Andreas Huyssen

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
The Voids of Berlin
Andreas Huyssen
Eight years after the fall of the wall, seven years after the unification of
East and West Germany, and just a couple of years before the final trans-
fer of the national government from Bonn to Berlin, the city on the Spree
is a text frantically being written and rewritten. As Berlin has left behind
its heroic and propagandistic role as flashpoint of the cold war and strug-
gles to imagine itself as the new capital of a reunited nation, the city has
become something like a prism through which we can focus issues of con-
temporary urbanism and architecture, national identity and statehood,
historical memory and forgetting. Architecture has always been deeply
invested in the shaping of political and national identities, and the re-
building of Berlin as capital of Germany gives us significant clues to the
state of the German nation after the fall of the wall and about the ways
Germany projects its future.
As a literary critic I am attracted to the notion of the city as text, of
reading a city as a conglomeration of signs. Mindful of Italo Calvino's
marvellously suggestive Invisible Cities, we know how real and imaginary
spaces commingle in the mind to shape our notions of specific cities. No
matter where we begin our discussion of the city of signs-whether with
Victor Hugo's reading of Paris in Notre-Dame de Paris as a book written
in stone; with Alfred D6blin's attempt in Berlin Alexanderplatz to create a
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

57

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58 Andreas Huyssen The Voids of Berlin
montage of multiple city discourses jostling against each other like pas-
sersby on a crowded sidewalk; with Walter Benjamin's notion of the fla-
neur who reads urban objects in commemorative meditation; with Robert
Venturi's upbeat emphasis on architecture as image, meaning, and com-
munication; with Roland Barthes's city semiotics of the Empire of Signs;
with Thomas Pynchon's TV-screen city; or with Jean Baudrillard's aes-
thetic transfiguration of an immaterial New York-a few things should
be remembered: The trope of the city as book or text has existed as long
as we have had a modern city literature. There is nothing particularly
novel or postmodern about it. On the other hand, one may want to ask
why this notion of the city as sign and text reached such a critical mass
in the architectural discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, arguably the peak
of an architectural obsession with semiotics, rhetorics, and codings that
underwrote much of the debate about architectural postmodernism.
Whatever the explanation may be-and certainly there is no one simple
answer to this question-it seems clear that today this interest in the city
as sign, as text, is waning in much architectural discourse and practice,
both of which have by and large turned against an earlier fascination
with literary and linguistic models, no doubt at least partially as a result
of the new image-graphing technologies offered by ever more powerful
computers. The notion of the city as sign, however, is as pertinent as
before, even though now perhaps more in a pictorial and image-related
rather than a textual sense. But this shift from script to image comes
with a significant reversal. Put bluntly: The discourse of the city as text
in the 1970s was primarily a critical discourse involving architects, literary
critics, theorists, and philosophers bent on exploring and creating the
new vocabularies of urban space after modernism. The current discourse
of the city as image is one of "city fathers," developers, and politicians
trying to increase revenue from mass tourism, conventions, and office
or commercial rents. Central to this new kind of urban politics are aes-
thetic spaces for cultural consumption, megastores and blockbuster mu-
seal events, festivals, and spectacles of all kinds, all intended to lure the
new species of city tourist, the urban vacationer or metropolitan mara-
thoner who have replaced the older model of the leisurely flaneur. The
flaneur, even though something of an outsider in his city, was always fig-
ured as a dweller rather than as a traveler on the move. But today it is
the tourist rather than the flaneur to whom the new city culture wants to
Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative

Literature at Columbia University and an editor of New German Critique.
His publications include Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture ofAm-
nesia (1995) and After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodern-
ism (1986).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
appeal, just as it fears the tourist's unwanted double, the displaced mi-
grant.
There is a clear downside to this notion of the city as sign and image
in our global culture, nowhere as evident to me as in a recent front-page
article in the New York Times in which the paper's art critic celebrates the
newly Disneyfied and theme-parked Times Square as the ultimate of a
commercial billboard culture that has now, in this critic's skewed view,
become indistinguishable from real art.' One can only hope that the
transformation of Times Square from a haven for hustlers, prostitutes,
and junkies into a pop art installation will not presage the wholesale
transformation of Manhattan into a museum, a process already far ad-
vanced in some older European cities.
This brings me back to Berlin, a city justly famous for its glorious
museum collections but, due mainly to its decenteredness and vast exten-
sion, much less liable to turn into an urban museum space such as the
centers of Rome, Paris, and even London have become in recent decades.
Thus it is no great surprise that after an upsurge in the early 1990s, tour-
ism to Berlin is significantly down. This slump may of course have some-
thing to do with the fact that Berlin is currently the most energized site
for new urban construction anywhere in the Western world: enormously
exciting for people interested in architecture and urban transformation,
but for most others mainly an insufferable mess of dirt, noise, and traffic
jams. Once all this construction is completed, the hope is that Berlin will
take its rightful place as a European capital next to its more glamorous
competitors. But will it? After all, Berlin is in significant ways different
from other Western European capitals, in terms of its history as a capital
and as an industrial center as well as in terms of its buildings. And the
fact that the city is caught between the pressures of this new urban image-
politics and the more general crisis of architectural developments in these
last years of our century makes any such hope appear simply misplaced,
if not deluded. Indeed, Berlin may be the place to study how this new
emphasis on the city as cultural sign, combined with its role as capital
and the pressures of large-scale developments, prevents creative alterna-
tives and thus represents a false start into the twenty-first century. Berlin
may be well on the way to squandering a unique chance.
There is perhaps no other major Western city that bears the marks
of twentieth-century history as intensely and self-consciously as Berlin.
This city-text has been written, erased, and rewritten throughout this
1. See Michael Kimmelman, "That Flashing Crazy Quilt of Signs? It's Art," New York
Times, 31 Dec. 1996, pp. Al, C20.

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violent century, and its legibility relies as much on visible markers of built
space as on images and memories repressed and ruptured by traumatic
events. Part palimpsest, part Wunderblock, Berlin now finds itself in a
frenzy of future projections and, in line with the general memorial obses-
sions of the 1990s, in the midst of equally intense debates about how to
negotiate its Nazi and communist pasts now that the safe dichotomies of
the cold war have vanished. The city is obsessed with architectural and
planning issues, a debate that functions like a prism illuminating the pit-
falls of urban development at this turn of the century. All of this in the
midst of a government- and corporation-run building boom of truly mon-
umental proportions. The goal is nothing less than to create the capital
of the twenty-first century, but this vision finds itself persistently haunted
by the past.
Berlin-as-text remains first and foremost a historical text, marked as
much, if not more, by absences as by the visible presence of its past, from
prominent ruins such as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedichtniskirche at the end
of the famous Kurffirstendamm to World War II bullet and shrapnel
marks on many of its buildings. It was in the months after the collapse of
the East German state that our sensibility for the past of this city was
perhaps most acute, a city that for so long had stood in the eye of the
storm of politics in this century. Empire, war, and revolution; democracy,
fascism, Stalinism, and the cold war all were played out here. Indelibly
etched into our memory is the idea of Berlin as the capital site of a discon-
tinuous, ruptured history, of the collapse of four successive German
states; as the ground of literary expressionism and the revolt against the
old order; as the epicenter of the vibrant cultural avant-gardism of Wei-
mar and its elimination by Nazism; as the command center of world war
and the Holocaust; and, finally, as the symbolic space of the East-West
confrontation of the nuclear age, with American and Soviet tanks staring
each other down at Checkpoint Charlie, which is now being turned into
an American business center watched over, temporarily, by the towering
photographic cut-out figure of Philip Johnson and a shrunk, gilded
Statue of Liberty placed atop the former East German watchtower (figs.
1 and 2).
If at that confusing and exhilarating time after the fall of the wall
Berlin seemed saturated with memories, the years since have also taught
us multiple lessons about the politics of willful forgetting: the imposed
and often petty renaming of streets in East Berlin, which were given back
their presocialist, and often decidedly antisocialist, cast; the dismantling
of monuments to socialism; the absurd debate about tearing down the
GDR's Palace of the Republic to make room for a rebuilding of the
Hohenzollern palace; and so forth. This was not just tinkering with the
communist city-text. It was a strategy of power and humiliation, a final
burst of cold war ideology, pursued via a politics of signs, much of it
wholly unnecessary and with a predictable political fallout in an East Ger-

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.eN.,
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FIG. 2.-Former Checkpoint Charlie in 1

148.63.195.42 on Moff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
man population that felt increasingly deprived of its life history and of its
memories of four decades of separate development. Even though not all
of the plans to dismantle monuments and to rename streets came to fru-
ition, the damage was done. GDR nostalgia and an upsurge of support
for the revamped communist party, the Partei des demokratischen Sozia-
lismus (PDS), were the inevitable political results, even among many in
the younger generation who had been active in the opposition to the state
in the 1980s.
Forgetting is equally privileged in an official ad campaign of 1996,
literally written all over the city: "Berlin wird" (Berlin becomes). But "be-
comes what"? Instead of a proper predicate, we get a verbal void. Indeed,
this phrasing may reflect wise precaution, for in the current chaos of pub-
lic planning, backroom scheming, and contradictory politicking, with
many architectural developments (Spreeinsel and Alexanderplatz among
them) still hanging in the air, their feasibility and financing insecure, no-
body seems to know exactly what Berlin will become. But the optimistic
subtext of the ellipsis is quite clear and is radically opposed to Karl Schef-
fler's 1910 lament that it is the tragic destiny of Berlin "forever to become
and never to be."2 Too much of the current construction and planning
actually lacks the very dynamism and energy of turn-of-the-century Ber-
lin that Scheffler, ever the cultural pessimist, lamented. Since much of
central Berlin in the mid-1990s is a gigantic construction site, a hole in
the ground, a void, there are indeed ample reasons to emphasize the void
rather than to celebrate Berlin's current state of becoming.
The notion of Berlin as a void is more than a metaphor, and not just
a transitory condition. It does carry historical connotations. As early as
1935 the marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in his Erbschaft dieser Zeit, de-
scribed life in Weimar Berlin as "functions in the void."3 He then referred
to the vacuum left by the collapse of a nineteenth-century bourgeois cul-
ture that had found its spatial expression in the heavy, ornamental, stone
architecture of Berlin's unique apartment buildings, the pejoratively
named Mietkasernen (rent barracks) with their multiple wings in the back,
the so-called Hinterhduser, which enclosed inner courtyards accessible
from the street only through tunnel-like archways. The post-World War
I vacuum was filled by a functionalist and, to Bloch, insubstantial culture
of distraction: Weimar modernism, the movie palaces, the six-day bicycle
2. Karl Scheffler, Berlin-Ein Stadtschicksal (1910; Berlin, 1989), p. 219.

3. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), pp. 212-28. Of course,
Bloch's phrasing "Funktionen im Hohlraum" (literally, functions in a hollow space) suggests
that the void is bounded, which after all is appropriate whenever one discusses a void in a
spatial or temporal sense.

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" .,~i. ' ::::
.- ... .. .. .. ... ....

... .. . ... ?.. ...?
W.
?.......
.......
Wft:
....
..i ......". . . ...N , . " 9

..... ' '
FIG. 3.-Wall area between Leipziger Platz and the Brandenburg Gate.
races, the new modernist architecture, the glitz and glamor of the so-
called stabilization phase before the 1929 crash. Bloch's phrasing "func-
tions in the void" also articulated the insight that, in the age of monopoly
capitalism, built city space could no longer command the representative
functions of an earlier age. As Brecht put it in those same years, when he
discussed the need for a new, postmimetic realism, reality itself had be-
come functional, thus requiring entirely new modes of representation.4
A little over a decade later, it was left to fascism to transform Berlin
into the literal void that was the landscape of ruins in 1945. Especially in
the center of Berlin, British and American bombers had joined forces
with Albert Speer's wrecking crews who had intended to create a tabula
rasa for Germania, the renamed capital of a victorious Reich. And the
creation of voids did not stop then; it continued through the 1950s under
the heading of Sanierung (urban renewal) when entire quarters of the old
4. See especially Bertolt Brecht, 'Against Georg Lukacs," trans. Stuart Hood, in Ernst
Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London, 1977), pp. 68-85.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
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down to Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, a wide stretch of dirt, grass,
and remnants of pavement under a big sky that seemed even bigger given
the absence of a high-rise skyline that is so characteristic of this city. Ber-
liners called it affectionately their "wonderful city steppes," their "prairie
of history."5 It was a haunting space, crisscrossed by a maze of footpaths
leading nowhere. One slight elevation marked the remnants of the bun-
ker of Hitler's SS guard, which after being reopened when the wall came
down was soon sealed shut again by the city authorities to avoid making
it into a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage. Walking across this space that had
been a mined no-man's-land framed by the wall and that now served occa-
sionally as a staging site for rock concerts and other transitory cultural
attractions, I could not help remembering that this tabula rasa had once
been the site of Hitler's Reichskanzlei and the space to be occupied by
Speer's megalomaniac north-south axis from the Great Hall in the north
to Hitler's triumphal arch in the south, all to be completed by 1950, the
power center of the empire of a thousand years (fig. 4). In the summer
of 1991, when most of the wall had already been removed, auctioned off,
or sold to tourists in bits and pieces, the area was studded with the wall's
steel rods left behind by the Mauerspechte, the wall chippers, and decor-
ated with colorful triangular paper leaves that were blowing and rustling
in the wind; they powerfully marked the void as second nature and as
memorial (fig. 5). The installation increased the uncanny feeling: a void
saturated with invisible history, with memories of architecture both built
5. Quoted in Francesca Rogier, "Growing Pains: From the Opening of the Wall to the
Wrapping of the Reichstag," Assemblage 29 (1996): 50.

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and unbuilt. It gave rise to the desire to leave it as it was, the memorial
as empty page right in the center of the reunified city, the center that was
and always had been at the same time the threshold between the Eastern
and Western parts of the city, the space that now, in yet another layer of
signification, seemed to be called upon to represent the invisible wall in
the head that still separated East and West Germans and that was antici-
pated by Peter Schneider long before the actual wall came down.6
Since then, the rebuilding of this empty center of Berlin has become
a major focus of all discussions about the Berlin of tomorrow. With the
new government quarter in the bend of the river Spree next to the Reich-
stag in the north and the corporate developments at Potsdamer Platz and
Leipziger Platz at the southern end of this space, Berlin will indeed gain
a new center of corporate and governmental power. But how important
should the city center be for the cities of the future? After all, the city as
center and the centered city are themselves in question today. Bernard
Tschumi puts it well when he asks, "How can architecture, whose histori-
cal role was to generate the appearance of stable images (monuments,
order, etc.) deal with today's culture of the disappearance of unstable
images (twenty-four-image-per-second cinema, video and computer-
generated images)?"'7 For some net surfers and virtual-city flaneurs, the
built city itself has become obsolete. Others, however, such as Saskia
Sassen, the New York urbanist, or Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, the well-
known Berlin architecture critic, have argued persuasively that it is
precisely the growth of global telecommunications and the potential
dispersal of population and resources that have created a new logic for
concentration in what Sassen calls the global city.8 Indeed, the city as cen-
ter is far from becoming obsolete. But, as center, the city is increasingly
affected and structured by our culture of media images. In the move
from the city as regional or national center of production to the city as
international center of communications, media, and services, the very im-
age of the city itself becomes central to its success in a globally competitive
world. From New York's new Times Square, with its culture industry
giants Disney and Bertelsmann and its ecstasies of flashing commer-
cial signage, to Berlin's new Potsdamer Platz, with Sony, Mercedes, and
Brown Boveri, visibility equals success (fig. 6).
Not surprisingly, then, the major concern in developing and rebuild-
ing key sites in the heart of Berlin seems to be with image rather than
use, attractiveness for tourists and official visitors rather than heteroge-
neous living space for Berlin's inhabitants, erasure of memory rather than
its imaginative preservation. The new architecture is to enhance the de-
sired image of Berlin as capital and global metropolis of the twenty-first
6. See Peter Schneider, Der Mauerspringer (Darmstadt, 1982), p. 102.

7. Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities: Praxis (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 367.
8. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J., 1991).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
century; as a hub between Eastern and Western Europe; and as a center

of corporate presence, however limited that presence may in the end turn
out to be. But, ironically, the concern with Berlin's image, foremost on
the minds of politicians who desire nothing so much as to increase Ber-
lin's ability to attract corporations and tourists, clashes with what I would
describe as the fear of an architecture of images.
This tension has produced a very sharp debate in which the bat-
tlelines between the defenders of a national tradition and the advocates
of a contemporary high-tech global architecture are firmly entrenched.
The traditionalists champion a local and national concept of urban cul-
ture that they call "critical reconstruction."' Its representatives, such as
Hans Stimmann, the city's director of building from 1991 to 1996, and
Vittorio Lampugnani, former director of Frankfurt's Museum of Archi-
tecture, call for a new simplicity that seems to aim at a mix of Karl
Friedrich Schinkel's classicism and Peter Behrens's once-daring modern-
9. Some of the key contributions to the debate about critical reconstruction are col-
lected in Einfach schwierig: Eine deutsche Architekturdebatte, ed. Gert Kihler (Braunschweig,
1995).
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FIG. 6.-Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz. Architect: Helmut Jahn. Model. From Info Box:
Der Katalog (1996).

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ism, with Heinrich Tessenow as a moderate modernist thrown in to se-

cure an anti-avant-gardist and anti-Weimar politics of traditionalism.
Berlin must be Berlin, they say. Identity is at stake. But this desired iden-
tity is symptomatically dominated by pre-World War I architecture, the
Mietkaserne and the notion of the once again popular traditional neigh-
borhood, affectionately called the Kiez. In the late 1970s, the Kiez became
associated with counterculture in run-down, close-to-the-wall quarters
like Kreuzberg, where squatters occupied and restored decaying housing
stock. In the 1980s it was embraced by the city's mainstream preservation
efforts. Now it dictates key parameters of the new architectural conserva-
tism. Forgotten are the architectural and planning experiments of the
1920s, the great Berlin estates of Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut. Forgot-
ten or, rather, repressed is the architecture of the Nazi period of which
Berlin, after all, still harbors significant examples, from the Olympic Sta-
dium to Goering's aviation ministry near Leipziger Platz. Ignored and to
be quickly forgotten is the architecture of the GDR, which many would
just like to commit in its entirety to the wrecking ball-from the Sta-
linallee all the way to satellite housing projects like Marzahn or Ho-
henschdnhausen. What we have instead is a strange mix of an originally
leftist Kiez romanticism and a nineteenth-century vision of the neighbor-
hood divided into small parcels, as if such structures could become pre-
scriptive for the rebuilding of the city as a whole. But this is precisely
what bureaucrats like Stimmann and theorists like Hoffmann-Axthelm
have in mind with critical reconstruction. Prescriptions such as city block
building, traditional window fagades, a uniform height of twenty-two me-
ters (the ritualistically invoked Traufhdhe), and building in stone are vocif-
erously defended against all evidence that such traditionalism is wholly
imaginary. Building in stone, indeed, at a time when the most stone you'd
get is a thin stone veneer covering the concrete skeleton underneath.
There is not much of interest to say about the corporate side of the
debate. There we have international high tech, fagade ecstasy, a prefer-
ence for mostly banal high-rises, and floods of computer generated imag-
ery to convince us that we need to go with the future. But this dichotomy
of stone age versus cyber age is misleading: the fight is over image and
image alone on both sides of the issue. The new nationally coded simplic-
ity is just as image-driven as the image ecstasies of the high-tech camp,
except that it posits banal images of a national past against equally banal
images of a global future. The real Berlin of today, its conflicts and aspira-
tions, remains a void in a debate that lacks imagination and vision.
Take Stimmann and Lampugnani. Lampugnani disapproves of
"easy pictures ... superficial sensation ... tormented lightness ... wild
growth ... nosy new interpretation."'0 Stimman in turn protests that
"learning from Las Vegas" is out of place in a central European city, a
10. Quoted in Dagmar Richter, "Spazieren in Berlin," Assemblage 29 (1996): 80.

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programmatic statement as much directed against postmodernism in ar-

chitecture as it is quite blatantly anti-American in the tradition of conser-
vative German Kulturkritik." But this attack on a twenty-five-year-old
founding text of postmodern architecture and its reputed image politics
is strangely out of place and out of time. Las Vegas postmodernism has
been defunct for some time, and nobody has ever suggested that Berlin
should become a casino city. The hidden object of Stimmann's moralizing
protest is Weimar Berlin. For Berlin in the 1920s, we must remember,
defined its modernity as quintessentially "American"-Berlin as a "Chi-
cago on the Spree"-and as such different both from older European
capitals and from the Berlin of the Wilhelmian Empire. The embrace of
America was an embrace of pragmatic technological modernity, function-
alism, mass culture, and democracy. America then offered images of the
new, but memories of Weimar architecture-Erich Mendelsohn, Walter
Gropius and the Bauhaus, Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Hannes Meyer,
Mies van der Rohe-simply do not figure in the current debates about
architecture in Berlin. In their antimodernism, the conservatives them-
selves have gone postmodern. Small wonder then that Stimmann's prefer-
ence for critical reconstruction is itself primarily concerned with image
and advertising: the image of built space creating a sense of traditional
identity for Berlin whose voids must be filled; and the more intangible,
yet economically decisive, international image of the city in an age of
global service economies, urban tourism, cultural competition, and new
concentrations of wealth and power. But the desired image is decidedly
pre-1914. The critical reconstructionists fantasize about a second Griinder-
zeit analogous to the founding years of the Second Reich after the Franco-
Prussian war. Never mind that the gold rush of the first Griinderzeit
quickly collapsed with the crash of 1873 and the beginning of a long de-
pression.
The issue in central Berlin, to use Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izen-
our's by now classic postmodern terms from Learning from Las Vegas in this
very different context, is how best to decorate the corporate and govern-
mental sheds to better attract international attention: not the city as mul-
tiply coded text to be filled with life by its dwellers and its readers but the
city as image and design in the service of displaying power and profit.
This underlying goal has paradigmatically come to fruition in a project
on Leipziger Platz called Info Box, a huge red box on black stilts with
window fronts several stories high and with an open-air roof terrace for
panoramic viewing (figs. 7 and 8). Info Box, attracting some five thou-
sand visitors per day, was built in 1995 as a temporary installation to serve
11. Hans Stimmann, "Conclusion: From Building Boom to Building Type," in Anne-
gret Burg, Downtown Berlin: Building the Metropolitan Mix/Berlin Mitte: Die Entstehung einer ur-
banen Architektur, ed. Stimmann, trans. Ingrid Taylor, Christian Caryl, and Robin Benson
(Berlin, 1995).

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i ..."i : . i 'i : . .. . ..
S41,
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FIG. 7.-Construction site, Potsdamer Platz, with Info Box, 1995. Ph

licella.
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. .. .. . ... .. i
10
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FIG. 8.-Construction site, Posdamer Platz, seen from Potsdamer Platz subway station,
1996. Photo: author.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
as a site from which to view the construction wasteland studded with

building cranes that surround it (fig. 9). With its multimedia wall displays,
sound rooms, and interactive computers, it serves as an exhibition and
advertising site for the corporate developments by Mercedes, Sony, and
the A+T Investment Group on Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz. As a
cyber flaneur in "Virtual Berlin 2002," you can enjoy a fly-through
through a computer simulation of the new Potsdamer Platz and Leip-
ziger Platz developments or arrive by rail at the future Lehrter Bahnhof
(fig. 10). You can watch the construction site on a wraparound amphithe-
atrical screen inside, while listening to an animated, Disneyfied Berlin
sparrow deliver the proud narrative in a typical, street-smart, slightly
lower-class Berlin intonation. Or you can admire plaster casts of the ma-
jor architects-the cult of the master builder is alive and well as simula-
crum, all the more so as architects have become mere appendages in
today's world of urban development. More image box than info box, this
space offers the ultimate paradigm of the many Schaustellen (viewing and
spectacle sites) that the city mounted in the summer of 1996 at its major
Baustellen (construction sites). Berlin as a whole advertised itself as Schau-
stelle with the slogan "Bifihnen, Bauten, Boulevards" (stages, buildings,
boulevards) and mounted a cultural program that included over two
hundred guided tours of construction sites, and eight hundred hours of
music, acrobatics, and pantomime on nine open-air stages throughout
the summer. From void, then, to mise-en-scene and to image, images in
the void: Berlin wird ... Berlin becomes image.
Is it perverse to compare the gaze from the Info Box's terrace onto
the construction wasteland of Potsdamer Platz to that other gaze we all
remember, the gaze from the primitive elevated wooden (later metal)
platform erected near the wall west of Potsdamer Platz to allow Western
visitors to take a long look eastward across the death strip, emblem of
communist totalitarianism? It would only be perverse if one were to sim-
ply equate the two sites. And, yet, the memory of that other viewing plat-
form will not go away as it shares with the Info Box a certain obnoxious
triumphalism. The political triumphalism of the Free World during the
cold war has now been replaced by the triumphalism of the free market
in the age of corporate globalization.
Perhaps the box and the screen are our future. After all, the recently
completed developments on FriedrichstraBe, that major commercial ar-
tery crossing Unter den Linden, look frighteningly similar to their former
computer simulations, with one major difference: what appeared airy,
sometimes even elegant, and generously spacious in the simulations now
looks oppressively monumental, massive, and forbidding, especially when
experienced under the leaden Berlin skies in midwinter (figs. 11 and 12).
Call it the revenge of the real. In addition, some of the new fancy malls
on FriedrichstraBe, meant to compete with the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des
Westens) and the shopping area on and near the Kurfuirstendamm,

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
;imp
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FIG. 9.-Construction site, Potsdamer Platz, seen from Info Box roof terrace,
1996. Photo: author.
are already going belly-up, and though Berlin already has surplus office
space for rental, more is being built every day. Thus my fear for the future
of Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz is that just as the Info Box immo-
bilizes the flaneur facing the screen, the tight corporate structures,
despite gesturing toward public spaces and piazzas, will encage and con-
fine their visitors rather than re-creating the open, mobile, and multiply
coded urban culture that once characterized this pivotal traffic hub be-
tween the Eastern and Western parts of the city. There is good reason to
doubt whether Helmut Jahn's happy tent, which hovers above the central
plaza of the Sony development, will make up for the loss of urban life
that these developments will inevitably entail.
Looking at the forces and pressures that currently shape the new
Berlin, one may well fear that the ensemble of architectural solutions
proposed may represent the worst start into the twenty-first century one
could imagine for this city. Many of the major construction projects, it
seems, have been designed against the city rather than for it. Some of
them look like corporate spaceships reminiscent of the conclusion of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (fig. 13). The trouble is, they are here to stay.

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..... . . . . . i~iih!l~l RP?:?~ ?. ?'iiiiii~il !l~ei~~,
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FIG. 10.-Big screen inside Info Box. Photo: Elisabeth Felicella.
The void in the center of Berlin will have been filled. But memories of
that haunting space from the months and years after the wall came down
will linger. The one architect who understood the nature of this empty
space in the center of Berlin was Daniel Libeskind, who in 1992 made
the following proposal:
Rilke once said that everything is already there. We only must see it
and protect it. We must develop a feel for places, streets, and houses
that need our support. Take the open area at the Potsdamer Platz. I
suggest a wilderness, one kilometer long, within which everything
can stay as it is. The street simply ends in the bushes. Wonderful.
After all, this area is the result of today's divine natural law: nobody
wanted it, nobody planned it, and yet it is firmly implanted in all our
minds. And there in our minds, this image of the Potsdamer Platz
void will remain for decades. Something like that cannot be easily
erased, even if the whole area is developed.12
Of course, what Libeskind describes tongue in cheek as "today's divine

natural law" is nothing but the pressure of history that created the void
called Potsdamer Platz in the first place: the saturation bombings of
12. Daniel Libeskind, "Daniel Libeskind mit Daniel Libeskind: Potsdamer Platz"
(1992), in Radix-Matrix: Architekturen und Schriften, ed. Alois Martin Miller (Munich, 1994),
p. 149.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
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FIG. 12.-FriedrichstraBe, Quartier 207. Architect: Jean N

werden Realitit (1996).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
1944-45, which left little of the old Potsdamer Platz standing; the build-
ing of the wall in 1961, which required a further clearing of the area; the
tearing down of the wall in 1989, which made this whole area between
the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz into that prairie of history
that Berliners quickly embraced. It was a void filled with history and
memory, all of which will be erased (I'm less sanguine about the power of
memory than Libeskind) by the new construction.
However, in light of Libeskind's own architectural project, which is
crucially an architecture of memory, even his suggestion to leave the void
as it was in the early 1990s was not just romantic and impractical. For
Libeskind gave architectural form to another void that haunts Berlin, the
historical void left by the Nazi destruction of Berlin's thriving Jewish life
and culture. A discussion of Libeskind's museum project, arguably the
single most interesting building currently going up in Berlin, is appro-
priate here not only because it gives a different inflection to the notion
of Berlin as void in relation to memory and history but more importantly
because, however indirectly, it raises the issue of German national identity
and the identity of Berlin. While all the other major building sites in
Berlin today are inevitably haunted by the past, only Libeskind's building
attempts to articulate memory and our relationship to it in its very spa-
tial organization.
41
*NOW*
1110
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WO'7
FIG. 13.-Office building, Linkstra8e. Architect: Richard Rogers. Simulatio

Berlin: Visionen werden Realitiit (1996).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
... .. ... ....
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FIG. 14.-Berlin Museum with

Model. Bfiro Daniel Libeskind.
In 1989, just a few months before the wall fell, Libeskind was the
surprise winner of a competition to build the expansion of the Berlin
Museum with the Jewish Museum, as it is awkwardly and yet appropri-
ately called (fig. 14). The Berlin Museum was founded in 1962 as a local
history museum for the Western part of the divided city, clearly in reac-
tion to the building of the wall, which had made the former local history
museum, the Mairkisches Museum, inaccessible. Since the late 1970s, the
Berlin Museum has had a Jewish section, which documents the role of
German Jewry in the history of Berlin (currently housed in the Martin-
Gropius-Bau). With the new expansion, the museum was to consist of
three parts: one displaying a general history of Berlin from 1870 to the
present, one representing the history ofJews in Berlin, and an in-between
space dedicated to the theme of Jews in society that would articulate the
relations and crossovers between the other two components. Libeskind's
proposal was as architecturally daring as it was conceptually persuasive,
and even though multiple resistances-political, aesthetic, and eco-
nomic-had to be overcome, the museum is being built and is to be fin-
ished in the fall of 1997.
The expansion sits next to the old Berlin Museum, a baroque palace
that used to house the Berlin Chamber Court before the space became a

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
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FIG. 15.-Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum. Plan. Bfiro Daniel
Libeskind.
museum. The old and the new parts are apparently disconnected, and
the only entrance to the expansion building is underground from the old
building. Libeskind's structure has often been described as a zigzag, as
lightning, or, since it is to house a Jewish collection, as a fractured Star of
David. He himself has called it "Between the Lines." The ambiguity be-
tween an architecturally spatial and a literary meaning (one reads be-
tween the lines) is intended and indeed suggests the conceptual core of
the project. The basic structure of the building is found in the relation
between two lines, one straight but broken into pieces, divided into frag-
ments, the other multiply bent, contorted, but potentially going on ad
infinitum (fig. 15). Architecturally the longitudinal axis translates into a
thin slice of empty space that crosses the path of the zigzag structure at

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:47:45 UTC
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FIG. 16.-The void in the Jewish Museum. Buiro Daniel Libeskind.
each intersection and that reaches from the bottom of the building to
the top. It is sealed to the exhibition halls of the museum. Only at the
underground entry into the expansion building can the visitor physically
step into a section of this empty space. Elsewhere it cannot be entered,
but it is accessible to view from the small bridges that cross it at every
level of the building; it is a view into an abyss extending downward and
upward at the same time. Libeskind calls it the void (figs. 16 and 17).
This fractured and multiply interrupted void functions as a spine for the
building. It is both conceptual and literal. And, clearly, it signifies: As void
it signifies absence, the absence of Berlin's Jews, most of whom perished

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......? .......i!. 'Jill:
i::: . i::?iiii
. .,.rl
?:iii?? :?:ii?i
..... ..... ...........

? . . ..
.......,......,...
.4 ["... .....
.. .........
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M2F? SN ?M ?E':;:;: i~iii

iii::eo' :Oi?ie.!:ii ii
FIG. 17.-The void in the Jewish Museum. Biuro Daniel Libeskind.
in the Holocaust.'3 As fractured void it signifies history, a broken history

without continuity-the history of Jews in Germany; of German Jews;
and therefore also the history of Germany itself, which cannot be thought
separate from Jewish history in Germany. Thus, in line with the original
demand of the competition, the void provides that in-between space be-
tween Berlin's history and Jewish history in Berlin, inseparable as they
are, except that it does it in a form radically different from what was
13. For a gentle, though to me ultimately unpersuasive critique of Libeskind's void as

being too determined by history, meaning, and experience, see Jacques Derrida, 'Jacques
Derrida zu 'Between the Lines"' (1991), in Radix-Matrix, pp. 115-17.

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originally imagined by the competition. By leaving this in-between space

void, the museum's architecture forecloses the possibility of reharmoniz-
ing German-Jewish history along the discredited models of symbiosis or
assimilation. But it also rejects the opposite view that sees the Holocaust
as the inevitable telos of German history. Jewish life in Germany has been
fundamentally altered by the Holocaust, but it has not stopped. The void
thus becomes a space that nurtures memory and reflection for Jews and
for Germans. Its very presence points to an absence that can never be
overcome, a rupture that cannot be healed, and that certainly cannot be
filled with museal stuff. Its fundamental epistemological negativity can-
not be absorbed into the narratives that will be told by the objects and
installations in the showrooms of the museum. The void will always be
there in the minds of the spectators crossing the bridges that traverse it
as they move through the exhibition space. The spectators themselves
will move constantly between the lines. Organized around a void without
images, Libeskind's architecture has become script. His building itself
writes the discontinuous narrative that is Berlin, inscribes it physically
into the very movement of the museum visitor, and yet opens a space for
remembrance to be articulated and read between the lines.
Of course, the voids I have been juxtaposing are of fundamentally
different natures. One is an open urban space resulting from war, de-
struction, and a series of subsequent historical events; the other is an
architectural space, consciously constructed and self-reflexive to the core.
Both spaces nurture memory, but whose memory? The very notion of the
void will have different meanings for Jews than it will for Germans. There
is a danger of romanticizing or naturalizing the empty center of Berlin
just as Libeskind's building may not ultimately avoid the reproach of ar-
chitecturally aestheticizing or monumentalizing the void.14 But then the
very articulation of this museal space demonstrates the architect's aware-
ness of the dangers of monumentality: huge as the expansion is, the spec-
tator can never see or experience it as a whole. Both the void inside and
the building as perceived from the outside elude the totalizing gaze upon
which monumental effects are predicated. Spatial monumentality is
undercut by the inevitably temporal apprehension of the building. This
antimonumental monumentality, with which the museum memorializes
both the Holocaust and Jewish life in Berlin, stands in sharp contrast
to the unselfconscious monumentality of the official government-
sponsored Holocaust Monument that is to be built at the northern end of
the highly charged space between the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger
Platz.'5 For those who for good reasons question the ability of traditional
14. This is implied by Derrida for whom a void that represents is no longer a void
proper. See Derrida, "Jacques Derrida zu 'Between the Lines."'
15. At the time of this writing, it is not clear what will be built as the "Monument to
the Murdered Jews of Europe." A 1995 competition with a total of 527 entries ended in a
public outcry over the winning entry, a slanted concrete slab the size of two football fields

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monuments to keep memory alive as public or collective memory, Libes-

kind's expansion of the Berlin Museum may be a better memorial to Ger-
man and Jewish history, the history of the living and of the dead, than
any official funereal Holocaust monument could possibly be.16
As architecture, then, Libeskind's museum is the only project in the
current Berlin building boom that explicitly articulates issues of national
and local history in ways pertinent to postunification Germany. In its spa-
tial emphasis on the radical ruptures, discontinuities, and fractures of
German and German-Jewish history, it stands in opposition to the critical
reconstructionists' attempts to create a seamless continuity with a pre-
1914 national past that would erase memories of Weimar, Nazi, and GDR
architecture in the process. As an architecture of memory, it also opposes
the postnationalism of global corporate architecture a la Potsdamer Platz
and Leipziger Platz, an architecture of development that has neither
memory nor sense of place. As an unintentional manifesto, the museum
points to the conceptual emptiness that currently exists between a nostal-
gic pre-1914 understanding of the city and its post-2002 entropic corpo-
rate malling. The history of Berlin as void is not yet over, but then
perhaps a city as vast and vibrant as Berlin will manage to incorporate its
latest white elephants at Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz into the
larger urban fabric. If Paris is able to live with Sacr6 Coeur, who is to say
that Berlin cannot stomach Sony Corp. Once the current image frenzy is
over, the Info Box dismantled, and the critical reconstructionists forgot-
ten, the notion of the capital as a montage of many historical forms and
spaces may reassert itself, and the commitment to the necessarily palimp-
sestic texture of urban space may even lead to new, not yet imaginable
forms of architecture.
with millions of victims' names carved in stone. Even Helmut Kohl did not like it, though
surely for the wrong reasons. A new competition is anticipated for later this year.
16. I am only talking here about the building as architecture. Its museal and curatorial
functions are still too much in flux for us to comment with any degree of certainty about
the ways in which the exhibition spaces will be used or even about who will have ultimate
curatorial control over the expansion space.

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"See: "We Are All Neurasthenics"!" or, the Trauma of Dada Montage
Author(s): Brigid Doherty
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1344160
REFERENCES
http://www.jstor.com/stable/1344160?seq=1&cid=pdf-

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"See: We Are All Neurasthenics!" or,
The Trauma of Dada Montage
Brigid Doherty
The photomontages were given to her in a sealed envelope. When she opened the
envelope, she experienced such a shock that she does not recall clearly what she did
afterwards. Unable to speak or breathe normally, she seemed to be in great physical
and emotional distress and was perspiring heavily. When finally she was able to
speak, she explained that she had just had a great shock and pointed to the photo-
montages.
Those lines paraphrase testimony recently given in a civil suit before
a Massachusetts court.' The defendant in the suit was the maker of the
photomontages, which were images of the plaintiff, the woman who
opened the envelope. When the incident with the photomontages oc-
curred, the defendant and the plaintiff were coworkers in an office, and
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Johns Hopkins University in De-
cember 1995 and at the University of Manchester in March 1996; the present version bene-
fited from comments and criticisms offered on each occasion, particularly those of Elizabeth
Cropper, Michael Fried, Anton Kaes, Paul Lerner, and Mark Micale. I am also indebted to
T. J. Clark, Martin Jay, Richard Meyer, Paolo Morante, and Anne Wagner for their re-
sponses to versions of this material in various forms; and I am especially grateful to Ruth
Leys for her comments on the penultimate draft. An abbreviated version of this essay will
appear in Traumatic Pasts: Studies in History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, edited
by Lerner and Micale (forthcoming). My research was supported by the Fulbright Commis-
sion; the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Uni-
versitit, Berlin; the Western Europe Program of the American Council of Learned Societies
and the Social Science Research Council; and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. See Bowman v. Heller, 1993 WL (WestLaw Legal Database) 761159 (Mass.Super., 9
July 1993), memorandum and order; hereafter abbreviated BH1993.

82

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the plaintiff was a candidate in a local union election campaign. The de-
fendant was not a supporter of the plaintiff's candidacy, and the photo-
montages were conceived, he said, as a vehicle for his critical opinion of
her campaign.
To make the pictures, the defendant clipped from campaign post-
cards several captioned photographic portraits of the plaintiff-a "stern,
bespectacled" woman in her mid-sixties2-and pasted the plaintiff's face
and name to photographs of "nude and partially nude female bodies in
sexually explicit poses" (BH1993), which he had selected from porno-
graphic magazines. The defendant then photocopied the resulting com-
posite images, posted several of them by his desk, and distributed a few
others to colleagues in the office, envisioning his endeavor as "'a private
satire among a select group of friends,'" " a bawdy joke disparaging a can-
didate running for administrative office." Copies of the pictures were
eventually given to the plaintiff by her campaign manager, who, appar-
ently anticipating the plaintiff's response, delivered them to her in the
sealed envelope mentioned above.
The pictures inside the envelope were crude photomontages, images
assembled by cutting and pasting disparate photographs and juxtaposing
mismatched body parts. The idea of the photomontages was so crude,
the Massachusetts court ruled, that their creation and distribution in
photocopied form amounted to an "outrageous attack" (BH1993) and an
"intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress"5 by the defen-
dant upon the plaintiff. The court's ruling and the substantial monetary
2. Jeffrey Rosen, "Cheap Speech," review of Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Commu-

nity, Management, by Robert Post, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Wom-
en's Rights, by Nadine Strossen, Fighting Words: Individuals, Communities, and Liberties of Speech,
by Kent Greenawalt, Scrambling for Protection: The Net Media and the First Amendment, by Pat-
rick Garry, and Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment, by
Newton Minow and Craig LaMay, The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 1995, p. 76. Rosen is discussing
the case of Bowman v. Heller; the description of Sylvia Bowman he mentions does not appear
in the court records I have read.
3. David Heller, quoted in Bowman v. Heller 651 N.E.2d. 372 (Mass. 1995); hereafter
abbreviated BH1995.
4. Those pictures, the defendant testified, were "'the most absurd pictures that I could
think of, and [the plaintiff's] views were the most absurd I could think of"' (BH1995, p. 378
n. 5).
5. This is the phrase used in trial documents at both the Massachussetts Superior
(BH1993) and Supreme Judicial court (BH1995, p. 369) levels.
Brigid Doherty, assistant professor of the history of art at the Johns

Hopkins University, is currently completing a book, Berlin Dada Montage,
from which this essay is drawn. She is also at work on a project on Paula
Modersohn-Becker, Hannah H6ch, Marlene Dietrich, and Hanne Dar-
boven.

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84 Brigid Doherty The Trauma of Dada Montage
award for damages that accompanied it were based on the plaintiff's phys-
ical and emotional reaction to the photomontages. That reaction was, the
plaintiff claimed, traumatic.
Testimony from a clinical psychologist who had treated the plaintiff
was crucial to the case. The psychologist's diagnosis: Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), which she described as a condition "triggered by
an event outside the normal range of human experience" and character-
ized by symptoms including "psychogenic amnesia," "exaggerated startle
response, psychic numbness," and "loss of interest in formerly pleasur-
able activities" (BH1993).6 Based on the psychologist's testimony, the
court determined that "the specific event which caused the PTSD" was
the plaintiff's viewing of the photomontages (BH1993).
Several aspects of this civil case decided in Boston in 1995 have
prompted me to use it to introduce an essay whose subject is the avant-
garde art of dada montage, produced in Berlin around 1920. First, there
is the vivid description of the plaintiff's traumatic psychophysical reaction
to the photomontages, a reaction that I shall argue is strikingly similar to
the reaction the Berlin dadaists attempted to effect in the beholders of
their work. Second, there is the notion that a volatile mix of sexuality and
politics plays a part in the trauma caused by photomontage, a notion I
take to be central to the project of Berlin dada, although it is not the
focus of my argument here. Third, and most important for my purposes
in this essay, there is the suggestion that the capacity to induce trauma
inheres specifically in the form of photomontage, where the beholder's
traumatic experience is, so to speak, already embodied in the composite
image of a figure whose parts do not match-where, to put it another
way, traumatic shock is made visible in a fragmented body such as the one
whose "sexually explicit" pose appears in radical contrast to its "stern,
bespectacled" face.
In 1922, George Grosz published a portfolio of lithographs called

With Paintbrush and Scissors: Seven Materializations (Mit Pinsel und Schere: Sie-
ben Materialisationen). The prints are black-and-white reproductions of
color photomontages Grosz had made around 1920 while he was active
in the Berlin dada movement. In this essay, I propose a relationship be-
tween two concepts of materialization: materialization as a technical pro-
cedure in dada montage and materialization as a mechanism in the
6. The terms of the diagnosis correspond to those listed under category A of PTSD in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C., 1987). On
PTSD, see Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York, 1992); and the introduc-
tions by Cathy Caruth as well as essays by Laura S. Brown ("Not Outside the Range: One Femi-
nist Perspective on Psychic Trauma") and by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart
("The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma") in Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 3-12, 100-12, 151-57, and 158-82.

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production of the hysterical conversion symptoms of the traumatic neuro-

ses of World War I.7 The montage materializations of Berlin dada de-
mand to be understood in relation to the bodily materializations of
traumatic psychic shock that characterized the war neuroses, and it is in
this sense that I believe we may speak of the trauma of dada montage.
The trauma of dada montage is best seen in the context of the First
International Dada Fair, an exhibition of roughly two hundred objects in
a variety of media that was held at a Berlin art gallery from 30 June until
25 August 1920. With its stuffed officer's uniform fitted with a plaster
pig's head and hung from the ceiling in the gallery's main room, the Dada
Fair was most famously the event that resulted in charges against the
dadaists for slandering the German military, an offense for which the
dadaists were tried, convicted, and heavily fined.8 (As the Massachusetts
caricaturist was also to discover, sometimes the traumatic shock effects of
montage have serious legal consequences.) In a publicity photograph of
the Dada Fair (fig. 1) the dadaists converse at the exhibition opening,
7. I borrow the term materialization from Saindor Ferenczi, "Hysterische Materialisa-

tionsphinomene: Gedanken zur Auffassung der hysterischen Konversion und Symbolik,"
Bausteine zur Psychoanalyse, 4 vols. (Bern, 1939), 3:129-47; trans. Jane Isabel Suttie et al.,
under the title "The Phenomena of Hysterical Materialization: Thoughts on the Concep-
tion of Hysterical Conversion and Symbolism" (1919), Further Contributions to the Theory and
Technique of Psycho-Analysis, ed. John Rickman (1926; London, 1950), pp. 89-104. Ferenczi
does not discuss the war neuroses in this article, but his concept of materialization is broad
and would seem to me to encompass the symptomatology of the traumatic neuroses of
World War I, which Ferenczi in 1918 had asserted was "without exception hysterical," and
of which he had also said: "You see, it is like a museum of glaring hysterical symptoms" (Sie
sehen: es ist wie ein Museum schreiender hysterischer Symptombilder) (Ferenczi, paper delivered at
the Fifth International Psycho-analytical Congress, Budapest, Sept. 1918, in Ferenczi et
al., Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses, trans. pub. [London, 1921], pp. 10, 14; hereafter
abbreviated PWN.) The Budapest conference papers were originally published as Ferenczi
et al., Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen (Leipzig, 1919), and my inclusions of the original
German refer to that edition. In the 1918 paper as elsewhere, Ferenczi's language is often
emphatically visual, and it is worth noting that in his 1919 article he associated hysterical
materializations with other kinds of plastic representation, including artistic creation:
another problem hitherto considered only from the psychological side, that of artistic
endowment, is in hysteria illuminated to some extent from its organic side. Hysteria
is, as Freud says, a caricature of art [ein Zerrbild der Kunst]. Hysterical 'materializa-
tions', however, show us the organism in its preparedness for art [Kunstfertigkeit]. It
might prove that the purely 'autoplastic' artworks [rein "autoplastische" Kunststiicke] of
the hysteric are prototypes, not only for the bodily productions [kdrperliche Produktio-
nen] of artistes and actors [Artisten und Schauspieler], but also for the work of those
visual artists [bildende Kiinstler] who no longer manipulate their own bodies but
material from the external world [Material der Aussenwelt bearbeiten]. [Ferenczi,
"The Phenomena of Hysterical Materialization," p. 104; "Hysterische Materialisa-
tionsphinomene," 3:146-47; trans. mod.]
8. For a thorough account of the charges against the dadaists and the resulting trial
in April 1921, see Rosamunde Neugebauer, George Grosz-Macht und Ohnmacht satirischer
Kunst: Die Graphikfolgen "Gott mit uns," "Ecce homo" und "Hintergrund" (Berlin, 1993), pp.
51-78.

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in i
:. . : . . .. .
.... .
. . .
X c..,.
FIG. 1.-First International Dada Fair, 1920. Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz,

Berlin.
surrounded by scabrous representations of soldiers.9 The stuffed officer's

uniform with its pig's head looms. On a metal-legged slate table stands a
tailor's dummy with an illuminated lightbulb for a head, a metal pole for
a leg, false teeth in place of genitals, a revolver on one shoulder, a door-
bell on the other, and an array of military decorations (along with a prom-
inent knife and fork) glued to its torso. A parade of painted war cripples
(Kriegskriippel) marches along a side wall; one of the veterans shakes ex-
travagantly, with wavy lines of paint on and around the man's face and
right arm representing the symptoms of the so-called trembling neurosis
9. Eager to promote the Dada Fair, the dadaists hired a professional photographer to
document the exhibition and distributed the photographs as publicity pictures to newspa-
pers and magazines. The dadaists' promotional campaign was quite successful: the Dada
Fair received dozens of published reviews both in Germany and abroad-most of them
decidedly hostile, not to say outraged, a few baffled but amused. Indeed, newspapers all
over the world devoted space to the Dada Fair, with articles appearing, for example, in
Prague, Paris, Milan, London, New York, Buenos Aires, and El Paso, Texas. I should like
to thank Richard Sheppard of Magdalen College, Oxford, who generously shared with me
materials from his archive of dada press clippings. Another extraordinary collection of such
materials can be found among the Coupures de Presse in the Tristan Tzara Archive, Biblio-
theque Litt6raire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

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.........
;.::::" '"':++;+
.:: ... ..
Ini TVi~lAil
++++!++++
++=+N: ~ ~ t~~g L~~;1~alYi~~ ... .. ... ,..
FIG. 2.-First International Dada Fair, 1920. Hannah H6ch Archive,

erie, Landesmuseum ffir Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur
(Zitterneurose). In a second photograph (fig. 2), the faces of

organizers, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and John
featured on large-scale photographic posters and surro
sometimes shouting out, agitational slogans in bold typogr
My argument focuses on the montage "The Convict": M
Heartfield after FranzJung's Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet
Monteur John Heartfield nach FranzJungs Versuch, ihn auf die
(see fig. 9)10 and on the sculptural assemblage The Petit-Bourg
10. A note on the title of Grosz's 1920 portrait of Heartfield: The Mu

Art, New York, uses an abbreviated title, The Engineer Heartfield, whic
duced here. Instead, I return to the title the montage bore when first
and which I shorten below to MonteurJohn Heartfield. Concerning John
it is worth noting that he was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin in 1891 a
his name during World War I as an act of protest against the war an
vehement anti-British propaganda. Born in Berlin two years after Heart
fried GroB "Anglo-Americanized" his name during World War I. The
pressed both Grosz's opposition to the war and his fascination with Am
and mass culture.
Anarcho-communist writer Franz Jung was among the signatories of the 1918 "Dada-
ist Manifesto," cited below. Jung himself had been both a prisoner and a mental hospital
patient during World War I, when in 1915 he was shuttled between Spandau prison, where
he was incarcerated for desertion, and the Irrenanstalt Dalldorf in Berlin-Wittenau. On

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Heartfield Gone Wild. Electro-mechanical Tatlin-Sculpture (Der wildgewordene

Spiefjer Heartfield. Elektro-mech. Tatlin-Plastik) (see fig. 15), objects that com-
mand the attention of the dadaists themselves in the photograph of the
opening of the Dada Fair, where Grosz and Heartfield, standing at right,
regard their electrified assemblage, while Wieland and Margarete Herz-
felde, in the rear at left, look up at Grosz's montage portrait of Heartfield.
In this essay, I provide detailed analyses of the representation of trau-
matic shock within individual works that I consider representative of
dada montage in its most powerful forms and that thus demonstrate the
meaningfulness and vitality of trauma as a category of historical and in-
terpretative interest in Berlin dada. Because my analyses of texts and im-
ages are closely focused, I want to emphasize at this juncture that trauma
must be counted among the most basic concerns of Berlin dada. Trauma
figured prominently in the movement's founding document, the "Dadaist
Manifesto" of 1918, where a famous passage describes the ambitions of
Berlin dada's art in a graphic language of shock and dismemberment:
The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents
the thousandfold problems of the day, an art which one can see has
let itself be thrown by the explosions of the last week, which is forever
gathering up its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most ex-
traordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of
their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, holding fast to the
intellect of their time, bleeding from hands and hearts."
"Psychiatry knows traumatophile types," wrote Walter Benjamin in his

classic interpretation of Baudelaire.'2 This essay means to show that the
Jung, see Fritz Mierau, "Leben und Schriften des Franz Jung: Eine Chronik," in Der Torpe-
dokafer: Hommage a Franz Jung, ed. Lutz Schulenberg (Hamburg, 1988), pp. 133-86, on
which I draw here. On Jung and Berlin dada, see Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas: Die
Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen (GieBen, 1989), pp. 66-81, and Jennifer E. Michaels,
FranzJung: Expressionist, Dadaist, Revolutionary, and Outsider (New York, 1989).
11. Richard Huelsenbeck, "Dadaist Manifesto," quoted in Huelsenbeck, En Avant
Dada: A History of Dadaism, trans. Ralph Manheim, in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthol-
ogy, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2d ed. (1951; Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 40; trans. mod. It is
worth noting here that Huelsenbeck was a medical student at the time the "Dadaist Mani-
festo" was written and that he indeed went on to specialize in neuropsychiatry in the early
twenties and, having fled Germany in 1936, to practice psychoanalysis under the name
Charles R. Hulbeck in New York City. See Hans J. Kleinschmidt, "The New Man-Armed
with the Weapons of Doubt and Defiance," introduction to Huelsenbeck, Memoirs ofa Dada
Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1974; Berkeley, 1991), p. xxv. See also Richard Shep-
pard, "Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974): Dada and Psychoanalysis," Literaturwissenschaft-
lichesJahrbuch 26 (1985): 271-305; Karin Ffillner, Richard Huelsenbeck: Texte und Aktionen eines
Dadaisten (Heidelberg, 1983); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 187-244; and Weltdada Huelsenbeck: eine Biografie in
Briefen und Bildern, ed. Herbert Kapfer and Lisbeth Exner (Innsbruck, 1996).
12. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 163. In "On Some Motifs in Baude-

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Berlin dadaists were traumatophiles, too. The 1918 manifesto announces

as much, and it does so with a crudeness typical of dada. In what follows,
I shall claim that dada's conception of trauma and traumatophilia is more
complex than the manifesto's febrile polemic might suggest. Like Baude-
laire's, the dadaists' predilection for trauma was bound up in an apprecia-
tion of modernity and its problematics, represented in the manifesto's
traumatic language as "the explosions of the last week" (die Explosionen
der letzten Woche) and "yesterday's crash" (der Stofp des letzten Tages). The
manifesto prescriptively declares that dada's art is to have a "conscious
content" (Bewufitseinsinhalt) in the form of dismembered embodiments of
contemporary life; it should always, self-consciously, be "gathering up its
limbs" (ihre Glieder immer wieder ... zusammensucht). The dadaist's own body
is to be bloodied inside and out (leaking from the hand as from the heart,
in pain both physically and emotionally) and shattered in a way that will
allow him-perhaps compel him-to comprehend the frenzy and the
specific intellect of his age because he can identify with them, because,
we must suppose, both the frenzy and the intellect, both the madness and
the consciousness will be his own. For the dadaist, the madness and the
consciousness will be specifically those of the traumatic neuroses of war,
the madness and the consciousness of men who had indeed been thrown
(geworfen) by explosions.
A newspaper announcement for a "Dada-Soiree" in May 1919 closed
with this editorial commentary: "The dadaists differ from many who have
[taken the stage] since August 1914 primarily in that they only-simulate
insanity."13 As the periodization ("since August 1914") suggests, the simu-
lation of mental illness in which the dadaists were seen to engage was
a simulation specifically of war neurosis, an imitation of the condition
commonly known as shell shock.14 Cases of war neurosis reached epi-
laire," Benjamin takes Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as the source of his psycho-
analytic model of traumatic shock. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Stra-
chey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18:7-64. In this essay, I turn instead to the slightly earlier
work of Ferenczi, Freud's colleague, which was based on Ferenczi's firsthand experience
with war neurotics in World War I military hospitals and which I believe speaks more di-
rectly to dada montage. I discuss Benjamin and Baudelaire in relation to Berlin dada and
consider the potential interpretative usefulness of Beyond the Pleasure Principle for our under-
standing of dada in the larger study, Berlin Dada Montage (in progress), of which the present
essay is part. For a reading of surrealism that discusses both Benjamin and Beyond the Plea-
sure Principle extensively, see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
13. "Die Simulanten des Irrsinns auf dem Vortragspult," Neue Berliner 12. Uhr Zeitung,
20 May 1919. The announcement might also be read as suggesting that many who had
taken the stage to speak out for or against the war were "insane."
14. My understanding of the war neuroses is indebted to the recent work of Paul
Lerner, "Hysterical Men: War, Neurosis, and German Mental Medicine, 1914-1921" (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, 1996), parts of which I had the pleasure of reading in drafts
during the summer and fall of 1995, and Lerner, "Rationalizing the Therapeutic Arsenal:
German Neuropsychiatry in World War I," in Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medi-

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
demic proportions in the German army during World War I, with sol-
diers displaying psychogenic physical symptoms including tics and
tremors, paralysis, hyperaesthesia of one or all the senses, swooning, cata-
tonia, mutism, blindness, deafness, stuttering, rhythmical screaming, and
crawling on all fours, along with psychical symptoms such as depression,
terror, anxiety, a tendency to outbursts of rage, and a general lapse into
atavistic or infantile methods of reaction.15 It was those physical and psy-
chical symptoms of shock that Berlin dada simulated by employing the
technique of montage.
It is worth mentioning that, whether simulated or not, the madness
of the modern artist is a commonplace reiterated by modernism's ene-
mies and by its friends. It is a commonplace that was invoked often
enough in avant-garde circles in the years surrounding World War I, and
with particular force and frequency in Berlin and Paris during the 1920s,
especially in the context of dada and surrealism. And insanity was every-
where one looked as far as art was concerned in Germany in the 1930s-
in the pages of National Socialist newspapers and in catalogues and
speeches churned out around degenerate art exhibitions. Dada figured
prominently in those discourses, and from the movement's inception
there was no lack of accusations or metaphors of insanity among contem-
porary responses to Berlin dada's endeavors.
In addition to its vehemence, what makes the discourse of madness
that grew up around Berlin dada interesting is that the accusations of
insanity occasionally took explicitly clinical, diagnostic forms. For ex-
ample, a psychiatrist from Berlin's Charit6 hospital encountered the work
of the dadaists and declared, in an article that was published in a number
of German newspapers in July and August 1920, that he was familiar
from his observations of the mentally ill with artworks like those made by
the dadaists. The psychiatrist spoke of such objects being produced in
particular by mental patients in catatonic states, and he assured his read-
cal Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks
(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 121-48. I should like to thank Lerner in particular for his generos-
ity in providing me with information about the so-called active treatment of the war neuro-
ses in the German context, discussed below in relation to Berlin dada. Other indispensable
sources on the traumatic neuroses of World War I are Eric Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and
Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), especially pp. 163-92, and two recent articles by
Ruth Leys, "Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory," Critical
Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 623-62 and "Death Masks: Kardiner and Ferenczi on Psychic
Trauma," Representations, no. 53 (Winter 1996): 44-73.
15. I have drawn my list of symptoms largely from PWN. The symptomatology of the
war neuroses is notoriously broad, and other lists could be assembled; see, for example, the
detailed list in Leys, "Death Masks," p. 48. For obvious reasons, many of the symptoms I
have chosen relate directly to the representation of trauma in Berlin dada, while others are
provided to give the reader a sense of the range of ways that trauma manifested itself in the
war neuroses.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
ers that the art of the insane was "much more careful" and "far less sim-
ple" than dada. According to the doctor, even patients with psychogenic
paralyses produced self-portraits that were more successful in terms of
draughtsmanship than their dada counterparts. Noting that "there is a
wide range of... mental illnesses in which the patient has a compulsion
for activity and control in the 'dadaist sense,"' the doctor remarked on
several formal qualities shared by Berlin dada and art made by patients
in catatonic states: "a red thread runs through all of them: with insuffi-
cient means and inadequate materials, pictures and handicrafts are made
in a childish manner and a bizarre style." "In the mental ward of the
Charit6," he continued, "we have a little exhibition of such works. [And
now] we have [found] in the dadaist artworks a borderline case of a symp-
tom complex somewhere between an organic mental illness and a more
generalized psychopathology, and so we psychiatrists are grateful to the
dadaists for their exhibition. Whether one does right by the people by
letting them see it, is questionable: the collection belongs in the Charit."'16
The psychiatrist's diagnosis and his conceit of professional gratitude for
the dadaists' display of their own symptom complex are directed towards
the predictable conclusion that the proper place for dada art is in a men-
tal hospital. But that conclusion in this case has a political dimension: the
psychiatrist makes plain his anxiety about the risk of letting the people
(das Volk) behold dada; he sees in dada's "bizarre style" and "childish man-
ner" a capacity for political as well as psychopathological agitation. A
double-page spread for a dada magazine, which was never published but
was framed and displayed at the Dada Fair (fig. 3), shows a photograph
ofJohn Heartfield with a caption approximating the psychiatrist's evalua-
tion: "Send the painters to the madhouse!" (Steckt die Maler ins Irrenhaus),
shouts Heartfield from his angry mouth, fists clenched for emphasis,
16. Werner Leibbrand, "Da-Da, Betrachtung eines Arztes," General Anzeiger (Mann-
heim), 21 July 1920; originally published in 7Tgliche Rundschau (Berlin). The "organic men-
tal illness" with which Leibbrand associated dada is referred to elsewhere in the article
specifically as "jugendliches Irresein (Hebrephemie)" (dementia praecox), a condition
sometimes described in the clinical literature as having symptoms in common with the war
neuroses, especially where regression and the disruption of adult male sexuality were con-
cerned. On this point, see PWN, p. 17. It is worth noting here that war neurotics were
treated at the Psychiatrische und Nervenklinik der kiniglichen Charite, Berlin, during and
after World War I. Prominent among the Charite doctors was Karl Bonhoeffer, who pub-
lished a number of articles on the topic of the war neuroses. In 1941 Richard Huelsenbeck
prepared a list of his "psychiatric internships and residencies," which included the following
information: "Berlin Charite/Professor Bonhoeffer 1923/25, assistant psychiatrist" (Welt-
dada Huelsenbeck, p. 202). The secondary literature on madness and modern art is enor-
mous, and I shall not attempt to catalogue it here. On the interest of early twentieth-century
German psychiatrists in the art of the insane, and on the related association of modernism
with that art, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and
Madness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 217-38.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
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FIG. 3.-John Heartfield(?), two pages from the unpublished project, Dadaco, dadaistis
Zeitschriften (Hamburg, 1984), n. p. C 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bil

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
demonstrating, we might say, a compulsion for activity and control in the

"dadaist sense."
"See: we are all neurasthenics!" wrote George Grosz in a short poem

called "Kaffeehaus" (Caf6).'7 The poem was probably composed in Berlin
in mid-1917,18 shortly after Grosz's release from a military mental hospi-
tal, to which he had been sent because of what Grosz himself called his
"shattered nerves" (meine Nerven gingen entzwei).19 A passage from Grosz's
lyric reads:
Ich bin wie ein Kind in tausend Lunaparks

Und wie Bandstreifen, Film
Dreht sich rot und gelb,
17. George Grosz, "Kaffeehaus," Neue Bldtterfiir Kunst und Dichtung 1 (Nov. 1918): 155;
rpt. in Grosz, Grosz-Berlin: Autobiographisches, Bilder, Briefe, und Gedichte, ed. Marcel Beyer and
Karl Riha (Hamburg, 1993), p. 59; reproduced by permission of the Estate of George Grosz,
Princeton, N.J.
18. On the difficulty of dating the poem, see Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and
Politics in the Weimar Republic (1971; Princeton, N.J., 1991), p. 35.
19. Grosz, letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 15 Mar. 1917, Briefe: 1913-1959, ed. Herbert
Knust (Hamburg, 1979), p. 48. The letter was written from the "Nervenheilanstalt G6rden."
Many questions regarding Grosz's war service remain unanswered for lack of consistent
information. In what follows I sketch certain facts and related suppositions that seem to
me relatively certain. Grosz enlisted on 11 November 1914. The draft apparently seemed
unavoidable to Grosz, and he may have thought that by volunteering he would be able to
exercise a certain amount of choice in postings. In any case, rather than going into combat,
Grosz spent a considerable period during the winter of 1914-15 in a Lazarett, initially due
to a serious sinus infection. He was released as unfit for service in May 1915. Grosz was
called up again on 4 January 1917, and on 5 January was once again hospitalized, this time
apparently without any physical ailment at all. He spent January through April in mental
hospitals, first in Guben and then in Gbrden, both in the Brandenburg region not too far
from Berlin.
It has been suggested that the eminent sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld provided an
evaluation of Grosz's mental state that led to the young artist's final discharge. Should that
be true, it would be a matter of some interest where my interpretation of Grosz's representa-
tion of male sexuality and traumatic shock is concerned. First recounted by Grosz's biogra-
pher, Lothar Fischer, the suggestion of Hirschfeld's involvement in Grosz's discharge is
based on information obtained from Grosz's eldest son, Peter M. Grosz of Princeton, New
Jersey. In his autobiography, Grosz asserted that Count Harry Kessler had played a role in
his discharge, and made no mention of Hirschfeld. Recently published archival documents
support the claim for Kessler's involvement, insofar as they reveal that Grosz, Heartfield,
and Wieland Herzfelde all would seem to have been exempted from further military duty
in 1917 when they went to work making animated military propaganda films for the Bild-
und Film-Amt (Bufa), an endeavor endorsed and partially arranged by Kessler. On the
future dadaists' work at Bufa, see Jeanpaul Goergen, "Marke Herzfeld-Filme: Dokumente
zu John Heartfields Film-Arbeit," in John Heartfield: Dokumentation: Reaktionen auf eine unge-
wohnliche Ausstellung, ed. Klaus Honnef and Hans-Jilrgen von Osterhausen (Cologne, 1994),
pp. 23-66 and "'Filmisch sei der Strich, klar, einfach': George Grosz und der Film," in
George Grosz: Berlin-New York, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (exhibition catalogue, Neue Na-
tionalgalerie, Berlin, 21 Dec. 1994-17 Apr. 1995), pp. 211-18. Regarding Magnus Hirsch-

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
Und Tische verindern Farbe und Form

Und wandeln spazieren-
Zwischen den dicken Schenkeln der Frauen und weiBen Blusen.
Einer kurbelt fortwahrend
Mein Tisch ist ein ovales Stuick Marmor,
Kreise werden Eier-
Und Noten werfen wie Schrotschiisse kleine L6cher in mein Gehirn.
Herr Ober!!-bitte Selterwasser-

Ich bin eine Maschine, an der der Manometer entzwei ist-!
Und alle Walzen spielen im Kreis-
Siehe: wir sind allzumal Neurastheniker!20
(I am like a child in a thousand amusement parks

And in narrow bands, film
Twists around red and yellow,
And tables change color and form
And wander off walking-
Among the fat thighs of women and white blouses.
One of them spins without stopping.
My table is an oval slab of marble,
Circles become eggs-
And notes like shrapnel throw little holes into my brain.
Waiter!! A glass of seltzer please -
feld's possible involvement in Grosz's case, I should like to mention that Hirschfeld was not
an uncommon name in Berlin in 1917 and that there was indeed a Dr. Richard Hirschfeld
who treated war neurotics at the Charlottenburg Kriegslazarett in Berlin during World War
I-perhaps the latter was Grosz's evaluator and perhaps it is for that reason we find no
mention of the much more famous Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in Grosz's own reminiscences.
On his first period of military service, see Grosz, Ein kleinesJa und ein grofes Nein: Sein
Leben von ihm selbst erzdhlt (1955; Hamburg, 1986), p. 102, where Grosz himself suggests that
the account of his war experience provided by his art is the more complete and compelling
one: "I could write page after page about [World War I], but everything I could say about
it is already in my drawings." The 1917 hospitalization is described on pp. 110-14. On
Grosz's military service, see also Lewis, George Grosz, pp. 23, 51, and Lothar Fischer and
Helen Adkins, George Grosz (1976; Hamburg, 1993), p. 35.
In the hope of being able to describe in greater detail the circumstances of Grosz's
military service, in 1994 I attempted to gain access to Grosz's military medical records,
which are in the files of the Krankenbuchlager, Berlin. Unfortunately, access was denied, as
was the confirmation or denial of currently published information regarding materials said
to be contained in the records. For their support of my efforts, which included an appeal
to the city government of Berlin (Senat) in which their assistance was invaluable, I thank
Martin Kohli and Ingeborg Mehser of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and Euro-
pean Studies, Freie UniversitAt, Berlin. Some correspondence between Peter Grosz and the
Krankenbuchlager is among the Grosz Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard Univer-
sity, but that correspondence does not contain any information relevant to my concerns.
For related information obtained from my own correspondence with Mr. Grosz, see note 46.
20. Grosz, "Kaffeehaus," pp. 59-60.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
I am a machine whose pressure gauge has gone to pieces!

And all the cylinders run in a circle-
See: we are all neurasthenics!)
The poem describes the experience of a man returned from military ser-
vice to metropolitan Berlin, a figure like the one in Grosz's The Love-Sick
Man (Der Liebeskranke) (fig. 4), an oil on canvas of 1916, or in his The Post-
operative Man (Der operierte Mann) (fig. 5), a pencil drawing from a note-
book Grosz kept while hospitalized for the treatment of persistent, raging
sinus infections during his first stint of military duty in 1915.
In the caf6 of Grosz's poem, a man becomes a child, the world a
collection of amusement parks, a Coney Island of the mind. The caf6 is
transformed before the man's eyes, its furnishings seen through colored
filters of twisting film. Objects are altered by an addled self. Set in motion,
tables stroll and visit the spaces between women's legs and inside their
blouses, around their breasts. (In terms of sound as well as space, the
tables have not far to travel from weifen Blusen to weif en Busen.) A table
just keeps spinning, and its solid marble-once painted briskly circular
in The Love-Sick Man-changes not only shape but substance: what was
geometric, thick and hard, all mineral, becomes a fragile mix of animal
and mineral-"circles become eggs." A once-firm slab of rock becomes a
thing to be shattered.
The shocks of the trenches are simulated by the shocks of the me-
tropolis. The musical notes of a caf6 band are now projectiles penetrating
a vulnerable brain: "Und Noten werfen wie Schrotschiisse kleine Locher
in mein Gehirn." The man becomes a machine whose pressure gauge no
longer functions: "Ich bin eine Maschine, an der der Manometer entzwei
ist." And the words Grosz chooses to describe the machine's breaking are
the same as those he chose for his own damaged nerves a few months
earlier, when he wrote: "meine Nerven gingen entzwei." Tables, eggs,
pressure gauges, nerves: they all go to pieces. Now meterless, and thus
unregulated, the man-machine operates in perpetual repetitive motion.
"And all the cylinders run in a circle - / See: we are all neurasthenics!"
The speaker is an intoxicated poet at a caf6 table, shifting his gaze
and setting down lines at a pace that can be traced in the poem's orthog-
raphy, full of dashes and multiple exclamation points, and in its agitated
verbs: things get thrown, undergo sudden transformation, spin, wander,
and roll (kurbeln) like a movie projector. When addressing the reader, the
poet's speech is urgent and blunt. He announces what must be seen. He
says at last what all the previous lines, vivid with color and matter and
sound overwhelming the senses, have been sputtering and toppling to-
ward: a diagnosis of universal neurasthenia. A relation is established be-
tween an engine spinning unmonitored-an apparatus always at work
but without apparent purpose, at risk of overheating or otherwise ceasing
to function-and the condition of neurasthenia. The poem ends with

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
a??.
ili'??~li?
~.?::??
~:~~i~ae:s
/i
~.
:?::
~sirliii; 2? ~ A
?,??:,~
..i?
IC> t ;
4k?
j ,, vs
?:?:r?
WI!F':'iit:?.: ?? ?'':li':ll
FIG. 4.-George Grosz, The Love-Sick Man, 1916. Oil on can- FIG. 5.-Georg
vas. 100 x 78 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Diissel- 1915. Pencil. Gr
dorf. ? Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J./Licensed by VAGA, 1915), p. 25. 16.2
New York, NY. demie der Kiins
graph courtesy
? Estate of Georg
VAGA, New York

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that simple pronouncement of a psychopathology, suspending discussion

of what the speaker takes neurasthenia to be-as a disease or a way of
being or feeling-except insofar as neurasthenia means experiencing a
caf6 as described in the poem. I want to suggest that the relation estab-
lished in the poem-a relation whose first term is the atmosphere and
action of the lyric in its entirety up until the final line, and whose second
term is neurasthenia-inheres specifically in the spinning, in the running
of cylinders in a circle, which is offered as evidence, visual evidence, of
the neurasthenic condition. Look at the cylinders on this machine whose
pressure gauge is broken, and "see: we are all neurasthenics!"
An engine's cylinders, I suppose, will always run in a circle, if they
run at all. Yet Grosz arranges his lines-and designs them with dashes
and colons and italics for emphasis-such that the circular pattern of the
parts in motion indicates a machine out of control, an engine running
hot but exhausted, as though driven through the paces of madness rather
than those of production. The pathology of the machine thus described
is internal. To repeat, a pressure gauge has blown, and the parts spinning
inside do not know how or when to stop; that is the analogy drawn to
neurasthenia or, more precisely, that is the condition whose description
is meant to function, within the poem, as an example or a demonstration
of neurasthenia and of its ubiquity. But if the evidence of something gone
mechanically and by analogy psychically wrong is figured (in the line
"Und alle Walzen spielen im Kreis-") as interior to the man-machine
(the cylinders are parts of his engine, his insides), the evidence is also (in
the very next line, "Siehe: wir sind allzumal Neurastheniker!") rendered vis-
ible, and finally social, in the sense that neurasthenia becomes a shared
affliction as well as an observable one. Suddenly the poem has a plural
subject, a "we" that would seem to be the cylinders ("alle Walzen"), all of
them legible (to the reader obeying the final line's command) as miniature
neurasthenics turning in circles. This conception of the poem's psychopa-
thology is illustrative: it describes men as mechanical and all neuras-
thenic, all prisoners of repetition (spinning cylinders); and it demands
that the reader recognize their condition (see it).21
I imagine the poem's illustrative notion of neurasthenia in the visual
terms provided in a lithograph by Grosz called Licht und Luft dem Proletar-
21. In Berlin Dada Montage I argue that the poem sustains two notions of neurasthenia
as a universal condition, the first being the illustrative conception discussed above, and the
second notion being a performative one that invites the reader to participate in an experi-
ence of neurasthenia, an experience conceived as immanent to the reading of the poem.
Regarding the line "See: we are all neurasthenics!" compare the language of Ferenczi's clinical
descriptions of war neurotics; see nn. 7, 60, 63. On the clinical gaze, see Michel Foucault,
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1963;
New York, 1975). On the history of neurasthenia and its relation to modernity and to work,
see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berke-
ley, 1992).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
.o .,* ?p k ....
r? ..,,?
... .,.,.. .*..?
.,..,+
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i ~ ~ . :i!!".. ...
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L1BERTE. EGA.lIT. FRATERNIMt LIGHT iUNO LUFTi OM PROLETARIAT THE WORKMANI 4UMAY
FIG. 6.-George Grosz, Licht und Luft dem Proletariat-Libert&, Egaliti, Fraterni
Workman's Holiday, 1919/1920. Lithograph. 48 x 39 cm. Grosz, Gott mit uns (Berlin
p. 4. Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum fiir Moderne Kunst, Photographie und
tektur, Berlin. ? Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J./Licensed by VAGA, New Yor
iat (fig. 6). The title, which mocks the mottoes of contemporary ho
reform movements, can be translated as "Natural Light and Fresh A
the Proletariat." Licht und Luft dem Proletariat was published as pa
Grosz's 1920 portfolio, Gott mit uns, and was exhibited that year
Dada Fair.22 When the poem's machine parts turn and repeat, I am
22. When published by the Malik Verlag in 1920, the picture bore the caption
ert&, Egalite, Fraternit--Licht und Luft dem Proletariat-The Workman's Holid

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gesting, they do so in the manner of men marching under the guard's

watchful eye in the exercise yard of a prison-the picture bears an obvi-
ous relation to Van Gogh's 1889/90 In the Prison Yard (After Gustave Dori)-
or of a military mental hospital.23 In his great 1922 monograph on Grosz,
the philosopher, literary satirist, and dada fellow traveler Salomo Fried-
lander offered this description of the lithograph:
From the portfolio "Gott mit uns": 'Licht und Luft dem Proletariat!'
Penitentiary-mechanics. A hard, durable circle [durer Kranz] of ma-
chine-men, between electrodes of tyrannical military mustaches.
Walls, high, higher. Way up high, the narrowest glimpse into the false
freedom of a smoke-filled sky. Three times three porthole-style,
barred windows on the right-angled walls. Bleakly the human carou-
sel [Menschenkarussell] turns and turns. The hands are shackled be-
hind the back, and binding fetters force their way into limbs and
gazes.24
Thus Friedlinder saw in the circular pacing of the manacled men a

mechanized ritual of discipline overseen by military authority. This aspect
of his description leads us back to the turning cylinders of neurasthenia
in the poem "Kaffeehaus" and supports my claim that poem and litho-
graph share a thematic concern with the symptoms of war neurosis. The
image of the men as a Kranz has specifically mechanical associations that
I have left out of my translation in favor of the generic figurative transla-
tion of the word as "circle," chosen because it captures at once the men's
motion and the drawing's crude but rigid geometry. But it is worth noting
that a Kranz, which is most commonly a wreath, can also describe a rim,
for example the rim of a wheel, as well as the revolving mount of a gun.
The subsequent choice of Menschenkarussell to figure the men in circular
Grosz, Gott mit uns (Berlin, 1920), p. 4. The phrase "Gott mit uns" means "God with us" and
was a German military slogan during World War I. The portrayal of the military in Gott mit
Uns was one of the centerpieces of the charges of "slandering the military" (Beleidigung der
Reichswehr) on which Grosz and the other dadaists were tried. Copies of the portfolio were
set out on a display table at the Dada Fair, where visitors could leaf through the nine prints.
In 1921, Licht und Luft dem Proletariat was published with the expanded title Arbeitersanato-
rium: Licht und Luft dem Proletariat. Also compare a 1919 drawing by Grosz, Maifeier in Pl6t-
zensee, which depicts pacing prisoners, incarcerated for revolutionary activity. See
Alexander Diickers, George Grosz: Das druckgraphische Werk/The Graphic Work, trans. Steven
Connell (San Francisco, 1996), p. 192. Grosz revived the composition of Licht und Luft dem
Proletariat in his stage design for Erwin Piscator's 1926 Berlin production of Das trunkene
Schiff Eine szenische Ballade, Paul Zech's theatrical adaptation of Arthur Rimbaud's Le Ba-
teau ivre.
23. Following Duickers, Neugebauer makes the comparison to Van Gogh in George
Grosz, p. 61. For a discussion of issues related to the conflation of prison and military mental
hospital I describe here, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (1975; New York, 1979), pp. 135-69.
24. Mynona [Salomo Friedlinder], George Grosz (Dresden, 1922), p. 21.

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motion also resonates with the language of"Kaffeehaus," where the man
is a child and the world is an amusement park. (I shall return in a subse-
quent section to the image of "electrodes of tyrannical military mus-
taches.")
The subject of Licht und Luft dem Proletariat is nominally the proletar-
iat incarcerated (witness the smoking chimney and the filthy sky beyond
the high prison walls), but the image, I think, conflates those two scenes
I named above; this is a prison, but it is also a military madhouse, where
the shared experience of mental illness might take the social form of pac-
ing together in a circle. Indeed, the overseers are not prison guards, but
Prussian officers, the "tyrannical military mustaches" of Friedlinder's
synecdoche.
And if the men's suits underscore the similarities between workers'
coveralls and the standard-issue cotton garb of inmates, they also resem-
ble the outfits of shell-shocked convalescents, which themselves resemble
or may even have been a version of the soldiers' military uniforms. Com-
pare a photograph published in a Berlin psychiatric journal in 1918
(fig. 7), where the soldier-patients at a wartime mental hospital take in-
struction in singing.25 Some of the men, we know from the text of the
article, have only recently recovered the faculty of speech, having been
rendered psychogenically mute by the traumatic shock of their war expe-
rience. In another photograph from the same article (fig. 8), patients-a
few with visible head injuries, others with purely psychic dysfunctions-
practice language exercises while doctors in officers' uniforms observe,
displaying in costume and posture the authority of their medical and
military roles.26 The uniforms stand out in what otherwise might appear
to be just a cheery hospital common room, complete with checkered
tablecloths and tropical plants in wicker baskets to make the convales-
cents feel at home.
I have said that Grosz's lithograph, Licht und Luft dem Proletariat, con-
flates factory, prison, and mental hospital. The collapse of factory into
prison is presented by Grosz with straightforward irony, announcing that
the only natural light and fresh air the proletariat has access to in Ger-
many in 1920 are that of the penitentiary's exercise yard. That is the
bitter joke of the picture and its caption. But it is the other conflation,
25. The image is captioned "Gesangstunden," and appears in Fritz Hartmann, "Die
K.K. Nervenklinik Graz im Dienste des Krieges," Archiv fiir Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten
59, no. 2-3 (1918): 1162-1258. See figure 31, p. 1190.
26. The image is captioned "Schulstunden mit Sprachkranken und anderen Gehirn-
verletzten." See figure 14 in Hartmann, "Die K.K. Nervenklinik Graz im Dienste des
Krieges," p. 1181. At the Graz clinic, patients were not separated according to whether they
were being rehabilitated for a return to military service, or for civilian work, and those with
organic disorders were treated along with those with functional disorders. See Hartmann,
"Die K.K. Nervenklinik Graz im Dienste des Krieges," pp. 1250-56.

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. . .. . . . .
. ...............
pax -, .. ......
.. ... ... .. .. ...
FIG. 7.-"
Dienste de
William H
'nr . i. B~.. ?....... ... .. ?:; .. ............... . . .. ......... :i;; )!:....... ........... j i.. .. i : ..
?:
?+ :":':::
.:.. ..?: r:
?B E . :. ."
'*"'; ?;;i -
?'U "
:.....:??: ? .::
:.2 l ............ . .... . . ...... .
? ....
FIG. 8.-"Instruction of Convalescents with Speech Impediments and Other Brain

Injuries." In Fritz Hartmann, "Die K.K. Nervenklinik Graz im Dienste des Krieges," Archiv
fiur Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 59, no. 2-3 (1918): 1181. William H. Welch Medical
Library, The Johns Hopkins University.

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the one that brings together prison and military mental hospital, which I
should like now to pursue.27
Grosz's "The Convict": MonteurJohn Heartfield after FranzJung's Attempt

to Get Him Up on His Feet (fig. 9) is a modestly sized 1920 montage. As the
title pronounces, the montage is a portrait of Heartfield and specifically
of Heartfield playing two roles simultaneously: prisoner and monteur, or
maker of montages. Like Grosz, Heartfield spent most of his military ser-
vice in a mental hospital. He was drafted in the autumn of 1915 and was
soon hospitalized for several months after a breakdown on the eve of his
mobilization to the front.28 Following Heartfield's induction, his brother,
Wieland Herzfelde, along with friends such as the poet Else Lasker-
Schiller, attempted to convince him to simulate mental illness in order
to avoid military service. Heartfield apparently did not agree to try ma-
lingering, and in a final attempt to keep him from being sent to the
front, Herzfelde, Lasker-Schiuler, and others decided to treat Heart-
field as though he were mad in the hope that they would undermine
his confidence in his own mental health, thus compelling him to declare
himself unfit for service. Herzfelde suggests that their perverse "psycho-
therapy" (the word is Herzfelde's) worked: at roll call the morning he was
to be sent to the front from his barracks in Berlin, Heartfield stepped
forward and announced to his sergeant that he was mentally ill (Ner-
venkrank). The sergeant smirked, and Heartfield flew into such a violent
rage that he was indeed taken away by orderlies and delivered to a Berlin
mental hospital converted for military use. Herzfelde visited Heartfield
there and found him in the hospital's garden, raking leaves into a heap.
Heartfield, Herzfelde recounted, appeared strikingly pale and spoke
with a stammer. "The institutional smock [Anstaltskittel]" he was wearing,
wrote Herzfelde, "did more than its share to upset me."29 And there, in
the montage portrait of the monteur Heartfield with its photographic
swatches of cotton cloth mounted on shoulder and sleeve, is that conva-
lescent's smock again, now doubling as the worker's blue coveralls Heart-
field was said to sport in the studio and that in German are called a
Monteuranzug.
27. In Berlin Dada Montage I analyze the identification of the (revolutionary) proletar-
iat with the traumatic neurotics of World War I as that identification was framed in dada
and in the clinical literature on the war neuroses. For a discussion of the employment of
war neurotics in factories during World War I, see Lerner, "Rationalizing the Therapeutic
Arsenal," pp. 134-37.
28. See Wieland Herzfelde,John Heartfield: Leben und Werk (Dresden, 1962), pp. 16-17.
In radio and print interviews during the 1950s and 1960s, Heartfield discussed his defiant
attitude towards military authority during the war; but, to my knowledge, he never men-
tioned a hospitalization for mental or other illnesses. See John Heartfield, Lebenslaufe and
transcripts of Rundfunk-Gesprdche, John Heartfield Archive, Akademie der Kiinste zu Berlin.
29. Herzfelde, John Heartfield, p. 18.

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V .........
~??~ ? ?? . ?;?~. ??. ?? ??, ? :i ?? .... . .......::

:"MO
R.?F
... . .. .. 61
....... . ..
...........
...... .. .. ?? ? ?:
. . .i: ..... ..
Ivy ;3 ;?xe
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. . . . . . . .. ...
.... ........
. ...... ....ii??:.r
..... ..........
........ ......
M r :??: ???
FIG. 9.--George Grosz, "The Convict": Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung's A
tempt to Get Him Up on His Feet, 1920. Watercolor and photomontage. 41.9 x 30.5 cm. G
of A. Conger Goodyear. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. ? Estate of Geo
Grosz, Princeton, N.J./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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Heartfield the convict-monteur is compact, closed-mouthed, a little

nasty. His provisions are slim-a broken handled pitcher resting on a
white rectangle we are to take for a table, no cup to drink from, no food
to eat-and his back is turned, such that he takes no notice of what little
he has been given. The picture's glimpse of the world outside this sparse
cell is clipped from a postcard advertisement. Pasted on in a ruptured
rectangle, it shows a row of city shops-an improbable inmate's-eye-view
of a delicatessen--and in overlaid type it wishes the monteur "Good luck
in [his] new home." The monteur is largely watercolor and ink, himself
only partly a product of montage. But if most of the body here is painted,
soaked into the page in confident wash, limned full and round with
quick-handed ink, its heart is indeed mechanical: a mean, metal pump,
worn proudly exposed as though impervious to the injuries feared by a
man of flesh, and looking like imitation military decorations.
The monteur Heartfield is an angry man. Angry, no doubt, about his
incarceration. Angry about his having to submit to authority. His rage is
plainly visible, materialized in every detail of the gigantic head and face:
in the slanting Morse-code dashes that stand for wrinkles on his forehead;
in the brown aura that seethes around his eye; in the eye itself, with its
empty pupil and bitter, shifty, backwards stare; in the swollen crease be-
neath the eye; in the short straight line of eyebrow pressing down above;
in the frozen chomp of the mouth; in the dimples drawn like scars or
slashes; in the lunging, shadowed chin; in the comical grumpiness of the
nose with its nostril wing not so much flaring as snarling; and in the little
flicks of stubble on jaw and scalp, all standing on end. The rage is there
in the whole stiff, cartoonish sweep of the almost unbroken line that arcs
and falls with no relief up from the collar of the tunic and all the way
back around to become a shorthand ear that is really nothing more than
a projection or an afterthought of all that tension in the jaw. The face is
flat, with shadow mostly meaning lack of a shave, and nothing but the
brown glow around the plain paper eye and the film of white on the jowl
doing anything much to make it flesh.
The figure in the montage is the monteur Heartfield, but it is also
Grosz himself, taking up once again the profile pose of the earlier self-
portraits (figs. 4 and 5)-and of the poster from the Dada Fair (fig. 2) in
reverse. The spare blue suit indeed may be the worker's coveralls favored
by Heartfield, but the figure itself has nothing of his narrow and angular
look. This monteur's face is Grosz's own, all rigid profile and jutting
chin.30 In the 1917 poem and the wartime self-portraits, Grosz repre-
sented himself as an alternately agitated and melancholy man, always
with a narrow fitted suit, high starched collar, finger rings, and walking
stick. In short: a dandy, shocked and troubled, but well turned-out, a man
in pain imagining his nasal trauma at once extended to his entire head
30. I thank Dawn Ades for calling my attention to the resemblance to Grosz.

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and mitigated (or at least ironized) by his elegant attire, or a deca-

dent artist imitating the pose of Diirer's saturnine winged genius in
Melencolia I.31 I see Grosz's Postoperative Man as a picture of overall in-
nervation in the wake of traumatic shock: lips drawn back to expose teeth
that are either chattering or nervously clenched, arms that may be in the
midst of a rhythmic, birdlike flail, and a leg and foot that bear the graphic
traces of a tic, with the pentimento of a tapping or quivering shoe, and
the outline of a trouser leg drawn over and over, as though to show a
slight but insistently repeated motion. That is the dandy's agitation. But
I have also mentioned his melancholy. And indeed the melancholy be-
longs to the shell-shocked man as much as the agitation does. Mel-
ancholy-meant roughly in the sense in which we would now say
depression-was one of the common psychical symptoms of shell shock,
and, compared to the tics, tremors, convulsions, and other physical con-
version symptoms many war neurotics suffered, melancholy was one of
the less extravagant manifestations of traumatic shock. I have pointed to
the melancholy of the love-sick man in Grosz's eponymous 1916 painting,
and I have suggested that the picture bears a close relation to the poem
"Kaffeehaus" of the following year, a poem whose subject is neurasthenia.
Thus I would want to call the love-sick man a melancholy neurasthenic.
During World War I, neurasthenia was a mild diagnosis of nervous ex-
haustion, generalized anxiety, and depression that was assigned as a cour-
tesy to shell-shocked officers. Shell-shocked regular soldiers, infantrymen
like Grosz and Heartfield, tended to be diagnosed as hysterics, with their
conversion of psychical trauma into physical symptoms such as convul-
sions or incessant shaking, and their falling into dramatic fits of rage, seen
partly as markers of inferior rank and class.32
The monteur Heartfield is no agitated dandy, no melancholy neuras-
thenic. Outfitted in the prisoner's tunic that is also a workers' costume
and a military hospital smock, he is not one to be diagnosed with the
privileged affliction of nervous exhaustion. Nor will he any longer take
up the pose of the melancholic artist at the caf6 table. Grosz, having
painted in The Love-Sick Man an ironic fantasy of himself as neurasthenic
dandy, went on to mock his own prior self-representation by depicting in
MonteurJohn Heartfield a moment of (almost) giving in to a hysterical out-
burst of soldier's rage, a rage Grosz and Heartfield experienced, not in
the face of battle, but in the face of authority. "Almost worse than the idea
of death or being crippled was the dread of [the] Prussian barracks drill,"
31. My Berlin Dada Montage includes a fuller discussion of Grosz's representation of

melancholy in The Love-Sick Man and of its relation to the tradition of self-portraiture in
German painting.
32. On the diagnoses of neurasthenia and hysteria among the World War I shell
shocked, see Leed, No Man's Land, pp. 163-64; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's
Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, 1996), pp. 112-16; and Ernst Simmel, in Ferenczi
et al., Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses, p. 32.

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explained Herzfelde in a biographical sketch of Grosz.33 "I had been bel-

lowed at for so long that I finally developed the courage to bellow back,"
wrote Grosz himself, describing his own military experience. "I defended
myself as best I could against vicious stupidity and brutality.... I was not
defending any ideals or beliefs, I was defending myself."34 In the picture,
he is still mute. There is something he wants desperately to say, to shout,
yet his mouth stays shut. But he is getting ready to bellow. He is now
literally a machine whose pressure gauge is failing, with the gauge em-
bodied in the pasted-on mechanical heart, an apparatus designed to reg-
ulate the monteur's perpetual state of readiness to defend himself against
another traumatic shock. The monteur's experience of trauma is now ma-
terialized in the juxtapositions of dada montage, from his heart cranking
cold and hard to his face ready to explode, to his arms pumping and
ruffling the material of his suit into wrinkles of montaged fabric.
"We see a deformed body," wrote Herzfelde in the entry for Monteur
John Heartfield in the catalogue to the Dada Fair, "a body whose forms
bespeak uncommon reserves of energy, which swell up in every direction
against those indifferent walls." "Beyond that," he continues, "the unique
and material reflexes: the intimate knowledge of the machine ... and
the obsession with good food and freedom, symbolized by the new home
dangling above him, which incorporates a delicatessen."35 In that brief
description of the montage, Herzfelde approximated certain clinical de-
scriptions of the war neurotics of the First World War. To cite one brief
example, an American psychoanalyst who worked extensively with World
War I veterans suffering from traumatic neuroses described one of his
patients in terms that apply with striking accuracy to the monteur Heart-
field: "His behavior was very rigid. He would look out of the corner of
his eyes rather than turn his face. He hardly looked around the room to
notice any of the objects in it."36
Closer in time and place to Berlin dada we find the following de-
scription of a war neurotic, which comes from a paper that was presented
by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Saindor Ferenczi at a 1918 conference in
Budapest on the war neuroses. Published in Germany the following year,
Ferenczi's paper provides a description that anticipates Herzfelde's refer-
33. Herzfelde, "The Curious Merchant from Holland," Harper's 187 (Nov. 1943): 481.
34. Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, trans. Lola Sachs
Dorin (New York, 1946), p. 146. Grosz's autobiography was written (in German) in exile in
New York during the Second World War. This quotation in English is from the original
American edition, which Grosz helped to prepare.
35. Herzfelde, "Zur Einftihrung," Katalog der Ersten Internationalen Dada-Messe (Berlin,
1920), n. p. The figure of "home" in dada montage and its relation to domestic interiors in
the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Georg Kaiser are discussed in my Berlin Dada Montage.
36. Abraham Kardiner, "The Bio-Analysis of the Epileptic Reaction," Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 1 (1932): 398; cited in Leys, "Death Masks," p. 62.

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ences to the monteur's "uncommon reserves of energy" and "obsession

with good food." According to Ferenczi, "the tendency to outbursts of
rage and anger is a highly primitive method of reaction to a superior
force;... and represents more or less incoordinate discharges of affect
analogous to those observed in the period of suckling.... The entire per-
sonality of most of the victims of trauma corresponds therefore to the
child who is fretting, whimpering, unrestrained and naughty in conse-
quence of a fright [Erschrecken]." "The excessive importance which almost
all the persons suffering from trauma attach to good food," Ferenczi con-
tinues, "fits in with this picture. The slightest neglect in this respect may
produce in them the most violent outbreaks of affect and even induce
fits" (PWN, p. 19). It must be said that these are mere fragments of de-
scription selected from Ferenczi's extensive theorizations of the traumatic
neuroses of war, theorizations characterized by what Freud called Fer-
enczi's "command over a well-directed scientific imagination [eine wohlge-
leitete wissenschaftliche Phantasie]."37 More particularly, they are fragments
chosen for their emphasis on certain kinds of regressive bodily affect that
the shock of war trauma engendered. Those regressive bodily affects-
the violent, childish fits of traumatized men deprived of what their
mouths and bellies desired-seem to me indeed to "fit in with this pic-
ture"; they provide a language with which we might describe the shape
and the disposition of the monteur's body as represented by Grosz. The
monteur, we might then say, really is angry about the lack of provisions
in his cell and about the never-ending temptation of the delicatessen out
the window. And his anger is symptomatic of his trauma. His hunger and
his rage, his balled fists, his grimace, and his machine-heart are dadaist
materializations of traumatic shock.
If the rage in the face is captured at a dangerous standstill, in the
body it is shown mounting to a violent outbreak of affect. Rage is curling
the monteur's stubby fingers and massing in the flesh of his chubby
hands. The monteur Heartfield is an angry man; you can see it in his
face, with its darkly shaded chin and unkind stare. His is an angry body,
but it is not properly a man's body. (Look at him a certain way, and he
resembles a wretched and dangerous Charlie Brown.) The monteur's is
the body of a very young child, still clumsy and round, lumpish in the
middle and narrow in the legs, topped off with a large domed head and
sparse hair. The monteur, you will recall from the title, has just been
helped up onto his feet, and maybe for the first time.38 It is not clear that
he knows how to take a step yet, and the uncommon reserves of energy
37. Freud, "Dr. S&ndor Ferenczi (on his 50th Birthday)," Standard Edition, 19:269. See
also Freud, "Dr. Sindor Ferenczi (Zum 50. Geburtstag)," Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud
et al., 17 vols. (London, 1940-52), 13:445. For a comprehensive analysis of Ferenczi's theo-
ries of trauma, see Leys, "Death Masks."
38. Ferenczi, among others, described the disruptions of posture, gait, and speech
observed in war neurotics in terms of a regression to an infantile stage of development. See

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Herzfelde described indeed seem concentrated in his doughy fists and

rigid forearms, in his biceps as they bulge softly into his chest. Like a
child, the monteur is prone to contractures and indelicate gestures
when enraged.
Tatlinesque Diagram (Model) (Tatlinischer Plan [Akt]) (fig. 11), another
small watercolor and montage picture exhibited by Grosz at the Dada
Fair, imagines an encounter between a man resembling the monteur
Heartfield and a woman who offers him her breast. 39 The man's face is
apelike, shaded evenly brown; his flat, stiff profile is now without an eye.
The blue tunic is (as always) plain, high-necked, and stiff. And his cell has
much in common with the monteur Heartfield's: tilted floor, pasted-on
picture view for a window, a pronounced lack of decoration or furnish-
ings. But here the man-represented by his head alone-is no longer by
himself. There is, as I said, a woman offering him her breast (of whom
more in a moment); and there are three additional "persons" present: a
bust of a man in military uniform is tucked in a deep window frame
PWN, pp. 15-16, as well as the following passage from his earlier paper on the war neu-
roses:
The result of such a psychic shock may quite well have been a neurotic re
is, the relapse into a phylo- and ontogenetic stage of development long
Now the stage to which these two neurotics regressed seems to be the i
of the first year of life, a time when they could not yet either walk or st
We know that this stage has a phylogenetic model; the upright gait bei
fairly late achievement of our ancestors among the mammalia. [Ferencz
of War Neuroses" (1916-17), Further Contributions to the Theory and Techniq
Analysis, pp. 136-37; hereafter abbreviated "T T"]
I take up Ferenczi's application of a phylogenetic schema of regression to t

in my analysis of Grosz's 1920 montage Tatlinesque Diagram (Model) (Tatlinisch
below.
In February 1996 British Airways ran an advertisement proposing its
(in-flight) regression, represented in montage (fig.10): the Club World cr
to have the power to transform a tired businessman into a blissfully sleepin
more precisely, to make a man dream, as it were bodily, of being rocked
arms, with his infant hands and legs dangling relaxed from his pillowy torso
diaper, and with his face dimpled and glowing in the gratification of an in
(Compare him to the monteur Heartfield.) The mother, too, has been tran
time, and her regression is historical: she wears her hair in a decades-ago
short-sleeved sweater-it tops a narrow skirt that must stretch to below t
strand of pearls while revealing her soft arms. The ad is clever, and far b
the several other photomontages produced for the same campaign; it visua
a male consumer changed and happy in a fantasy of baby getting what he
Virgin when you can be held by Mother?
39. I have more to say about this picture and its title, including the title's
Vladimir Tatlin (a reference also made in the complete title of Heartfield G
above), in Berlin Dada Montage. The image is reproduced here as it appears
Pinsel und Schere: Sieben Materialisationen. The original picture, which is wat
photomontage, and measures 41 x 29.2 cm., belongs to the Fundaci6n Cole
Bornemisza, Madrid.

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FIG. 10.-Advertisement for British Airways in The New

Yorker, 5 Feb. 1996, p. 3.
(glued there like a postage stamp); where floor meets rear wall in a shard
of brown on black, a woman, also glued on, is naked at least to her belly
button and cut off just below it; and, finally, an absurdly long-waisted
man in a frock coat and top hat is striding towards the door while turning
his montaged double head to look at the naked woman at the back of the
room (one of the man's heads is watercolor, round, brown, and stubbly
like that of the other man in the room, and like that of the monteur
Heartfield; the other head is a near three-quarter view from the back,
showing a light-colored collar, thick crop of glossy hair, and well-trimmed
beard). In the picture that stands for "outside the window," a column
emerges like a phallus from a dark mass of leafy treetops.
As I see it, this is another picture of a man at once adult and child.
It is dada's version of a war neurotic's regressive fantasy, delivered up in

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
. . .. . .
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
deadpan montage. In the background, a grown-up man (he with the

beard and formal suit) glances at the naked torso thrust forward by an
exotic dancer who opens her made-up face in a wide, solicitous grin. In
the foreground corner, another man regresses, getting ready to nurse.
The forward push of his jaw may register hunger, need, even desire, but
it also bears a suggestion of violence, with the mouth a lipless wedge of
exposed rectilinear gray teeth. The war neurotic's rage and regressive
desire are here entangled, inseparable in this silhouette head. The
woman in the foreground has what is missing from the monteur's own
face: his shocked eye, with its radically averted gaze and livid aura. Her
thick, over-long neck and knobby head are crudely sexualized; marked
off neatly from the paler breasts below, the neck and head are all too
obviously phallic, while in the face the delineation of chin and cheekbone
adds to the overblown sexualization, with the facial mass turned into but-
tocks. (The hollow decorousness of the black pillbox hat with its rigid
blue bow does more to underscore the head's phallic aspect than it does
to cap or temper it.) With the blank precision of a fantasy too many times
rehearsed, Tatlinesque Diagram (Model) shows adult sexuality abandoned
(the man in the suit walks out the door, declining the woman on offer) in
favor of regression, here figured as an ambivalent return to the (phallic)
mother with her ready breast-the ambivalence is there in the aggressive,
angry mouth, as ready to bite as it is to suckle. An art critic writing in
July 1920 took note of the important and interdependent function of
rage and regression in the works Grosz exhibited at the Dada Fair: "Grosz
has developed a style appropriate to his rage, in the manner of street
urchins who deface walls and fences with graffiti. He swims in the tide of
'infantilism.' "40
I have said that the monteur's face in Tatlinesque Diagram (Model) is

apelike. That apelike quality is not unrelated to the regression I have
been describing as a symptom of the monteur's traumatic neurosis. In an
illustrated postscript to his 1918 paper on the war neuroses (fig. 12), Fer-
enczi associates the human infant's earliest responses to shock with the
natural clasping reflexes found in monkeys. Ferenczi refers to an infant's
reaction to a pediatrician's experimental startling stimulus (arms and legs
thrown up simultaneously with mildly tonic movements) as an artificially
produced "little shock (or traumatic) neurosis" (eine kleine Schreck-[oder
traumatische] Neurose), and he reproduces a sketch in which the infant's
gesture is likened to a baby monkey's clutching at its mother's chest. "We
would say: atavistic reversion of the method of reaction in sudden terror"
(atavistischer Riickfall der Reaktionsweise bei plitzlichem Schreck) (PWN, p.
21).41 Developing a style appropriate to his rage, creating montages as
40. Max Osborn, "Dada," Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), 17 July 1920, [p. 12].
41. It is worth mentioning in regard to these lines, that the German word Schreck as it
appears in the materials addressed in the present essay has been variously translated as

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materializations of traumatic shock, Grosz seems to me to make a similar

statement concerning trauma and regression. In Tatlinesque Diagram
(Model), the monteur's shock transforms him into an infant and (almost)
into an animal.
In MonteurJohn Heartfield, it is not only the gestures that are unmanly,

but also the genitals. This is another fragment from Ferenczi on the war
neuroses: "in traumatic neurotics the genital sexual hunger (libido) ... is
generally greatly injured; in many cases it can even be entirely sus-
pended" (PWN, p. 18).42 Grosz imagines the injured libido materialized
as a shrunken penis, tightly wrapped in blue fabric. Or does he? Is what
Grosz bodies forth here the tense, diminished bulge of male genitals no
longer capable of embodying adult male sexuality and materializing de-
sire? To put it another way, is that area between the figure's rigid thighs
Grosz's ironic depiction of the miniature maleness of a toddler, the penis
or scrotum of a little fellow whose libidinal energies are still centered else-
where in the body-in agitated hands, for example, or in a mouth now
scowling for lack of something to taste (a treat from the postcard delica-
tessen) or to suckle (a model's torpedo breast, or his own balled fist)?
Visually, the montage sustains a sense of a body at once man and baby
boy that is difficult to match in language. Grosz's montage insists upon
the undecidability of the figure; the montage is like a fantasy of a man's
traumatic return to infancy, a return that the picture represents in action,
so to speak. The man retains his face and his grown-up name so that we
know where his identity begins, yet the body's regression is well underway
and is emphatically material, with changes not merely in pose and de-
"fright," "terror," or "shock." In the interest of consistency and because I believe it brings
us closer to the idiom of Berlin dada in 1920, I have for the most part translated Schreck as
shock. Consider the term Schreckneurose frequently used by both Ferenczi and Freud as a
synonym for traumatische Neurose. I have followed the original 1921 translation of Ferenczi's
phrase, eine kleine Schreck- (oder traumatische) Neurose, as "a little shock (or traumatic) neuro-
sis," which differs from Strachey's 1955 translation of Freud's Schreckneurose as "fright-
neurosis" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as it does from C. J. M. Hubback's 1922 translation
of Freud's text, which reserves the term "shock neurosis" for Unfallsneurose, the latter trans-
lated by Strachey in that instance as "traumatic neurosis." See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, pp. 12-14, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, rev. ed. (Vienna, 1921), pp. 9-10, and Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback (London, 1922), pp. 9-10. Questions of definition
and translation concerning the term Schreck demand more consideration than I can give
them here. On the psychoanalytic definitions of "fright" (Schreck) and "traumatic neurosis"
(traumatische Neurose), see Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, 1973), pp. 174-75, 470-73.
42. On the consequences of shell shock for male sexuality in World War I, see Leed,
No Man's Land, pp. 183-86; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English
Culture, 1930-1980 (New York, 1985), pp. 167-94 and "Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription
of Male Gender Anxieties"; and Sandra M. Gilbert, "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary
Women, and the Great War," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret
Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987), pp. 61-69, 197-226.

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meanor, but in the physical stuff of the body, in flesh gone baby soft, in
hands and genitals shrunk to childlike shapes and sizes. The short answer
to the question of whether the body we see is straightforwardly that of a
man regressed would have to be yes, but only partly. That the body and
the temperament of the monteur have returned to a very childish state
30 Dr. S. FerenazL Die Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen.
erzeugt. Das Merkwirdige an der Sache ist nun, daB dieser

Reflex beim Erschrecken des jungen (weniger als drei Monate
alten) Sauglings Andeutungen eines nattirlichen Umklammerungs-
reflexes zeigt, wie sie die ,Tragsauglin ge" charakterisiert, d. h.
Tier- (Affen) SIuglinge, die gezwungen sind, sich mit Hilfe eines
ausgesprochenen Klammerreflexes sich mit den Fingern an das
Fell der aui den Blumen herumkletternden Mutter festzuhalten
(Siehe Abbildung.) Wir warden sagen: atavistischer Rtickfall der
Reaktionsweise bei plbtzlichem Schreck*.
S(,Mtinchner Mediz. WochenschTift" 1918, Nr. 42, p. 1150.)
FIG. 12.-Shock reaction of human infant compared to clasping reflex of baby

monkey. In Sindor Ferenczi, "Die Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen," in Ferenczi et al.,
Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen (Leipzig, 1919), p. 30.

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seems clear enough. But the disruption of the monteur's imagined sexual-
ity involves something more than libidinal injury figured in a little penis.
As though the bodily return to enraged infancy were not enough, Grosz's
depiction of the monteur Heartfield involves not just regression, but
transformation and disorganization, a thorough unsettling of sexual
identity. Perhaps the reduction of genital potency and the corresponding
regression into infantile narcissism that Ferenczi describes in his 1918
paper on the war neuroses are not the only explanations for the unusual
small double bulge between Heartfield's columnar thighs. Perhaps what
we see is labia stretching the fabric of the monteur's suit.
We can find agitation and confusion at the crotch of each one of
Grosz's male figures we have looked at thus far. About The Love-Sick Man
there is a certain transparency, with the contour of an organ drawn with
the brush, but never fully painted in with pigment. Beneath and around
the sketched penis we find the now familiar double bulge. Rendered here
in two quick strokes of deep mossy green, it means to say just testicles, but
seems somehow forced, or insecure, as though the area had been re-
turned to at painting's end with a gesture that moved fast, but fell short
of the nonchalance it was meant to demonstrate. And The Postoperative
Man? Well, just that, to put it bluntly: something has been removed; if
not surgically altered, then erased in sketching. Among Grosz's fragmen-
tary notes in the 1915 sketchbook where this drawing appears are these:
"That I hate myself" (Dafi ich mich hasse); and "I can love no woman" (Ich
kann keine Frau lieben).43 In the sketch, we can just barely discern a looping
line for testicles. Grosz's hand is cartooning here, and the scrotum's bulge
is comical, with an energized horizontal swell that at once undercuts and
emphasizes the violence in the overlay of lines that make the balls all but
invisible. Nothing is left of a penis except its covering over in rapid pencil,
stabbing and pressing-and then that little kitty-whiskered button-up
pump, a perfect fetish for this draughtsmanly castration, adding insult
to injury, with bitter, self-ironizing fun.
Traumatic shock in MonteurJohn Heartfield is embodied in the overall

pose, as well as in the body divided against itself--regressed, disorga-
nized, and sexually transformed. There is mute rage in the mature, mas-
culine face; a childish outburst and unsatisfied desire in the upper body;
and a lack of desire, indeed impotence, and perhaps anatomical emascu-
lation, below. The montage fragments in the picture serve a special func-
tion in representing shock. The fragments interrupt the interlocking
passages of even-toned watercolor-the block of the torso and the swol-
len puppetlike arms-revealing both the mechanical heart that drives
a body through the automatic movements of shock reactions, and the
43. Grosz, cited in George Grosz: Berlin-New York, p. 498.

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patches of photographic fabric that themselves embody in the well-placed

motion of their folds the abrupt gestures of the arms.
The monteur Heartfield has experienced military discipline as a
traumatic shock. As is common with war neurotics and other subjects of
trauma, the monteur has succumbed to a mimetic identification with the
agent of his trauma; shocked and angry, he has bellowed back at the au-
thority that created the circumstances of his traumatic experience (figs.
2 and 3).44 Herzfelde spoke of the dadaists' "dread of the Prussian bar-
racks drill," and indeed one of the centerpieces of the Dada Fair specifi-
cally invokes a notion of mimetic identification with military discipline
(and, implicitly, with the trauma that discipline might inflict). The pig-
headed, uniformed Prussian Archangel (Preuflischer Erzengel), the collabora-
tive construction attributed to Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter that
hung from the gallery's ceiling at the Dada Fair (fig. 1), demands physical
engagement and identification from its beholder. Clipped to its uniform
is a sign which claims that "to grasp entirely the meaning of this work of
art, one must, while completely outfitted for battle and carrying a fully-
loaded knapsack, perform daily twelve-hour drills on the Tempelhof
field." Imitating a shouting officer just as the beholder of the dada assem-
blage is asked to imitate a soldier performing military drills, the monteur
Heartfield has yelled back at the officers who themselves had barked or-
ders at him and humiliated him. For bellowing back the monteur has
been locked up. That is the narrative fantasy of the picture as I have now
described it. The montage suggests that Heartfield the convict-monteur
is there in his prison-cell-cum-mental-hospital-chamber, awaiting what is
to come. I want to pursue the questions I take the picture to be raising
in that regard. If indeed the monteur Heartfield is a war neurotic whose
hospital room is his prison, what might the military doctors next do with
him? What might they do to lift his symptoms, to bring him back in line?
The clinical literature on the war neuroses may provide an answer.
Compare the monteur's physiognomy to another head shot, this one
of a German war neurotic suffering from a psychogenic disruption of
sight that is painfully visible in the position of his paralyzed eyeballs (fig.
13). As pictured here, this is a man about to be cured of his hysterical
symptoms-his skewed, immobile eyes and their refusal to see. He is to
be cured, the psychiatric journal from which the photograph is taken tells
44. As Leys establishes through her reading of Ferenczi and Kardiner, the traumatic
event involves what she calls an "affective identification" on the part of the subject of
trauma. On this tendency of the subject of trauma to identify with the "aggressor" in the
traumatic scene, see Leys, "Death Masks," p. 60; and Leys, "The Real Miss Beauchamp:
Gender and the Subject of Imitation," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and
Joan W. Scott (New York, 1992), pp. 167-214. On the concept of mimetic identification, see
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif., 1988).

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us, through the administration of

shock by his military doctors.45 In
this case the treatment consisted of
"strong verbal suggestion" (starke
Verbalsuggestion) accompanied by
the application of electric current.
(Regarding the association of mili-
tary authority with the power of
electricity-an association which I
take to be implicit in the pairing of
strong verbal suggestion with elec-
tric shock in the treatment of war
neurotics-it is worth recalling
Friedlander's interpretative de-
scription of Licht und Luft dem Prole-
tariat, in which he speaks of the
pacing men as "a hard, durable cir-
cle [durer Kranz] of machine-men,
between electrodes of tyrannical
FIG. 13.-Psychogenically blind Ger-
military mustaches," thus trans-
man soldier. In E Kehrer, "Psychogene Stor-
ungen des Auges und des Geh6rs," Archiv forming Grosz's uniformed Prus-
sian officers into the tools of
fiir Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 58
(1917): 428. William H. Welch Medical Li- electric shock treatments.)46
brary, The Johns Hopkins University. In the case of a hysterically
blind man such as the one we see
here, a cure might be achieved through the administration of electric
shock to the man's face, which would cause the patient to feel pain and
to react by moving his psychogenically paralyzed eyes, discrediting the
hysterical symptom. To repeat, the cure would function because, through
45. E Kehrer, "Psychogene Storungen des Auges und des Gehors," Archiv fiir Psychia-
trie und Nervenkrankheiten 58 (1917): 401-532. See figure 1, p. 428. On German military
psychiatry, see Peter Riedesser and Axel Verderber, "Maschinengewehre hinter der Front" Zur
Geschichte der deutschen Militirpsychiatrie (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), and Karl Heinz Roth,
"Die Modernisierung der Folter in den beiden Weltkriegen: Der Konflikt der Psychothera-
peuten und Schulpsychiater um die deutschen 'Kriegsneurotiker' 1915-1945," 1999 2 (July
1987): 8-75.
46. At the military mental hospital (Nervenheilanstalt G6rden) where Grosz stayed for
more than four months in 1917, so-called electrotherapy was used extensively in the treat-
ment of war neurotics. Although we know it was in Berlin, we do not know to which hospital
Heartfield was sent, but based on the popularity of electrotherapy at the time Heartfield
was hospitalized, it is likely that he, too, would have seen patients there on whom electricity
had been used. One wonders what Grosz, Heartfield, and the other Berlin dadaists might
have known about the war neurotics who were hospitalized in a Kriegslazarett in the Kunst-
gewerbemuseum in Berlin; that place must truly have been, in Ferenczi's words, a "museum
of glaring hysterical symptoms"; see note 7.
Having been denied access to Grosz's military medical records at the Krankenbuch-
lager in Berlin (see note 19), I contacted Peter Grosz, who himself had looked into the

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the use of "suggestive electrification,'' the symptom would be exposed

as a conversion symptom-that is, as the materialization of traumatic
shock in a blind eye that was actually capable of sight, or in a paralyzed
limb that was actually capable of motion. Moreover, it was presumed that
as soon as the symptom had been exposed as strictly psychogenic, it
would dematerialize. The treatment would involve the application of
physical shock in the form of electricity, as well as the application of psy-
chic shock in words delivered as orders. The doctor's "strong verbal sug-
gestions" indeed explicitly mimicked in their tone and style of delivery
the commands of military officers.48 Thus the character of the treatments
was authoritarian, their logic disciplinary. They were meant, in essence,
to convince the war neurotic to abandon the illness into which he had
taken flight, to relinquish those physical and emotional conditions that
were a reaction to a traumatic shock experienced at the front, or, in sto-
ries like Heartfield's and Grosz's, in the barracks. And the treatments
were meant specifically to force the soldier-patient to relinquish his psy-
chogenic symptoms by substituting one experience of shock for another.
The second shock, in the form of electric currents applied to the face
and of commands shouted in the ear, was (under the best circumstances)
carefully managed by the doctor, but also traumatic, and calculatedly so.49
Krankenbuchlager records many years ago. In my correspondence with him, I inquired

whether his father had ever spoken of having witnessed forms of active treatment, such as
electrotherapy and other mechanized regimens, while hospitalized during the war. The
answer, as I had anticipated, was no, and Mr. Grosz's response was emphatic: "G. G. never
spoke of G6rden, never, at least to me" (Peter M. Grosz, letter to the author, 11 July 1995).
I am grateful to Mr. Grosz for his kindness in responding to my queries, and I look forward
to hearing what he discovers when he returns to the Krankenbuchlager, as he plans to do,
to give George Grosz's "thick dossier" a closer reading. Among other things, it will be inter-
esting to know for certain which Dr. Hirschfeld offered an assessment of Grosz's mental
fitness for service.
47. The phrase is a translation of Ferenczi's term suggestive Elektrisierung. See Ferenczi,
"Die Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen," in Ferenczi et al., Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneuro-
sen, p. 21. On the "success" achieved with electrotherapy, see Freud, "Memorandum on the
Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics" (1920), Standard Edition, 17:213-14.
48. On the perceived importance of the specifically militaristic disciplinary aspect of
treatment, and of the authoritarian personality of the doctor to the cure of war neurotics in
Germany during and immediately after World War I, see Erwin Loewy-Hattendorf, "Krieg,
Revolution, und Unfallneurosen," Veroffentlichungen aus dem Gebiete der Medizinalverwaltung
11, no. 4 (1920); Kurt Goldstein, "(Jber die Behandlung der Kriegshysteriker," Medizinische
Klinik: Wochenschriftfiir Praktische Arzte 13, no. 28 (15 July 1917): 752-54; Willy Hellpach,
"Lazarettdisziplin als Heilfaktor," Medizinische Klinik: Wochenschriftfiir Praktische Arzte 11, no.
44 (31 Oct. 1915): 1207-11; and Kurt Singer, "Das Kriegsende und die Neurosenfrage,"
Neurologisches Centralblatt 38, no. 9 (May 1919): 330-31 and "Was ist's mit dem Neurotiker
vom Jahre 1920?" Medizinische Klinik: Wochenschrift fiir Praktische Arzte 16, no. 37 (Sept.
1920): 951-53.
49. In "Two Types of War Neuroses," Ferenczi makes a related point when he suggests
that "it is not impossible that the results achieved by many neurologists from treating war
neuroses by painful electrical currents are due to the fact that these painful sensations sat-

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In a so-called Dadaphoto of Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield

(fig. 14), which hung on the same wall as did Heartfield's shouting por-
trait poster (fig. 2) at the Dada Fair, Hausmann gives a typical dada yell.
But here the dada yell would seem to be a command shouted in the ear.
Now a dadaist is simultaneously the maker and the victim of traumatic
sound, of the human voice become a weapon, or an instrument of shock-
ing cures. Hausmann's teeth are bared with furious authority, and his
monocle resembles that of the stereotypical Prussian officer. Heartfield's
eye snaps shut, fluttering enough to go out of focus as the camera's shut-
ter closes. I imagine that eye always lurched off to the side and forever
crinkled in the corner, a memorial to this traumatic moment.
Consider another dada object in which the shock of war neurosis and
its treatment are embodied, now materialized in three dimensions. In the
assembled form of Heartfield Gone Wild (fig. 15), the body named as the
dadaist's own is that of a child-sized tailor's dummy to which a number of
objects have been attached: a gun, knife and fork, military medallions,
doorbell, and so forth. As in the pictorial montage MonteurJohn Heartfield,
here "Heartfield"'s body is that of a boy, not a man. And again the trouble
with the genitals. The dadaists take injury and impotence literally once
more, seeing sexuality as genitality and now materializing the wounded
male libido as a glued-on vagina dentata, a chattering plaster bite. Heart-
field Gone Wild has been plugged into an electrical outlet, illuminating his
lightbulb head. From the dummy's trunk emerge one thigh ending in a
delicate mannequin's leg and another fastened to a primitive metal pros-
thesis. Poised peg-legged on a makeshift pedestal, its narrow shoulders
thrown back as though ready for roll call, its chest covered with medals
real and mock, its posterior (invisible to us here) adorned with an Iron
Cross, one shoulder equipped with a revolver, the other with an electric
doorbell, Heartfield Gone Wild is a montage in three dimensions, an assem-
blage of military and mechanical fragments. Notice the rigid, upright,
perpetually standing-at-attention pose, and remember Heartfield, step-
ping forward at roll call to announce himself a war neurotic before an
unsympathetic sergeant. And notice, too, the chalk lines drawn on the
isfy the patients' unconscious traumatophilia [unbewusste Traumatophilie]" ("T T," pp. 140-41;
trans. mod.). Although an adequate examination of the question is beyond the scope of this
essay, it seems to me worth mentioning here that what Ernest Jones in 1922 called the
"analogy of electricity" played an important part in the first English translation of Freud's
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. That translation, by Hubback with revisions by Jones, alter-
nately uses "the words 'investment' or [much more frequently] 'charge', the latter being
taken from the analogy of electricity," as translations of the Freudian Besetzung (Besetzungse-
nergie, Energiebesetzung, Uberbesetzung, and so forth). See Jones, "Editorial Preface," in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1922). In the Standard Edition and now elsewhere, Besetzung is usually
translated as "cathexis." See Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, pp.
62-65.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
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Gone Wild. Electro-Mechanica
doorbell, knife and fork, fal
bers and letters, Iron Cross).
Landesmuseum fiir Modern
George Grosz, Princeton, N.J
Society (ARS), New York/VG

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
slate table: might they not be indications of where a soldier was to stand
or step during military exercises? Might they not be traces, inscribed
memories of the dadaists' dread of the Prussian barracks drill?
Beyond the mounted military tools and medals (the revolver, the
mess kit cutlery, the emblazoned regiment numbers, the spread-winged
eagle and the Iron Cross), we find in the figure's electrification another
reference to the war experience, specifically to apparatuses devised for
the wartime treatment of traumatic neuroses. In the absence of illustra-
tions showing the administration of shock with the "electric hands" and
"electric brushes" that were the tools of military psychiatrists, I show you
here another kind of electric medical apparatus employed by the German
military during World War I (fig. 16).5o Proclaiming the dire need on
the part of the war wounded for electric compresses and other warming
devices, this 1916 advertisement-which Grosz and Heartfield would
have known-represents a wounded, electrified man who bears a striking
resemblance to Heartfield Gone Wild. Like Heartfield, the figure in the ad-
vertisement is plugged in and posed on a small platform, which is now
equipped with an electric carpet, one of the apparatuses the ad claims
were in use by the thousands in German and Austro-Hungarian mili-
tary hospitals.
In addition to the administration of electric current as a means of
shocking the soldier-patient out of his neurosis, German military psychia-
trists employed a variety of inventive, if often cruel, mechanized treat-
ments designed to lift psychogenic symptoms with extraordinary speed
and efficiency. At a 1917 conference of German psychiatrists and neurolo-
gists, Dr. Robert Sommer presented a paper describing his method of
curing psychogenic deafness and deaf-muteness among war neurotics.
The treatment employed a so-called Apparatus for the Representation of
the Shock Reaction (Apparat zur Darstellung der Schreck-Reaktion) (fig. 17),
to which the patient was hooked up as follows: his forearm was placed in
a sling, with his hand extended towards the front of the apparatus and
his first and middle fingers secured on a miniature shelf to which a device
resembling an ergograph or pneumograph writer was attached (the
device was then appended to a kymographic tambour that provided
the endless paper surface on which the graphic apparatus's inscriptions
would appear).
The treatment process consisted of the administration of a shock to
rouse the soldier-patient out of his psychogenic state of deafness. While
the patient's attention was still focused on observing the procedures in-
volved in setting up the apparatus to which he had been fastened, the
50. On electricity and medicine, see Michael Hubenstorf, "Vom Krebsgang des
Fortschritts," in Lichtjahre: 100Jahre Strom in Osterreich (exhibition catalogue, Osterreichische
Elektrizititswirtschaft und Gesellschaft Bildender Ktinstler Osterreichs, Vienna, 1986), pp.
149-76. See also Lerner, "Rationalizing the Therapeutic Arsenal," pp. 143-47.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
i
T5
ro sn! unercn
/'
Verwundeten und Kranken
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". Heiteoppiche ,, , 25.50 ab,
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in jd. rorm
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Wilhelm Hilzinger, Stuttgart B.
rabrtk von crSnuft- unr etcktr schen Htieza;r~r rcn.
i ,ltferant zahrcOt:ctr Kran nei ??scr and Laza:r:c.
Ueber 8000 Hllzlnger-Apparate sind in deutschen a und
8sterrelchlsch- ungarlschen Lazaretten in Verwendung.
FIG. 16.-"Hilzinger's Electric Warming Device." Advertisement in Berliner Illustrirt

Zeitung, various numbers, 1916-17. Bibliothek der Hochschule der Kfinste, Berlin.
"IL
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Fitgur 1. App
FIG. 17.-"Apparatus
mer, "Beseitigung fu
tal-psychologische Met
84 (Feb. 1917): 67. Wi

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
psychiatrist or an assistant rang a

bell loudly behind the patient's
head. Startled by the doctor's noisy
trick, the deaf man shuddered, his
forearm and hand twitched, and
the apparatus inscribed a ragged
curve recording the man's auto-
matic motor response to the sound.
According to Dr. Sommer, the sol-
dier-patient was then directed to
the graphic evidence provided by
the apparatus, evidence that he
had, in fact, heard the sound of the
ringing bell, and that he therefore
no longer could sustain his symp-
tom of psychogenic deafness.5'
Thus the Apparatus for the Repre-
sentation of the Shock Reaction FIG. 18.-"Shock Curve." In Robert
produced a materialization of shock.

Sommer, "Beseitigung funktioneller Taub-
heit besonders bei Soldaten durch eine
It compelled the patient to mani-
experimental-psychologische Methode,"
fest his shock bodily, in a form that
Schmidts Jahrbiicher der in- und ausl1tndischen
could be recorded and representedgesamten Medizin 84 (Feb. 1917): 69. William
visually as a "shock curve" (Schreck-
H. Welch Medical Library, The Johns Hop-
kurve) (fig. 18) ("B," p. 65). The war
kins University.
neurotic's deafness and mutism
were already themselves somatic materializations of traumatic shock, but
what the machine now provided was a graphic representation of shock
that the military doctor could employ for the purposes of suggestive
treatment.
Heartfield Gone Wild has an electric bell on his shoulder. I see him
forever enduring a shocking cure, with the glow of his head as a sign
his reaction to the activity of an apparatus for the representation of shock
an apparatus that is now part of his own traumatized body. The bell ri
and his head lights up.
Another patient of Sommer's, this one a man who became hyster

cally deaf and mute as a consequence of a terrifying grenade explosi
51. See Robert Sommer, "Beseitigung funktioneller Taubheit besonders bei Soldaten
durch eine experimental-psychologische Methode," Schmidts Jahrbiicher der in- und ausllin-
dischen gesamten Medizin 84 (Feb. 1917): 65-75; hereafter abbreviated "B." Sommer's appara-
tus is based on one he had earlier employed in his experimental research. See Sommer,
"Analyse der directen Ausdrucksbewegungen," Lehrbuch der psychopathologischen Untersuch-
ungs-Methoden (Berlin, 1899), pp. 97-98. The representational function of the Apparatus for
the Representation of the Shock Reaction differs from that of its predecessor. The 1916
device is not an instrument of analysis; it is more like a theatrical prop.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
?r?** ?.?r?- ??? ? ?. .. . .. .. . R. . . ......

. . .
\:???
FIG. 19.-Raoul
on pink paper.
seum for Mode
Society (ARS), N
reacted to t
described ab
tion), activa
seeing the ev
excited and i
p. 71). When
again, the p
individual le
OFFEAHBDC
plete text of
Hausmann w
rated in the
not especiall
displayed in
to be declaim
with the spe
52. On the ma
Riha and Giint

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
sometimes lilting cadences.5 Spoken, "OFFEAHBDC" is a poem in which

we can hear something like the coming back to language experienced by
the war neurotic following a shock treatment. (In this regard it is interest-
ing to note Walter Benjamin's assertion that "the typographical experi-
ments ... undertaken by the Dadaists stemmed, it is true, not from
constructive principles but from the precise nervous reactions of these
literati.")54 In the material form of mechanically reproduced letters that
fail to make words, the poster-poem shows language lost and partly
recovered through experiences of traumatic shock. Read this way,
OFFEAHBDC is an abrupt and artificial return to sound and speech, a
return induced by trauma and enforced by authority.55 Indeed, we see
within Hausmann's poem itself a commanding hand. With its decorous
cuff, it is by design the quaint hand of advertising, invented to point to a
product. But now the hand accompanies dada's blank recitation of letters,
a poem that stammers and smashes the language of advertising that its
little hand invokes.56 I want to suggest that the hand might also stand in
for that of a military psychiatrist, pointing to the mechanically inscribed
53. I base this description on recordings of Hausmann performing his sound poems.
One such performance, called "phoneme bbb," is featured as part of the collection Lipstick
Traces, Rough Trade Records R2901/2902, 1993, a soundtrack to Marcus's book of the same
title; see note 11.
54. Benjamin, "Attested Auditor of Books," "One- Way Street" and Other Writings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1979), p. 61; my italics.
55. For a chilling description of the treatment of a mute war neurotic with a combina-
tion of electricity and verbalized military discipline, see Pat Barker's historical novel, Regen-
eration (1991; Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 226-34. It is interesting to note, concerning the
scene in the novel, that the neurologist W. H. R. Rivers experiences a profound affective
identification with the subject of the traumatic cure Rivers observes being administered by
his colleague, Dr. Lewis Yealland. Rivers's identification in part enacts a poignant reversal
of the mimetic identification of the subject of trauma with the source of trauma (the aggres-
sor) in the traumatic scene, a reversal undoubtedly facilitated by the fact that Rivers himself
suffered from a stutter. On trauma and affective identification, see note 44. Rivers's trauma-
tophilic identification with the subject of the electrical shocking cure in turn recalls the
passage on unconscious traumatophilia in "TT"; see n. 49.
A recent description of current practices of aversive therapy involving electric shock
also brings Ferenczi's hypothesis of unconscious traumatophilia to mind. "He might never
be entirely freed of shock," said a psychologist at the Behavior Research Institute in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, of one of his most difficult cases, "like someone with vision problems
who always needs glasses" (N. R. Kleinfield, 'Journey toward Independence: From Electric
Shock to Glimmer of Hope for a Better Life," New York Times, 23 June 1997, p. A14). The
eyeglasses analogy strikes me as grotesque in regard to the patient, a seventeen-year-old
who scratched himself compulsively-to the point of self-mutilation-and whose nearly
three thousand daily scratches were eventually reduced to fewer than thirty through the
administration of as many as one hundred shocks a day, delivered through electrodes
mounted on his torso, arms, and legs. A photograph of the patient (fig. 20) is a horrible
after-image of Heartfield Gone Wild and Hilzinger's Electric Warming Device.
56. On the violent language of dada poetry as a response to World War I and its
propaganda, see Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 195. The relation of dada photomontage to war-
time advertising is addressed in my Berlin Dada Montage.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
HE.~
I~~?
. .............
SiWNAV?I02 .IFDt :ICATION

James Veks at the Ihwmr Rvearh In~iute
hooked up to a device that allowed ani ade to
FIG. 20
evidence that a soldier's hyste

hand to show, in a stock gestu
psychical origins has been lifted,
has been reversed with a coun
ment of shock in an inability
longer to a hollered order or a
that he has lost his legs, can n
there is material evidence to th
finger. (And immediately foll
inverted commas that might m
begins in lower case and finish
you soldier who stopped speak
57. My thanks to T. J. Clark for his

with typical dadaist literalism, a chan
of the commas is consistent with conv

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
who sent you to the trenches, or ordered you to perform exercises as

exhausting as they were absurd, day after day, and always with the noise
of the bitter voice of discipline in your ear. Look here, the finger says,
and speak once again. Repeat after me.
Soon, Sommer explains in his report on the success he achieved with
the Apparatus for the Representation of the Shock Reaction, the deaf-
mute war neurotic was "softly singing along to Deutschland iiberAlles" ("B,"
p. 71). While I am not suggesting that the dadaists had specific knowl-
edge of Sommer's experimental method, I think it is safe to assume that
had they been aware of a mechanized treatment capable of restoring a
war neurotic's patriotic voice with such relatively uncomplicated means,
and sometimes in less than a minute, they surely would have taken per-
verse delight in the doctor's therapeutic use of traumatic shock. And it is
not difficult to imagine Heartfield Gone Wild, already electrified, hooked
up to a phonograph blasting the national anthem.
Again, it is not my intention to prove that Berlin dada refers directly

to particular methods employed by German military psychiatrists in the
ing the dynamic of typographic and verbal call-and-response in OFFEAHBDC, I want to

mention one more psychiatric practice involving German war neurotics during World War
I. In 1917, a sample of 100 soldiers was subjected to association experiments designed
along the lines of the Jungian model. Individual soldiers were read a list of 100 stimulus
words such as "shoot" (Schiefien), "fear" (Angst), and "consequences" (Folgen). The test was
given to healthy soldiers as well as convalescents and was intended to gauge how frequently
a word would evoke a belligerent (kriegerisch) or militaristic (militdrisch) association. A conva-
lescent infantryman from the Rheinland answered "Folgen" with "Der Krieg hat bdse Fol-
gen" (the war has evil consequences), a response he delivered with marked displeasure. A
Bavarian soldier with a head wound responded to "Angst" with "die Gefangenen" (the pris-
oners), while a hysteric (ein Hysteriker) offered "vor dem GeschoB" (of the bullet). Military
psychiatrists apparently had hoped to use the association experiments as a means of un-
masking malingerers. The experiment delivered the unsurprising evidence that belligerent
and militaristic associations were far more common during war than in peacetime. As a
means of uncovering the simulation of the traumatic neuroses of war, however, the associa-
tion experiment proved a total failure. I recount the experiment here because it seems to
me to represent another aspect of the treatment of trauma that I am suggesting relates to
dada-in this case the compulsory expression of verbal associations. I base my description
of the 1917 association experiments on a brief report by one Herr G. VoB. See G. VoB,
"Assoziationsversuche bei Kriegsteilnehmern," Neurologisches Centralblatt 36 (Sept. 1917):
733-34. On the development of the Jungian model of word association experiments, which
drew on the earlier work of Wilhelm Wundt, as well as that of Emil Kraepelin and Georg
Theodor Ziehen, and which was also informed by Sommer's experimental research, see
Carl Gustav Jung and Franz Riklin, "The Associations of Normal Subjects" (1904), Jung,
"The Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence" (1906), and Jung, "The Psychopathological Sig-
nificance of the Association Experiment" (1906), Experimental Researches, trans. Leopold
Stein and Diana Riviere, vol. 2 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire et
al. (Princeton, N.J., 1973), pp. 3-196, 318-52, 408-25. See also Sommer, "Associationen,"
pp. 326-88. I thank Ruth Leys for pointing me back to Jung's early work, and for helpful
conversations about association experiments more generally. See Leys, "Meyer, Jung, and
the Limits of Association," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (Fall 1985): 345-60.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
treatment of war neurotics. Instead, I mean to demonstrate that dada

montage, assemblage, and sound poetry engage on the level of form as
well as content aspects of traumatic shock and its treatment as they
emerged in German culture during and immediately after World War I.
Trauma's psychophysical effects, as well as its shocking cures, informed
Berlin dada's production and reception, from the 1918 "Dadaist Mani-
festo" to the responses to dada in art criticism and in the popular press.
We have examined at some length Berlin dada's materialization of trau-
matic shock by means of montage, in two dimensions and in three, and
we have looked at how dada incorporated some of the techniques of rep-
resentation on which the treatment of the war neurotic's traumatic shock
depended: the (re)production and recording of startle responses, the vio-
lent invocation of verbal repetitions, and so forth. In conclusion, I want
to address the depth of what the newspaper in 1919 called dada's simula-
tion of insanity, and to demonstrate that both the making and the viewing
of montage should themselves be seen as traumatophilic. Dada montage
aimed to be mimetic of traumatic shock in such a way that the material-
ization of shock experiences would be effected in the bodies of both the
maker and the beholder of the dada object.
In that regard, consider a passage from Elias Canetti's memoir, The
Torch in My Ear:
Heartfield was always swift. His reactions were so spontaneous

that they got the better of him. He was skinny and very short, and if
an idea struck him, he would leap into the air. He uttered his senten-
ces vehemently as if attacking you with his leap.... It took me a
while to realize that this was how he reacted to everything that was
new to him. It was his way of learning: he could only learn aggres-
sively; and I believe one could show that this is the secret of his mon-
tages. He brought things together, he confronted things after first
leaping up at them, and the tension of these leaps is preserved in
his montages.
John ... consisted of spontaneous and vehement moments.
He thought only when he was busy doing a montage. Since he was
not always calculating away at something like other people, he re-
mained fresh and choleric. His reaction was a kind of anger, but it
was no selfish anger. He learned only from things that he regarded
as attacks; and in order to experience something new, he had to re-
gard it as an attack.58
Canetti's description is sensitive and insightful. Based on the writer's own

encounters with Heartfield in Berlin in the 1920s and describing in par-
ticular what it was like to converse with the monteur while walking the
58. Elias Canetti, The Torch in My Ear, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 1982),
pp. 270-71; trans. mod. For the original German, see Canetti, Die Fackel im Ohr (1980;
Frankfurt am Main, 1982), pp. 252-53.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
city streets, it complements and animates the static photographs of angry

dadaists (figs. 2, 3, 14). And it touches on several aspects of montage, and
several symptoms of the war neuroses, that we have already addressed.
Following the dissolution of the dada movement, Hausmann on occasion
referred to Heartfield as "a well-known hysteric."59 Canetti gives us some-
thing different from that cutting biographical observation: a picture of
shock and of outbursts of rage as aspects of the technique of montage.
Heartfield's own condition, the nature of his consciousness (which is
angry, combative) and the disposition of his body (which is swift, sponta-
neous, leaping), is productive of an art-montage-that, by "bring[ing]
things together" embodies "the tension of [the monteur's] leaps."
Canetti's vignette also brings us back around to Ferenczi's discussion
of the war neuroses. Towards the end of his remarks from the 1918 Buda-
pest conference, Ferenczi suggests that the shell-shocked soldier's "state
of terror" (Schreckhaftigkeit) should be understood as a "spontaneous at-
tempt at cure on the part of the patient" (PWN, p. 20). That state of
terror, the perpetual state of shock-the state, we might say, of always
leaping into the air, of receiving every stimulus as an attack-"serve[s] to
bring piecemeal [stiickweise] to conscious abreaction the shock [Schreck],
which in its totality was intolerable and unintelligible and was therefore
converted into symptoms" (PWN, p. 20). In MonteurJohn Heartfield, symp-
toms are brought piecemeal to conscious abreaction in the sense that they
are distributed and experienced, simultaneously and not without contra-
diction, throughout the montaged body: the head embodies mute rage,
the trunk mechanized frustration and the automatisms of infantile anger,
the crotch the damaged libido, and so forth. Montage takes the totality
of the figure to pieces and reassembles it, presenting its parts as bodily
symptoms of traumatic shock. If Heartfield's leaps, the leaps whose ten-
sion is preserved in montage, are attacks, they are also the crude mecha-
nisms of a cure that itself mimics the traumatic experience of shock.
Montage, then, is a vehicle for the monteur's traumatophilia; it is a
59. Hausmann, letter to Jan Tschichold, 2 Apr. 1930, Mappe 3.1.1, BG RHA 769,
Raoul Hausmann Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum ffir Moderne Kunst, Photo-
graphie und Architektur, Berlin. Hausmann's comment emerged in the context of the dada-
ists' dispute over the invention of photomontage, and he remarked specifically that "Herr
Heartfield, ein bekannter Hysteriker, ist keineswegs der Erfinder der Photomontage" (Mr.
Heartfield, a well-known hysteric, is under no circumstances the inventor of photomon-
tage). Hausmann's remark was a superficial jab, and I do not intend to make it bear much
analytical weight, but I think it is worth pointing out that hysteria formed a part of the
dadaists' vocabulary of self-description. Indeed Grosz had lobbed the same accusation (or
diagnosis) at Hausmann as early as 1921, when he began a letter to Hausmann: "Du
schreibst einen Brief wie eine hysterische Frau" (you write a letter like a hysterical woman)
(Hannah Hoch: Eine Lebenscollage, ed. Ralf Burmeister and Eckhard Ftirlus, 2 vols. [Ostfil-
dern-Ruit, 1995], 2:34-35). I am grateful to Wolfgang Erler and Eva Ziichner of the Ber-
linische Galerie for their kindness in granting me access to and permission to quote from
unpublished materials in the Raoul Hausmann Archive.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:48:34 UTC
technique for the materialization of traumatic shock. We might return to

Ferenczi for a further elaboration of the traumatophilic hypersensitivity
that he recognized as a symptom of war neurosis, and which in Canetti's
account also characterizes the monteur Heartfield--always fresh and
choleric, overwhelmed by spontaneous reactions, and vehement in his
leaping up at new things. In a paper given at a Scientific Conference of
Hospital Physicians in 1916-at which time he had for two months been
the head of a hospital's "section for nervous diseases" and had during
that period "had about two hundred cases [of war neurosis] under [his]
observation"-Ferenczi described the case of a war neurotic whose symp-
toms again call to mind MonteurJohn Heartfield. Look once more at Grosz's
montage and consider this parallel case study:
As a crude example of traumatophilic hypersensitiveness, I show you

this shell-shocked [granaterschiittert] man whose whole body-as you
see-is in a state of constant muscular restlessness without his being
able to carry out any intended movements. His eyes are so hypersen-
sitive that in order to avoid the light of day they are constantly kept
rolled upwards; at short intervals-once or twice a second-he turns
the eyes downwards far enough to let him obtain a fleeting image of
his surroundings, otherwise the pupils are hidden behind the con-
stantly blinking upper lids. ["TT,' pp. 139-40; trans. mod.]
Again, the doctor's account of the patient's symptoms-an account that

itself depends upon the specifically visual presentation ("I show you,"
"as you see") of the war neurotic's bodily materializations of traumatic
shock-resonates with the picture of Heartfield, with Grosz's poetic line,
"See: we are all neurasthenics!" and with Canetti's description of Heartfield's
own montages as materializations of the monteur's aggressive traumato-
philia.60 According to Ferenczi, "the repeated affects of alarm and the
heightening of the acuity of the senses are things that the traumatic neu-
rotics themselves seek out and maintain involuntarily, because they sub-
serve an effort at healing" (PWN, p. 19). As Canetti remembers him, the
monteur Heartfield "consisted of spontaneous and vehement moments."
He was always constructing his experience of the world as a constant,
acute, and aggressive reception of shocks: "he learned only from things
that he regarded as attacks; and in order to see something new, he had
to regard it as an attack." Thus the monteur Heartfield's learning was
traumatophilic; its description belongs to a discourse of traumatic shock.
Heartfield "could only learn aggressively" and, for Canetti, "this is the
secret of his montages." Heartfield, leaping along next to his interlocutor
on the streets of Berlin, was an imaginative traumatophile always on the
60. Once more it is worth keeping in mind that Ferenczi's descriptions of the war
neuroses and of hysterical materializations often employ a metaphorics of the visual that is
explicitly associated with the production and display of art. See also notes 7 and 63.

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lookout for a fresh shock: "he brought things together, he confronted

things after first leaping up at them, and the tension of these leaps is
preserved in his montages."
In a 1918 manifesto called "Synthetic Cinema of Painting" ("Synthe-

tisches Cino der Malerei"), Hausmann describes how dada planned to
give modernism "a tremendous freshening up."61 He prepared one of
several printed editions of "Synthetic Cinema of Painting" for display at
the Dada Fair in 1920 by overprinting the text with sound poems, and
he placed the framed montage-poem-manifesto beneath his own portrait
poster, where it is visible in figure 2. A particularly important passage
from the manifesto-a passage that, I warn you, is written in a kind of
obscurantist parataxis meant to imitate the shocks and simultaneities it
lists-is a set of propositions about montage and its capacity to material-
ize traumatic shock. It reads:
In dada you will recognize your real situation: miraculous constella-

tions in real material, wire, glass, cardboard, tissue, corresponding
organically to your own utterly brittle fragility, your bagginess. Only
here, and for the first time, there are no repressions, no anxious ob-
stinacies, we are far from the symbolic, from totemism; electric pi-
ano, gas-attacks, manufactured relations, men howling in military
hospitals, whom we with our wonderful contradictory organisms for
the first time help along to some kind ofjust compensation, spinning
central axle, reason to stand or fall.62
According to Hausmann, dada montage will capture those experiences

of modern life that defy representation in painting or sculpture.63 The
61. Hausmann, "Synthetisches Cino der Malerei," Bilanz der Feierlichkeit: Texte bis 1933,
ed. Michael Erlhoff, 2 vols. (Munich, 1982), 1:16.
62. Ibid.
63. Regarding Hausmann's notion of dada montage as proto- cinematic, it is interest-
ing to note that Ferenczi, in his discussion of the symptoms of his war-neurotic patients at
the lecture published as his 1916-17 article, seems to me implicitly to have declared both
the medium of still photography and the presentation of the patient himself (in the flesh)
insufficient to the task of representing the physical conversion symptoms of the war neuroses.
Cinematography, Ferenczi noted, might have been the appropriate technique for their
representation: "the gait of the trembler is most remarkable; he gives the impression of
spastic paresis; but the varying mixture of tremor, rigidity, and weakness occasions quite
peculiar gaits, possibly only to be reproduced cinematographically" (vielleicht nur kinemato-
graphisch reproduzierbare Gangarten) ("TT," p. 125; trans. mod.). I read Ferenczi's comment
on cinematography as an expression of his confidence in the capacity of that technique
(over and against the capacities of the unaided human eye) to make visible the operations
of the body. Although it lies beyond the scope of the present essay, this aspect of Ferenczi's
theorization of the war neuroses demands attention regarding his broader discussion of
hysterical materialization and his understanding of the relation of hysterical materialization
to other forms of plastic representation, in this case photography and cinematography. See
also notes 7 and 60. Perhaps Ferenczi was aware of the German psychiatrist Max Nonne's

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"real situation" that dada will force its viewers to recognize is emphatically
a material one, a bodily one. In dada's synthetic cinema of painting, in
montage, marvelous objects made of mundane "real material" correspond
organically to the disposition of the viewer's own body, a body so stiff it
threatens to shatter. Dada, says Hausmann, compels the viewer's bodily
identification with the traumatic shocks it simulates. Like Canetti's deli-
cate description of Heartfield, Hausmann's ranting presentation of dada
contains the suggestion that, for the dadaist, traumatic shock is simul-
taneously an attack and a "spontaneous attempt at cure." (Hausmann
considered naming the text Psychoanalytisches Cino der Malerei.)64 In dada
the spontaneous attempt at cure, the offer of assistance to a man howling
in a military hospital or crawling on all fours, is embodied in "contradic-
tory organisms," objects that might help the man get up on his feet, as
Grosz indicated the monteur Heartfield needed to be helped; or might
leave him spinning, like the neurasthenics in Grosz's poem; or might give
him reason, finally, to collapse.
Berlin dada imagined for itself an audience of traumatophiles. A re-
view of a 1919 dada performance suggests that the movement may have
found one: "The success was tremendous. An alienist [Psychiater] in the
tenth row made a stupid face. A neo-Kantian in the fifteenth row sweated
egg-sized drops and mumbled as he grew faint: 'synthetic nihilism.' But
tears ran down the cheeks of a wounded veteran [Kriegsbeschddigter] in the
last row, from which it is to be surmised that in his heart he had answered
the question: 'What is dada?' unequivocally."65
1916 film of his war-neurotic patients, featuring before-and-after footage of soldiers appar-
ently cured of psychogenic symptoms through suggestive treatment. See Lerner, "Rational-
izing the Therapeutic Arsenal," p. 140. On psychiatric photography, see Georges Didi-
Huberman, Invention de l'hystirie: Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris,
1982), and The Face of Madness: Hugh W Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, ed.
Gilman (New York, 1976). Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive," October, no. 39 (Win-
ter 1986): 3-64, would be relevant to further consideration of the issues raised in this note.
64. See Hausmann, "Auflistung von 17 Aufsatztitel," Notizbuch (1918), pp. 97-98, BG
RHA 1751, Raoul Hausmann Archive.
65. Lg., "Dadaismus in der Tribiine," Berliner Birsen-Courier, 2 Dec. 1919.

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Looking at the Monster: "Frankenstein" and Film
Author(s): James A. W. Heffernan
REFERENCES

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Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film
James A. W. Heffernan
Movies speak mainly to the eyes. Though they started talking in words
some seventy years ago, what they say to our ears seldom overpowers or
even matches the impact of what they show us. This does not mean that
film is a medium "essentially" visual, any more than theater is. Many of
the films made in the twenty-five years following the 1927 advent of the
talkie crackle with dialogue worthy of the stage, which in fact is where
many of them originated. Even in the visually captivating Citizen Kane,
the single word Rosebud resonates just as memorably as any of its shots,
and one notable film from the mid-twentieth century-Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard (1950)-has been plausibly read as an allegory of how
the word contests the power of the cinematic image. But whether or
not this film ultimately "confirms the triumph of the female image," as
W. J. T. Mitchell suggests,1 or demonstrates the ironizing power of the
word, it cannot help but remind us of what film and film theory alike
In its long journey from first draft to publication, this essay has benefitted from sug-
gestions made by a considerable number of readers and listeners. Special thanks to William
Spengemann, Eric Rentschler, Tom Mitchell, Albert LaValley, Philip Pochoda, Morton Pa-
ley, Hillis Miller, Jay Parini, Richard Johnson, Linda Hughes, Anne Mellor, and Jerrold
Hogle, and thanks also for the comments of those who heard earlier versions of this essay
at Irvine; Berkeley; Middlebury; the Yale Center for British Art; and Trinity College, Dub-
lin. Lastly I thank Aeron Hunt for her meticulous editing.
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Going Too Far with the Sister Arts," in Space, Time, Image, Sign:
Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (New York, 1987), p. 9.

133

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134 James A. W Heffernan Frankenstein and Film
repeatedly privilege: the structure and sequence of images, which Andre

Bazin calls "the language of cinema."2
The fact that Bazin welcomed the literal language of the human
voice to movies because it enhanced their realism only heightens the sig-
nificance of his steady concentration on the figurative language of what
movies show, what they say to our eyes.3 For Bazin, the great divide in the
history of film was not a split between silents and talkies but a crack that
began within the silent era, when expressionist directors like Griffith and
Eisenstein used devices such as montage and special lighting to create
meaning from images while realist directors like Flaherty and Stroheim
used prolonged shots to record actions and settings that putatively spoke
for themselves. For Bazin, therefore, the advent of recorded sound in
movies simply reinforced the realism of films bent on recording the vis-
ible world in visual-or, more specifically, spatial-terms, preserving the
unity of space in prolonged, deep-focus shots.4 One may object, of course,
that recorded sounds lead no more surely to realism than recorded sights,
for both are equally liable to manipulation.5 But the crucial point is that
while Bazin welcomed sound to the world of film, it did nothing at all to
change his concept of the language of cinema, which remained purely
visual.
Since Bazin, film theory has become more explicitly linguistic but no
2. Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" (1950), in What Is Cin-
ema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1971), 1:28.
3. I cite Bazin precisely because he treated sound as an asset to film, unlike critics
such as Rudolf Arnheim, who thought sound fundamentally alien to the art of manipulating
silent images for expressive effect. See Rudolf Arnheim, "The Making of a Film" [selection
from Film as Art (1933)], in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall
Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York, 1992), pp. 275-77. More recently, Stanley Cavell has
argued that while movies can effectively break silence with speech, their power lies chiefly
in their images, which convey "the unsayable by showing experience beyond the reach of
words" (Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film [1971; Cambridge,
1979], p. 152).
4. See Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," pp. 33-36.
5. Long before Bazin asserted that "the sound image" is "far less flexible than the
visible image," Roman Jakobson observed that sound need not be synchronously bound to
images in talking films. See Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," p. 33, and
Roman Jakobson, "Is the Cinema in Decline?" (1933), in Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed.
Herbert Eagle (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), p. 164.
James A. W. Heffernan, professor of English and Frederick Sessions

Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, has pub-
lished widely on English romantic literature and on the relations between
literature and visual art. His latest book is Museum of Words: The Poetics of
Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993).

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less committed to the principle that the language of cinema is fundamen-

tally visual. When Christian Metz explains the semiotics of film, he treats
its syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes as chains and stacks of images, not
of words.6 When Kaja Silverman applies the linguistic concept of suture
to film, she redefines suture in terms of interlocking shots.' To realize
that both these formulations could apply just as well to silent as to talking
films is to see how tenaciously the image dominates film theory and criti-
cism. Seventy years of sound have not really loosened its grip.
This stubborn visuality of cinema-or, rather, our habit of consider-
ing it predominantly visual-may help to explain why film versions of
Frankenstein have drawn so little attention from academic critics of the
novel. Not long after its publication, Percy Shelley asserted that language
"is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our inter-
nal being,..,. than colour, form, or motion."8 Film versions of Frankenstein
seem to confirm this axiom by showing us far less of the monster's inner
life than his long autobiographical narratives in the novel do.9 In the first
talking film version, James Whale's Frankenstein of 1931, the monster is
totally silenced and thus forced-like the monster of Richard Brinsley
Peake's Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823), the first of many
plays based on the novel-to make gesture and expression tell a fraction
of his story, which is mutilated as well as severely abridged.'0 Mary Shel-
6. See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor
(New York, 1974), pp. 108-46.
7. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), pp. 201-5.
8. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Enti-
tled 'The Four Ages of Poetry"' (1821), Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Sharon B. Powers (New York, 1977), p. 483.
9. The namelessness of the being created by Victor Frankenstein makes the very act
of designating him problematic. Victor calls him a "miserable monster" from the moment
he is animated-simply because of the way he appears (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the
Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle [Harmondsworth, 1992], p. 57; hereafter abbrevi-
ated F). Shorn of Victor's instant prejudice against him-a prejudice shared by everyone
else who sees him-he is properly Victor's "'creature,'" which is what he calls himself (F, p.
96). Yet when he sees his own reflection for the first time, he concludes that he is "'in reality
[a] monster"' (F, p. 110). Taking this cue, I call him a monster except where special condi-
tions necessitate the term "creature."
10. Following common practice, I refer to the 1931 Universal Frankenstein as James
Whale's version because he directed it. But the genesis of this film exemplifies the way
filmmaking disperses the notion of authorship-a topic I cannot adequately explore in this
essay. Based on an Americanized version of Peggy Webling's 1927 London stage play of the
novel, the screenplay for the 1931 Frankenstein was credited to Garrett Fort and Francis
Edward Faragoh but shaped in part by three other writers (Robert Florey, John L. Balder-
ston, and Richard L. Schayer), and at least one more-the young John Huston, no less-
helped with the prologue. See Wheeler Winston Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," in
Approaches to Teaching Shelley's "Frankenstein," ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York, 1990),
p. 169. See also David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York,
1993), p. 138. Even if we hold Whale chiefly responsible for translating a multiauthored

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ley's monster leaves us with a poignant apologia pro vita sua delivered to
Walton over the body of Victor; Whale's creature dies in a burning wind-
mill, while Elizabeth and Victor (unaccountably named Henry) both sur-
vive to beget what Victor's father (who also survives, in perfect health)
expects will be a son. The latest film version is much closer to the book
but nonetheless adds its own twists. In Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein (1994), the creature rips out Elizabeth's heart and in so doing
reenacts what filmmakers regularly do to Mary Shelley's text. They rip
out its heart by making the creature speechless, as Whale's version did, or
at the very least cutting out his narrative, as even Branagh's version does.
What then can film versions of Frankenstein offer to academic critics
of the novel? Can they be anything more than vulgarizations or travesties
of the original? To answer these questions in anything but the negative,
we must consider what film can tell us-or show us-about the role of the
visual in the life of the monster represented by the text. If film versions of
the novel ignore or elide the inner life of the monster, they nonetheless
foreground for the viewer precisely what the novel largely hides from the
reader. By forcing us to face the monster's physical repulsiveness, which
he can never deny or escape and which aborts his every hope of gaining
sympathy, film versions of Frankenstein prompt us to rethink his monstros-
ity in terms of visualization: how do we see the monster, what does he
see, and how does he want to be seen? To answer these questions, I will
chiefly consider three of the nearly two hundred films that Frankenstein
has spawned: Whale's version, Branagh's version, and Mel Brooks's Young
Frankenstein (1974).1
To learn why academic critics may need film to help answer the ques-
tions I have posed, consider two recent essays that both set out to explain
the monster in terms of his body. Bette London gives a new twist to femi-
nist readings of the novel by arguing that it makes a spectacle of stricken
masculinity-of the broken, enervated, or disfigured male body-and
screenplay into the film we call his, the crucial scene in which the creature unintentionally
drowns the child Maria-a scene that for at least one critic "utterly" shapes the meaning of
the film as a whole film (Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," p. 171)-embodies not so much
Whale's intentions as those of Boris Karloff as shown below in section 3.
11. My source for the total number of Frankenstein films, including independent and
privately distributed versions, is Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of "Fran-
kenstein"from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 127. For annotated lists of the
more notable versions, see Alan G. Barbour, "The Frankenstein Films," in Radu Florescu, In
Search of Frankenstein (Boston, 1975), pp. 189-211, and Leonard Wolf, "A Selected Franken-
stein Filmography," in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein": The Classic Tale of Terror Reborn on Film, ed.
Diana Landau (New York, 1994), pp. 186-88.

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thus challenges "the singular authority of masculinity and ... the fixity
of sexual positions."'2 Peter Brooks likewise highlights Mary Shelley's rep-
resentation of the male body, but his argument turns on the contrast be-
tween the ugliness of the creature's body and the eloquence of his speech.
Caught in the contradiction between the visual and the verbal, between-
in Lacanian terms-the imaginary order of the mirror stage and the sym-
bolic, acculturating order of language, the Monster (as Brooks calls him)
is that which "exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself."13
Each of these two readings aims to define the verbalized body that
the text exhibits to the reader. Yet London turns the body of the not-yet-
animated monster into a universalized sign of masculine vulnerability,
disfigurement, and pathetic lifelessness. She thus averts her critical gaze
from the sight of the monster's animated body, which is anything but pow-
erless and which appears uniquely repulsive at the very instant it is given
life.'4 In Brooks's argument, the body of the monster is largely consumed
by what the monster himself calls the "'godlike science"' of language-
or, more precisely, by the Lacanian vocabulary of desire, which subordi-
nates the body to the word (F, p. 108). "Love," writes Brooks, "is in essence
the demand to be heard by the other" ("WIM," p. 210; emphasis mine).15
"'Hear my tale,"' says the creature to Victor as he covers Victor's eyes to
relieve them from "the sight of [his] detested form" (F, p. 98). The crea-
ture's very turn to language as a means of "escape from a condition of
'to-be-looked-at-ness"' is precisely the turn reenacted by critics like
Brooks, who define him in essentially linguistic terms ("WIM," p. 218).
Yet the creature's longing to communicate in words-his desire to be
heard-is no more urgent than his longing to be looked at with desire,
with something other than fear and loathing. Just before planting in the
dress of the sleeping Justine the portrait that will lead to her execution,
he fleetingly imagines himself her lover: "I bent over her, and whispered,
'Awake, fairest, thy lover is near-he who would give his life but to obtain
one look of affection from thine eyes: my beloved, awake!"' (F, p. 139).
This remarkable passage, which first appeared in the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein, echoes at once the Song of Solomon (Song of Sol. 2:10-12),
the words spoken by Milton's Satan to a sleeping Eve, and-most poi-
gnantly of all, perhaps-the words spoken by Keats's Porphyro to the
12. Bette London, "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,"
PMLA 108 (Mar. 1993): 264.
13. Peter Brooks, "What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)" Body Work: Objects
of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, 1993), p. 218; hereafter abbreviated "WIM."
14. "He was ugly [while unfinished]," says Victor; "but when those muscles and joints
were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have
conceived" (F, p. 57).
15. Quoting Jacques Lacan, Brooks writes: "What is finally desired by the speaker is
'the desirer in the other,' that is, that the speaking subject himself be 'called to as desirable"'
("WIM," p. 210). See Jacques Lacan, Le Transfert, vol. 8 of Le Seminaire (Paris, 1991), p. 415.

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sleeping Madeline in Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes."16 Ever since Laura
Mulvey's classic essay on visual pleasure, feminist criticism has sensitized
us to the visual subjugation of women by the gaze of the male, and as
Brooks notes, in his sole reference to film, the condition of "to-be-looked-
at-ness" is the phrase Mulvey uses for the "traditional exhibitionist role"
given to women in film." Yet if the creature's aversion to being seen signi-
fies a feminine or feminist rejection of that role, as Brooks suggests, his
desire to be seen longingly-to be looked at with affection--reminds us
that the capacity to attract and hold such a look is just as often a gender-
neutral source of power as a gendered target of male exploitation (see
"WIM," pp. 218-19).
The doctrine that film subjugates women to the gaze of the male
should also be rethought, as Silverman suggests, with the aid of Lacan's
distinction between the gaze and the look. While the gaze is impersonal,
ubiquitous (issuing "from all sides"), and detached, the look is the desir-
ing act of an eye seeing from just one viewpoint.18 Such an act cannot be
simply identified with male power. As Silverman notes, a film such as
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) "not only ex-
tends desire and the look which expresses it to the female subject, but
makes the male desiring look synonymous with loss of control."'9
What Silverman says of Fassbinder's film might well describe the
acute ambivalence with which Mary Shelley's creature looks at the sleep-
ing Justine. Longing "to obtain one look of affection from [her] eyes," he
is terrified by the thought that if she awakened to see him, she would
curse and denounce him as a murderer (F, p. 139). Though no film
known to me conveys the creature's ambivalence in this scene (Branagh's
brief shot of him looming over Justine shows just his desire), Branagh's
film includes a moment of the creature's tormented looking in another
16. See John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan
Goldberg (Oxford, 1991), bk. 5, 11. 38-47, p. 447; hereafter abbreviated PL. Like the crea-
ture, Porphyro addresses a sleeping lady with feelings of profound ambivalence, eager to
awaken her-"'And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!'"'-yet petrified when he succeeds:
"Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone: / Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-
sculptured stone" (John Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes," John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack
Stillinger [Cambridge, Mass., 1982], p. 237, 11. 276, 296-97).
17. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Visual and Other Pleasures
(Bloomington, Ind., 1989), p. 19. Mulvey's essay first appeared in Screen 16 (Autumn 1975):
6-18. See also "WIM," p. 218.
18. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1978), p. 72; quoted in Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the
Margins (New York, 1992), p. 130. Lacan's terms are le regard and l'oeil, which Silverman
respectively calls the "gaze" and the "look."
19. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, p. 131. Carol Clover likewise argues that
in slasher films such as Hell Night (1981), the "Final Girl"-a would-be victim who survives
to take revenge on a murderous male-finally assumes the gaze, "making a spectacle of the
killer and a spectator of herself" (Carol J. Clover, "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the
Slasher Film," Representations, no. 20 [Fall 1987]: 219).

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scene: a close-up of his bloodshot eyes peering through a chink in the

wall of the De Laceys' cottage. In the text, where the creature tells Victor
that his "eye could just penetrate" the chink, the phallic intrusiveness
implied by his language is belied by his vulnerability, for the sight of old
De Lacey and the lovely young Agatha fills him with such "a mixture of
pain and pleasure" that he shortly feels compelled to turn away (F, p.
104). In Branagh's film, the close-up of his peering face combines the
spectacle of his mutilated features with the complex expression of his
desire to see and his fear of being seen.
Since the whole episode of the monster's spying on the De Laceys is
narrated in the novel by the monster himself, the text never describes the
sight of his peering face. So we might construe this shot as an example
of the way film reveals what the novel hides or suppresses. Yet to identify
anything as hidden or suppressed in a novel is to acknowledge or assert
its presence there as something implied, something we are authorized to
imagine. Elaine Scarry has recently argued that verbal arts can achieve
the "vivacity" of the material world by telling us how to imagine or con-
struct an object of perception, how to imitate the act of perceiving it.20
We can be led to imagine a three-dimensional object, she says, by the
description of something transparent-like film or water-passing over
something solid.21 If Scarry is right, Mary Shelley prompts us to visualize
a body when Victor describes what he saw just after animating the mon-
ster: "Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles
and arteries beneath" (F, p. 56). But even without such precise instruction,
any description of an act of looking can lead us to imagine both the seen
and the seer.22 What else could explain Branagh's conviction that the novel
actually does describe the monster's spying face? "There's a very strong im-
age in Shelley's book," he writes, "of the Creature peering ... and spying
on the family. We reproduced that exactly, this image of the eyes as win-
dows of his soul."23 For all the feebleness of his cliche, Branagh unwit-
tingly testifies to the force of the sight implied by Mary Shelley's text.
Beyond exposing such sights to the viewer's eye, film versions of
Frankenstein implicitly remind us that filmmaking itself is a Franken-
steinian exercise in artificial reproduction.24 Mary Shelley's Victor is a
20. Elaine Scarry, "On Vivacity: The Difference between Daydreaming and Imagin-
ing-Under-Authorial-Instruction," Representations, no. 52 (Fall 1995): 1.
21. See ibid., p. 9.
22. On this point, see Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response
(Baltimore, 1994), p. 183.
23. Kenneth Branagh, "Frankenstein Reimagined," in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," p. 23.
24. In film theory, as in Mary Shelley's novel, the idea of artificial reproduction has
sometimes excited alarm. In 1933, Arnheim wrote that films were already approaching the
"dangerous goal" of manufacturing "an image ... which is astoundingly like some natural
object" (Arnheim, "The Complete Film," [selection from Film as Art (1933)], in Film Theory
and Criticism, p. 50). Declining to tell Walton just how he made the monster, Victor likewise
calls such information "dangerous" (F, p. 52).

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140 James A. W. Heffernan Frankenstein and Film
"Modern Prometheus" in the words of her subtitle, a figure created from

the fire-stealer she found in the opening lines of Aeschylus's Prometheus
Bound and the man-making master craftsman that she found in Ovid's
Metamorphoses.25 As Anne Mellor has shown, Frankenstein conflates the fire-
stealer and the man-maker of classical antiquity in the figure of a 1790s
scientist exploiting the newly discovered powers of electricity, the fire of
life, the "spark of being" with which-by the flickering light of a candle
that is "nearly burnt out"-he animates the creature (F, p. 56).26 Is it mere
coincidence that the earliest known Frankenstein movie-made in 1910-
came from the film company of Thomas Edison, who had thirty years
earlier invented the first commercially practical incandescent lamp and
installed in New York City the world's first central electric-light power
plant? Ever since Edison, filmmakers have been reenacting what Victor
calls his "animation" of "lifeless matter" (F, p. 53).
Mythically, as William Nestrick notes, the concept of animation in
Frankenstein looks both backward and forward: backward to Genesis and
the creation of man and woman, "which two great sexes animate the
world," and forward-chronologically at least-to the mechanical repro-
duction of animal movement on a screen and to the illusion of meta-
morphosis (PL, bk. 8, 1. 151, p. 511).27 For if Mary Shelley's modern
Prometheus originates in part from her reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses,
one of her own most telling passages anticipates what Georges Mdliks dis-
covered by accident in 1898, when his camera briefly jammed while he
was filming traffic outside the Paris Opera and he then resumed crank-
ing. When he projected the film, which had captured two discontinuous
sequences of images before and after the interruption, he saw "a bus
changed into a hearse, and men changed into women."28 By the end of
the nineteenth century, then, film could actualize the vividly metamorphic
nightmare that comes to Victor right after he animates the creature.29
At the moment of animation, Victor's admiration for the beauty of
the creature's inert form dissolves. "The beauty of the dream vanished,"
25. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,
1921), 1:6-9 [1.1.78-88].
26. See Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York,
1988), pp. 102-7.
27. See William Nestrick, "Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narra-
tive," in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and
U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 294-95.
28. Quoted in ibid., p. 291.
29. The story of this development is complicated by the fact that some pioneer film-
makers such as Louis Lumibre (inventor of the Cinematographe) actually resisted "the
Frankensteinian dream ... of analogical representation, the mythology of victory over
death" even as their inventions helped to realize this dream (Noidl Burch, Life to Those Shad-
ows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster [Berkeley, 1990], p. 20). As Siegfried Kracauer long ago
noted, Lumibre aimed to reproduce the world while Mlies sought to re-create it. See Sieg-
fried Kracauer, Theory of Film:The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York, 1965), pp. 30-33.

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he says, "and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart" (F, p. 56).
The nightmare reenacts this change by essentially reversing what Victor
has done-bestow animation on a composite of lifeless body parts-and
precisely reversing what he had hoped to do: "renew life where death
had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (F, p. 53). In his night-
mare, Victor is surprised to see Elizabeth walking down a street in Ingol-
stadt, but as soon as he embraces and kisses her, she turns into the
worm-ridden corpse of his mother (see F, p. 57). This sudden dissolving
of one image into another is "supremely cinematic," as Branagh has said
of Frankenstein as a whole.30 At the same time, the passage encapsulates
the greatest of all ironies in the novel, the fact that Victor's ambition to
create and renew life leads only to death. We will shortly see how Bra-
nagh's film intensifies this irony by pursuing some of the implications of
the nightmare-even while eliding the nightmare itself.
First, however, Branagh's comment on Frankenstein must be qualified.

Mary Shelley's novel is by turns supremely cinematic and stubbornly un-
cinematic. Much of it-such as the creature's account of what he learned
from reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe (see F, pp. 124-27)-would
be numbingly static on the screen. And filmmaking itself evokes Victor's
project only in a broadly figurative sense. While film is a wholly artificial
product, the creature consists entirely of natural body parts, so that he is
closer to an actual human being with one or more transplanted organs
than he is to the mechanical men constructed by futurist designers in the
1920s or to the cyborg of present-day science fiction.3' Nevertheless, the
visual medium of film highlights something at once crucial to the novel
and virtually invisible to the reader: the repulsiveness of the creature's ap-
pearance.
In the novel, the words of the creature-especially as we read his
autobiographical story-cover our eyes, and our blindness to his appear-
ance is precisely what enables us to see his invisible nobility. Though Vic-
tor abhors the creature's looks, the novel seldom asks us even to imagine
them.32 Instead it repeatedly makes us imagine what the creature sees
30. Quoted in "The Filmmakers and Their Creations," Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," p.
177. Curiously enough, neither Branagh's film nor any other film of Frankenstein known to
me includes the nightmare.
31. See Skal, The Monster Show, pp. 131-33. Donna Haraway explicitly exempts the
cyborg-a composite of animal and machine-from the creature's heterosexual longing for
organic or Edenic wholeness. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Rein-
vention of Nature (New York, 1991), p. 151.
32. While the novel often asks us to imagine the monster's looking, as I have already
noted, the only description of his looks appears in Victor's account of his newly animated

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and hears. A faithful re-creation of the novel's central narrative, in fact,

would never show the monster at all-would give us only the sound of
his voice over shots of what he perceives, such as the roaring crowd of
torch-bearing villagers charging up a mountain after him in Whale's ver-
sion. Yet no director known to me has ever even considered filming the
monster's story in this way.33 Essentially, filmmakers treat it as Phiz the
illustrator treats the hero's autobiography in Dickens's David Copperfield
(1849-50).34 In film versions of Frankenstein, as in Phiz's illustrations, the
first-person narrator telling us all that he experiences-or has experi-
enced-becomes just one more visible object.35
Yet if filmmakers seem thus compelled to objectify the creature, they
also compel us to face-more frankly and forthrightly than critics of the
novel usually do-the problem of the creature's appearance. In the novel,
Victor says that the creature was "gigantic ... about eight feet in height,
and proportionably large," that his skin was "yellow," that his hair was
"lustrous black, and flowing," that his teeth were "of pearly whiteness,"
that the color of his "watery eyes" almost matched that of their "dun-
white sockets," that his complexion was "shrivelled," and that his lips were
"straight [and] black" (F, pp. 52, 56). It is hard to know just what to make
of this description. The creature's size is monstrous, but except for his
yellow skin, the other details suggest a face seductively sinister rather
than truly repulsive, something closer to Bela Lugosi's Count in Tod
Browning's Dracula (1931) than to the mouth-distending, barbed-wire
stitchery of Robert De Niro's creature in Branagh's Frankenstein.36 Yet Bra-
form. Not even when the monster is terrified by his own reflection in a pool do we get any
further instructions on how to visualize him; see F, pp. 56, 110.
33. This subjective camera technique has been used for parts of many films, such as
Delmer Daves's Dark Passage (1947) and is used throughout Robert Montgomery's Lady in
the Lake (1946), where Montgomery himself plays the hero with the camera strapped to his
chest. See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1978), p. 160.
34. In chapter 5, for instance, David recalls how he drifted in and out of sleep during
breakfast with the flute-playing Master at Salem House, hearing by turns the actual strains
of the flute and the imagined sounds of the coach he would soon be taking. But the drawing
shows him simply as an insensate object-a boy sitting asleep on a chair. See Charles Dick-
ens, David Copperfield (New York, 1950), pp. 79-81. My thanks to Grant Cerny for this ex-
ample.
35. According to Chatman, one of the many differences between fiction and film is
that while fictional narratives may operate from a generalized perspective, film is always
shot from a specific point of view-the viewpoint of the camera. See Chatman, "What Nov-
els Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)" Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980):132-33.
Paradoxically, however, film versions of a novel told from the viewpoint of a single character
are almost never consistently shot from that viewpoint.
36. On the other hand, the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, which
depicts the moment of the monster's first stirring, shows a well muscled male nude whose
only serious abnormalities-apart from his size-are an elongated right hand and the
sprouting of his head from his right shoulder (reproduced as the frontispiece to The Mary

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nagh and his collaborators ask the right question about the creature's
effect on Victor: "Why, after all this time, having seen what he was putting
together, should he be so repelled and then be so frightened by it?"37 The
question becomes even more pointed when we realize that Victor made
the creature from features "selected ... as beautiful" (F, p. 56; emphasis
mine). What makes Victor's composition of such beautiful features mon-
strous?
In part, the answer made by Branagh's film is much like the now-
familiar answer formulated by critics such as Ellen Moers, who claim that
Victor's sudden loathing for the newly animated creature he has long
labored to construct evokes the sense of "revulsion against newborn life"
that may be felt by any new mother, as Mary Shelley knew from her own
experience.38 Branagh's film makes this point graphically. First, the mon-
ster lunges from a great copper sarcophagus filled with water to make it
a kind of womb. After he lands sprawling in the spill tank under it, Victor
lifts him up, vainly tries to show him how to walk, then ties him standing
to a set of chains. But when the struggling creature is struck by a falling
piece of wood and shortly goes limp, Victor concludes that he himself has
killed this luckless heir to "'massive birth defects,"' and that "'this evil
must be destroyed . .. forever.'""39 Since Branagh's Victor tries to help the
creature at first and seems dismayed to think that he has killed him, he
is decidedly more paternal-or maternal-than the Victor of the text.
But when (in the next scene) Branagh's Victor awakens in his bedroom
to find the naked, stitched-up creature looming over him, he cries out
"No!" and flees ("S," p. 84). Like the Victor of the text, who finds the
ugliness of the creature inconceivably magnified by its acquisition of the
capacity to move, Branagh's Victor is horrified by life itself-by the living
sight of what he has made (see F, p. 57).
Branagh's answer to his own question, then, is at once visual and
Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson [New York, 1990]). Staged
versions of the novel include at least one beautiful monster. In the Royal Ballet version,
which premiered in London on 26 July 1985, the monster was represented by an Ariel-like
figure costumed and made up wholly in white. (My thanks to Linda Hughes for this infor-
mation.)
37. Branagh, "Frankenstein Reimagined," p. 19.
38. Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic," in The Endurance of "Frankenstein," p. 81. Mary Shel-
ley called Frankenstein her "hideous progeny" (Mary Shelley, author's introduction to the
standard novels edition, F, p. 10; hereafter abbreviated "AI"). Also, as critics often remind
us, she had already endured before writing it the death of her first child, born prematurely
in February 1815, who lived just twelve days. See Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley (New York,
1987), p. 45. In itself this hardly explains why Victor is horrified by the very animation of
the creature and dismayed by its stubborn survival. But Victor's "labour" in his "workshop
of filthy creation" (F, pp. 52, 53) may well signify the repulsiveness of child-bearing. Moers
calls Frankenstein "a horror story of maternity" (Moers, "Female Gothic," p. 83).
39. Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, "The Screenplay," in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein,"
p. 81; hereafter abbreviated "S."

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psychological. His Victor rejects the creature in part because any new-
born being may disgust its begetter and in part because this one-in the
film-has apparently risen twice from the dead, more "hideous" than "a
mummy again endued with animation," in the punning words of the
novel, which has just described Victor's nightmare of embracing his dead
mother (F, p. 57). But Branagh's Victor is also horrified by the sheer ugli-
ness of the creature, by the barbed-wire stitches that harrow his body
and distend his face. The stitching of the creature--nowhere explicitly
mentioned in Mary Shelley's text-originates in film with Jack Pierce's
makeup for Boris Karloff in the Whale Frankenstein, where the creature's
face and body appear discreetly sutured. But the body of De Niro's crea-
ture in Branagh's film is vividly, cruelly stitched, and thus reminds us that
Mary Shelley's creature was precisely not a reanimated corpse-some-
thing Victor had so far found "impossible" to produce (F, p. 53)-but a
patchwork quilt of flesh cut from dead bodies, a paradoxically ugly com-
posite of features "selected ... as beautiful."
With singular irony, Victor's phrase evokes a leading principle of neo-
classical aesthetics. Encapsulated in the story of Zeuxis, the ancient Greek
artist who painted Helen of Troy by selecting and combining the loveliest
parts of the most beautiful virgins of Crotona, this was the principle of
what Sir Joshua Reynolds called "Ideal Beauty" in visual art: a general-
ized shape abstracted from the comparative study of particular human
figures, a "central form ... from which every deviation is deformity."40
Victor deviates from the central form, of course, by making his creature
eight feet tall. But otherwise his project turns neoclassical aesthetics on
its head. By applying to corpses a formula calculated to produce ideal
beauty in painting and sculpture, Victor generates only deformity: the
deformity of a creature artificially assembled.41 It is this myth of miscre-
ation, of artistic ambition run monstrously awry, that scores of filmmakers
have sought to illuminate in their own art-an art which may yet lead us
to a deeper understanding of Mary Shelley's.
40. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, Conn.,
1975), p. 45. For an account of the story of Zeuxis, see Jean H. Hagstrum, The SisterArts: The
Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), p. 14.
41. Marie-H61~ne Huet suggests that the creature is monstrous because Frankenstein's
art is purely reproductive or (in Plato's term) eikastiken, "without interpretation, without
proportion or the necessary betrayal of the model that makes the phantastiken object un-
faithful to nature but at the same time aesthetically beautiful" (Marie-Hlene Huet, Mon-
strous Imagination [Cambridge, 1993], p. 132). Yet even if we construe Victor's act of
assembling actual features as the reproduction of a human body, the creature is an explicitly
enlarged-and thus artfully transformed-version of the model, "about eight feet in
height, and proportionably large" (F p. 52; emphasis mine).

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Let us return, then, to the question posed by Peter Brooks's essay:

"What Is a Monster?" Unlike Brooks's linguistic response, the answer one
might expect from film is that a monster is someone visibly deformed,
hideous to behold. Yet Karloff's monster in the Whale Frankenstein is not
unequivocally ugly. Without saying a single word, without the eloquence
that enables the novel's monster to make us forget his ugliness, Karloff's
monster excites our sympathy. He radiates longing when he raises his
arms to the light pouring through the partly open roof of the dark watch-
tower where he has been made, and he radiates joy when he smilingly
kneels to join the little girl Maria in picking and throwing daisies into a
lake. Even his throwing of Maria into the lake-censored out of the prints
originally released but now restored-was scripted as an innocent gesture
prompted by his assumption that she would float like a flower, and in spite
of Whale's wishes, Karloff played it this way.42 What do such moments tell
us about monstrosity? Do they confirm what Mary Poovey has written of
Mary Shelley's creature-that while "it recognizes and longs to overcome
its definitive monstrosity," it "is unable to disguise its essential being"?43
To rephrase my earlier question, just what is the essential being of a
monster?
The difficulty of answering this question-or rather the problem

with assuming too quickly that we know the answer-may be illustrated
by turning again to Dickens, this time to Great Expectations. Shortly after
Magwitch reveals himself as the source of Pip's wealth and gentlemanly
status, which he has come back from New South Wales to admire, Pip
explicitly compares the two to Victor and his creature. "The imaginary
student," writes Pip, "pursued by the misshapen creature he had impi-
ously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who
had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the
more he admired me and the fonder he was of me."44 Pip is of course not
just another Victor. As a gentleman "made" by the wealth of a criminal,
he is himself a creature, and perhaps a monster of snobbery and affecta-
tion as well. But his aversion to Magwitch, who now wants Pip to care for
him, clearly recalls Victor's loathing of his new creature, whose infantile
appeal to his maker-with "inarticulate sounds" and "a grin wrinkl[ing]
42. See Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," p. 171. Whale ordered Karloff to raise the
girl over his head and brutally cast her down; Karloff wanted to "pick her up gently and
put her in the water exactly as he had done to the flower" (quoted in Donald E Glut, The
Frankenstein Legend [Methuen, N.J., 1973], pp. 112-13).
43. Mary Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Ro-
manticism," PMLA 95 (May 1980): 337.
44. Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (1860-61; Harmondsworth, 1985),
p. 354.

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his cheeks"-prompts Victor to see only a "miserable monster" (F, p. 57).

One other thing that Pip says about Magwitch also anticipates what
Poovey writes of the creature. After dressing up Magwitch to pass him off
in public as a prosperous farmer, Pip despairs of the effort. "To my think-
ing," he says, "there was something in him that made it hopeless to at-
tempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the better I dressed
him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes....
From head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man."45
In Pip's eyes, the undisguisably "essential being" of his coarse-
grained creator/creature is criminal. Implicitly, Pip reads Magwitch in the
light of physiognomy, the ancient art of construing external features-
especially facial ones-as signs of "supposed inner essences."46 Revived in
the later eighteenth century by the Swiss theologian Johann Kaspar La-
vater (1741-1801), one of whose disciples examined the infant Mary Shel-
ley herself at her father's request,47 physiognomy strongly influenced the
description of characters in Dickens's earlier novels as well as the draw-
ings of them made by Hablot K. Browne, whose very nickname (Phiz)
revealed his belief in the idea that beauty expresses virtue and ugliness
vice, that facial features disclose-to an astute reader of them-one's
moral character.48 Dickens's later work shows some resistance to this idea.
In Great Expectations itself, significantly unadorned by the handiwork of
Phiz or any other illustrator, Pip's physiognomic reading of Magwitch ex-
poses his blindness to the man's inner worth, which he eventually recog-
nizes. But for all its blindness, Pip's reading anticipates yet another revival
of physiognomy less than three decades after Great Expectations first ap-
peared. In 1887, Cesare Lombroso published the first of a series of books
that established the science (or pseudoscience) of criminal anthropology,
which claimed that the "'born criminal"' can be known from his anatomy
and especially from the configuration of his skull.49 According to Lom-
broso, criminals are evolutionary throwbacks, visibly atavistic reincarna-
tions of the prehistoric savage or the ape. As Nietzsche paraphrased the
theory in Twilight of the Idols (1889), it "tell[s] us the typical criminal is
ugly: monstrum infronte, monstrum in animo" (a monster in face, a monster
in soul).50
Criminal anthropology has cast its shadow backwards on Mary Shel-
ley's text. Though Lombroso's theory could not have influenced Shelley
45. Ibid., p. 352.

46. Michael Hollington, "Dickens, 'Phiz,' and Physiognomy," Imagination on a Long
Rein: English Literature Illustrated, ed. Joachim Mbller (Marburg, 1988), p. 125.
47. See Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman
and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), 1:26 n.
48. See Hollington, "Dickens, 'Phiz,' and Physiognomy," p. 125.
49. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), p. 124.
50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in "Twilight of the Idols" and "The Anti-Christ,"
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 30.

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herself, it has subtly influenced our ways of construing and representing

the creature's monstrosity. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) ultimately de-
rives from Frankenstein's literary sibling-John William Polidori's The
Vampyre (1819), the only other child of Byron's proposal that he and Poli-
dori and the Shelleys should "'each write a ghost story"' in the summer
of 1816 ("AI," p. 7). Whether or not Lombroso's theories ever directly
affected the portrayal of Mary Shelley's creature on stage or screen, they
certainly influenced Stoker, for as Leonard Wolf has shown, Jonathan
Harker's first description of Count Dracula closely follows Lombroso's de-
scription of the criminal face.51 Likewise, most of the faces that Universal
artists originally drew for the creature in the Whale Frankenstein were de-
cidedly atavistic, just the sort of face Lombroso thought innately crimi-
nal.52 While none of these faces resembles the one that Pierce made for
Karloff, Karloff's creature-in one of the many notable departures from
Mary Shelley's text-gets a brain explicitly labelled "abnormal." In Wald-
man's words from the film, it is "the abnormal brain of the typical crimi-
nal," marked by "distinct degeneration of the frontal lobes." The film thus
tries to ensure that the inner self or "essential being" of the monstrous-
looking creature will likewise be monstrous, will validate the simplest
notion of what a monster is: one whose malformed body proclaims the
viciousness of his or her soul.
In its basic form, this notion is much older than Lombroso or La-
vater. Thersites, the ugliest of all the Greeks in the Iliad, is also-ac-
cording to Odysseus-the worst of them.53 In the Book of Revelation,
Satan appears as "a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns"
(Rev. 12:3). Shakespeare's humpbacked Richard III is a "lump of foul
deformity," at once bodily disfigured and morally corrupt.54 In Paradise
Lost, the ur-text of Frankenstein, Sin is a woman whose lower body "ended
foul in many a scaly fold" and is surrounded by hellhounds uglier than
Scylla and Hecate (PL, bk. 2, 1. 651, p. 391). Few ideas are more enduring
or more seductively plausible than the assumption that deformity signi-
fies depravity.
Yet literature and life itself offer us many monsters in disguise: fig-
ures whose physical attractiveness belies the evil within. Milton's Sin is
beautiful down to the waist, and the verbal picture of Fraud (froda) drawn
51. See Wolf, The Annotated Dracula (New York, 1975), p. 300. Daniel Pick aptly notes
that Dracula should not be lumped with Frankenstein under the undifferentiated heading of
"gothic" because the later novel reflects a major issue of the late nineteenth century. It
expresses, he argues, "a vision of the bio-medical degeneration of the race in general and
the metropolitan population in particular" (Daniel Pick, "'Terrors of the Night': Dracula
and 'Degeneration' in the Late Nineteenth Century," Critical Quarterly 30 [Winter 1988]: 75).
52. These drawings are reprinted in Skal, The Monster Show, p. 133.
53. See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (1951; Chicago, 1978), bk. 2, 11.
216, 249, p. 82.
54. William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Mark Eccles (Harmondsworth, 1988), 1.2.57,
p. 41.

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by Dante-whose power to conceive monsters Victor finds limited (see F,

p. 57)-likewise combines the trunk of a serpent with "the face of a just
man, so benign was its outward aspect."55 In realistic fiction and drama
the handsome seducer is a stock figure, as in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the
D'Urbervilles, where the handsome Alec d'Urberville not only takes the
heroine's virginity but diabolically drives her to murder. Victor Franken-
stein himself, who is at least attractive enough to win the love of Elizabeth,
seems unwittingly to reveal the depravity of his own soul in the very act
of expressing his wish to kill "the monstrous Image which I had endued
with the mockery of a soul still more monstrous" (F, p. 177). And if we
turn to recent, actual events, how would Doctors Lavater and Lombroso
read the handsome face of the late Jeffrey Dahmer, whose actual behavior
made the fictional crimes of Mary Shelley's creature look like the misde-
meanors of an Eagle Scout?56 If ever a monstrum in animo was speciosus in
fronte, Dahmer was.
Beside malformed criminals and handsome knaves, however, there
is a third kind of monster much closer to the original meaning of mons-
trum-"divine portent or warning"-than either of the other two is.57
Nietzsche's phrases in fact refer to Socrates, a monstrum infronte renowned
for his admonitions, a notoriously ugly philosopher. Nietzsche argues that
Socrates' dogged promotion of "rationality at any cost" made him also a
monstrum in animo, leader of a sickeningly repressive war against instinct.58
But earlier in the nineteenth century, it is far more likely that Mary Shel-
ley viewed Socrates as Alcibiades does in the Symposium, a dialogue Percy
translated in July 1818 as The Banquet.59 For Alcibiades, Socrates is a mons-
55. Dante, Inferno, in The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Singleton, 3 vols. (Princeton,
N.J., 1970), 1:173 (17.10-11). See also PL, bk. 2, 1. 650, p. 391.
56. Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen young men and boys, had sex with some of their
dead bodies, skinned and dismembered them, tried to lobotomize at least one of them,
spray-painted their skulls, preserved body parts in formaldehyde so he could look at them
while masturbating, kept human hearts in his freezer, and ate body parts so as to reanimate
the dead within him. He was murdered in 1994 while serving a life sentence. See Edward
Walsh, "Murderer Jeffrey Dahmer Beaten to Death in Prison," Lebanon (N.H.) Valley News,
29 Nov. 1994, p. Al.
57. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "monster." On the construal of monsters as portents
in the sixteenth century, see Lorraine Daston, "Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence
in Early Modern Europe,"' Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 93-124.
58. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 34.
59. Percy had read the Symposium in Greek by 7 December 1817, when he cites the
speech of Agathon in a letter to William Godwin. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, ed. Fred-
erick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), 1:574. Mary promptly transcribed his translation,
and from it I quote the Symposium below. See Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley,
1814-1844, 1:220-22. See also Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Banquet: Translated from Plato, in
Prose, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E.
Peck, 10 vols. (London, 1930), pp. 165-220; hereafter abbreviated B. William Veeder treats
Plato as one of several sources for Mary's views on androgyny, a topic central to Aristopha-

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trum in fronte, deus in animo, a god of wisdom with the face of a monster.
Alcibiades compares him to Marsyas, the ugly satyr whose pipe makes
music that is enchantingly divine, for the ugly Socrates makes Marsyan
music with his philosophic words (see B, pp. 210-11).
Are echoes of this music audible in the philosophic eloquence of
Mary Shelley's monster? Though enchanted by the sounds of old De La-
cey's guitar (see F, pp. 104, 113), the monster does not know the Sym-
posium as he knows Paradise Lost. But Mary Shelley probably knew
something of Plato's dialogue by the time she wrote Frankenstein, and what
the monster says to Victor reflects-in part by a kind of desperate inver-
sion-something of what Socrates says he has learned from Diotima
about love. When the monster tells Victor that he must have a female "of
the same species, and ... the same defects" as himself (F, p. 139), he
inverts Diotima's definition of love as the yearning not for one's other half
(Aristophanes' theory) but for the good (see B, pp. 200-201). Love, says
Diotima, "embraces those bodies which are beautiful rather than those
which are deformed" (B, p. 204). Ironically, the monster's instincts con-
firm this axiom. Gazing on the miniature portrait of the "most lovely
woman" that was once Victor's mother, he is filled with delight (F p. 138).
But knowing that he can excite in beautiful creatures only fear and loath-
ing, he bitterly cultivates a "burning passion" for "one as deformed
and horrible" as he is, someone who "would not deny herself to me"
(E p. 139).
Apparently, then, the monster cannot reach even the first step of the
ladder that would lead from particular to "supreme beauty" in Diotima's
discourse (B, p. 207). Yet he startlingly resembles the figure of Love that
Diotima describes. Like Love, a "great Daemon" holding "an intermedi-
ate place between what is divine and what is mortal" (B, p. 197), Victor's
creature is a "daemon" of superhuman strength and endurance (F, p.
161). Like Love, too, the creature is "for ever poor,... squalid,' and
"homeless,... ever the companion of Want" (B, p. 198). In the Symposium,
Love's poverty and squalor help to show what the seeker for love must
learn: that the mind's beauty transcends the "mere beauty of the outward
form" (B, p. 206). In Frankenstein, we are nowhere told that the monster
seeks a beauty of mind. But if he wants Victor to "make [him] happy,"
could he be satisfied by a woman who offered no more than the "same
nes' definition of love in the dialogue and to Mary's critique of the isolated, self-absorbed
masculine ego. See William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny (Chi-
cago, 1986), pp. 23-24. Whether or not Mary knew anything about the Symposium before
publishing the first edition of Frankenstein in 1818, she uses Plato's Diotima in the frame-
story for the first version of the next novel she wrote, Mathilda. See Andrea K. Henderson,
Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 125. In any case,
the ugliness of Socrates sheds an important and generally neglected light on the kind of
monstrosity the creature embodies.

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defects" as his (F, p. 97)? Would he not also desire someone with compara-
ble virtues, someone whose soul radiates "love and humanity," as his own
once did (F, p. 97)? Whatever the answer to these questions, the creature's
"burning passion" is much closer to Socrates' conception of love than to
Victor's egotism. While Victor spurns companionship in his quest for sci-
entific glory, the monster's whole story-right up to its final words-aims
to show that life is unbearable without love.
This complex evocation of Socrates in the monster's narrative helps
to explain and justify a bit of dialogue invented by the scriptwriters for
the ice cave scene in the Branagh film, a drastically condensed version of
the creature's narrative. The scene reminds us that even as the language
of fiction can sometimes be visual, the verbal language of film can some-
times rival the impact of its images. Just before De Niro's monster asks
for a mate, he reveals that he knows how to play the recorder, and he
claims not to have learned but to have "remembered" this Marsyan skill
by means of what Branagh's Victor goes on to suggest might be "trace
memories in the brain, perhaps" ("S," p. 115). I will not claim that the
scriptwriters were thinking of Socrates, but for anyone who can hear ech-
oes of his voice in the novel, the film dialogue between Victor and the
monster about memory and the recorder calls to mind the ugly philoso-
pher whose theory of knowledge is based on recollection, on the silent
recorder known as memory. Victor struggles to forget the monster as
soon as he comes to life, but the monster compels him to remember both
what he has created and what he has repressed in the very act of solitary
creation: the desire that erupts in Victor's nightmare.
Let us now revisit this nightmare and the desire it signifies with the
aid of Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein, a film scripted by Gene Wilder,
who also plays Friedrich Frankenstein, the eponymous hero. At the end
of the film, Madeline Kahn's Elizabeth not only survives but also falls in
love with the monster when he abducts her. Lulled by her own mood
music (she sings "Ah! sweet mystery of life") and enchanted by his charm
as he suavely lights two cigarettes and gives her one (like Paul Henreid in
Now, Voyager [1942]), she ends up marrying him and playing tigress to his
tame executive, lustily leaping into a bed where the creature sits up read-
ing the Wall Street Journal. (Friedrich has selflessly traded his brain for the
monster's, which is what makes the creature "normal" at the end.) What
do these sophomoric pranks have to do with Mary Shelley's novel? They
have, I think, quite a lot to do with one of the myths lurking just beneath
the surface of its plot, the myth of Beauty and the Beast. It is powerfully
implied not only by the creature's response to the sleeping Justine but

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also by what he says about the miniature portrait of Caroline Beaufort

that he takes from William and plants on Justine.
It was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it

softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight
on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes,and her lovely lips; but pres-
ently my rage returned: I remembered that I was forever deprived
of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow; and that
she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have
changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and
affright. [F, p. 138]
Steeped as he is in Paradise Lost, the creature implicitly recalls what the

beauty of Eve does in book 9 to Satan, who is so enraptured by it that he
momentarily forgets his vengeful plot against her and all of humankind
(see PL, bk. 9, 11. 455-66, pp. 534-35). But unlike Satan, who can present
to Eve a "pleasing" and "lovely" shape even when he inhabits the body of
a serpent (PL, bk. 9, 11. 503-4, p. 536), the monster knows-or at any
rate presumes-that the woman whose portrait he lovingly contemplates
would be horrified by the sight of him. Irresistibly attractive, Satan
damns himself to the Dostoevskian hell of those who cannot love. Gro-
tesquely repulsive, the monster is damned to the hell of those who cannot
be loved. He stirs desire in no woman, beautiful or otherwise, and one
woman faints at his appearance (see F, p. 102).
But he is nowhere actively rejected by a woman, not even by the
young girl he saves from drowning and takes (admittedly "senseless") in
his arms (F, p. 136). In the myth of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty's love
for the Beast turns him into a prince. In a children's book version of the
story that Mary Shelley may well have known, the Beast is by his own
admission "hideous" and "ugly," but the kindness of this "Monster" makes
Beauty overlook his "outward form" and eventually turns her fear of him
into desire.60 The children's story may be read as an allegory of Mary
Shelley's fascination with what she called her "hideous" idea in the intro-
duction to the 1831 edition ("AI," p. 5). Lovingly portraying a monster
loved by no one else, she gives him an eloquence that makes us overlook
his outward form, as I have already noted, and she lets him show by his
own words and deeds how "benevolent and good" he was before misery
60. Quoted in Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale
(Chicago, 1989), pp. 34-35. The earliest known literary version of the myth appeared in
France in 1740, and in 1811 (when Mary was fourteen) an English poem attributed to
Charles Lamb and titled Beauty and the Beast: Or a Rough Outside with a Gentle Heart appeared
as a children's book. See Hearne, Beauty and the Beast, pp. 2, 34. Since Lamb first met Godwin
in 1805 and since Mary Shelley saw him socially at least twice in the winter and spring of
1817, when she was writing Frankenstein, it seems more than possible that she knew some-
thing of this book. See Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, 1:164, 172.

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"made [him] a fiend" (F, p. 97). Nothing about the creature she presents
to us is more poignant than his longing to be loved. In Young Frankenstein,
Elizabeth gratifies this desire. Acting out-campily, to be sure-the crea-
ture's deepest fantasy, she plays a loving Beauty to his Beast.
Wacky as it is, the monster's marriage to Elizabeth in Young Franken-
stein also points directly to the sexual energies that Mary Shelley's Victor
so perversely thwarts in himself and the monster alike. When Victor tears
apart the monster's mate and thus breaks his promise to furnish one, the
monster grimly tells Victor, "'I shall be with you on your wedding-night'"
(F, p. 163). As he later tells Walton, Victor's decision to take a bride for
himself while denying one to the monster drove the monster to kill Eliza-
beth (F, p. 212). But the killing of Elizabeth is not just an act of vengeance.
It is also a vicarious expression of Victor's misogyny and, contradictorily,
a tortured expression of the creature's desire for the woman he kills.
First of all, as the psychic son or "symbolic projection" of Victor's
imagination, in Poovey's words, the creature vengefully reenacts Victor's
misogynistic dismemberment of the female creature, an act prompted
largely-as Mellor has argued-by Victor's fear of what an unregulated
female might do.61 Having set out to preempt the generative powers of
women, Victor is horrified by the spectre of rampant heterosexual repro-
duction, by "a race of devils [who] would be propagated upon the earth"
(F, p. 160). This overt fear of what a pair of monsters might beget suggests
a deeper fear of what any woman could beget, and more specifically of
what his own bride might generate. For this reason, the creature's killing
of Elizabeth gratifies one of Victor's deepest wishes.62 In refusing to con-
summate his marriage on his wedding night, in leaving Elizabeth alone
in their room while he stalks the inn corridors in search of the creature,
Victor unconsciously invites the creature to take her.
The taking, I submit, is sexual as well as murderous-a tortured ex-
pression of the monster's hitherto frustrated desire. Just after Victor de-
stroys the mate-to-be before the eyes of the monster and swears never to
create one, the monster says, "You are my creator, but I am your master-
obey!" (F, p. 162). Victor's refusal to do so goads the creature to exercise
in his own murderous way the traditional right of a feudal master: the
droit de seigneur, the lord's right to take his vassal's bride on her wedding
61. Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny," p. 337. See also Mellor, Mary Shelley, pp. 119-20.
62. Reminding us that Victor sees Elizabeth at various times as his "cousin" and "sis-
ter" and that she dissolves into his dead mother in his nightmare, James Twitchell argues
that Victor unconsciously uses the monster to punish Elizabeth for exciting Victor's incestu-
ous desires (F, pp. 35, 146; see also F, p. 57); for Twitchell, the novel as a whole allegorizes
"the male impulses and anxieties about incest as well as the female impulses and anxieties
about birthing" (James B. Twitchell, "Frankenstein and the Anatomy of Horror," Georgia Re-
view 37 [Spring 1983]: 60; see also pp. 50-53). Twitchell's argument is plausible as far as it
goes, but does not-in my judgement-reckon sufficiently with Victor's misogyny and the
monster's desires.

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night. Whether or not this brutal custom was ever mentioned in the his-
tory course that the creature overheard Felix giving to Safie (see F, pp.
115-16), it is central to the plot of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (1786),
which Mary Shelley knew about well before she finished writing Franken-
stein.63 The echo of the droit de seigneur in the creature's wedding-night
assault on Elizabeth amplifies all of the other signals pointing to rape: the
creature's own fierce desire for a mate and the appearance of Elizabeth
herself when, drawn by a scream from her room, Victor finds her dead
body "thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and
distorted features half covered by her hair. Every where I turn I see the
same figure-her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the mur-
derer on its bridal bier" (F, p. 189). In this vivid picture of a "relaxed"
body thrown or flung across the "bridal bier" of her bed, Victor portrays
the victim of a murderous rape: a complex expression of his own misog-
yny, of the creature's lust for revenge, and of his frustrated longing for
a mate.
Victor's response to this spectacle of murderous consummation-the

closest he gets to consummation of any kind-is singularly revealin
After fainting and then reviving, he says, he rushed back to the body
Elizabeth "and embraced her with ardour" (F, p. 189). This passiona
embrace of her dead body marks the very first time he is said to tou
her at all, but it vividly recalls the nightmare in which he embraces a
Elizabeth who turns into his mother's corpse. Just as the monster's mu
der of Elizabeth reenacts Victor's dismemberment of the monster's mat
Victor's embrace of his dead bride reenacts the dream, which itself reve
Victor's oedipal obsession with his dead mother, his inability to transfe
his desires to any other woman.
Branagh's film situates this necrophilia within a triangle of desire
binding both Victor and the creature to Elizabeth. Branagh's Victor, fir
of all, is a passionate lover as well as an obsessed scientist. Besides radiat
ing a robust vitality that scarcely recalls the wasted, emaciated figure
meet in the novel, he loves his Elizabeth far more intensely than Mar
Shelley's Victor loves his; he kisses her hungrily when he leaves for t
university, and though he writes her no letters for months, he joyousl
seizes her when he rises one day from his sickbed to find her-improb
bly enough-playing the piano at the far end of the garret in which h
has recently manufactured the monster. But if Branagh's film makes Vi
tor far more passionate than Mary Shelley does, it also reveals somethin
merely implied by her text: the link between Victor's project and his
mother's death. In the novel, Victor's ambition to create life is ignited b
Waldman's lecture on the "'new and almost unlimited powers'" of mod
63. See Mary Shelley, letter to Leigh Hunt, 3 Nov. 1823, The Letters of Mary Wollstone
craft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1980), 1:395-96.

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ern science (F, p. 47); the idea of reviving the dead is just a secondary
possibility, and the dead mother comes to his mind only in his nightmare
(see F, p. 53). In the film, however, it is her death that makes him resolve
"to fight ... death itself," and even though his project goes catastrophi-
cally awry, the monster's murder of Elizabeth reanimates this urge ("S,"
p. 45).
Like the monster of the novel, De Niro's monster kills Elizabeth on
her wedding night while Victor is out seeking him with a gun. When
Branagh's Victor returns to find the monster ripping out her heart, he
shoots in vain at her fleeing assailant and then takes her corpse in his
arms. But unlike the Victor of the text, who simply collapses with exhaus-
tion at this point, Branagh's Victor desperately strives to revive Elizabeth
by sewing her now shaven head to the torso of Justine, who (as in the
novel) has been hanged for the murder of little William. After electrically
animating this composite body in the sarcophagus/womb, clothing her in
a wedding dress, and thrusting a wedding ring onto her finger, he begs
her to recognize him, coaxes her to stand, and then waltzes her around
the room, spinning and laughing with her until he sees the monster
standing by the sarcophagus. For the monster, the sight of Elizabeth's
shaven head and sutured body is a Lacanian stade du miroir Seeing at last
a woman whose mutilated form mirrors and thus affirms the humanity
of his own, he says, "She's beautiful," and claims her as his long-promised
mate ("S," p. 132).64 But when Victor's counterclaim leads them to fight
over her, she recoils at once from the men and from the alien body
stitched to her head, and immolates herself with a kerosene lamp.
Students of Mary Shelley's text may find all this merely grotesque or
recklessly sensational. Yet even as it wrenches the plot of the novel, this
sequence exfoliates some of its major themes: Victor's necrophiliac obses-
sion with his dead mother, the contradictions embedded in what Noel
Carroll calls the "overreacher" plot of his ambition to create life from
dead bodies, the monster's desire for a mate, and Victor's unwitting sub-
stitution of Elizabeth for the mate he destroyed.65 Above all, Branagh's
64. He thus reverses the process by which, according to Linda Williams, a woman is
punished for looking at a monster by being made to see his freakishness as a reflection of
her own. See Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Williams (Los Angeles, 1984), pp.
85-88. Strikingly enough, a real mirror is used to generate a wholly different effect in the
final scenes of the Edison Frankenstein. When the monster enters Victor's bedroom on his
wedding night, he stands before a large mirror and then gradually fades away, leaving only
his reflected image to be seen by Victor when he enters, as if the mirror now showed Victor
his own monstrosity. But gradually the monster's image gives way to that of Victor in his
young manhood-a sign that he has purged himself of monstrosity and can now marry
Elizabeth. For more on the Edison version, which has recently been rediscovered, see
Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," pp. 166-69.
65. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York, 1990),
p. 118.

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film evokes the oedipal conflict between Victor and his creature. In fight-
ing over the reanimated body of Elizabeth, they remind us that Mary
Shelley's Elizabeth was chosen by Victor's dying mother to be not only his
mate but her successor as mother to the Frankenstein family (see F, p.
42). In the "beautiful" body of the sutured Elizabeth, De Niro's monster
briefly finds his own mother and mate.
It is hardly news, of course, that Frankenstein tells the story of an oedi-
pal conflict. But Mary Shelley's Frankenstein helps to show how tightly the
novel knits the Oedipus story to the myths of Prometheus and of Milton's
Satan. Ultimately, Victor's struggle with the creature for possession of
Elizabeth-their would-be mate and mother surrogate-springs from an
ambition at once Promethean and Satanic: the ambition to rival the cre-
ative power of God.66 In Paradise Lost, Satan defies God by claiming to be
"self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power" (PL, bk. 5, 11. 860-
61, p. 467), and he begets Sin all by himself, in the very act of conceiving
his rebellion (see PL, bk. 2, 11. 748-61). When Satan's monstrous crea-
ture-literally a monstrum, a "sign / Portentous" (PL, bk. 2, 11. 760-61, p.
394)-excites his incestuous lust, he begets upon her the still more hid-
eous monster of Death, who rapes her and thus impregnates her with the
hellhounds that ceaselessly torment her (see PL, bk. 2, 11. 761-802, pp.
394-95). The story of this unholy trinity is reconfigured in Frankenstein,
where Sin splits into Elizabeth and a monster who plays the role of Death.
But unlike Sin, Elizabeth is not conceived by the Satanic Victor. On the
contrary, she is a rival creator, or rather an instrument in the scheme of
creation conceived by God. That is why Victor exposes her not only to
rape, which Sin undergoes, but death.67
The Branagh film reveals the implications of this point by moving
one step beyond it. If Mary Shelley's Victor can embrace a woman only
after she has turned into a corpse, Branagh's Victor finally seeks a woman
he has created from corpses, a woman who signifies not the divine scheme
of creation and reproduction but his own egomaniacal alternative to it.
What he repeatedly begs of the reanimated Elizabeth is a tribute to him-
self: "Say my name" ("S," p. 130). In contesting Victor's claim on the
woman that he believes had been promised to himself, De Niro's monster
reasserts his right to be treated as God treated Adam. He reasserts, in
other words, the primacy of the divine scheme, which makes mating es-
sential to reproduction.
66. Both Victor and the creature link themselves to Milton's Satan. The creature iden-
tifies himself with "'the fallen angel"' and deliberately echoes his words ("'Evil thenceforth
became my good"') (F, pp. 97, 212; see PL, bk. 4, 1. 110, p. 423). Victor compares himself
to "the archangel who aspired to omnipotence" (F, p. 204).
67. While rape can of course lead to impregnation, it can also serve as a crime against
generation. In recent years, for instance, it has been reported that Bosnian Serbs have
systematically raped Muslim women in order to make them unmarriageable and thus to
eradicate the Muslim population.

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If radical departures from the plot of the novel may sometimes

sharpen our understanding of it, they may also help to illuminate our
cultural relation to the nameless monster who has captivated the popular
imagination for the better part of two centuries. Probably the most outra-
geous and certainly one of the most original cinematic departures from
Mary Shelley's novel is the scene from Young Frankenstein in which Wilder's
Friedrich Frankenstein presents Peter Boyle's monster to a theater audi-
ence. Dressed in white tie and tails, Friedrich and his creature tap dance
and sing "Puttin' on the Ritz," with Friedrich singing most of the words
and the monster periodically grunting out a nearly consonantless refrain,
which sounds roughly like "ootin' on ah itz."
What can be learned from this bizarre spectacle of the monster as
would-be Fred Astaire? On the one hand, Astaire's combination of sexual
charm and urbane sophistication is about as far from Mary Shelley's re-
pulsive giant as anything can be. On the other hand, the episode exem-
plifies what the creature has become in popular culture: a source of
immensely popular entertainment. When Carroll writes that we enjoy
horror fiction because we are fascinated "with the categorically trans-
gressive beings that star in the genre," he reveals precisely what makes
transgression pleasurable.68 We are captivated not by transgression as
such but by the starring performance of it. In the tap dance of Young
Frankenstein, the creature acts out transgression for an audience, theatri-
cally breaching the wall between savagery and sophistication.
Like so much else in Young Frankenstein, the scene parodies not the
novel itself but earlier film versions of it, especially the Whale Frankenstein,
which begins with a shot of Edward Van Sloan stepping out from behind
a curtain to announce a film that "will thrill" and "may ... horrify you!"
Yet Van Sloan also plays Waldman, who in the novel makes comparable
claims for modern chemistry. Galvanizing Victor by explaining what
chemists can now do, Waldman says they "'have indeed performed mir-
acles. ... They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can
command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock
the invisible world with its own shadows"' (F, p. 47). Waldman's language
recalls the machinery of theater even as it adumbrates the spectacles of
film. In the first part of the eighteenth century, thunder effects devised
by the playwright John Dennis were, he testily charged, promptly stolen
for a production of Macbeth.69 At the end of the twentieth century, film-
makers not only mimic thunder and earthquakes but can re-create a rag-
ing Arctic sea on a studio stage, as production designers did for Branagh's
68. Carroll, "Disgust or Fascination: A Response to Susan Feagin," Philosophical Studies

65 (Feb. 1992): 85; emphasis mine.
69. William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia, 1892), p. 1052.

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Frankenstein.70 The tap dance of Young Frankenstein exemplifies the theatri-

cality of science as well as of transgression. Conceived by Victor in re-
sponse to a lecture that defines chemistry as miraculous mimicry, Mary
Shelley's monster was made to be exhibited as the supreme specimen of
mimesis, the living simulacrum of life itself. In Young Frankenstein, this
spectacle disarms a theater audience, by turns amusing and terrifying
them. Presented by the Baron (Victor's grandson) as a scientific wonder,
the creature fascinates the crowd by walking on command, then dancing
and singing; but when his oafish diction makes the people laugh, he turns
to rage and they flee in terror. In so doing, they reenact the flight of
Mary Shelley's Victor, who rushes from his lab in "breathless horror and
disgust" at the first sign of animation in a creature whose "beautiful" fea-
tures were chosen for display but not meant for motion beyond the con-
trol of his maker-who would, of course, also be his exhibitor.
Film versions of Frankenstein violate the tacit compact made between

novel and reader precisely by showing us what the novel decorously
hides. According to Friedrich Schelling, approvingly quoted by Freud, the
uncanny or unheimlich "'is the name for everything that ought to have remained
... hidden and secret and has become visible.'"71 The uncanny springs from
the return of the repressed-"nothing new or foreign," Freud writes, "but
something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been es-
tranged only by the process of repression."72 At the moment he comes to
life, the monster is profoundly familiar to Victor, who has been laboring
for months to construct him. But because Victor has up to now seen only
"the beauty of the dream," the glorious prospect of singlehandedly creat-
ing life, he has blinded himself to actual ugliness quite as much as to
actual beauty. His own animation of the monster opens his eyes to an
ugliness he has hitherto refused to see, and the Heimlichkeit of this ugli-
ness-the fact that it erupts in his own secret workroom-is exactly what
makes it so unheimlich. When the monster that we mentally construct from
the words of the text-in the workshop of our own reading experience-
suddenly erupts as a visible object on the screen, we are made to see him
with something like the eyes of Victor.
In the novel, of course, the monster's ugliness of face and form blinds
Victor to the beauty of his soul, which is revealed in words that Victor
cannot or will not understand because they come from one who seems to
him nothing but a repulsive killer. Yet while the novel thus exposes Vic-
tor's double blindness, it also shields the reader from-or blinds the
reader to-the shock of what Victor sees. With one brief exception, all
70. See "The Filmmakers and Their Creations," p. 166.

71. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny"' (1919), Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere, 5
vols. (New York, 1959), 4:375. Freud quotes Schelling from Daniel Sanders's W6rterbuch der
deutschen Sprache (1860).
72. Ibid., p. 394.

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we are asked to visualize in our reading are reactions to the sight of the
monster-not the sight itself. We might imagine a film that showed us
nothing more than such reactions. But aside from breaking the promise
implicitly made by all reaction shots-the promise that we will be shown
what provoked them-such a film would fail to show the monster's tor-
tured longing to be sympathetically seen, to be the object of a desiring
gaze.
The monster of the Frankenstein films, above all the Karloff monster
of the Whale films, has in one sense realized this desire beyond his wildest
dreams. Captivating millions, his image has been reproduced and dis-
seminated as widely and as often as the Mona Lisa. But there is a vast
difference between the riveting impact of his picture on a viewing audi-
ence and the repulsiveness of the figure it represents as seen by those
around him. The monster of the screen cannot bask in universal admira-
tion any more than he can relish the scornful laughter of a theater audi-
ence. On screen as in the novel, the monster knows the pitiless gaze of
the other only as the witness to his inescapable monstrosity.
Pictures, we are told, are typically feminine objects consumed by the
male gaze. Yet if a monster seems the very antithesis of a beautiful
woman-whether da Vinci's Gioconda or Victor's doomed bride-he can
nonetheless signify the feminine because he, like women, deviates from
the normative male form.7" The picture of a monster epitomizes this con-
tradiction. Even as it displaces the picture of beauty, its radical deformity
reinscribes both the feminine and the abject, which-in the words ofJulia
Kristeva-"disturbs identity, system, order," and yet also "beseeches, wor-
ries, and fascinates desire."74 The moving picture of a talking monster is
doubly monstrous, for it rends not only the lineaments of beauty but also
the silence traditionally expected of women and pictures alike. In the
end, what is most startling about the Frankenstein films is not that they
make the monster visible but that in most cases they also make him aud-
ible. Subject and object, viewer and viewed, he speaks at once to our eyes
and our ears.
73. "Traditionally," writes Barbara Creed, "the male body has been viewed as norm;
the female body a deviation" (Barbara Creed, "Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Hor-
ror Film," in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan
and Ina Rae Hark [London, 1993], p. 118). Aristotle argued that monstrosity began with
female deviation "from the generic type" (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck
[Cambridge, Mass., 1953], p. 401 [4.3.767b.9]). See also Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 3.
74. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York, 1982), pp. 4, 1. Mitchell has recently argued that insofar as pictures can be personi-
fied, they embody a conflict between the desire to master the beholder and a feminine
sense of abjection; pictures and women, he writes, seek a power "manifested as lack, not as
possession" (Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Really Want?" October, no. 77 [Summer 1996]: 76).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:49:08 UTC
Blankness as a Signifier
Author(s): Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
Blankness as a Signifier
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Leaving aside a question to which I'll return, that of the blank stare, it
seems blankness first appeared as the ground for a signification that it
facilitated but that antedated it. According to Meyer Schapiro the smooth
white ground common to most pictorialisms was quite a late develop-
ment.' Blankness, then, was a response to the pictographic rather than
a precondition for it. Cave painters did without or felt no need for an
uninterrupted field, but one later became necessary-the ground ac-
quired the properties of a clear sky-in order that the image could oper-
ate unimpeded by any other presence.
Schapiro makes the point that at first this field is filled with rows of
figures, and then it turns into a rectilinear space with figures in it, which
he tantalizingly analogizes to the walled city. So, in his model, blankness
first comes into view as a space in which the pictograph narrative no
longer has to compete with a ground cluttered with detail and accident,
and then it becomes associated with what one might call a pictorialism of
the finite space, where the smooth white ground is coupled with a limit,
with a dimension and thus a proportion, and, in consequence, with an
overt connection between composition and orientation. The space of the
image now has a figural relationship to its viewer; blankness has invisibly
changed into a kind of space, a metaphor of some sort (an account of the
development of the space of the signifier that makes it be a passage from
1. See Meyer Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and
Vehicle in Image-Signs," Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, vol. 4 of Selected
Papers (New York, 1994), pp. 1-7.

159

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160 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Blankness as a Signifier
the sublime to the beautiful, beginning as unbounded and rough and

becoming bounded and smooth).
If blankness signifies from the start the place of signification, and if,
similarly, the blank rectangle is already figural before it is filled with fig-
ures or otherwise composed-during which process blankness disappears
altogether in the course of the full realization of the potential of the rect-
angle's proportions--then Schapiro's model also suggests that blankness
emerges as the condition of an absolute temporality before becoming one
of an absolute spatiality. As the surface on which rows of pictograms are
arranged, it is first encountered as analogous to silence (the background
to stories) and only later becomes associated with depth. And here I take
note of a familiar conundrum. Space itself could be, and often is, seen
as a figure of immediacy, but inasmuch as depth implies movement and
therefore time, it must always be giving way to what it is not: to things, to
interval, to structure, to deferral. I shall suggest here that the blank face
of the technological offers immediacy as a hyperaccelerated duration, the
near instantaneity of the electronic, a duration invisible to the naked eye;
and in that I am defining blankness as a surface both continuous and
uninterrupted, I note that Tom Mitchell has observed, in conversation
during this essays's preparation, that continuity and uninterruptedness
might for some invoke the image of a sphere, which to me suggests that
the blank and smooth surface of pottery may have been the first achieved
or manufactured blankness, and as such an early product of something
that moved fast.
Be that as it may, if blankness originated as a necessary absence, a
condition of erasure, clearing, which makes possible a level of clarifica-
tion-the maximum mobility of the sign--unimaginable (as it were, liter-
ally) without it, humanism and the traditions to which it gave rise seem
to have maintained it in that condition, allowing it to be no more than a
precondition for the emergence of the pure and unimpeded idea, which
is to say, a necessary absence. (A contemporary version of which would be
an approach to formlessness that only wanted to see it in terms of the
unformed.) This would be a further sense in which blankness has been
theorized only in terms of that to which it gives way, so that blankness is
defined as space without incident, its temporal equivalent time without
change (inflection or interruption), that is, time without incident.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's recent publications include Beyond Piety:

Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993 (1995) and Das Sch6ne und das
Erhabene von heute, translated from the English by Almuth Carstens
(1996). Currently a Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the MFA program
at Art Center, Pasadena, California.

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This is to define blankness as that which, lacking incidentals, be-

comes, in works of art and other visual signs, itself incidental but in that
still fundamental to what is incidental to it. Absolute silence, absolute
depth become conditions for all that doesn't so much replace them as
occur in their place. John Shearman has discussed the Renaissance as a
time and place where "the invention of the work of art may sometimes be
predicated upon the full engagement of the spectator in front of it," but
this would be an engagement that had little use for blankness insofar
as it depends upon the spectator's "willingness to read it realistically in
behavioral or narrative terms"-at least during Shearman's "sometimes,"
which in his account seem to encompass a large number of the period's
most important works.2 The behavioral and the realistic involve the com-
position of incidentals-filling in all the blanks.
This would seem to me to raise another kind of question were one
to inquire as to the social role of blankness within a tradition that sees it
only as the ground for the sign and as such a sign of absence or potential-
ity. Insofar as the social is a matter of displayed signs of power, blankness
has a spotty history, although one could talk of it as a sign of asceticism
or austerity, as in Spanish noblemen's dress or the abandoning of orna-
ment in bourgeois as opposed to aristocratic dress in revolutionary
France. This is blankness as imposed absence where its imposition de-
notes piety, an absence of anything good to look at, which is also the sign
of seriousness in too much contemporary art. If that be blankness, then
it is blankness as the absence of the material as pleasurable stimulus, plea-
sure in misery, and as such it is structurally analogous to silence and, if
you like, to depth.
There may be another question about blankness and the social,
which I cannot develop here but which would return one to Schapiro's
analogy of the blank rectilinear field bounded by its margins or frame
and the walled city with its cleared ground hived off from nature. Writing
about Heidegger in the course of developing an argument about time
and the political in Derrida, Richard Beardsworth says that "if the basic
trait of the human is to be thrown out of familiar paths ... the paths
meet in the polis."3 As a convergence of ungrounded (inauthentic, leading-
astray) paths, the polis seems comparable to the image of blankness as
a new place, a detached zone of origination for the inherently un-
grounded-suspended in absence, which is to say the absence of any
other sign-where the inherently ungrounded could be writing, deorigi-
nated by the white ground that allows thought to start or start again in
its own space. This may indicate another use for blankness, as that with-
2. John Shearman, Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance
(Princeton, N.J., 1992), p. 27.
3. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London, 1994), pp. 115-16.

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out which one can't have the sociocultural considered as an affair of in-
scriptions and fresh starts, history as clearings and beginnings.
Here, however, I shall restrict myself to suggesting that the contem-

porary is witness to the end of blankness as absence, whether one be talk-
ing about production and reception of visual works, of art or not, or the
context in which this takes place, which is the world as visual work.
Specifically I'm interested in what blankness looks like now as op-
posed to a hundred years ago. I think its appearance has changed and so
has what it appears to be. As a signifier it's changed its connotation.
Where it once marked the absence of the sign by being a sign for absence,
it is now the sign of an invisible and ubiquitous technological presence.
I want to suggest that where blankness used to be excluded from the
world it is now everywhere and in everything, that the difference between
the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries is the difference be-
tween wallpaper and the blank wall, and, in the parallel development in
clothing and a lot of visual art, between an idea of layering and one of
intensification. What once stood for withholding or obliteration, potential
or loss, now appears as the condition of presentation and as a sign for
clarity. Contemporary blankness is the successor to, or at any rate comes
after, modernism's use of transparency, and I think the way it works now
has something to do with the late twentieth century's taking transparency,
and with it immediacy, for granted, where the nineteenth was still con-
cerned with the accumulation of details that could have implications from
which one could, in time, draw conclusions.
The passage from the Victorians to modernism and beyond leads
from a horror vacui to a displayed blankness, and that is also the passage
from the mechanical to the electronic, from the steam engine and the
mechanical calculator to the jet aircraft and the computer, from visible to
invisible energy and activity. We have gone from that which takes place
in a recognizable duration to that which takes an instant. I want to sug-
gest that the blankness we have now is indebted to the moment of trans-
parency that preceded it and signifies differently nowadays than it did
once because of its, and our, relationship to the instantaneity of the elec-
tronic. That transparency was also close to the idea of the instantaneous,
whereas detail is a matter of duration, and this is the sense in which the
kind of modernism grounded in an absolute substitution of transparency
for detail and plenitude may be seen as a transitional period between
what it despised and what takes it for granted. Before modernism, accu-
mulation and detail; after it, blankness: Northampton Town Hall on the
one hand, Philip Johnson's Dallas Cathedral on the other.
Blankness may be associated with the flawless, the completely ade-

quate and complete, as well as with the unformed. Either association pos-
its a close relationship with inscrutability, a condition often associated

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
with both the beautiful and the sublime, although I'd argue that where
the sublime may be seen to be necessarily inscrutable, for the beautiful
it's just one possible option. If inscrutability has remained a constant fea-
ture of the sublime, in other respects the latter has changed; the terrible
infinity, or obligatory inscrutability, of the sublime is now a property of
technology rather than nature. The contemporary techno-sublime does
not seek to overcome the body by simulating the natural, however, as
Burke saw a repeated loud noise as "capable of the sublime" in that it
brings the listener "just to the verge of pain."4 The new techno-sublime
seeks instead to obviate the body or to redefine it as a face attached to
a pulse.
C6zanne saw the blank-empty and white, blank and blanc-canvas
as already deep, waiting only to be carved out. This is blankness as poten-
tiality waiting to be ordered, as opposed to emptiness waiting to be filled,
so it's no longer the object of a horror vacui. In this respect C6zanne might
be seen as halfway towards a contemporary idea of blankness as a condi-
tion in which something is already happening--halfway because the
depth he saw in the blank canvas was still a depth, tied to human percep-
tion and to the idea of the human as requiring volume.
The whiteness of the canvas signifies preparation, brown linen acti-
vated by white paint. Similarly, without electricity the screen is just the
dead face of an inert object. Turned on it is already active bat can't be
a depth because instantaneity precludes depth to the extent that depth
requires duration for its realization. Carving takes time because it takes
place in space, as it were. A surface, on the other hand, always points in
two directions at once, is by definition an interstitial condition and is in
that sense both instantaneous and not spatial. These are the terms, I
think, in which one may think of blankness as an active signifier, and as
signifying kinds of activity, in the contemporary context, and in which the
late twentieth century has available to it the possibility of blankness as an
activity, something happening now, as opposed to a condition that can
only point to a beginning or an end. Electronic blankness occurs as event
rather than eschatology, as a quality making possible any progression of
properties.
As an event running through any narrative it may frame, the appear-
ance and function of blankness in objects and signs-like computers and
the image of the body offered by fashion--suggests a comparison and
convergence between, as it were, being and the sign, which might be use-
ful here. Anthropomorphize blankness and it goes to the idea of the im-
passive; analogize it to language and it becomes a beginnihg and an end.
As the property of a face it complicates communication, symbolically
precluding communication by communicating incommunicativeness.
4. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (1757; Oxford, 1990), p. 127.

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The term a blank expression sums up the problem: it implies communica-

tion through noncommunication, the recognition of incomprehension.
If one does not anthropomorphize it and thinks of a blank sheet of
paper instead of a face, blankness becomes that which writing can't write.
One can't write a blank any more than one can literally draw one; blank-
ness would preclude drawing. (Invisible ink is a deferral of what will have
to emerge as a visible line, one more legible trace.) Blank sheet or blank
face, both present themselves as already full of meaning expressed as im-
passivity or the absence of a mark. The face signifies by refusing to signify.
Mallarm6 looks at a sheet of paper all day, fails to write a poem on it,
sends the empty-if it may still be called that-sheet to his publisher as
a poem.
As far as the sublime is concerned, one may say that the Victorian
scene presented a mechanical complexity which meant to be awesome but
now perhaps seems comforting, particularly when decayed, in compari-
son with the passive-aggressive blankness of the contemporary. In con-
trast to that, being able to see how things work is reassuring however
overwhelming they may be. It seems touching to us that the Victorians
should think that they could symbolically control the industrial by cov-
ering its products with pictures and architectural details depicting plants.
The effect created by the nineteenth-century's decoration of the mechani-
cal with references to the preindustrial, the gothic and the classical in
particular and the organic-the natural-in general, is in practice ironic:
Schiller's gothic as the facade of that which eliminates nature altogether,
or Ruskin's nostalgia for the gothic as amelioration of that to which it was
opposed. It was a visible world as ours is not. Victorian decoration always
accompanied a mechanism whose operation could be seen; both it and
what it ameliorated were present to vision. Where for us the absence of
decoration embellishes the absence of visible articulation. The steam en-
gine's smoke was always egregiously and triumphally visible, especially
from far away, as in any image of a train puffing its away through En-
gland's verdant vales and fields or across the prairies of the American
West. The jet airliner on the other hand seems to me quite different.
From afar one can't see any visible signs of locomotion. High in the sky it
seems to move soundlessly and enigmatically, driven by an exhaust im-
perceptible at that distance. Only when, through the terminal window
whose heavy glass preserves a relative soundlessness, one sees an airliner
taxiing, does one notice that as it passes by them objects behind its jet
stream become wavy images of themselves, dissolved in a translucent
stream of poison. In the nineteenth century pollution was maximally vis-
ible, soot everywhere. In the twentieth it is in contrast minimally appar-
ent, the subtler but equally deadly fumes of the internal combustion
engine: Manchester covered with soot; Los Angeles suspended in a deli-
cate biliously green haze.

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Modernism abolished ornamentation and instead made the outside

disappear into a presentation of the inside. This is especially clear in ar-
chitecture, where glass was used to abolish the facade and lay bare the
interior. On occasion, this could lead to the architectural program requir-
ing a kind of supplementary space in which the building could actually
perform its function, as in Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin,
where the disappearance of the facade into transparency requires most
of the gallery space to be located below ground, where there can actually
be unpunctuated walls and where paintings may be sheltered from an
excess of natural light. Often, however, modernism could never get fur-
ther than the outside. One thinks of the first passenger jet built by the
former Soviet Union, the Tupolov 104, which from the outside looked
sleek and modern and quite like any other jet aircraft, but inside looked
like a prewar railway compartment at the latest, complete with floral
plush seats with nets hanging above them for one's luggage-possibly
leading to materialist skepticism during turbulence. Clearly Soviet engi-
neers looked to the nineteenth century for comfort and reassurance be-
cause they realized that the modern was never comfortable and not all
that reassuring.
In one respect contemporary objects like computers and televisions

are more like the TU 104 than they're like the buildings of van der Rohe,
for they too have exteriors that give no clue to what goes on inside. The
same could be said of Frank Gehry's guestworker housing project in
Frankfurt, where I'd also raise the question of differences that occur in
architecture when the facade may be blank without being massive;
in Gehry's case, the facade reappears as color, the blank alternative to
transparency.
This is another sense in which transparency, to a considerable extent
the goal of the modern, whether it be achieved through defamiliarization
or by way of an essentialism such as van der Rohe's, is the opposite of
what surrounds us now, where the idea of transparency has been replaced
by an idea of interaction. And one notes that Gehry's building might, in
one or another respect, distantly recall that architecture which came at
the beginning of modernism. What comes after recalls the beginnings of
what it succeeds.
This returns one to wallpaper as opposed to Sheetrock, the wall cov-

ered with paper as opposed to the wall intensified as much as concealed
by paint. And I'd note, in passing, that Europeans and especially the Brit-
ish still resist the blank wall and that while this may be a function of their
resistance to the twentieth century, in favor of the heroic nineteenth, I'd
also suggest that its ready acceptance in America had as much to do with
a residual loyalty to seventeenth-century fetishizations of plainness as to
any taste for the modern. Where Europe seems always to be adjusting

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and reconnecting to capitalism and the technology it produces and is

produced by, American Calvinism has always been connected to and con-
tinuous with it. Europe remembers the idea of a society; America only
ever was a market with people preaching in it. In the one the absence of
wallpaper represents a freedom from decoration, in the other the con-
temporary expression of a traditional value.
The Victorians covered up blankness as far as possible, allowing
modernism to use transparency as an uncovering as well as that which
does not need to be ornamented-as beginning and end, earth and world
as one, totality as the condition of the essential. But in contemporary
objects blankness comes to be associated with the (perhaps Bergsonian)
simultaneity with which the electronic proposes to replace the diachronic
articulation of the mechanical. It has moved from an earlier association
with the idea of process as potentiality that can be visually articulated or
manifested-withholding and therefore promising, absent and therefore
capable of becoming present-to become instead the signifier of an idea
of process as present but unrepresentable, invisible because unimaginable
in spatial terms (that is, as visual, and particularly as a matter of inside
and outside and the concealed and revealed).5
Recalling the celebrated or infamous instruction allegedly given by

Rouben Mamoulian to Greta Garbo, "I want you to be a tabula rasa," one
would note that nowadays he'd only have to say, 'Just look cool, sweetie dar-
ling" or something like that. What Mamoulian may have said to Garbo in
the course of setting up the final shot of Queen Christina represents the old-
fashioned assumption about blankness. Blankness is a space of projection,
where anything can happen or even be made to happen. In the contempo-
rary context blankness is eloquent rather than the absence of a message,
the condition of a subject whose fashionably blank expression, formerly
known as a lack of expression, is neither communicative nor incommuni-
cative but rather brings the two as close together as they can get.
To invoke what one might hesitantly call contemporary subjectivity
is to describe not what actual contemporary subjects are but what the
contemporary subject proposed by the context would be, and I'm sug-
gesting that it would be one that aspired to the condition of the electrical
rather than the mechanical. We're familiar with the human identifying
itself with the scientific models fashionable at the time, particularly with
its having spent the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries transforming
itself from a combination of a clock and a telescope to something more
like a combination of a steam engine and a calculator. If one wishes to
discuss the late twentieth century, one might do better to consider the
5. In this connection I have suggested elsewhere that the electronic renders all de-
grees of solidity equally insubstantial. See my "Cabbages, Raspberries, and Video's Thin
Brightness," Art and Design 11 (May-June 1996): 14-23.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
face rather than what is said to lie behind it precisely because, paradoxi-
cally, the model that one would now require would not and could not be
a visual one, and could not be because of its origin in an idea of instanta-
neity-movement without perceivable time and therefore without space:
the face as an interface, transmission and reception together on a plane
of convergence. Garbo's face may have been a tabula rasa, just as a sheet
of paper may be seen to be empty, but not so the contemporary model's
face and not so the computer screen when it's turned on (figs. 1 and 2).
In both cases one is in the presence of a blankness that is a mobility, active
rather than awaiting action. Perhaps one could say that insofar as faces
are mobile by definition and pages not, technology, having come to be
characterized by instantaneity and having substituted the electronic page
for the one made out of rag or wood pulp and only capable of being
inscribed from outside itself, through the application of an entirely differ-
ent material, has managed to attribute the properties of the one to the
other.
What is signified is nonvisual in the sense that it's not tactile. In the
sense that Merleau-Ponty describes the Cartesian concept of vision as be-
ing modeled on a sense of touch, the electronic surface of the video
screen presents a non-Cartesian action that is not conceivable as action
between forms.6 This condition, to which the facial arrangement of con-
temporary fashion models aspires, is neither the absence of expression
nor a particular expression, but the possibility of expression in the sense
of a presentation of the conditions of expression. This is one sense in
which blankness is more easily described as an excess than as an absence
in the contemporary situation. What it exceeds is the visual conceived as
a matter of forms.
There are no such things as blank forms, while there clearly is such
a thing as a blank surface. A smooth surface can be blank, but a smooth
form is still a shape, with a figural relationship to an at least implicit field
and all that that implies. Blankness itself eludes the tactile; Descartes's
blind subject is always touching something or failing to find anything to
touch. This is the visual as outsides that must have insides and that finds
its contemporary expression in the putatively anti-Cartesian Lacanianism
of the stain and the blind spot, a Hegelian symptomology of the limits of
the tactile and the visual. And it's also the sense in which the face can
only be blank because it's an array of mobilities on a surface, the front
part of the head as opposed to the head itself. The face is the place where
the body interfaces with everything its face faces.
I have mentioned Bergson and have in mind the Bergsonianism
identified or invented by Deleuze, of a continuity between outsides predi-
6. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, The Primacy
of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and
Politics, trans. Dallery et al., ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill., 1964), p. 170.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
rp..
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
;.. .. .........
6x:
FIG. 2.-Photo: Lee Caruso. Model

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:50:03 UTC
cated on the idea of the surface-the plane and the point-as opposed
to the form-the shape and its interior. These would be the terms in
which the active blankness I've sought to invoke here might be seen as a
necessary response to what technology has, equally necessarily, produced.
The substitution of becoming-electronic for becoming-animal is conceiv-
ably a logical consequence of modernism's transparent humanism. As
has been remarked elsewhere, in Against Nature des Esseintes describes a
blond who becomes a race horse that turns out to be a railway locomo-
tive.7 The Victorians, perhaps because of being alert to the animality that
lay behind or below the rational mechanism that their technology per-
suaded them was their consciousness, were able to see machines and the
"machinic" as animal bodies and movements. No one can see the contem-
porary context as such, but it does seem possible to see it as made out of
faces rather than bodies, of surfaces containing instantaneous mobility
rather than bodies articulated through times. Video's capacity to morph
one image into another, beloved by children and American politicians,
makes the point over and over again that the face belongs to technology,
but the face remains a form. A surface is a face but not necessarily a form,
and it is its freedom from form that gives it its instantaneity.
But I want to approach my conclusion by way of what Hegel says

about gunpowder, another technological agent of dissolution. (As with
Hegel so with Deleuze, I am inclined to say: when insides cease to be
impregnable, people cease to believe in them and soon stop building
them altogether.)
Hegel says of gunpowder that "humanity needed it, and it made its
appearance forthwith." Moreover:
It was one of the chief instruments in freeing the world from the
domination of physical force, and placing the various orders of soci-
ety on a level. With the distinction between the weapons they used,
vanished also that between lords and serfs. And before gunpowder
fortified places were no longer impregnable, so that strongholds and
castles now lose their importance.8
In, as it were, not quite the same spirit, perhaps this may be rephrased
as follows: Capitalism needed, for its objects and the subjects who would
mold themselves around them, an exterior at once receptive and ex-
pressive, and technology produced one forthwith. It was one of the chief
instruments in that substitution of passive aggression for physical force
that is the triumph of the market over politics. With the distinction be-
tween speeds of access abolished, it also caused the distinction between
7. See J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1959),
p. 37.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo, 1991), p. 402.

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metropolitan and provincial to disappear. With the computer, places-

fortified or not-lose their importance in relation to a larger placeless-
ness where information is to be found and some discourse takes place.
Placelessness is the condition of the face. It can be anywhere and is
always a completeness made up of movement. The condition of placeless-
ness is that of the ultimate mobility, which is capitalism's central theme
and which is realized in the ludicrously entitled Age of Information,
where even if you're really there you are simultaneously accessible to and
from everywhere else. This is Heidegger's nightmare, distance no longer
defining the neighborliness between farmers, which was so important to
him. Now they have mobile phones, powered by the hydroelectricity from
the dam across the Rhine that he had wanted to keep under some sort of
control. Blankness is the sign of placelessness and of that which joins all
places seamlessly and of the instantaneity that it approximates in practice
and that is fundamental to its teleology. The term cyberspace seems fatuous
because it is precisely space that has been eliminated, cyber or any other.
By the same token, one cannot attribute a lack of expression to what is in
fact an expression; blankness complicated is by definition not blankness
as absence or lack. Nor can I resist, having invoked Heidegger, let alone
Hegel, quoting Derrida: "To bear witness would be to bear witness to
what we are insofar as we inherit, and ... we inherit the very thing that
allows us to bear witness to it."9 Contemporary blankness is heir to both
the Victorians' horror vacui and the transparency which sought to decon-
struct it, and it is as such that it mutely testifies to the dependence of both
on an idea of the interior and therefore of human space and time to
which it itself may not be returned. Our relationship to the video screen
is one of pure discourse taking place on a ground that virtually no one
can visualize in the sense that one may visualize the workings of a steam
engine or a printing press-and quite like the way language can't be made
to express its own grounds.
Blankness changed its identity when it stopped identifying its sig-
nificance with either the result of human labor or that which marks its
absence. The smooth stone surface-produced emptiness-or the area
of the canvas that has been left unpainted-emptiness made to produce
space, as in Cezanne or Matisse, or uncertainty, which is to say active
absence, as in Rauschenberg but not Ryman-are both uses of emptiness
that link it to the labor that produced it and in that to erasure or potenti-
ality. Contemporary blankness doesn't necessarily work like that although
it may well continue to invoke such readings in the course of redirecting
them. Which is to say it inherits and bears witness to them. Consider the
contemporary role of smoothness, blankness full of decision, in automo-
bile design, another place in which blankness is tied not to contemplation
9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London, 1994), p. 54.

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but to speed. With regard to both speed in the streamlined object and
clarity in the world of video one recognizes blankness as a property of the
surface that has to be flawless, and therefore cannot be said to present
blankness as symptomatic of any kind of lack.
This is why I'd say that the contemporary is an inversion of the tradi-
tional relationship between blankness and transparency and impassivity.
Norman Bryson, talking about David's uninflected brush work, describes
it as a transparent signifier vulnerable to discursive control on account of
the absence of gesture.'" This is the uninflected as the official style, and
Bryson's point is well taken. But I wonder if the reverse isn't true in the
age of the photograph and the photographically instantaneous. The
selfless lack of gesture of which Bryson speaks may after all be that be-
cause one recognizes in it the effacement of a self and the absence of
the gesture that would articulate it. But these were never there in the
photograph. In such a context perhaps one could suggest that it is the
uninflected which always resists direction, while the inflected can always
be qualified by connotation and thus rendered subordinate to, or an ef-
fect of, what it is said to connote. This might suggest that the absence of
visible mediation is a challenge to a hermeneutics of bodily recognition,
that that in which the human is least apparent-because it was never
there-is by definition that which is finally out of the human's control:
inscrutability as the absence of putative empathy, the conversion of the
trace from nature to technology.
Perhaps one might say that the transparent signifier is vulnerable to
discursive control until you stare at it for a long time, when, having begun
to concentrate on its impassivity, one can think about its indifference to
what controls it. It may be controlled by a specific discourse, but that's
only because it may be controlled by any other discourse, too, which
could imply that in that it provides a ground for that to which it is said
to be subordinate the relationship is in fact not one of subordination and
the subordinated, and is predicated on the opposite of transparency.
As I understand it the idea of the interface, like Deleuze's Bergsoni-
anism, precludes the transparent because it has no need of the layer. The
surface does not give way to what supports it; it is, if anything, extraskele-
tal and needs no support from within or behind. This is one reason why
the visual, as a matter of the spatial, has to disappear along with the body
as an articulation in time. It's a commonplace that the visual arts are at
some level never visual; because they're about the visual-an idea of the
visual, the experience of the visual-they can't entirely be what they're
about. So in the visual arts we expect to see the nonvisual components of
the visual clearly laid out and, as it were, in our face. My observations
here have been about the extent to which a similar possibility has spilled
10. See Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cam-
bridge, 1981), p. 238.

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over into a ubiquitous aspect of daily life. Insofar as I've put forward an
argument, it's that the absence of a mask is also a mask. The nun's cowl
announces what she is, its absence hides her true identity. Which brings
me to blankness as singularity.
The ornate grandiosity of the Victorian railway terminus was meant
to astonish and therein lay its sublimity. Burke described astonishment as
related to that terror whose object is the sublime and describes it as the
highest sensation on a sliding scale that runs from there down through
"awe, reverence, and respect.""11 It is not, he says, a positive pleasure.
Leaving aside the appalling way in which Burke's desperate masculinism
obliges him to insist by implication that one can't be astonished by the
beautiful, I want to suggest that the sublime proposed by contemporary
technology may be terrifying, but it is couched in terms as far away from
astonishment, awe, reverence, and respect as it can get. It is instead a
sublimity lodged in an idea of the same as a condition of the singular. It's
a user-friendly sublime. But it is nonetheless a sublime, marked as such
by its otherness. Just as the face can't not signify, so that there will by now
be a developing tradition of blank expressions, so too the computer as an
object can't not have an attitude to design properties, to the world of the
tactile and the visual. As objects, electronic devices benefit from having
little pretechnological history; what they do was by and large just not
done before they did it. The television may have replaced the radio but
the radio didn't replace something else. Electronic communication en-
tered the house as something that could be put on the shelf, then trans-
formed itself into an independent piece of furniture, the television. It, in
turn, disguised itself as a kind of sideboard, with fake wood and sliding
doors, such as one still finds in American hotels, which labor under the
delusion that being reminded of the fifties makes everybody comfortable.
But television has since progressively transformed itself into a rounded
black thing, molded rather than constructed, unlike anything else in the
domestic interior except the telephone. Plastic objects gesture towards
one another across rooms filled with references to the once handmade,
offering access in both directions, genealogically divorced from the inte-
rior whose irreversible penetration by and continuity with what was once
an outside they represent. My mother recently had to buy a new television
and was first alarmed that she couldn't get one with doors and subse-
quently put out that she couldn't even put a few flowers on top of the
ones she could buy because they were rounded and postangular. Such
objects are by design as well as volition at once at hand and irretrievably
apart. One has only to add that the latest sales triumph in the electronics
world has to do with putting computers and fax machines in rounded
black casings instead of the grey, more angular ones, which have been the
11. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beauti-
ful, p. 123.

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norm and which clearly referred to things like metal file cabinets. A sym-
bolic equation of the office with the home, of work and what gives relief
from it, performed within the language of that which cuts across both,
obviates both, proposes a world in which there's no necessary distinction
between them. The performance, it should be noted, is by objects that
are extruded and molded rather than constructed, things with skins, em-
bodiments that need make no reference to the organic.
For the visual arts the technological in its current form presents the
same problem, if in other terms, offered by the body when it is under-
stood as a zone of intensification rather than revelation. The task is to
make the technological visible; the trouble is that it already is. Manet saw
it coming. The world could make more meaning as a flat image than a
fat thing. Not only flat, but approximated. The national standard for
color video in the States is known by the initials NTRC. No one knows
what they stand for, but they are remembered by the phrase "never the
right color." These are the colors that all clothes, cars, toys, and foodstuffs
nowadays strive to imitate.
One could certainly divide the visual arts over the past twenty-five
years into those where people work with blankness and those where
people cover it up. One category is a response to the demands of the
sublime, another to the narratives technology makes possible. The last
fifteen years have largely been dominated by art of the latter sort, social
realism represented as pop piety or conventionalized transgression. One
could see it coming when, in the late seventies, artists and critics of the
more literal and sentimental sort started to vociferously denounce what
they called and still call blank abstraction. And despite its detractors' ma-
licious intent, it was indeed abstraction's blankness that was at issue. Mini-
malism, the last popular abstract style, was all about blankness, but in a
rather neoclassical sort of way; blankness attached to greyness; colorless-
ness as sobriety and the serious; the art object as a product above all of
drawing, which is to say of the idea. In this sense it too was as nostalgic
for form as all the retro piety that has replaced it. It may have been the
last moment in which blankness stood for absence, for form giving way
to the pure idea.
Abstraction itself, if that's the right word for it (I prefer the term
nonrepresentation, which frees it from a prior allegiance to a form), has
for some time now clearly been struggling with the transmutation of the
sublime from the space of unbounded nature to that of an uncontrollable
technology. In the course of this struggle it has lost the implacable and
blank as resources peculiar to the work of art (these are now common-
place), nor can it claim to own the idea of a world of surfaces, for such is
the technological world that has taken over the world as such. This is the
dilemma first spelled out in Lyotard's essays on Barnett Newman and the
sublime, where I first found the problem of the instantaneous posed as

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technology's challenge to painting. The problem of "Is it happening?"

posed by Lyotard, would seem to me to lead to another-whether or not
Lyotard's was answered-that is, the problem of singularity.'2 I mean by
this that art could only converge with blankness as I've discussed it here
by being a handmade object that neither rested on naturalist nostalgia
nor imitated that which-as the last necessarily handmade object in the
world-it alone could not be: continuous, instantaneous, wholly unin-
flected by the body. Paradoxical though it may be, the problem for paint-
ing, for example, an art of images, becomes how to live as a thing in a
world which has ceased to be a world of things and become itself a world
of images. The passage from Victorian horror vacui to the present is that
passage, the passage from potentiality to instantaneity. If in the former
blankness was not a sign, but rather the place for the sign, in the latter it
has become signally characteristic of the surface of all the signs which
exclude it with recognizability and narrative, that is, which seek to sub-
sume it within form and formality, shape and protocol, urge and econ-
omy. Lying outside of art it would have to be art's subject. Producing and
produced out of discontinuity, art would be the only thing not continuous
with it. This suggests a placeless art, neither nature nor technology, lost
(but also found) in a space that can't be instantaneous because it is tempo-
ralized; as a repetitive pulsation it is as much a constant deferral of the
instant as its realization. Faced with such an art, everything else would be
an ornament we've seen before, still decorating a subject long since hid-
den in transparency and what succeeded it.
12. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," The Inhuman, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 93.

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The Names of the Dead
Author(s): Robert Pogue Harrison
REFERENCES

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The Names of the Dead
Robert Pogue Harrison
The following essay is composed of two parts. In the first I trace the gene-
alogy of a literary image. In the second I relate it to the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial wall, which is one of the most visited and, some would say,
most stirring monument in America. My intention is not to "explain" the
emotive power of the wall, only to provide a particular perspective on it.
I neither fought in the Vietnam War nor lost anyone in it who was close
to me. I do not presume to share the grief of those who did. But as they
say in Latin: homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto. The memorial, insofar
as it is human, is not alien to any of us.
1. The Genealogy of an Image
While he was fighting in the trenches of World War I, Giuseppe Un-

garetti composed the following poem, entitled "Soldati," or "Soldiers":
Si sta come
d'autunno
sugli alberi
le foglie
Literally translated:
One is as
in autumn

176

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on the trees
the leaves.'
There is something quintessentially lyrical about the suspended image

and elegiac tone, yet the use of the impersonal "Si sta" rather than the
first-person singular evokes the epic prehistory of the poem's simile, a
prehistory of which Ungaretti was certainly aware. Lyric poetry is tradi-
tionally understood as a universalized first-person singular voice, hence
as an individuation of the universal, while the epic represents a type of
universality that synthesizes a plurality of voices and speaks for the collec-
tive in its public concerns and passions. In the epic poems in which it
occurs, this image of the autumn leaves serves as a simile for the appurte-
nance of the individual to his family, race, class, or species. In that sense
one could say that it registers the divergent claims of the lyric and epic
vocations, not by pitting them against one another, but by figuratively
thematizing, or poetically intensifying, the tension that, in any epoch, de-
fines the relation between the individual and the community. This rela-
tion has a long and vexed history in Western culture, so much so that one
could say that what is most distinctively Western about Western culture
is the history of how that relation has been conceived and represented.
The genealogy of Ungaretti's image takes us all the way back to book
6 of The Iliad, where two armies on the fields of Troy have come together
to do battle. A warrior from the Trojan side detaches himself from the
throng, moves out ahead of the others to confront the awesome Dio-
medes. This bold gesture of separation provokes the demand for identi-
fication. As the two horsemen approach each other, Diomedes inquires
after his opponent's identity:
"Who among mortal men are you, good friend? Since never
before have I seen you in the fighting where men win glory,
yet now you have come striding far out in front of all others
in your great heart, who have dared stand up to my spear far-
shadowing.
Yet unhappy are those whose sons match warcraft against me."2
In essence, Diomedes wants to be sure that his foe is a mortal and not a
god in disguise. By asking him to identify himself he is asking not only
1. Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Soldati," Vita d'un uomo: Tutte le poesie (Milan, 1967), p. 87;
my translation.
2. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1952), bk. 6, 11. 123-27, p.
156; hereafter abbreviated I.
Robert Pogue Harrison is professor of French and Italian at Stan-

ford University. He is the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
(1992) and The Body of Beatrice (1988).

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178 Robert Pogue Harrison The Names of the Dead
about his family lineage but also about his "generation," in the sense of
his genesis or genus (mortal or immortal).3 The reply he receives suggests
that his antagonist is not only human but knows what it means not to be
a god:
"High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies."
[I, bk. 6, 11. 145-49, p. 157]
This warrior may have bravely separated himself off from the crowd, yet
he speaks here as an indifferent member of his species, aware of the futil-
ity of distinctions among men, all of whom share a common mortal fate
precisely by virtue of their "generation." Why ask of my generation when
my generation is human?
The answer to that question is to be sought perhaps in the question
itself. Ludwig Feuerbach, for example, in the opening paragraphs of The
Essence of Christianity, claims that what distinguishes humans from animals
is that we take cognisance of ourselves not merely as individuals but as a
species. We ask of our generation because it is our nature to take cogni-
sance of our nature:
Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom

his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. .... The brute
is indeed conscious of himself as an individual-and he has accord-
ingly the feeling of self as the common center of successive sensa-
tions-but not as a species. ... Science [knowledge] is the cognisance
of the species.4
For Diomedes's interlocutor, whose name is Glaukos, the ultimate cogni-

sance of the species is the cognisance of death, which renders us all equal
and indistinguishable. Death is the nature of the generationality that sub-
sumes all specific human genealogies, whether they be lofty or humble.
This sober wisdom, however, does not prevent Glaukos from divulg-
ing his lineage to Diomedes in great, even boastful detail. In the next
sixty verses we learn that in Argos there lived Aiolos's son Sisyphos, who
had a son named Glaukos, who in turn sired Bellerophontes the blame-
less ("blameless" because he was unjustly accused and exiled by the Ar-
3. The Greek word for family, lineage, and generation is the same: genea. The word
genos refers to an extended clan.
4. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York, 1957),
pp. 1-2.

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give king to Lykia), and that Bellerophontes' wife bore him three
children-Isandros, Hippolochos, and Laodameia. Laodameia lay with
Zeus and gave birth to Sarpedon, king of the Lykians.
"But Hippolochos begot me, and I claim that he is my father;

he sent me to Troy, and urged upon me repeated injunctions,
to be always among the bravest, and hold my head above others,
not shaming the generation of my fathers, who were
the greatest men in Ephyre and again in wide Lykia.
Such is my generation and the blood I claim to be born from."
[I, bk. 6, 11. 206-11, p. 158]
Never once does the Lykian disclose his name to Diomedes. To the query,
"Who among mortal men are you?" the answer is, "Such is my generation
and the blood I claim to be born from." Glaukos's identity is proudly
reducible to his descendancy. This goes for his so-called moral selfhood
as well, for here is a man whose principle motivation is not to shame "the
generation of my fathers." His act of "coming out ahead of the others" on
the battlefield fulfills his father's injunctions to "hold my head above oth-
ers." In that sense Glaukos is happy and even eager to derive his identity
from his family and kin, his genea and genos.
Listening to Glaukos retrace his ancestry, Diomedes realizes to his
delight that there exists a connection between them, for Bellerophontes
was once a guest in the house of Diomedes' grandfather Oineus. The two
of them had exchanged gifts of friendship. Diomedes proposes to
Glaukos that they venerate this legacy, embrace one another as friends,
and vow to avoid one another henceforth on the field of war. He even pro-
poses that they exchange their armor, "'so that these others may know /
how we claim to be guests and friends from the days of our fathers"' (I,
bk. 6, 11. 230-31, p. 159). Recognition gets the better of anonymity as two
strangers on opposite sides of the war's divide discover a bond that runs
deeper than the circumstance that pits them against one another. Thus
in a sublimely ironic fashion the episode as a whole belies Glaukos's pre-
amble about the impersonality of the human generations. Here it is pre-
cisely their "generations," or genealogies, that turn foes into friends.
Or so it would seem. We will never know if Diomedes was telling
the truth about the connection between Bellerophontes and Oineus, or
whether he had all the while been eyeing Glaukos's splendid armor and
plotting a strategy by which to possess himself of it:
but Zeus the son of Kronos stole away the wits of Glaukos
who exchanged with Diomedes the son of Tydeus armour
of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth the worth of a hundred.
[I, bk. 6, 11. 234-36, p. 159]

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Diomedes was, after all, a Greek-no more to be trusted than the wife of
the king of Argos, Anteia, who, spurned by Bellerophontes the blameless,
falsely accused him of attempting to lie with her.
Glaukos's simile-"'As is the generation of leaves, so is that of hu-
manity"-is one of the most poignant and lyrical in all of Homer, evoking
not only the general caducity of the human condition but also an analogy
between the falling of leaves and the falling of soldiers on the battlefield,
an analogy condensed and intensified in Ungaretti's "Soldati." Yet let us
not assume that Glaukos proclaims such wisdom wistfully, as if to imply
the vanity of earthly glory (or golden armor). That the generations suc-
ceed one another like leaves on a tree-such is the order of things. It is
natural, it is good, it is as it should be. Despite the lyricism of the passage,
therefore, the simile of the leaves is essentially epic in its import, by which
I mean that it speaks not for or as the single individual but for or as
the collective. It speaks, in other words, of a communal destiny-what
Heidegger calls Dasein's Geschick as opposed to its Schicksal.5
When Virgil takes up the Homeric image of the generation of leaves
in book 6 of The Aeneid, the context is at once more ominous and more
rueful than in The Iliad, for we are now no longer among the living but
among the dead. Aeneas has just begun his descent into the gloomy
depths of Hades. One of the first scenes he witnesses is that of a "multi-
tude" of recently arrived shades swarming toward the shores of the Styx,
which they must cross in order to gain their designated place in the un-
derworld. Those who have been properly buried and mourned will be
ferried across by old man Charon. The others must wait.
And here a multitude was rushing, swarming

shoreward, with men and mothers, bodies of
high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys
and unwed girls, and young men set upon
the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes:
thick as the leaves that with the early frost
of autumn drop and fall within the forest.6
By drawing attention primarily to those who died prematurely, Virgil

strains the very simile of autumn leaves, since these souls presumably
5. Geschick is translated as "destiny," Schicksal as "fate." The latter is individual, while

the former is collective. Yet Heidegger makes it clear that
if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its

historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative of its destiny [Geschick]. This is how
we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. ... Dasein's fateful des-
tiny in and with its "generation" goes to make up the full authentic historizing of
Dasein. [Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Rob-
inson (New York, 1962), p. 436]
6. Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York, 1971), bk. 6, 11.
402-8, p. 143.

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never made it into the autumn of their years. One has a sense here of an
underworld congested with the dead, an unnatural excess made up
mostly of innocent victims cut down in their prime. There is something
in Virgil's version that is lacking in its Homeric counterpart, namely, the
scandal of death. In Homer the simile serves to naturalize the human
generations. In Virgil, the correspondence between humanity and the
natural order seems troubled and compromised, as if to suggest that the
injustice by which death takes its toll among the living is hardly "natural,"
or that, if this be nature's justice, human justice remains unreconciled to
it. In both Homer and Virgil the simile speaks of the generic nature of
human generations, but by elaborating on the image-what with the
thickness of the leaves, the autumnal forest and the early frost-Virgil
almost overdetermines it. While Homer emphasizes the successive nature
of the seasons, that is, the succession of death by life ("'so one generation
of men will grow while another dies"'), Virgil dwells only on the season
of death. These leaves do not grow and die. They only fall in the autumn's
"early frost." It is almost as if Virgil makes of the dead the genus of which
we the living are only a species.
The notion that life is a form of living death is not foreign to Virgil.
Think of the famous pietas of Aeneas. This piety is sacrificial and oppres-
sive, a mark of the servitude that enslaves the living to the dead. Homer's
Glaukos is pious toward his fathers, to be sure, but with an exuberance
not to be found in the sullen, necrocratic universe of Virgil, where the
burden of the generations weighs heavily on the individual, interring him
prematurely. One could even argue that only because Aeneas is already
dead-in the sense that his piety subjects his life to the will of the ances-
tors-is he able to descend into the underworld and commune with the
shades of the deceased. That descent, and Aeneas's mission to found the
future city of Rome, are the matter of Virgil's Aeneid, whose epic vocation
is to exalt and commemorate Rome's grandiose destiny. But Virgil knew,
and his poem registers the fact, that Rome's destiny exacted untold inno-
cent victims, only some of whose unredeemed shades Aeneas encounters
on the shores of the Styx. It was not without reason that the medievals
believed that Virgil was at bottom a proto-Christian who despaired of the
earthly city but was born too early to find rescue in the doctrine of the
city of God-the only truly eternal and universal city, according to Saint
Augustine. ("The Rome in which Christ is Roman," Dante calls it in Purga-
torio. )7
As is the generation of leaves, so too is that of this simile. From Virgil
it is passed on to Dante. We come across it in canto 3 of the Inferno, on
the banks of the Acheron, where a multitude of souls, as in book 6 of The
7. Dante, Purgatory, trans. Mandelbaum (New York, 1980), canto 32, 11. 102-3, p. 102.

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Aeneid, waits to be ferried across the river by Charon. Dante describes

the scene as follows:
As, in the autumn, leaves detach themselves,

first one and then the other, till the bough
sees all its fallen garments on the ground,
similarly, the evil seed of Adam
descended from the shoreline one by one,
when signaled, as a falcon-called-will come. 8
In Homer the leaves are likened to the human generations in their suc-
cession; in Virgil, they are likened to the shades of the dead; in Dante,
they are likened to the damned. Damnation explains the agglutination of
descent imagery in the two tercets: autumn, the detaching of leaves, the
"fallen garments," the seed of Adam (that is, the fall from Eden as well as
the descendancy of humankind from that first ancestor), the descent of
the souls from the shoreline, and finally the image of the falcon descend-
ing from the air at the call of the falconer. Yet surely the most conspicuous
aspect of Dante's version is his individuation of the falling leaves-"first
one and then the other"-corresponding to the shades who "descended
from the shoreline one by one." By insisting on the singularity of each leaf
(or sinner) Dante in effect reminds us that every individual who comes of
age in the Christian era chooses, and does not merely suffer, his or her
posthumous fate. Whereas Virgil evokes a multitude of "innocent" dead
on the banks of the Styx-boys, unwed girls, and high-hearted heroes-
the shades on Dante's river bank are the engineers of their own damna-
tion, for each is (or in life was) endowed with individual free will.
In other words, in God's providential dispensation there is no more
tragedy. The Christian era is that of comedy, in the sense of a story (or
history) that ends happily for those who choose to accept God's free
grace.9 The legacy of original sin is still with us, our nature is still corrupt,
and we still have an inborn tendency to sin, yet the event of the Incarna-
tion has opened the possibility of expiation in and through the person of
Jesus Christ. This redemption, however, is not general. As Saint Au-
gustine makes clear in his The City of God, expiation can take place only
in the individual, not in the race as a whole: "This offence [original sin]
was committed when all mankind existed in one man, and it brought
universal ruin on mankind; and no one can be rescued from the toils of
8. Dante, Inferno, trans. Mandelbaum (New York, 1980), canto 3, 11. 112-17, p. 27.
9. For a fuller treatment of this topic, and the meaning of the title of Dante's poem,
see my essay "Comedy and Modernity: Dante's Hell," MLN 102 (Dec. 1987): 1043-61, and
Giorgio Agamben, "Comedia: La svolta comica di Dante e la concezione della colpa," Para-
gone 346 (Dec. 1978): 1-19.
10. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, 1972),
bk. 14, chap. 20, p. 582.

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that offence, which was punished by God's justice, unless the sin is expi-
ated in each man singly by the grace of God."' When it comes to expiation,
each man is all mankind existing in one man. Each man is Adam. The
individual has become a universal. This is the providential meaning of
Christ's incarnate personhood.
It has been remarked that the Inferno is full of damned souls whose
powerful portraits as individuals show that Dante's theology is frequently
at odds with his all-too-human passions." I believe, on the contrary, that
the dramatic individuation, if not individualism, of his infernal characters
accords well with a theology that puts so much of the burden on the
individual's free will. Again, this is not to say that human beings are liber-
ated from a common genealogy that links them all to Adam's seed; it
means that the advent of Christ has liberated a space of freedom in the
interiority of the individual. Whether one calls it the soul, the conscience,
the moral self-it is in each case as singular as the leaves that fall "first
one and then the other," or the shades who descend to the river "one
by one."
No one would approve more of Dante's gesture of singularizing the
falling leaves of autumn than the Christian philosopher Leibniz, whose
entire metaphysics represents a sustained attempt to think the notion of
identity in terms of singularities. His "principle of the identity of indis-
cernables" holds that no two things in the universe can be exactly alike,
since identity excludes a priori the possibility of something being identical
to anything but itself, not only because two or more things cannot occupy
the same spatiotemporal position but because in God's rational universe
there is no sufficient reason for them to be identical. Identity is in each
case singular. To illustrate his point, Leibniz offers an example reminis-
cent of Dante's simile in canto 3 of the Inferno, though that canto was
certainly the last thing Leibniz had in mind when he recounts the follow-
ing anecdote in New Essays Concerning Human Understanding:
I remember that a great princess [Sophie Charlotte, 1668-1705, the

first queen of Prussia], who is of a pre-eminently excellent mind, said
one day while walking in her garden that she did not believe there
were two leaves perfectly alike. A gentleman of distinction, who was
walking with her, thought he would easily find some. But although
he searched long, he was convinced by his eyes that he could always
note the difference.12
The example every school child learns, or at least used to learn, for
such generic diversity is, not leaves, but snowflakes. If it was true then, I
11. See Erich Auerbach, "Farinata and Cavalcante," Mimesis: The Representation of Real-
ity in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1953), pp. 174-202.
12. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. Al-
fred Gideon Langley (Chicago, 1916), bk. 2, chap. 27, par. 3, pp. 239-40; trans. mod.

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presume it is still true now that no two snowflakes have ever fallen to
earth which are exactly alike. The crystal form of each flake is unique.
This quotidian generation of infinite singularities is a wonder to contem-
plate, lending credence to more than Leibniz's principle of the identity of
indiscernables (the hypothesis of God, for instance, which becomes less
and less absurd the more one learns about the natural world). In any case
it is in terms of this relation between the individuality of the flakes and
the generic blanket of snow which they form when they accumulate on
the ground that I have always been tempted to make sense of the epipha-
nic ending of James Joyce's story, "The Dead." Let us turn for a moment
to that ending, one of the most famous in modern fiction.
Upon returning with his wife Gretta to the hotel room after the din-
ner party at his aunts' house, Gabriel Conroy is chilled to the bone to
learn that in her youth Gretta was loved by a boy who had "died for her."
(The boy, leaving his sickbed one cold and rainy night, had come to her
window to tell her he did not want to live without her, dying shortly there-
after.) The ghostly resurrection of Michael Furey in his wife's memory
that evening (thanks to a song) opens an unbridgeable distance between
her and Gabriel, precisely at the moment when he feels an unusual urge
to draw close to her. After she falls asleep in the grief of her memory,
Gabriel lies awake thinking about the boy who died in his seventeenth
year, and about his wife, himself, his aunts, and all the people he knows
and does not know who slowly but surely are on their way toward becom-
ing dead. The story ends with a vision:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had
begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark,
falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him
to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right:
snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the
dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of
Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous
Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely
churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly
drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the
little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard
the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like
the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'3
Unlike the images of autumn leaves I have reviewed so far, the snow
here is not a simile but a symbol. A clause in the last sentence-"like
the descent of their last end"-invites us to associate it with the condition
of human mortality. This snow, "falling faintly through the universe,"
evokes, among other things, an idea of the vast accumulation of the dead
13. James Joyce, "The Dead," Dubliners (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 223-24.

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over untold human generations-an accumulation to which the living, in

their own time-bound falling, will add their heavy numbers. Both the
living and the dead are symbolically subsumed under the snow's implaca-
ble descent, which falls on both. The snow is "general." It falls all over
Ireland, on every part of the plain, on every part of the churchyard, upon
all the living and the dead. In sum, it is more reminiscent of Glaukos's
generic generations of humanity than of Dante's individuated leaves.
Yet in their own way these snowflakes are implicitly individuated as
well, for Gabriel's vision is generated by a prior image of a shivering boy
standing under a tree in the nocturnal rain, telling a girl named Gretta
that he no longer wants to live. The lonely, lyrical image of Michael Furey
gives the countless flakes falling silently to the ground their sublime, al-
most unbearable palpability. The spirit of Michael Furey not only ani-
mates the snow but in some subtle yet powerful sense is the symbol of
that which the snow as such symbolizes-the drift of life toward inevitable
death. It is as if all the snow over Ireland falls in a medium haunted by
the soul of this boy who died for a passion he was not permitted to
live.
Michael Furey is dead, but as a ghost he is more alive than any of the
Dubliners of which Gabriel is the everyman. Or so Gabriel imagines in
his moment of self-examination. Gabriel embodies the rule of his class,
his people, his society. Michael Furey remains an exception to that rule.
That is why the presence of his ghost is able to carry Gabriel outside of
himself that night and inspire in him the epiphanic vision of a universal
snow. Only after this symbolic breakthrough into the realm of the univer-
sal does the story we have just read assume a meaning that seemed pain-
fully lacking in the prolonged, excruciatingly boring account of the
dinner party at the Morkans. Suddenly all of those unexceptional, emi-
nently forgettable characters at the party become translucent. They now
appear to us as individual snowflakes in their descent toward oblivion,
and their dinner party figures as a last supper of sorts. Yet through their
portraits as individuals shines the light of something more generic and
epic, so to speak-something like types of the Irish people as a whole
and, more universally, of humanity as such. The falling snow of the last
paragraph gathers them all into its drift and renders their caducity at
once singular and generic, specific and universal, Irish and human.
I am tempted to say that the snow "repeats" in its symbolism the
genealogy of the image I have traced from Homer to Virgil to Dante. It
evokes Homer's genericism of the human generations; it shares with Vir-
gil an emphasis on the early, sacrificial, unredeemed death; and with
Dante it shares the christological enigma of individuation. Joyce certainly
did not have this prehistory in mind when he wrote "The Dead," but I
suspect that the author of Ulysses would not have objected to the notion
that in his earlier story he intuitively or inadvertently recapitulated it.
To conclude this first part of my essay, then, I would remark that if

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it is true, as Feuerbach claimed, that our distinction among the species is

that our species becomes an object of thought for us, this means that
human beings have access to a measure outside of (a human life) time-
call it death, eternity, the afterlife of the dead or the posterity of the un-
born-by which we take cognisance of our being in time, like leaves on a
branch in the autumn, or snow falling faintly through the universe. It is
also true, however, that this cognisance of our species-being, pervaded as
it is by this tension between our being in and out of everyday time, has a
history (of conception and representation) of its own. This history, of
which we have caught only a glimpse in this genealogy of a literary image,
consists of what I would call the fitful personalization of our species-
being. The more our species-being is thus personalized, the more univer-
sal do the claims (or "rights") of personhood appear. What Saint Thomas
said of the angels-omne individuum sit species infima (every individual is a
species unto itself) becomes more and more true of humans, at least in
our cultural conceptions of ourselves, as we continue in the drive to an-
gelicize our nature. In short, that our species becomes an object of
thought for us is only the beginning of humanization, the beginning, that
is, of a process by which personal identity seeks its absolute and impossi-
ble absolution (Western culture is the cultural and even political history
of this impulse). If such absolution is impossible, at least among the living,
it is because of the incontrovertibility of personal death. Death assures
that this process by which personal identity seeks its absolute absolution
can never reach an end, never attain its goal. It can only continue to
symbolize, ritualize, elegize, or memorialize the finitude the cognisance
of which is, in the final analysis, the true mark of our species. It is this
mark that the poets inscribed in their epics and that we also find in-
scribed on the Vietnam memorial wall.
2. The Wall
November 13, 1982, was an unforgettable day in America. Over

150,000 people, many of them Vietnam veterans, descended on Washing-
ton for the opening of the Vietnam memorial. Wheelchairs, fatigues, old
army jackets, and a sea of decorations followed the brass parade toward
the park between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
After the sundry speeches, when the fences guarding the memorial finally
came down, there was a prolonged, uneasy silence as people surveyed the
wall, approached it, touched it, walked along it, searched it for the names
of fallen kin or comrades. One by one, veterans began to break down.
Strangers embraced, weeping in each other's arms. Mothers, fathers,
wives, daughters, sons, relatives, and friends of the dead also broke down,
and before long the scene of spontaneous grief moved reporters and
broadcasters to tears as well.

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Since that day the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become one of
the most visited monuments in America, along with the Lincoln Memo-
rial. On any given day, in the crushing heat of summer or in the dead of
winter, one can witness the same cathartic scene taking place before the
wall. Much of it has to do with the unresolved tensions associated with
the Vietnam War and the long-overdue need for a public mourning pro-
cess, no doubt, but there is also something about the solemn gravity of
the wall's symbol-the encrypted presence of its dead-which seems to
turn the deaths of those memorialized into a stubborn question. The si-
lence with which it responds to this question gives the wall's black granite
stone an almost overwhelming power of withholding. The irresistible
need many visitors feel to touch an inscribed name, kiss it, talk to it, offer
it flowers or gifts, leave it notes or letters is evidence enough of the dead's
privative presence in the stone-a presence at once given and denied.
To the depths of silence with which the wall responds to its own ques-
tion correspond the depths of its symbolic underworld. In structure and
form the wall evokes an implacable descent, built as it is below the ground
level of the park. A highly charged irony pervades its structural simplicity.
The wall is boldly finite in its spatial dimensions, yet its triangulated plane
extends to infinity. It has a clear beginning, middle, and end, yet every
name in the chronological sequence lies at an absolute end. Maybe that
is why all the names seem to gravitate toward or explode out of the corner
where the wall forms a sharp angle. This highest part of the wall is also
the lowest point of the descending pathway and marks the first and last
deaths of the war. Here, where the wall peaks and forms a sharp angle,
drawing all the lateral names into its somber recess, the names of the
dead seem to rain down from a sublime height. Even those at the very
bottom of the slabs seem to have fallen to the ground from on high. As it
reaches a peak and then begins to descend, the line of the wall evokes the
"natural" progress of a human life, from growth to maturity to decline.
Yet the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam was nineteen.
One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that
of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the path-
way toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradu-
ally wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image
of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of
the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead,
to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of
Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship be-
tween extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic
reach.
By that I mean the reach into collectivity and generationality. As in

Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Joyce, the wall evokes a generic multitude of
the dead, an entire generation of sacrificed Americans. From a distance
the thousands of small markings in the granite appear as part of the

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stone's texture. When one realizes that they are not texture but the names
of the dead inscribed along the entire stretch of the wall, one is struck by
the sheer profusion that characterizes this class of veterans who met their
death in Vietnam. One gets an impression of Virgil's vast hosts of the dead
in their incalculable numbers, or of the legions of shades that inspired in
Dante's pilgrim the famous line, "I had not thought death had undone
so many." When we speak of 59,000 dead, that is a crushing figure even
in its abstraction. But allow their names to occupy space and suddenly
the "so many" undone by the war find a measure for their immoderate
excess.
The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain suc

its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have s
briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this
as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting
of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial
cess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot
them-it does-but because in its mute memory of the Vietn
proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is o
The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and
The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is per
the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Vir
scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and u
and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their f
Yet Rome-that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor
or redeem these deaths-is missing.
If the wall sympathizes with the Virgilian pathos, it sympathizes even
more with Dante's conspicuous insistence on the singularity of each
damned soul. The genius of the monument lies in the way it particular-
izes the general at the same time as it reflects the general back upon the
particular by simply listing the names of every man and woman who
never made it back from Vietnam.14 The chronological order of the list-
ing, according to the dates on which they met their deaths, drives home
the reality that these soldiers fell one by one, first one and then the other,
like Dante's autumn leaves that "detach themselves, / first one and then
the other, till the bough / sees all its fallen garments on the ground." The
intersection of time, identity, and death in the dolorous stone makes of
its names a seasonal accumulation of dead leaves, each one "identical" in
Leibniz's sense of being identical only to itself.
14. The idea of a monument that would feature the names of all the men and women
who never made it back from Vietnam we owe, not to Maya Ying Lin, the wall's designer,
but to Jan Scruggs, who founded the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Fund in 1979. Every
design submitted to the nationwide contest had to meet this condition of a complete listing
of the names of the dead and missing. For an inspired meditation on names, memorials,
and the dead, see Peter S. Hawkins, "Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES
Project AIDS Quilt," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 752-79.

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While it is clearly symbolic, the wall defies the most traditional defi-
nition of the symbol. In The Statesman's Manual Coleridge famously affirms
that the symbol is characterized by "a translucence of the special in the
individual, or of the general in the special, or the universal in the gen-
eral."'15 This is a compelling definition and one that works well in the case
of the generic Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The (unidentified) soldier
buried in such tombs "symbolizes" all the known and unknown soldiers
who died in a given war and, more generally, all the soldiers who died in
battle on behalf of that nation and, more universally, the soldiers of all
nations who have lost-and who in the future will lose-their lives in
war. The symbolism of the Vietnam memorial wall works the other way
around. We see an almost endless list of names of "known" soldiers who
make up a (special or general) class. But in this case it is the individual
who shines in and through the generic multitude of names. The epic
ambition to monumentalize the Vietnam War in the memorial wall comes
to grief in the lyric singularity of each and every name. This failure of
the epic gesture is deliberate, and it accounts for the wall's astonishing
solemnity. The translucence of the individual in the general, embodied
in the reflective surface of the stone itself, makes of the wall a contrarian
symbol, or a symbol of contrariness. In that sense it is an appropriate
memorial for a war that, at bottom, was a civil war-a war at odds with
its own concept.
When the project for the memorial wall was first announced, many
veterans protested its conception and considered it another insult to their
dignity. They called it "the black gash of shame." They had expected
something more in keeping with other war memorials. They expected
and demanded to be honored the way their fathers and grandfathers had
been honored in previous wars. These were the Glaukos types, eager to
follow their fathers' injunctions, eager for a patriotic monument that
would finally authorize their pride for having served in the Vietnam War.
To placate them, a bronze statue of three anonymous soldiers was com-
missioned and placed near the wall. These three soldiers, in their generic
status, are evidence of just how pathetic a conventional symbolism ap-
pears in this context. The suggestion of heroic patriotism and comraderie
rings, if not false, then fatuous-an idol that Nietzsche's hammer would
have found hollow and deceiving. For the Vietnam War was not like other
patriotic wars. On the contrary, it shattered the very concept of a patriotic
war. How do you memorialize that?
The names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall are the signa-
tures of a generation that many believe was betrayed by its fathers, fathers
15. Quoted in M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th ed. (New York, 1981), s.v.
"symbol." See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J.
White, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart
Winer (Princeton, N.J., 1972), p. 30.

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who had asked of their sons-as Hippolochos had asked of Glaukos-

not to shame them. But the shame in this case fell on the fathers, who
enlisted a generation and sent it off to a war that had little to do with
the abstract concepts in which the war sought its justification: freedom,
democracy, honor, patriotism. These universals proved to be, if not mean-
ingless, then at least devoid of content when it came to the reality of the
war's conflagrations. Just as the Vietnam War remains unsubsumable un-
der the general reasons for which it was engaged, so too its dead remain
unsubsumable under the general symbolism of honored veterans. To
honor someone means to affirm the moral basis from which one pre-
sumes to honor, and no one in America has the moral authority to honor
the Vietnam veterans. Their honor is above and beyond us.
In its silent refusal to honor those who died in the Vietnam War,
the wall's countersymbolism proclaims its thousands of names (morally)
unaccounted-for, even as it accounts for every last one of them. Each one
of the names stands out, in excess of the reasons for its signature. In that
sense the memorial is an ecstasy of individuals that the wall cannot con-
tain, cannot absolve, since their deaths are fundamentally absurd-as is
death in general. After all, the wall is not a tombstone, which for better
or worse can presume to contain "all that was mortal" of the dead whose
names it registers. The bodies of those nearly sixty thousand names lie
scattered all over the nation. In some cases there were no bodies whatso-
ever left to bury or cremate. The wall's purpose is not to bury the dead,
nor to mourn them. It's to mark their absolution as mortal individuals. It
does this the only way it knows how: through inscription, which is the
most, and the least, we who live on can do.

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The Fabric of Modern Times
Author(s): Jeffrey T. Schnapp
REFERENCES

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
The Fabric of Modern Times
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
1. Modern Matters
This essay is concerned with how certain materials-associated not with

the decadent materiality of ruins, languorous bodies, and exotic land-
scapes but instead with the clean, agitated, intensified materiality be-
fitting a new age of electricity and steel-became identified with modern
forms of embodiment. It approaches this global tale from the standpoint
of a local, differentiated story: that of the symbolic investments made by
a generation of Italian designers, architects, artists, writers, industrialists,
and engineers in artificial textiles. Like tempered glass, reinforced con-
crete, aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics, artificial textiles belong to a
privileged family of modern materials. "Privileged" because theirs is a
happy, often utopistic, even miraculous materiality, not unlike a secular-
ized version of the Christian theology of glorified bodies according to
which the chains that bind matter and human bodies to the corrosive
effects of time are shed through the activation of a higher potentiality
that was thought to lie dormant within the material world (but was none-
theless imagined as an integral component of it): that inner agitation and
An abridged early draft of this essay appeared under the title "Canto della materia I:
Il rayon e i tessuti autarchici," Annuario di Estetica 1995, ed. Stefano Zecchi (Bologna, 1996),
pp. 211-42. I would like to express my gratitude to Luce Marinetti-Barbi and the Getty
Research Institute for granting their permission to publish an English translation of an
unpublished early draft of E T. Marinetti's "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light" (see ap-
pendix). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

S1997 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/97/2401-0009$02.00. All rights reserved.
191

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192 Jeffrey T Schnapp The Fabric of Modern Times
drive towards "greater ardor, greater movement, a greater subdivision of

itself" sung in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto of Fu-
turist Literature" (1912).' My essay's aim is to apply some pressure to
the timeworn formulas that identify modernity with secularization and
modern architectures and design practices with a functionalism or ratio-
nalism stripped of myth or metaphysical aspirations. In probing these
mythologies and aspirations, I set out to track the traffic between techni-
cal and nontechnical discourses contemporary to futurism: in the present
case study, between a technicist poetics with hypermimetic ambitions and
a set of industrial practices saturated with and motivated by symbolic and
social meanings. The spirit, I try to suggest, could not easily be buried in
an era of diminished or absent belief in the supernatural. Rather, poets,
designers, architects, industrialists, and engineers regularly collaborated
to relocate the spiritual within new technologies and the materials with
which they were affiliated, all of which were felt to offer artificial para-
dises constructed from the very building blocks of nature, man-made
forms of levity and levitation that compensated for deeper losses: of com-
munity, tradition, and a stable sense of social identity and place.
My claim, then, is that instead of receding into a passive role-as raw
stuff to be worked, whose inherent value resides in their receptivity to
human modification-modern materials emerge as autonomous forces
within an overarching modernist prosopopoeia. Beyond even their sym-
bolic import, they become protagonists and heroes endowed with powers
of agency and moral value, capable of sharing in the particular and uni-
versal attributes of human subjects and/or of serving as prosthetic exten-
sions of humanity. This point was well understood by Maxime Du Camp,
whose 1855 Songs of Matter (Chants de la matiere) first chronicled the rise of
this distinctively modern cult of materials. The artist of the industrial era,
Du Camp suggests, must resist the past's siren song, which summons him
to weave garlands around history's greatest monuments and to sing "the
immortals and their distant works."2 Instead, his task entails an act of
1. The full passage reads: "Man tends to soil matter with his youthful joy or old pain,
matter which possesses an admirably sustained drive towards greater ardor, greater move-
ment, a greater subdivision of itself. Matter is neither sad nor happy. Its essence is courage,
willpower, absolute force" (F T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista,"
Teoria e invenzionefuturista, ed. Luciano De Maria [Milan, 1983], pp. 51-52).
2. Maxime Du Camp, "A Charles Lambert," Chants de la matiere, in Les Chants modernes
(1855; Paris, 1860), p. 170; hereafter abbreviated "ACL."
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is professor of Italian and comparative literature

at Stanford University. The author of The Transfiguration of History at the
Center of Dante's Paradise and Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses
for Masses, he is currently working on a study of the anthropology of speed
from eighteenth-century coaching to 1960s pop art, entitled Crash.

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visual/verbal engineering: to translate into imperfect objects and words

"the songs of matter, explicating [modern] matter's towering deeds"
("ACL," p. 169). Du Camp concludes:
This is the song that I offer you here: .

the poem of ceaseless labor and human progress,
of hope that leads mankind by the hand,
of peaceful efforts that will bring glory to our age
by eliminating hunger, war, and slavery;
a poem made up of forces that God blesses without end
forces wherein lies the promise of our future freedom!
['"ACL," p. 171]
So modernity's song of matter is not the song of history. Nor does it con-
sist in that disengaged and ornamental form of creation that Du Camp's
contemporaries and successors referred to with disdain as "mere art" or
"mere literature." Rather, the artwork is at once a work in progress and a
vehicle for work and progress. It provides the visual/verbal counterpart to
industry's alchemical transformations of the real and thereby participates
directly in the forces and devices required to build an irenic industrial
future: capital, steam, the worker, the loom, the scythe, the locomotive.
In the following reflections we rejoin Du Camp's poem of incessant
labor and human progress some eighty years later, at a time when, at least
in Italy, his dreams of universal peace had metamorphosed into a militant
politics and poetics designed to identify the concept of national sover-
eignty with strategic metals, materials, and fuels. Mussolini's invasion of
Ethiopia in October 1935 provoked stiff economic sanctions on the part
of the League of Nations by the year's end, sanctions that substantially
reshaped not only the Italian economy but also the cultural and technical
debates of fascism's second decade. Thanks to these events, songs cele-
brating modern materials quickly devolved into songs of autarchy, epics
celebrating the nation's struggle for economic self-sufficiency that Musso-
lini's Italy shared with Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia and also, with
notable variations, with numerous liberal democratic and social demo-
cratic states. The bards of this autarchic poetry were many, but I will limit
myself to a single case study here: that of Marinetti, the founder and
leader of the Italian futurist movement. More specifically, I will be recon-
structing the context that gave rise to the culminating work of the final
phase of his literary career, The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms (Il poema
non umano dei tecnicismi) (1940), a work wrapped around a core of poems
dedicated to proving the proposition that rayon is the fabric of modern
times (fig. 1).
Rayon is what is known as a modified natural (or artificial) fabric
since, unlike true synthetic textiles such as nylon, it is made from plant-
derived cellulose that is first transformed into a liquid compound and

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
"."i.:.:. '::: ::i..l :i(:, : :: :
........ . ...... .....~~..... ?:..:.....

... .. : ....... ..... ... ???..- :.- ,
ii: ? iiii i?: ::?? ? ? :???? ? : ?? ii'i i:
.i:?:??i: i:: ... .....:I ..?:' :::Jii
?i/
FIG. 1.-"A nocturnal vision of power and beauty." Main factory building of
SNIA Viscosa's rayon production facilities in Torviscosa, 1939. From 10 anni di
attivitt della SNIA Viscosa (1939).
then reconverted back into fiber and spun." Straddling the threshold be-
tween the natural and the man-made, it was one of several such fabrics
seized upon by Italian industry; the fascist state; and contemporary de-
signers, writers, and artists as a site for elaborating a complex physics and
metaphysics of sovereignty that celebrated, on the one hand, a limited
and limiting national/natural landscape (imbued with attributes of hero-
3. The word rayon designates the family of man-made fibers and fabrics produced
from plant cellulose, usually derived from trees, though sometimes also from cotton seeds
("linters") and other plant material. Over the course of its history, rayon has assumed three
principal forms: nitrocellulose rayon (abandoned early on because of its flammability); vis-
cose rayon (the most successful variety); and cuprammonium rayon (also known by the
trademark Bemberg). For purposes of this essay, the term refers to viscose rayon. Textile
terminology is not always applied with rigor in nontechnical publications from the pre-
World War II period, but standard usage defines synthetic fibers and fabrics as entirely pro-
duced by chemical means, whereas artificial fibers and fabrics, on the contrary, rely upon
naturally occurring fibrous matter or materials that are chemically modified. Therefore,
both rayon and Lanital, a casein-based autarchic fabric that will be discussed below, are
considered artificial fabrics.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
ism and moral superiority) and, on the other, the unlimited power of
technology, culture, and the national will to transform that very lack into
abundance, beauty, and strength. In some regards the mythology in ques-
tion was a distinctively Italian one, unimaginable outside the framework
of fascist ideology and/or, more broadly, an economy dominated by small-
scale, family-based industries; craft and design traditions hypersensitive
to the dialectical interplay between modernity and the cultural-historical
past; and a long-standing tendency to conflate aesthetic and political
manifestations of power and selfhood. In no other country could a fashion
mobilization built around the cult of national fabrics have been undertaken
with such apparent urgency and so few smiles. As early as 1930, the dicta-
tor rallied his troops with a call for "an Italian style in furnishings, inte-
rior decoration, and clothing [that] does not yet exist: it can exist,
therefore it must come into existence now."4 The troops replied by devel-
oping a design culture that, constrained by the need for stylistic auton-
omy and for reliance upon both old and newly developed autarchic
materials, set the stage for Italy's emergence as a world leader in postwar
fashion, textiles, and design. The effect may be charted in terms of ca-
reers such as that of the brilliant Milanese designer-architect Gi6 Ponti,
forefather and catalyst of much postwar design work. It is also registered
in the annals of corporations like the Salvatore Ferragamo shoe company.
Onetime shoemaker to Hollywood stars such as Theda Bara, Jean
Harlow, and Rudolph Valentino, Ferragamo built his business around
autarchic materials and themes from the mid-1930s onward.5 When
high-quality kid leather became unavailable, he devised elegant designs,
including Roman-style sandals and several shoes bearing the imprint
DUX, made out of viscose-derived cellophane, leather waste, bakelite,
raffia, bark, rope, hemp, and rubber derivatives (fig. 2).6 When the steel
stiffeners that once supported his high-heeled creations became scarce,
he experimented with wire and leather before coming up with the solu-
tion that would ensure his firm's wartime and postwar triumph: platform
and wedge-heeled shoes made out of autarchic wood or cork.7
4. Benito Mussolini, quoted in Natalia Aspesi, II lusso e l'autarchia: Storia dell'eleganza

italiana 1930-1944 (Milan, 1982), p. 24. In the original, the closing phrase reads "'crearla
[una moda italiana] Ze possibile, bisogna crearla'"
5. It would be more accurate to speak of a "rebuilding" inasmuch as adverse economic
conditions had driven Ferragamo to declare bankruptcy in the late 1920s. On the history
of Ferragamo's company, see Centro Di, I protagonisti della moda: Salvatore Ferragamo (1898-
1960) (exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 4 May-30 June 1985); and Salvatore
Ferragamo, Shoemaker of Dreams: The Autobiography of Salvatore Ferragamo (London, 1957).
6. Only two models of shoes bearing the DUX imprint are included in the Centro Di
catalogue: model 47, a women's closed toe sandal design from 1936, featuring a plaited
grass upper, kid binding, and wood high heel; and model 72, a women's suede ankle boot
from 1938 with a black satin collar, a wood heel, and a platform sole.
7. Though most of Ferragamo's prewar and wartime designs were simply reworked in
the postwar period, his breakthrough design-the so-called invisible shoe with its nylon-

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
FIG. 2.-Woman's sandal, designed and manufactured by Salvatore Ferragamo

productions, 1940. Black satin and gold kidskin; gold platform heel. From Centro
Di, Iprotagonisti della moda: Salvatore Ferragamo (1898-1960) (1985).
In other regards, the cult of national fabrics fostered by the fascist

autarchy campaigns and codified in The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms is
not distinctive at all. Textile production's importance to the early history
of industrialization had long ago assigned to fabrics a central, symboli-
cally charged place in the universe of commodities, so much so that the
textile sector was viewed as a key indicator of a modern nation-state's
ability to project its power at home and abroad. Industrial fabrics and
the modern machines responsible for their production were therefore
showcased right from the start. They were featured together at the 1851
Crystal Palace exhibition in London, where swatches and bolts were
paired with sculptural representations of the "several processes through
which the same [colonial raw] material passes, until it finally quits
England again in its most highly finished and useful form."8 At the
1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition fabrics and machines stood out
among the stars of the Hall of Industry in a display of enormous Ameri-
thread vamp and f-shaped, sculpted wood heel-was new. Introduced in 1947 and ideally
suited to Dior's "New Look" (with its lowered shoulders and ankle-length skirts made of
precious brocades and taffetas), the invisible shoe's heel design was, nonetheless, directly
based on Ferragamo's prior wedge designs.
8. Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (London, 1855), p. 135.

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can power looms "in practical operation, attracting crowds of visitors, all
interested in the curious automatic movements and apparently marvel-
ous results accomplished by these machines."9 At the 1889 and 1900 Paris
Expositions, the practice was carried over to the display of Count
L. M. H. Bernigaud de Chardonnet's newly discovered marvel, "artificial
silk"-renamed rayon in 1924, in order to avoid intimations of artificiality
and/or inferiority to natural silk-and the magical machines responsible
for its manufacture.'0 The following century extended and expanded
upon this legacy, introducing wave after wave of so-called miracle fabrics,
from nylon to Dacron (polyester) to spandex, often in exhibitions allego-
rizing them in nationalist or internationalist terms." Regularly identified
with themes of democratization, emancipation, resistance, strength, and
personal hygiene, these "fabrics of the future" (not unlike modern "fab-
rics of the past," ranging from Scottish tartans to Ghanaian kente cloth)
provide a direct tie-in between efforts at collective self-fashioning and
individual subject-formation.12 Unlike other emblems of modernity and
potential objects for prosthetic self-extension, such as airplanes, automo-
biles, household appliances, and armored cars, fabrics, which surround
the epidermis as a secondary membrane, bear a uniquely intimate and
direct relation to the human body. Indeed, it was as a literal second skin,
as the technologically enhanced double of a primary skin seen as once
enfeebled and enervated but reinvigorated thanks to the fascistization of
the Italian body politic, that rayon and autarchic peers like Lanital, a
9. From the exhibition guidebook, quoted in Rita J. Adrosko, "Textiles," in 1876: A

Centennial Exhibition, ed. Robert C. Post (Washington, D.C., 1976), p. 123.
10. Enciclopedia Italiana, 36 vols. (Rome, 1935), 28:882. Chardonnet, a chemist and
disciple of Louis Pasteur, was less the discoverer of rayon than the first to bring it from the
laboratory to industrial production. The chemistry of rayon was largely worked out before
him by figures such as G. Andemars, J. W. Swann, and E. Schweizer. A comprehensive his-
tory of rayon comprising a detailed description of the production processes may be found
in Enciclopedia Italiana 28:882-98. The unsigned entry devotes sixteen full pages to rayon,
while the same volume rather tellingly dispatches the topic of psychology in only fourteen
pages.
11. On the history of Dacron, see Stephen Demeo, "Dacron Polyester: The Fall from
Grace of a Miracle Fabric," Science as Culture 5, no. 3 (1996): 352-70. It is perhaps worth
observing that one postmodern continuation of this story has the cult of miracle fabrics
transformed into that of recycled or "environmentally friendly" nontoxic or nonexploitative
textiles of the sort favored by the Patagonia company or L. L. Bean (for instance, the new
textile Tencel, grown on land otherwise unsuitable for crops). I wish to thank Ann Wein-
stone and Samuel Isenstadt, respectively, for calling my attention to these references.
12. The pursuit of romanticized revolutionary futures differs only superficially from
that of romanticized lost heritages inasmuch as both presume the existence of an unstable
selfhood in need of a fashioning that is literalized through clothing and fabric choices. Scot-
tish tartans as tribal markers were themselves an invention of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Similarly, kente cloth's status as a marker of Ghanaian national identity,
not to mention pan-African identity, can be dated back no further than the administrations
of Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of Ghana after independence (1957-66).

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casein- (which is to say, cheese-) based artificial textile, were dubbed the
fabrics of modern times.
2. Matter against Rot
The overcoming of physical decay by forging new bodies and materi-

als had always figured among futurism's heroic themes (and never with-
out nationalist and/or imperialist connotations). From the auto crash out
of which the movement, reborn in the maternal muck of an industrial
ditch emerged in the "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909);'3
to the 1912 "Technical Manifesto"'s dream of destroying the "literary I"
and replacing it with matter's "directive impulses, its forces of compres-
sion, expansion, cohesion, and dispersion, its massing swarms of mole-
cules and swirling electrons";'4 to the 1915 "Manifesto of Electrical War"
in which, "free of wood and its lesson of weakness and debilitating soft-
ness, and from fabrics and their rustic ornaments," men are able to force
their flesh to "resemble the surrounding steel";15 to the 1933 radio mani-
festo's proposal that the waves emitted by dead spirits be revivified, am-
plified, and altered;'6 to The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms with its
transfigured and transfiguring fabrics, futurism was deeply haunted by
the problematic of decline, whether in the domain of nature, the individ-
ual body, or the body politic.17 Like much of the fascist cultural-political
world which it had shaped and by which it was shaped in turn, Marinetti's
movement rejected the prior century's visions of eternal progress. It em-
braced instead nonlinear myths of catastrophe and revolution couched-
however paradoxically-in the languages of mathematics, technology,
and science. Waging its war against decline even on the molecular level,
the movement turned to double-bind structures or "addiction loops" in
order to engender the types of polarization, intensification, and arousal
that it deemed necessary to overcome Europe's turn-of-the-century crisis:
loops that pitted escalating demands for energy, speed, sacrifice, and self-
expenditure and ever more steely human subjects, struggling to sustain
such demands, against an array of fatal historical, biological, and telluric
laws that would potentially frustrate all efforts at resistance. In so doing,
13. Marinetti, "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo," Teoria e invenzione futurista,

p. 10.
14. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," p. 50.
15. Marinetti, "La guerra elettrica (Visione-ipotesi futurista)," Guerra sola igiene del
mondo (1915), Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 320.
16. See Marinetti and Pino Masnata, "La radia: Manifesto futurista dell'ottobre 1933,"
Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 209.
17. On this topic, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," Modernism/Modernity 1
(Sept. 1994): 153-78.

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however, it always found consolation in even the most tragic outcomes.

"The poet," according to the sixth principle of the founding manifesto,
"must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity."'8 But al-
though such self-expenditure leads to death, as indeed it must, nothing
in a futurist universe is ever lost: either the enthusiastic fervor of the
primordial elements simply swells or "a qualitative mathematics" can be
relied upon to abolish the "quantitative" fact of death.19
The same logic informed futurist ruminations on fashion and fab-
rics.20 These began early in the movement's history, with the May 1914
publication of Giacomo Balla's "The Male Futurist Clothing Manifesto"
("Le VWtement masculin futuriste"). Rewritten as an interventionist tract
several months later that year by Marinetti under the new title of "The
Antineutral Suit" ("II vestito antineutrale"), the manifesto is built around
the contrast between a corrupt body buried in clothing "that negates its
muscular life and suffocates it in the anti-hygienic passeism of excessively
heavy fabrics and tedious, effeminate, decadent halftones" and its futurist
antitype: a muscle-bound, militarized body clad in "aggressive," "agile,"
"dynamic," "rapidly changeable," "bright" garb with "muscular" poly-
chrome hues.21 Here, as in Volt's "The Futurist Manifesto of Women's
Fashion" ("Manifesto della moda femminile futurista") (1920), Marinetti's
"Against Female Luxury" ("Contro il lusso femminile") (1920), and Er-
nesto Thayaht and Ruggero Michahelles's "Manifesto for the Transforma-
tion of Male Attire" ("Manifesto per la trasformazione dell'abbigliamento
18. "Bisogna che il poeta si prodighi, con ardore, sfarzo e munificenza, per aumentare
l'entusiastico fervore degli elementi primordiali" (Marinetti, "Fondazione e Manifesto del
Futurismo," p. 10).
19. "Una matematica qualitativa abolisce la morte che e quantitativa" (Marinetti, "La
matematica futurista immaginativa qualitativa: Calcolo poetico delle battaglie," Teoria e in-
venzionefuturista, p. 231). Compare the conclusion of the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature": "Dead cells intermingle with living cells. Art is the need to destroy and to dis-
perse oneself, a great watering can of heroism that floods the world" (Marinetti, "Manifesto
tecnico della letteratura futurista," p. 54).
20. On Futurism's excursions into the fashion world, see Enrico Crispolti, Ilfuturismo
e la moda: Balla e gli altri (Venice, 1986); and Emily Braun, "Futurist Fashion: Three Manifes-
toes," ArtJournal 54 (Spring 1995): 34-41. Crispolti omits any mention of "The First Futurist
Manifesto for Italian Fashion" ("Primo Manifesto futurista per la moda italiana"), jointly
authored by Ernesto Thayaht and Marinetti: a fiercely nationalistic polemic in favor of "Fu-
turist Mediterranean mystical and aerial" new fashion. (A typescript of this manifesto, ap-
parently published in early 1932, may be found in E T. Marinetti Papers, Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, Resource Collections, accession no. 850702, folder 172.)
21. Marinetti, "I1 vestito antineutrale," reproduced in Crispolti, Il futurismo e la moda,
p. 90. Unlike the bulk of Balla's manifesto, the cited passage was left unmodified by Mari-
netti. The notion of sartorial musculature is emphasized throughout both versions of the
manifesto, particularly in their discussions of color: "fabrics [ought to be employed] whose
colors and iridescence thrill. They should be muscular colors, ultraviolets, ultrareds, ultra-
turquoises, ultragreens, ultrayellows, ultraooooranges [aranciooooni], ultravermillions" (Ma-
rinetti, "II vestito antineutrale," p. 90).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
maschile") (1932), the core concern is bodily decay and the solution an
acceleration of libidinal flows (fig. 3).22
This leads the authors, on the one hand, to argue for what Volt refers
to as "the dictatorship of artistic Genius" over men's and women's fashion
("MMF," p. 115)-that is, for the sort of unbridled fantasy that would
"obtain for men the same sartorial freedom that women have long en-
joyed"23 and transform woman into a "living plastic complex" (un
complesso plastico vivente) through the creation of "illusionistic sarcastic so-
norous noisy homicidal explosive outfits; outfits that lunge shock trans-
22. See Volt, "Manifesto della moda femminile futurista," reproduced in Crispolti, II
futurismo e la moda, p. 115, hereafter abbreviated "MMF"; Marinetti, "Contro il lusso fem-
minile," Futurismo e Fascismo (1924), Teoria e invenzionefuturista, pp. 546-49, hereafter abbre-
viated "CLF"; and Ernesto Thayaht and Ruggero Micahelles, "Manifesto per la
trasformazione dell'abbigliamento maschile," reproduced in Crispolti, Ilfuturismo e la moda,
p. 137.
23. "Reclamiamo per l'uomo quella liberth nel vestire gia da tempo raggiunta dalla
donna" (Thayaht and Michahelles, "Manifesto per la trasformazione dell'abbigliamento
maschile," p. 137).
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helles) presenting his futurist one-piece suit, 1918. From "La tuta futur-
ista" pamphlet. Author's collection.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
mute, armed with springs, stingers, camera lenses, electric currents,

spotlights, spouting perfumes, fireworks" ("MMF," p. 115).24 On the other
hand, they subject the play of fantasy to the laws of a natural body whose
animal vitality is sustained by polarities of gender, place, and race. Pas-
s6ist fashion gives rise to fetishism, a libidinal detour with leveling and
homogenizing effects. It breeds a male "who gradually loses his feeling
for the power of female flesh and develops instead an indecisive and en-
tirely artificial sensibility that is susceptible only to silks, velvets, jewels,
and furs" and who is indistinguishable from a female counterpart whose
"obsessive passion for fabrics and jewels . .. extinguishes the healthy im-
petuousness of her blood and the joys of lust" ("CLF," pp. 547-48). It
enforces a tyrannical uniformity of dull Nordic dress in the case of men
and of "two or three Parisian designs" in the case of women ("CLF," p.
548). So futurist fashion responds by reinstating and reinforcing epider-
mal differences, which is to say, physical attractions and repulsions. It
demands Mediterranean bodies that can be clearly distinguished from
northern bodies, hat and tie styles readily identifiable as Italian, women
so individualized that each becomes an "ultra-original living poem"
("CLF," p. 548), and constantly amplified sexual divergences. Male cloth-
ing "ought to emphasize the most beautiful and characteristic lines of the
male body in opposition to female lines; whenever possible, it should be
more vibrantly colorful than women's clothing (as is the law of the animal
kingdom)."25 Female clothing must "accentuate develop exaggerate the
gulfs and promontories of the female peninsula.... We will glorify the
flesh of woman in a frenzy of spirals and triangles" ("MMF," p. 115).
The means to this end are twofold: forms that sexualize, modernize,
and nationalize the body; and materials that are unconventional and/or
new-in Volt's manifesto, "paper, cardboard, glass, tinfoil, aluminum, ce-
ramics, rubber, fish skin, burlap, oakum, hemp, gas, living plants and
animals" ("MMF," p. 115); in "The Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Hat"
("Il manifesto futurista del cappello italiano") (1933) "felt, velvet, straw,
cork, light metals, glass, celluloid, composites, leather [pelle], sponge, fi-
ber, neon tubing, etc., alone or combined";26 in the "Futurist Manifesto
on the Italian Tie" ("Manifesto futurista sulla cravatta italiana") (1933)
"ultralight brilliant lasting metals" including tin, aluminum, chrome,
brass, and copper.27 The new subject comes into being at the meeting
24. "Outfits that lunge" reads "toilettes a scatto" in the original, implying an analogy
with "motori a scatto" or "internal combustion engines."
25. Thayaht and Micahelles, "Manifesto per la trasformazione dell'abbigliamento
maschile," p. 137.
26. Marinetti et al., "Il manifesto futurista del cappello italiano," reproduced in Cris-
polti, Ilfuturismo e la moda, p. 143. I have translated "pelle" as "leather" because the alternate
meaning, "fur," appears to conflict with some of Marinetti's earlier pronouncements.
27. Renato di Bosso and Ignazio Scurto, "Manifesto futurista sulla cravatta italiana,"
reproduced in Crispolti, Ilfuturismo e la moda, p. 147.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
At
IWX
"i .
, ..
: ,,
:...
FIG. 4.-Thayaht, Synthetic Effigy of "il

Duce," 1929. Cast iron and steel on stone
base. From Mino Somenzi, Polemiche sul fu-
turismo.
point of skin and garment. So banished forever are delicate and costly
fabrics like silk: "the reign of silk over women's fashions must come to an end once
and for all" ("MMF," p. 115). In their place, futurism embraced inexpen-
sive surrogates, from industrial metals to man-made yet natural fabrics
like Lanital and rayon.
Such was the setting in which the conquest of matter assumed a privi-
leged place within what Marinetti referred to as "the Futurist religion-
morality of speed." New materials like high-speed steel, aluminum,
zinc-aluminum alloys, tempered glass, and plastics became both emblems
of a crystalline modernity that had emerged from out of the dark shadows
of decadence and the body double or prosthetic extension of the new
multiplied man and woman. The principle was firmly in place by the time
of Thayaht's cast-steel Synthetic Effigy of "il Duce" (1929) (fig. 4). "The idea
of the Lictorial ax, of Roman arches, of the warrior's helmet, and of the
gaze fixed on a distant future," Thayaht wrote to his brother Ruggero,

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
"all these are brought together and interpenetrate to create a whole that
truly resembles il Duce. This work does not aspire to be a portrait, but rather
a symbolic effigy of the dynamic power of the Man in whose hands lies
Italy's fate."28 True resemblance is here established via the attributes of a
metal (ferro acciaioso, or "steely iron") that has escaped the bad or passeist
materiality of perfumes, moribund flesh, rusted machines, and aban-
doned ruins. Mussolinian steel offers instead a portrait of a redeemed
and explosive material world. Resembling a kind of ax blade or prow-
the themes of Thayaht's two other famous portraits of il Duce-cutting
through the oceanic mob or the seas of history, the head is at once a
unicum and a multiple. Planted on a cubic stone block, it rises up as the
singular profile that gives a face and name to the brute collective fact of
the fascist revolution. Its streamlined surfaces suggest bulletlike penetra-
tion and bulletproof impenetrability, striving to fuse two contradictory
effects: swift motion and monumental stillness.
By 1936, Mussolinian steel had become a well-worn clich6, as, for
instance, in Fortunato Depero's poem "Steel" ("Acciaio"), which proclaims
that
Steel has a right-angled jaw that moves on silent and well-oiled

hinges. It has a spear-like voice and its silence paralyzes. Its gaze
vibrates with the Hertzian wave. It resembles only one man: il Duce.
Steel is the modern poem of the most perfect accuracy and max-
imum power.... When manufactured it is the God of certainty and
dazzling serenity.29
To this metallic Mussolini corresponded an array of visions, many nonfu-

turist in inspiration, of the fascist state as a house of glass, an electrical-
power-system grid, a highway network. But it was within the setting of the
autarchy campaigns that the futurist song of matter attained its climax in
Marinetti's most important experiments from the late 1930s: The Poem of
the Milk Dress (Il poema del vestito di latte) and The Poem of Viscose Tower (Il
poema di Torre Viscosa), two words-in-freedom poems concerned with the
manufacture of new fabrics dating from the 1937-38 period, dedicated
28. Thayaht, letter to Ruggero Michahelles, 12 May 1929, Michahelles archive,

Florence.
29. Fortunato Depero, "Acciaio," Poesia (n.p., 1936-37), p. 21. The immediate source
of inspiration appears to be Marinetti's own "Dynamic Portrait of Mussolini" in the preface
to Marinetti e ilfuturismo (1929):
When he rises to speak, he extends his overpowering head, squared-off like a projec-
tile, packed full of good gunpowder, the cubic will of the State.
Yet he lowers it when concluding, always ready to attack the question head on
or, better, to gore it with the force of a bull. Futurist eloquence, well chewed by teeth
of steel, plastically sculpted by an intelligent hand that shaves off the useless clay of
contrary opinions....
His will plows the mob like a guided missile that explodes. [Marinetti, preface
to Marinetti e il Futurismo, in Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 576]

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to il Duce and published by the propaganda office of Italy's largest pro-

ducer of man-made textiles, the Societa Nazionale Industria Applicazioni
Viscosa (SNIA Viscosa).
The circumstances surrounding the writing of these two texts are
complex, but it is safe to say that both were commissioned by the SNIA
Viscosa. Marinetti's links to the corporation dated back to early in the
prior decade when its then director, the noted patron of modern architec-
ture and the arts, Riccardo Gualino, was among the few industrialists to
embrace the futurist leader's proposal for the creation of a special na-
tional bank for artists.30 Gualino's subsequent disgrace-the result of a
series of financial scandals that saw him on trial in both Italy and France
and then sent into exile on the island of Lipari-led Mussolini to inter-
vene directly at the end of 1929 and to replace him with Senatore Bor-
letti, owner of the newspaper Il secolo and a personal friend of Marinetti's,
who had served on the organizing committee of the November 1924 na-
tional celebrations honoring "Marinetti catalyst of Italianness" (Marinetti
animatore d'italianita).31 With Borletti's appointment, the SNIA Viscosa re-
sumed its ties to the movement and, in early 1937, invited Marinetti to
visit its production facilities at Cesano Maderno.32 The result was The
Poem of the Milk Dress, a poetic and typographical tour de force retracing
in minute detail the making of Lanital. Enhanced by a series of brilliant
graphic overlays and transparencies by the futurist artist-designer Bruno
Munari, which juxtaposed human digestive organs with industrial boil-
30. The proposal, first printed in March 1923 in the newspaper LImpero but later
integrated into Futurismo efascismo, reads as follows:
Just as credit institutions are created to help industry and commerce, so there should
be institutions that provide financial support to cultural events or institutions for
industrial art or that lend money to artists so as to facilitate their work (manuscripts,
paintings, statues, etc.), travel for purpose of research, and advertising. [Marinetti,
"I diritti artistici propugnati dai futuristi italiani: Manifesto al Governo fascista," Fu-
turismo e Fascismo, in Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 565]
The initiative was initially endorsed by Mussolini, though without yielding any results. On
Gualino's activities as patron of architectural Rationalism, see Dennis P. Doordan, Building
Modern Italy: Italian Architecture 1914-1936 (New York, 1988), pp. 58-60.
31. Documents concerning the Gualino scandals (which involved financial fraud as
well as currency speculation) are preserved at the Central State Archive in Rome, Segreteria
Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato 1922-1943, folder 102 ("Gualino"). The file con-
tains a great many letters from enraged stockholders, as well as documentation concerning
Mussolini's actions and special interest in promoting the manufacture of rayon. On Borletti,
see the entry by Alceo Riosa, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 46 vols. to date (Rome,
1960-), 12:794-96.
32. A letter from Franco Marinotti, director general of the SNIA Viscosa since the
time of Borletti's takeover, confirms the visit: "Thank you for your lyric [most likely his
newly published Poema africano], which is especially meaningful to me after the visit which
you were kind enough to make to our factory in Cesano Maderno" (Franco Marinotti, letter
to Marinetti, 27 Feb. 1937, Marinetti Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 13,
folder 696).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
ers, the flow of milk with the flow of tanks and aerial squadrons, the text
was published in a lavish edition on whose tricolor cover the red outline
of a cow's head floated over a green title and factory, with a black and
white bolt of Lanital curling into the center (figs. 5, 6, 7, 8).3 Even before
the completion of this first work, the SNIA Viscosa was already expressing
its satisfaction with this collaborative venture involving art and industry.
"Away in Milan [when Marinetti was present]," wrote its director general
in a letter dated 3 August 1937, "only now can I see for myself the enthu-
siasm with which you are struggling to complete the already magnificent
The Poem of the Milk Dress. Lanital is marching towards new horizons-
[our] poems must replicate themselves."34
And replicate themselves they did. New industrial poetry followed
almost immediately, whether in the commodified guise of ever new varie-
ties of autarchic rayon, or in the literary guise of The Poem of Viscose Tower,
a words-in-freedom text that retraces the range of emotions felt by fields
of reeds as they sway under the wind and stars and confront their trans-
formation into rayon within the utopian setting of the factory-city of Vis-
cose Tower (Torviscosa).35 This work inspired two further progeny: one
devoted to the actual manufacture of viscose rayon, entitled "Simultane-
ous Poem of Woven Light" ("Poesia simultanea della luce tessuta") (1939),
which provides a technical account of the chemistry involved; and an-
other, the "Simultaneous Poem of Italian Fashion" ("Poesia simultanea
della moda italiana") (1939), concerned with combating "the tasty cere-
bralism of French fashion sick with good taste measure and harmony we
prefer the passionate creative dynamic military surprising instinct of Ital-
ian fashion thoroughly invented [tutta inventata] with no less invented tex-
33. The full title is Il poema del vestito di latte: Parole in liberta futuriste di Marinetti, accadem-
ico d'Italia (Milan, 1937). The back cover bears the phrase, "Omaggio della SNIA Viscosa"
("courtesy of the SNIA Viscosa"), which suggests that the document was sent out free of
charge to associates and friends. In The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms the poem appeared
under the title of "Simultaneous Poem of a Milk Dress" (Poesia simultanea di un vestito di latte).
34. "Assente a Milano, posso compiacermi solo oggi dell'entusiasmo col quale Ella si
accinge a completare il gia magnifico Poema del vestito di latte. II Lanital marcia verso nuove
realizzazioni-i poemi devono ripetersi" (Marinotti, letter to Marinetti, 3 Aug. 1937, Mari-
netti Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 13, folder 696). The closing reflexive
ripetersi implies not just repetition (in the sense of rehearsal or repetitive consumption) but
also especially reproduction. The reference to "poems" is deliberately imprecise, implying an
analogy between industrial products and literary artifacts. In fact, Lanital proved only par-
tially successful at first. Insufficiently resilient, it was prone to stretching, had an unpleasant
scent, and did not hold up well under regular wear and tear. Some of these flaws were
eliminated in the course of subsequent years, and it was reborn as the far more successful
artificial textile Merinova in the postwar period.
35. The poem was originally published as Ilpoema di Torre Viscosa (Milan, 1938). In The
Non-Human Poem of Technicisms it appeared under the alternative title of "Simultaneous
Poem of Arunda Donax Reeds" (Marinetti, "Poesia simultanea dei canneti Arunda Donax,"
II Poema non umano dei tecnicismi (1940), Teoria e invenzione futurista, pp. 1151-60; hereafter
abbreviated "PCA").

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
tiles and ornaments."36 Together with The Poem of the Milk Dress and The
Poem of Viscose Tower, this quartet of industry-sponsored and industry-
inspired texts would make up the backbone of the 1940 collection, The
Non-Human Poem of Technicisms, dedicated to "the exemplary Italianness
dynamism autonomy creativity of the SNIA VISCOSA corporation as an
homage from we Futurist aeropoets dedicated to the uniqueness of Impe-
rial Fascist Italy."37
In this compilation, the futurist leader and member of the Italian
Royal Academy set out to yoke the antiliterary to the nonhuman in ways
that echo the Soviet avant-garde's early flirtations with productivism:
"While the earth's poets continue more or less to spin nostalgias and de-
spairs around the verses of Leopardi Baudelaire or Mallarme the Italian
Futurist Movement has for many years prompted its poets and artists to
create a 'non-human' poetry and art which is to say a poetry and art
extraneous to humanity thanks to its systematic extraction of new beaut-
ies and new music from the technicisms of machine civilization."" He
went on to add:
The new task of poetry and art in Imperial Fascist Italy daughter of
the Fast War: that of organizing the idealization of single conceptual
administrative manual mechanical chemical forms of work with a
profitable distribution of intuitions and creative efforts.... [To do
so] without dressing everything up in verbal and plastic and musical
rhetorics without the long rancid symbolism of plow eagle scythe
anvil hammer abolished by airplanes sowing-machines electrical
plants pneumatic hammers motor-plows we want to mine every work
in its characteristic technics and production-mode so as to extract
slivers of poetry.39
For Marinetti, the automation of production promised to free culture

from the burdens of the old humanism and its cult of reflective distance
36. Marinetti, "Poesia simultanea della moda italiana," II Poema non umano dei tecnicismi,
in Teoria e invenzionefuturista, pp. 1187-88.
37. Marinetti, dedication of II Poema non umano dei tecnicismi, in Teoria e invenzionefutur-
ista, p. 1139. The compilation was first published in Milan in 1940. On the basis of manu-
script evidence, the composition of "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light" would seem to
date back to around the time of Marinetti's visit to Torviscosa (September 1938). The earli-
est direct mention of it and of the "Simultaneous Poem of Italian Fashion" that I have been
able to locate occurs in December 1939, so I give 1939 as a tentative date for both. In Teoria
e invenzionefuturista, De Maria gives no indication that the text was published prior to the
appearance of The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms.
38. Marinetti, "Invito ai lettori spregiudicati," preface to II Poema non umano dei tecnici-
smi, in Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 1142; originally published in the April 1937 manifesto
"Poetry and Corporatist Art."
39. Marinetti, "Estrazione sistematica di nuovi splendori e nuove musiche dai tecnici-
smi," introduction to II Poema non umano dei tecnicismi, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, pp.
1143-44.

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and interiority. It was already bringing into being a "non-human" world

in which workers and their tools have become "autopoets surging forth in
a sea of sparks";40 a world in which the mingling of worker bodies and
machines would give rise to a "proletariat of geniuses" capable of partak-
ing of that intensified experience of the real that is Marinettian poetry
and to nonhuman doubles-"distinct mechanical and chemical personal-
ities ... that can increasingly be considered interesting figures or better
heroes to be praised and sung."4' In order to prepare the way for the
advent of this industrial autopoetry, The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms
undertook to extract poetic gold out of industrial ore via a survey of the
commercial port of Genoa, of colonial highway projects, and of an imagi-
nary battle in which the swastika and the virile lictorial fasces triumph
jointly. But, as already noted, the collection's core was made up of poems
identifying the production of rayon and Lanital and their use in ultra-
Italian fashions with Italy's conquest of spiritual and economic sover-
eignty.
3. Rayon, Lanital, and Autarchic Poetry
At first glance, the choice of textile manufacture as the site for car-
rying out the enterprise just described may seem eccentric, even for a
poet with tastes as outlandish as Marinetti's. Yet I hope to demonstrate
that, far from anomalous, this choice stands as the end product of a de-
cade-long historical process that had imbued man-made fabrics with dis-
tinctly modernist political and poetic meanings. Just like cast iron, which
for Emile Zola transforms the arcades of Paris into "fairy palaces petri-
fied as if by the wave of a magic wand"; tempered glass, which for Paul
Scheerbart provided the new environment that would "completely trans-
form mankind"; steel, which, from Walter Gropius through Depero, was
envisaged as "the modern poem of the most accurate perfection and
greatest power"; or polystyrene, which for Raymond Queneau in his ode
to plastics, "Le Chant du Styrene," provided the basis for an entirely new
cosmogony, so by 1937 it seemed natural enough that artificial fabrics
should be designated the "rural poetry" of a new Imperial Italy.42 "A fab-
40. "Un giorno i lavoratori e i loro utensili sprizzeranno fuori autopoeti a scintille"
(ibid., p. 1145; my emphasis). Autopoeti is a neologism, most likely modeled after words such
as "autopilot." On automation and the nonhuman, see the appendix to this essay.
41. Marinetti, "Invito ai lettori spregiudicati," p. 1142.
42. Interview with Emile Zola, "L'ouverture de l'Exposition universelle," Le Messager
de l'Europe (June 1878), p. 346, quoted in Jacques Noiray, L'Univers de Zola, vol. 1 of Le
Romancier et la machine: L'Image de la machine dans le roman francais (Paris, 198 1), p. 242; Paul
Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. James Palmes (New York, 1972), p.
74; Depero, "Acciaio," p. 21; and see Raymond Queneau, "Le Chant du Styrene," Chine et
chien, suivie de Petite Cosmogonie portative et de "Le Chant du Styrene" (Paris, 1969).

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ric is not the proverbial textile gazed upon in store windows," writes a
typical commentator on the 1937 National Textile Exhibition, "rather it is
a secret power ripped out of nature and it possesses a proteiform vitality,
opening up labyrinths of new modes of expression and demanding mo-
dernity of impulses and plants."43 Similar imaginings permeate the great
mass of 1930s technical writings on the production of man-made fabrics,
which envisage fabrics like rayon not as artificial but rather as an intensi-
fied, accelerated, redeemed prolongation of a (national) natural world
that has been emancipated and democratized by modern science.44 Such
was the view of the futurist poet as well, but it is worth insisting that, in
its production practices, technical writings, and advertising campaigns,
industry took the lead in celebrating man-made fabrics' "proteiform vital-
ity" and "demanding modernity of impulses and plants." Art merely
served as an amanuensis. It came along afterwards and reworked already
codified myths.
Italy's traditional leadership in the domains of silk and wool produc-
tion had ensured the relatively early entry of giants such as the SNIA
Viscosa and its rival, the CISA Viscosa, into the field of viscose rayon
production in 1920. The ups and downs of the post-World War I econ-
omy, particularly in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929, led the
SNIA Viscosa through a cycle of booms and busts which underscored the
vulnerabilities of the Italian textile industry.45 First, there was the matter
of foreign tariff barriers, which had been growing in response to severe
problems of oversupply on the international market. Second, there was
43. Carla Rulli, "Problemi dell'Autarchia: La mostra del tessile," Meridiano di Roma, 26
Dec. 1937, p. 12; hereafter abbreviated "PA."
44. See, for instance, works such as Silvio Coggi, luta efibre autarchiche: Canapa, ginestra,
sparto efibre dell'Impero (Milan, 1939); and the writings collected by the National Federation
of Consortia for the Defense of Hemp Growers (Federazione Nazionale dei Consorzi per la
Difesa della Canapicoltura) on the occasion of the congress which accompanied the Forli
textile exhibition (11-20 Dec. 1936). Among the latter we find a technical report by the
federation's president, Roberto Roversi, prefaced by a lengthy analogy between the agricul-
tural policies of Julius Caesar and those of Mussolini, followed by a roll call of materials-
hemp, linen, broom plant, ramie, agave, and so forth-each invoked as if they were soldiers
belonging to an avant-garde brigade. He concludes his exordium: "In the fascist clime ev-
erything is possible.... And because Italy's newly enhanced presence in the textile sector
is fueled by the imperialist spirit that inflames the heart of every Italian worthy of belonging
to il Duce, the national textile problem will be resolved even at the cost of unlimited sacrifice
and without the slightest compromise" (Roberto Roversi, "Le fibre tessili vegetali prodotti
in Italia e nelle Colonie," Relazioni mostra convegno delle fibre tessili nazionali e dell'Impero [Rome,
1937]). Interesting and less technically oriented evidence to this same effect may be found
in the special issue of Curzio Malaparte's Prospettive devoted to the national textile industry
(Prospettive, no. 5 [1938]).
45. For the official history of the SNIA Viscosa, see SNIA Viscosa, 10 anni di attivitdt
della SNIA Viscosa (Milan, 1939), characterized by its Rationalist layout and typography, and
SNIA Viscosa, La SNIA Viscosa (Milan, 1958). Both are careful to elide the Gualino scandals
and the direct role played by Mussolini and National Fascist Party secretary Augusto Turati
in the corporation's various crises during the 1920s and early 1930s.

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the question of raw materials. The manufacture of viscose-based fabrics

and cellophane requires not only fossil fuels (of which Italy's supplies
were inadequate) but also large quantities of high-quality cellulose de-
rived from white and red fir trees, Nordic pines, and/or beech wood. In
Europe these trees abound only on the Scandinavian peninsula, for
which reason the Nordic countries enjoyed a virtual monopoly in cellu-
lose markets during the first half of our century. A similar situation pre-
vailed in the area of natural fabrics. Wool production was a traditional
strength of the Italian economy, but it relied heavily upon imported raw
materials, particularly for its upmarket products; it was neither large
enough nor sufficiently cost-efficient to supply both the national and the
international market. Italian cotton production was small, expensive, and
largely dependent upon imports from Turkey and Egypt. As for silk pro-
duction, its quality was world-renowned, but limitations in scale and high
production costs relegated it to the luxury sector of the market.
Italian textile manufacturers therefore faced a quandary during the
late 1920s as, on the one hand, export markets tightened up, while, on
the other, fluctuations in the international fossil fuel, cellulose, and cotton
markets regularly disrupted their operations. By 1930 they were forced
to develop a long-term strategy to combat these and other structural
weaknesses. Led by the SNIA Viscosa and with the firm support of the
fascist government, they set out, first, to focus on protecting and ex-
panding internal Italian markets, while aggressively targeting particular
export markets; second, to concentrate their efforts on the development
of a market for man-made fabrics (because of their lower production
costs); third, to complement this campaign with a parallel effort to substi-
tute cotton fabrics with fabrics based upon native materials such as ramie,
hemp, and linen; fourth, to promote local forestation programs where
appropriate; and last, to develop new sorts of fabrics and fabrication
methods that took advantage of locally available flora and fuels (figs. 9
and 10).
In the case of the SNIA Viscosa, these efforts would bear three fruits.
The first was the foundation of the SNIA Viscosa's Italraion division in
1931 and the launching of a decade-long campaign promoting the use of
viscose rayon. Second, a research program both for the substitution of
local products for Scandinavian cellulose and for the creation of autarchic
fabrics was undertaken. In the wake of this research program's success,
the third result was the construction of state-of-the-art production facili-
ties, probably inspired by American precedents such as the DuPont cor-
poration's "model city" projects for textile workers, in the immediate
vicinity of the newly developed supply sources. The case that I will touch
upon is that of Torviscosa, alluded to in the title of Marinetti's The Poem
of Viscose Tower.
As regards the first, suffice it to say that by the end of 1934 no Italian
citizen could have been unaware that rayon was the fabric of modern

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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Graphic table by Damiani, 1937. From Prospe
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(redubbed the Technico-Economic Re
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internal market, Italy's rayon manu
publicity campaign. The campaign's f
show: a touring truck caravan made
supplementary trailers, instantly tr
47. Publication of this review appears to h

48. On this topic and on the overall history
fascist decades, Aspesi's II lusso e 1'autarchia is

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
rayon's virtues and applications (fig. 11).49 Atop each of the trucks were
loudspeakers from which were broadcast a series of rayon songs com-
posed especially for the trucks' tour of the Italian peninsula: an event
known as "The Five Thousand Miles of Rayon" (after the legendary auto
race, the Mile Miglia).50 Launched on 18 May 1934 and completed to-
49. Pinkus mysteriously alludes to a "rayon train," apparently on the basis of a mis-
reading of the Italian label auto-treno (BR, p. 221).
50. Among the many rayon songs is the following, entitled "II poeta e Nina," whose
author went by the name Reco:
"Nina, do you know how much

my love for you is a source of torment?
It seems to me that your heart is bound to mine
by a thread so subtle that it's invisible
and yet so strong that no one can ever cut it."
Nina looks at me and declares:
"A fine thread that is so resistant?
Surely a thread of rayon made."
"Your gaze, my Nina,
has struck me square in the chest.
What web of intrigue have you woven [Qual trama hai duque ordito]
with such perfection, you twisted brunette,
that I can no longer regain my lost tranquility?"
Nina smiles and answers:
"A web of intrigue? And a perfect one at that?
Why we're dealing here with a rayon fabric."
"But sweetheart, please indulge
the love of him who now implores you.
Yield to him who adores you.
I have never seen you as beautiful
as you now appear dressed in the sun's rays!"
Nina sulks and says:
JAM, 'I ? - , m.?'
All
= ....... ~
~I ?? ... . ... ~.
.*: .. ....
I...i I6
ff*
FIG. 11.-Rayon truck car

Luce Archive, Rome.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
wards the end of the same year, the tour-or "triumphal march," as it
was described in an extensive advertising campaign--included not just
exhibits but also dances and fashion shows celebrating the elegance, du-
rability, and savings that could be achieved by switching to man-made
fabrics (fig. 12).51
The rayon road show's meanderings were covered on the so-called
rayon page, which became a standard feature in the major daily newspa-
pers during much of 1934 (fig. 13). There, news items covering the atten-
dance of the masses and visits by their leaders appeared weekly in the
company of interviews, industry updates, technical bulletins, and draw-
ings and photographs of Italy's newest fashions, along with fables, apho-
risms, essays, and short stories singing rayon's praises by popular writers
such as the onetime futurist Enrico Cavacchioli. The highlight of every
rayon page was the brilliantly playful rayon poems of Luciano Folgore (a
longtime futurist fellow traveler), gathered together under such titles as
"Mythology and Rayon" and "Rayon and Poetry." Some examples are in
order. Rayon myth 1:
Ercole un giorno divent6 un ossesso

perche indoss6 la tunica di Nesso;
invece se la tunica indossata
di rayon fosse stata
Ercole avrebbe fatto, in pochi istanti
impazzir d'invidia tutti quanti.
[Hercules one day became obsessed
because in Nessus's hairshirt he was dressed;
yet if his tunic had been of rayon instead
With envy he would have knocked 'em dead.]
"Dress of rays? Better

a fancy patterned rayon dress."
[un bel vestito rayon fantasia]
[Reco, "II poeta e Nina," Corriere Padano, 30 Oct. 1934, p. 3]
Another "Nina" song appeared under the title "Anacreontica" on the 18 Dec. 1934 rayon
page of Corriere Padano.
51. One of the announcements for the rayon truck convoy, published on the 18 May
1934 rayon page (in Corriere Padano, among other newspapers), promises the following:
The convoy has a double aspect for, once it reaches a destination, it will unfold its
coverings in a flash and transform itself into an authentic exhibition hall for rayon
products. From the threateningly armed vehicle, in the meantime, songs, sounds,
and phrases singing the praises of the new textile will emanate. And a luminous
beam ffascio] will issue from it, projecting on an overhead screen the splendors of
rayon. Then, as soon as the mob has admired (as it will never tire of doing), as soon
as all have impressed on their memory that vision of lights, colors, and elegance, the
hall will in a few seconds transform itself anew into a motorized caravan and will
depart to greet "other folks who perhaps await it." [Corriere Padano, 18 May 1934]

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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FIG. 12.-"The truck caravan of th

ing its triumphal march." Advertise
1934.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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1934.
Rayon myth 2:
La nuda Verita disse agli Dei:

Se dovessi vestir, senza vergogna,
solo col rayon mi rivestirei
perche non e un tessuto ... di menzogna.
[Naked Truth said to the Deity:
If I were to dress without indignity,
only rayon would I not despise
for it's not a tissue . . . of lies.]

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Rayon myth 3:
Fu Diana una provetta cacciatrice,

ma per battere il piano e la pendice,
per traversar le macchie e le foreste,
senza perdere un fil della sua veste,
di rayon si vestiva e dalla prova
la veste usciva intatta e sempre nuova.
[Diana was an able huntress,
a stalker in nature's fortress.
She dreamed of hunting, it is said
without fear of snagging a single thread.
So she donned a rayon dress.
It passed the test.
She was impressed.]52
In brief: according to Folgore's new mythology, rayon is the fabric of mod-

ern comfort and hygiene. It is also the fabric of naturalness (that is, of
truthfulness, not artifice), because in rayon nature-in the form of cellu-
lose-is not falsified but instead multiplied and transfigured through the
workings of science. Since "mere literature" and "mere art" were prover-
bially dismissed as tissues of lies, this naturalness renders rayon the touch-
stone for an authentic art of fascist times, which is to say, a realist,
antiornamental, effectual art.
These myths for modern times find their parodic counterpart in
Folgore's no less deft updating of Renaissance poets like Petrarch:
"Cosa bella e mortal passa e non dura."

Ma il rayon ch'Z una stoffa eccezionale
non si sciupa, non cangia, non s'oscura.
Non oso dir che il rayon e immortale,
per6 posso affermar ch'Z sempre quello:
pii' il tempo passa e pi'i diventa bello!
[Some say that "mortal things cannot last."
But rayon does. Against time's ravages,
against pulls and tears and stains, it stands fast.
Does this mean that rayon is forever?
Maybe not, but its beauty doesn't weather.]
And Ariosto:
"La verginella e simile alla rosa"

disse un giorno l'Ariosto ed io ci credo
52. Corriere Padano, 18 May 1934. Other rayon mythologies elaborated by Folgore in-
clude Mercury and Thalia, Jove and Venus, Penelope and Ulysses, and a story of a nymph.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
specie quand'ella il giorno che va sposa

porta in casa di rayon un corredo,
perche dimostra col cervello a posto
d'essere niente fumo e tutto Ariosto.
[Ariosto was the first to propose
that a maiden is similar to a rose.
The proof that he is right
comes on her wedding night
when a rayon trousseau
she brings to her chateau,
and confirms that, no joke,
she's all fire and no smoke.]53
Folgore's compositions were immediately replicated in industry publica-

tions such as Lefibre dell'eleganza, a 1937 pamphlet produced by and for
the Rome office of the CISA Viscosa. Celebrating the uses of fabrics such
as Cisalfa, Cisafiocco, Cisnivea, and Fiocco di Ginestra, it features full-
page color drawings of women, workers, imperial army soldiers, and colo-
nial subjects, each accompanied by a ditty in which the final rhyme word
is CISA Viscosa. The worker's poem reads:
Lavatore che col tuo badile

vai sulla strada aperta dal fucile,
per l'uniforme della tua fatica,
che da strade al lavor, solchi alla spica,
t'offre la stoffa bella, vigorosa,
tenace come te CISA-VISCOSA.
[Worker, you walk with pick in hand
down roadways conquered by force,
as the uniform of your exertions,
clearing the road for your labor
and the furrow for your wheat,
the CISA-VISCOSA offers you beautiful cloth
cloth as vigorous and tenacious as you are.]54
He subsequently added another three rayon fables: one concerning a siren (Corriere Padano,
19 July 1934) and the others on "Acquazzone and Solleone" and Sleeping Beauty (Corriere
Padano, 30 Oct. 1934).
53. "Il rayon e la poesia," Corriere Padano, 23 June 1934. There is no adequate way to
render into English the closing line of the second poem which inverts the popular Italian
expression "tutto fumo e niente arrosto" ("all smoke and no roast"), meaning something
like "all talk and no action," into "niente fumo e tutto arrosto" or "no talk and all action."
The verse is further complicated, however, by the substitution of the last name of the poet
Lodovico Ariosto for the word arrosto. Other rayon rewritings by Folgore targeted Dante,
Tasso, Manzoni, and Leopardi.
54. CISA Viscosa, Lefibre dell'eleganza (n.p., 1937), p. 10; hereafter abbreviated FE.

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The soldier's poem reads:
Soldato dell'Impero, veterano

delle guerre che spinsero lontano
l'aquila che da Roma aperse l'ali
nella luce dell'alba imperiali,
la divisa superba e gloriosa
col suo fiocco ti da CISA-VISCOSA.
[Soldier of the Empire,
veteran of the wars
that extended the eagle's flight
who spread his wings over Rome's new imperial dawn,
the CISA-VISCOSA provides the stuff
of your superb and glorious uniforms.]
[FE, p. 1]
The colonial subject's poem reads:
Madamina color di cioccolato,

che ami farti vedere sul mercato
vestita di tessuti allegri e belli
come i fiori e le piume degli uccelli
che cantan dopo la stagion piovosa
be ti pu6 accontentar CISA-VISCOSA.
[O chocolate-colored little madam
who loves to be seen at market
appareled in joyous textiles,
beautiful like flowers and like the feathers on birds
who sing at the end of the season of rains,
the CISA-VISCOSA can bring you happiness.]
[FE, p. 20]
In all of the rayon poems, verbal quickness and levity are implicitly
designated as the poetic medium of an era in which, thanks to technologi-
cal advances and a modern state, leisure, luxury, and even a secularized
version of the glorified body have become available to the many. Folgore's
poems in particular suggest that, under fascism, fashion and, by exten-
sion, literature and art, once the exclusive preserves of the bourgeoisie
and the aristocracy, have become instruments for the forging of a true
mass society.
The same point was made in graphical terms by the army of stick
figures and mannequins found in period advertisements for rayon.55
55. This personification of textiles extended also to the Forli and Rome exhibitions
and was frequently picked up by commentators, as, for example, Luigi Antonelli, "Presenta-
zione della protagonista," Corriere Padano, 15 Dec. 1937. On rayon and the mannequins that
abound in period advertising, see BR, pp. 195-243. While sometimes acute and always

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
These modern everymen and everywomen appear either against the ty-
pographical backdrop of the phrase "rayon is a textile and not a surrogate
nor an imitation of other textiles" or against texts describing rayon's Ital-
ianness, its resistance and economy, the almost miraculous array of tex-
tures that can be produced with it, and its no less miraculous adaptability
to the multiple lives led by contemporary Italians (figs. 14 and 15). In-
deed, the fabric is thought to be so rooted in the Italian soil and so infi-
nitely adaptable that the ads depict it as suitable for applications such
as flags, uniforms, pajamas, tablecloths, upholstery, and wall coverings.
They display rayon fabric bolts coming to life, entire houses built out of
rayon, and department stores rising up in the form of rayon skyscrapers
(fig. 16). The globe itself is shown wrapped in rayon, Italy's imperial uni-
form (fig. 17).
The last element in this elaborate campaign assumed the form of a
series of pavilions for Italy's most important trade fairs, starting with Emi-
lio Lancia and Giancarlo Palanti's Rationalist pavilion for the 1934 Fiera
di Milano, in whose central hall loomed an immense rayon flag, and even-
tually extending beyond the national borders to the Italian pavilion at
the 1939 New York World's Fair, which featured a "demonstration of ma-
chines actually manufacturing synthetic fibers: rayon and artificial wool
fiber derived from ordinary cow's milk."56 Dozens of these structures were
built for the SNIA Viscosa between 1935 and 1940 by architects such as
Eugenio Faludi, to the point that Rationalist glass architecture, accompa-
imaginative, Pinkus's analysis is weakened both by the looseness of her associative chains
(rays-radiation-rayon-X-rays; spinneret-hymen) and by her overall claim that, despite their
heterogeneity, their international character, and the evident continuities between pre-
World War I, interwar, and post-World War II graphic culture, advertising images from
the fascist period are to be considered the repressed material that forms "a ground for the
present Italian state and its economy" (BR, p. 1). Yet as she herself observes, Bibendum, the
Michelin man-an icon born in France well before the advent of fascism-was ubiquitous in
1920s and 1930s Italian advertising. He is alive today, along with many other prewar ho-
munculi like the Perugina chocolate figure who survived the war much as Aunt Jemima has
persisted in American culture. Hardly the "forgotten icons of a generation that now passes
itself off as dead," these little creatures remain no less visible in "the present Italian state"
than they were during the fascist decades (BR, p. 1). If, like Ronald McDonald and Poppin'
Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy, they are able to shuttle so effortlessly back and forth across
national, historical, and ideological barriers, some questions arise. To wit: is the psychoana-
lytic notion of repression-too unproblematically coupled here to fascism's literal repressive
acts-the right tool to examine a phenomenon that pushes so insistently to the surface and
seems unconcerned with either revealing or concealing its past? Moreover, if advertising
culture and design practices (like so many other features of interwar industrial develop-
ment) are so decidedly heterogeneous and transnational, to what degree can they tell us
anything distinctive about fascism? (Unless, that is, one is willing to accept the crude pre-
sumption that fascism somehow distilled within itself the very essence of advanced capi-
talism.)
56. Nations: New York World's Fair, ed. William Bernbach and Herman Jaffe (New York,
1939), p. 99.

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1 42 :e...
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Rayon allows the textile industries to
FIG. 15.-"Rayon's qualit
create the most elegant and modern
forms soft folds preserving
fabrics." Advertisement. From II po-
vaporousness." Advertisem
polo d'ltalia, 3 May 1934.
d'ltalia, 14 June 1934.
nied by neon and halogen light

became identified with the fabric
(figs. 18 and 19).57 The connectio
SNIA Viscosa was Italy's first pro
merged the worlds of glass and of
beginning of the 1940s, gave rise
Bontempelli and the technical rev
men's ties fabricated out of fibergla
I have strayed far from The Non-H
57. An excellent example of Faludi's wo

teenth Milan Trade Fair, whose illuminat
glass across which shone the inscription
58. On the "glass tie," see "La questione
noted above, the futurists had made their

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
path of return leads back through two developments that directly in-
formed the poems that make up the collection's core: the foundation by
the SNIA Viscosa of the fascist new town of Torviscosa, celebrated in The
Poem of Viscose Tower; and the discovery of a new fabric made entirely from
Italian source materials, celebrated in The Poem of the Milk Dress (fig. 20).
As regards the first, in 1936 SNIA Viscosa scientists discovered that
"noble," high-quality cellulose could be obtained from a type of reed-
the Arunda donax, or "canna gentile"-that was common to northern Ital-
ian marshlands (fig. 21). This led to the undertaking of a large-scale
reclamation program in the lower Friuli, and, in 1938, to the accelerated
construction of the state-of-the-art factory/city Torviscosa in the midst of
the reclaimed land.59 The event was much ballyhooed in the contempo-
rary press, and Marinetti's poem was an important cog in the propaganda
machine. After visiting the facilities on 27 August he wrote to his wife
Benedetta:
Yesterday, a long exhaustive visit of Torre di Zuino [the prior top-

onym of Torviscosa].... Kilometrical green reeds devoured by cu-
bicity and sphericity of new geometrical city coming to life. It will be
ready on September 21 for il Duce. Thus is born a new words-in-
freedom poem of genuine originality and power (or so I hope).60
Bosso and Scurto's 1933 "Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Tie," preferring metals such as
aluminum, chrome, zinc, and tin.
59. For a telling indication of the importance of the foundation myth of Torviscosa,
see SNIA Viscosa, Torviscosa (Milan, 1941), which was bound with an Arunda donax spine
encasing green-tinted cover-boards on which cane fields were juxtaposed with the city's
geometry (see fig. 21). As for the press, the intensive coverage found in the magazine Tempo
is not unusual. See '~4runda donax: La canna gentile coltivata a Torre di Zuino per la cellulosa
nobile," Tempo, no. 25 (16 Nov. 1939): 1; "Torre di Zuino: Citta della cellulosa," Tempo, no.
26 (23 Nov. 1939): 1; "Dalla canna gentile alla cellulosa nobile," Tempo, no. 27 (30 Nov.
1939): 1; and "Conquiste autarchiche della SNIA Viscosa," Tempo, no. 33 (11 Jan. 1940): 1.
See also the special issue of the popular science magazine Vedere, no. 153 (15 May 1941),
devoted entirely to Torviscosa and synthetic fabric production. As noted earlier, the inspira-
tion for the building of Torviscosa may have come from the DuPont corporation, which had
built a model factory/city in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1920s.
60. Though the handwriting of the letter is not always easy to decipher, the original
reads something like this: "Ieri lunga minuziosa visita a Torre di Zuino con Marinotti. Chilo-
metrico canneti verdi divorati dalle cubicita e sfericita di una nuova citta nascente. Sara
pronta per il 21 settembre davanti al Duce. Nasce cosi un mio poema parolibero che spero
originale e potente" (Marinetti, letter to Benedetta Marinetti Cappa, Bolzano, 28 Aug. 1938,
Marinetti Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 5, folder 60.) Pinkus's assertions
that the poem's publication "coincides with the regime's official denunciation of 'modern'
and 'degenerate' art, which includes Futurism" and that "although Marinetti accepted his
commission from the Torre Viscosa, he may also be expressing anti-Mussolini sentiments at
this moment" are both counterfactual (BR, p. 265 n. 35). No such "official denunciation"
was issued and, despite Marinetti's embarrassment regarding the proclamation of racial
laws in 1938, his sentiments remained fiercely pro-Mussolinian.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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FIG. 16.-"Rayon is the perfect fabric for today's fashions. Its ele-
gance, durability, and convenience render it preferable to all other tex-
tiles in all of its infinite applications." Advertisement. From Corriere
Padano, 6 Oct. 1934.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
ilia t
FIG. 18.-Night view

Architect: Eugenio F
fascista di architetti
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its heavy-handed use
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148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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. . . ... ..i: .:17:~~~~ ~~~~~~.1 :;i ;:..... .... . . .... ...!iii!!i!i'% iiiii!:i% iiii!i% ii
Ar?:
FIG. 19.-"Italian noble cellulose / The new conquest of the SNIA Viscosa in
the name of national textile independence." Advertisement for the SNIA pavilion at
the 1938 Milan Trade Fair, juxtaposing Eugenio Faludi's building with the cane tower
of Torviscosa, atop an image of the masses and against a backdrop of cane fields.
From La rivista illustrata del popolo d'Italia, Aug. 1938.
which they are rounded up like a revolutionary mob ("studentesse rivo-

luzionarie") and relayed up a funereal conveyor belt into the "transparent
cathedral-like tower" of an industrial silo where they will undergo their
final metamorphosis ("PCA," p. 1158). The poem's climax nears as out of
"the solemn imperial night" the word DUX shines forth over the once-

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Xii
.. ... ... ..
Il~iiei..... ......"
i. . ...........
g~o'llpN,
. ... .......
;:ii -0
iici ZZ Xir
i~-mm. TO
X M.-::ii
E!~~'ie~n?i~s~~~aiAN:
.. . . . . .. . .
zTN :?:?
! t44404m
FIG. 20.-The fascist new town of Torviscosa (formerly Torre di Zuino) in 1939.
Press photograph. From Tempo, 23 Nov. 1938. Author's collection.
FIG. 21.-SNIA V
an Arunda donax sp
The Wolfsonian, M

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idle marshlands; overhanging it is "the luminous glassy axe blade" of Tor-

viscosa's fasces-shaped tower ("PCA," p. 1159).62 Finally, the garden city
itself appears and its unveiling marks the realization of a fascist utopia:
Continuous devouring of reeds of arising city of

Viscose Tower O goddess Geometry
Calcium Bisulfite
Swimming pools for workers workers' children soccer fields

bocce ball
Vittorio Veneto and Arnaldo Mussolini Streets
Theaters and refectories for thousands of workers
A lofty shelter of plane trees and horse chestnuts for a

populace of bicycles
["PCA," pp. 1159-60]
The chemical allusion prefigures the arduous theme of the next nonhu-
man technicist exercise, "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light," a demon-
stration of the miraculous effects of the harvest's violence that takes the
reader step by step through baths and boilers filled with caustic soda,
sulfuric acid, bleach, and the like; then through dryers, spinnerets, and
weaving machines; and, finally, through surfacing and cutting machines
onto retail shelves.63 But, for the moment, the accent falls on the human:
on leisure, labor, and sport; on the accelerated cadences of modern life;
on geometries of steel unleashing hitherto-unknown potentialities of
brute matter-this is the stuff of which Torviscosa is made (fig. 23). The
deeper meaning of the epiphany (and of Marinetti's entire 1940 compila-
tion) is still to come. It flashes before the reader in a valediction in which
the clustered words of Mallarme's Un Coup de dis jamais n'abolira le hasard
are reconfigured as "the new constellation whose stars spell out the word
AUTARCHY" ("PCA," p. 1160).64
My tale reaches its close with the development of a series of new
fabrics by the SNIA Viscosa, the CISA Viscosa, and their peers: autarchic
62. Nearly two hundred feet tall, this tower was employed for the production of cal-
cium bisulfite, a key ingredient in the viscose preparation process. The glass axe blade rep-
resents a borrowing from fascist show architecture: to be precise, from Libera's Italian
pavilions for the 1933 Chicago world's fair and the 1935 Brussels international exposition.
63. See the appendix to this essay for a translation of an unpublished early draft of
this poem.
64. Despite the upbeat tone of "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light,"' Blum senses a
fracture here: "the excuse of progress and national self-sufficiency does not outweigh the
pathos of nature's destruction; the final, happy scene of prosperity makes sense only as a
convenient diversion from an inescapable impasse, or perhaps as a token gesture of compli-
ance with the requirements of the epideictic situation" (Blum, The Other Modernism, p. 142).

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??ial?: ':'?'flii.; .??? .

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?::: :? ?~?????:'??;::?l:?il.iii:'::":? '.:?'? ?
FIG. 22.-Mussolini on tour of Torviscosa at its September 1938 inauguration. From

10 anni di attivitd della SNIA Viscosa.
textiles like Cafioc (based on hemp), Lanital (based on casein), and Gines-
tra (based on the broom plant) whose large-scale production began in
1936. The success of each of these products varied, but, success or no
success, they were featured as the stars of the decade's two most impor-
tant textile exhibitions: the National Textile Exhibition of Forli (held in
mid-December 1936) (figs. 24, 25, and 26) and the National Textile Exhi-
bition of Rome (inaugurated one year later at the Circus Maximus on the
two-year anniversary of the imposition of sanctions) (figs. 27 and 28).65
Organized by industry but attended by large masses of spectators, these
events ensured the widespread public diffusion of the story line of The
Non-Human Poem of Technicisms, its technical vocabulary, and its materialist
65. On the Forli exhibition, the best source is Federazione Nazionale dei Consorzi per
la Difesa della Canapicoltura, Le fibre tessili nazionali e dell'Impero (Milan, 1937), which
includes the technical reports presented at an accompanying symposium, reports on the pres-
ence of dignitaries and foreignjournalists, and reports on Mussolini's visit, as well as room-by-
room descriptions of the exhibition. No catalogue was apparently produced for the Circus
Maximus exhibition, but the event was lavishly covered in the contemporary press-nowhere
better than in the December 1937 issue ofLa rivista illustrata delpopolo d'lItalia.

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?;.i;;.i~;... ..........
i ,
R IP . .....
m Vo.MR
FIG. 23.-Gymnasium for workers and their families at Torviscosa. From 10

attivith della SNIA Viscosa.
fantasies. By prominently juxtaposing actual raw materials with their

photographically or industrially processed counterparts, both shows
strove to exploit the central paradox celebrated in "Simultaneous Poem
of Woven Light" and The Poem of the Milk Dress: the fabrics' ability to bring
together the apparently distant worlds of farm and factory, nature and
technology. The spectacle they put on, that is, wedded visions of a primi-
tive peasant world (associated with the nation's origins), whose poverty
and humility were on display in the form of crude materials and tradi-
tional handcrafted textiles, to visions of an advanced industrial world (as-
sociated with the nation's future), in which fabrics were celebrated for
their unnatural resistance, their mutability, their ability to simulate tradi-
tional textile products, and their potential to invade export markets. In
the case of the Circus Maximus exhibition, this emphasis upon natural
artifice and archaizing avant-gardism was enhanced by the "crystalline
and airy clarity" achieved through the abundant use of tempered glass
by Rationalist architects such as Adalberto Libera, whose contributions
included an Autarchic Winter Garden made exclusively of wood, cement,
and glass.66 As widely acclaimed as its successor, the Autarchic Minerals
Exhibition, it followed Faludi's practice in the prior SNIA Viscosa pavil-
ions-a practice borrowed, in turn, from the universal expositions of the
prior century-of placing working machines on the premises inter-
spersed with fabric samples and photomontages (figs. 29 and 30). But it
went one step further. To these machines it added actual workers, peasant
66. "La mostra del tessile," II vetro 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1938): 8.

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II
*oow No
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FIGS. 24,
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nazionali e
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FIG. 25

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2:
iai
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FIG. 26
women, animals, and natural products, all in the service of a sort of indus-
trial magic realism aiming to reconcile an idealized rural Italy with an
aggressive vision of the new civilization of machines. The exhibition hall
was thus transformed into a virtual factory where spectators could see,
touch, and smell the alchemy of modern textile production: from the raw
materials with which the process started out; to their preparation in caus-
tic soda baths; to their chemical processing; to the spinning and weaving
process; to the folding and cutting of the finished product; to its conver-

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V MS 6:: 5,-M
... ... ... ..
. . ..... . WE
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m *i .......
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FIG. 27
? .: : ?: i : . i I:E :g
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:.
:i:. ?.o ::: .::i" ?i?.::.:i:: :.... :

i~i!:!:::'?i' :?
::. ?.:. .:. ?:?: ??: ?
FIGS. 27 and 28.-Two parts of the SNIA Viscosa pavilion at the National Textile Exhi-
bition of Rome, 1937. Architect: Adalberto Libera. From La rivista illustrata del popolo d'Italia,
Dec. 1937.

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?rsI?
........... ..
2el:?i
M.. 8il H~ii~iii sn~:
. . . . . . . . . . . . :
il~ l::i|!i!
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FIG. 29
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FIGS. 29 and 30.-Photomontages from the SNIA Viscosa's virtual factory at the
tional Textile Exhibition of Rome, originally devised by the painter Mondaini for th
Milan Trade Fair. From La rivista illustrata del popolo d'Italia, Dec. 1937.

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sion into garments and everyday objects, first viewed in display cases and
then on live models parading down catwalks. All of this magic, needless
to say, unfolded under Mussolinian slogans such as "it is the spirit that
tames and molds matter" (E lo spirito che doma e piega la materia), under
images of the supreme leader, or under shimmering emblems of the key-
word autarchia.
More could be said about the Forli and Circus Maximus national
textile exhibitions, but their ties to Marinetti's technicist poetics can best
be understood by noting the remarkable degree to which The Non-Human
Poem of Technicisms converges with viewers' responses to these two shows.
One example will have to suffice: a review of the Circus Maximus show
published in the weekly Meridiano di Roma quoted above. The reviewer
begins by asserting that "less than an exhibition, it is a rally": a mass rally
orchestrated and choreographed by a creative force and genius emanat-
ing from Piazza Venezia ("PA," p. 12). Then, after lauding the technical,
economic, social, lyrical, and statistical inspiration the show provided its
audience, the reviewer describes the natural fabric Ginestra:
Never has nature been so closely tied to the textile industry as to-
day.... The gentle broom plant, as Leopardi had prophesied, bows
its innocent head, but virtuoso machines and primitive spools trans-
form it into textiles just as pristine and resistant as linen but naturally
perfumed.67 ["PA," p. 12]
As indicated earlier, this portrait of Leopardi as prophet of industry

will be altered by Marinetti in the manifesto-preface that accompanies
his The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms. But the linkage of poetry, chem-
istry, and weaving-based on the conventional poetic-making-as-wool-
spinning topos-is no accident. Already codified by the industry's own
literature, it recurs over and over in press coverage, as in the following
description of the production of Lanital:
Its subsequent transmutations are a full-fledged poem of candor,

milk, butter, casein, made up of facets like minute crystals and pow-
dered like semolina flour. The peasant woman moves about in her
familiar kingdom. But where the cheese makers deliver their product
to the factories, the blazing whiteness remains. ["PA," p. 12]68
67. Leopardi's most famous poem, a poem known by heart by every Italian school-
child, was entitled "La ginestra" ("The Broom Plant"). The conceit was borrowed from
Mussolini who, in a 23 March 1936 speech in the Campidoglio, had declared: "The broom
plant that grows wild everywhere ... known to Italians only because Leopardi dedicated
one of his most pathos-filled poems to it, has today become a textile fiber capable of indus-
trial production" (quoted in Aspesi, II lusso e l'autarchia, p. 77).
68. The link between industrial weaving and creative writing, already invoked in the
3 August letter from Marinotti of the SNIA Viscosa to Marinetti, recurs in an anonymous
write-up on the wool production section of the Circus Maximus exhibition, entitled "The

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This transfiguring milk which is at once poetry's source and its end prod-
uct is cast as the hero of The Poem of the Milk Dress, which begins:
Milk milk freshly milked I drink milk in an iron cup

I am baked an Ethiopian thirst burns my throat a friend
gave me the miraculous present of a can of luminous concen-
trated paradise69
Just as in the Meridiano di Roma review, this paradisiac substance is regu-

larly viewed in relation to iron and steel machinery that multiplies it with-
out watering down its candor. The poem's framework is, as always in
Marinetti, rigorously autobiographical and leads the reader through a
rapid-fire sequence of scenes-the African battle front, a crossing of the
Suez canal, a train ride north to Rome-in preparation for a triumphal
parade that circles the Coliseum in celebration of Italy's newly acquired
empire.7" Above the crowds looms "an imperial gourmet who dominates
public squares and masses with his mute rotating mouth tasting horizons"
("PVL," p. 1165). Troops and war machinery stream by, among which
"Colored Troops" march and flow "towards the ideal European milk"
("PVL," p. 1166). Imbibed by the taster/dominator, they form a conflu-
ence of currents that is parted only when we reach the poem's crux. This
moment arrives in the form of an order, a monumental command that
corresponds to the starting point both of the Exhibition and of the Lani-
tal production process: "The Man commands // Milk, divide yourself"
("PVL," p. 1167). The man in question is Mussolini, cast in the role of
industrial demiurge, supreme commander and supreme coagulator.
From this point on the universe revels in its obedience-the subject of
much of the rest of The Poem of the Milk Dress:
Everyone laughing joy participating in

the ecstatic drunkenness of a casein thread which bounces
due to the hilarity of its transmutation into a ribbon it then
Wool Novel": "[in addition to industrial machinery and botany] music also enters the pic-
ture, if only through an indirect action; for he was wise who stated that one cannot achieve
greatness in industry without the spark of art animating the creations of pure thought. This
is how it was with [the] Marzotto [wool works]. There is no doubt about it. In the epic of its
factories fanfares sound and poetry flashes" ("Il romanzo della lana," La rivista illustrata del
popolo d'Italia, no. 12 [Dec. 1937]: 78-79). The author later continues by rehearsing, one by
one, the "chapters of the wool novel, brimming over with so much fantasy and poetry freely
bestowed upon actual novelists" (ibid., p. 80).
69. Marinetti, "Poesia simultanea di un vestito di latte," II Poema non umano dei tecnici-
smi, in Teoria e invenzionefuturista, p. 1164; hereafter abbreviated "PVL."
70. In late 1935 Marinetti had volunteered to serve in the Ethiopian campaign, so the
return from Africa figures events that occurred in early 1936. The Coliseum scenes seem
to allude to the celebrations held in honor of the two-thousand-year anniversary of the birth
of Augustus Caesar, held in Rome in tandem with the Mostra Augustea della Romanita, a
year-long exhibition marking the anniversary (23 Sept. 1937-23 Sept. 1938).

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cries out I am milk that beatifically returns to its pure nipple

spool spool mine mine mine
["PVL" p. 1167]
The separation of cheese from whey and casein from water, treated
both with humor and high drama in this modernist reworking of the
Genesis story of the separation of land from water, yields ever-increas-
ingly solid masses, then luminous threads, and finally fabrics that still
bear the trace of their luminous milky origins. After numerous pages of
oddly abstract yet sensuous descriptions of the struggle of threads to
achieve their ultimate form, the poem closes with a celebration of the
happy fusion of hard and soft, first in a heroic human subject,
I AM THE HARD MAN NOT

SUFFICIENTLY MILK-LIKE EVEN THOUGH NURSED ON
THE BEST SNOWY MILK OF THE BEYOND
["PVL," p. 1170]
and then in a heroic nation-state,
And let this complicated milk be welcome power power

power let's exalt this
MILK MADE OF REINFORCED STEEL
MILK OF WAR
MILITARIZED MILK
["PVL," p. 1170]
Here, as elsewhere in The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms, a vertigin

play of substitutions insists upon the links between the magic of vis
rayon and Lanital, the asphalt roadways that il Duce unspools across I
ian Africa, the activities of Italy's commercial ports, and the aerial ba
fields opened up by World War II. But the deeper tale concerns
progress but a characteristically futurist creation myth, according
which a hard-edged new world of redeemed, spiritually-charged mat
als arises out of the primordial nothingness represented by the incho
materiality of mother's milk. In this regard, Marinetti's identificatio
the futurist man of steel with a suckling infant pushes the central myste
that the poem celebrates-the process of cheese making, required in t
for the manufacture of casein-backwards in time towards the point
human origins. This choice may well be instructive, for cheese makin
least since Aristotle, had served as the privileged analogy in the West
tradition for describing how the masculine seed succeeds in "fixing"
blood secreted in the uterus, thereby initiating the formation of that

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culiar composite of matter and spirit: the human embryo." The Non-
Human Poem of Technicisms thus returns to an archaic scene of human ori-
gins in order to proclaim more forcefully a nonhuman future in which all
originary milks have coagulated, been spun into imperial uniforms wor-
thy of fear and honor, and assumed a wondrous multiplicity of mechani-
cal forms.
Appendix
Wrapping the World in Italrayon
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Sonia Delaunay's "simultaneous dresses"; the worker suits of Aleksandr Rod-

chenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and Ernesto Thayaht; the futurist vests of Giacomo Balla;
the patterned fabrics of Varvara Stepanova, Kazimir Malevitch, and Fortunato De-
pero: these are but a few of the many experiments that bear witness to the avant-
garde's abiding interest in the domain of clothing design as a site for fashioning a
new humankind.72 The operation was typically envisaged in twofold terms: as a
repatterning of fabrics and as a recontouring of garments. The first sought
to replace the prior century's standard array of classical, organic, and figurative
ornamental motifs with brightly colored, hard-edged, abstract geometries so as to
mark a new rapport of intimacy between the surface of the wearer's body and the
new century's machine-dominated context. The second sought to devise outfits ideally
suited to the needs of modern bodies, whether these needs were functional-for hy-
71. The classic formulation of this doctrine can be found in Aristotle's treatise on the
generation of animals:
When the material secreted by the female in the uterus has been fixed by the semen
of the male (this acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk, for rennet is a kind
of milk containing vital heat, which brings into one mass and fixes the similar mate-
rial, and the relation of the semen to the menstrual blood in the same, milk and the
menstrual blood being of the same nature)-when, I say, the more solid part comes
together, the liquid is separated off from it, and as the earthy parts solidify mem-
branes form all round it; this is both a necessary result and for the sake of something,
the former because the surface of a mass must solidify on heating as well as on cool-
ing, the latter because the foetus must not be in a liquid but be separated from it.
[Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. Platt, Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed.
Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 1:1148 (2.4.739b.20-30)]
72. On this topic, in addition to Crispolti and Braun on Italian futurism, see, for
example, Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann, Women's Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus (San Francisco,
1993); Charlotte Douglas, "Russian Fabric Design, 1928-32," The Great Utopia: The Russian
and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932 (New York, 1992), pp. 634-48; The Werkbund: History and
Ideology, 1907-1933, trans. Pearl Sanders, ed. Lucius Burckhardt (Woodbury, N.Y, 1980);
and Otto Charles Thieme, Avant-Garde by the Yard: Cutting Edge Textile Design, 1880-1930
(Cincinnati, 1996).

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giene, lightness, elasticity, breathability, and so forth-or symbolic-for the outfits

to suggest movement, classlessness, agility, speed, and flight. The technicalities of
weaving and dyeing sometimes found a place within these utopian or mythic mus-
ings (as they had, decades before, in the Arts and Crafts movement). More often they
did not. The existence of industrially produced wools, cottons, silks, and linens was
simply taken for granted, and the artist's task was to repattern and re-form them,
while diminishing their exclusivity and cost.
Here, perhaps, lies the originality of The Non-Human Poem of Tech-
nicisms. For Marinetti the technicist, draping the body in patterned geometries and
freeing it from physical constrictions no longer guarantees the fulfillment of modern
clothing's revolutionary promise. His solution is to literalize the metaphor of clothing
as a second skin: to demand that fabrics become the living prolongations of living
beings-in his own words, the "tender elastic equivalent[s] to the human epidermis."
Such is the fantasy that informs the text that follows, an unpublished lecture script
and early draft of the "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light" found among the
resource collections of the Getty Research Institute.73 The typescript probably dates
from early 1939. It bears no title-the one listed above is of my devising-and may
well have been intended for one of Marinetti's occasional radio talks. Like the
poem that was culled from it, "Wrapping the World in Italrayon" links up directly
to the harvest story recounted in The Poem of Viscose Tower, which had con-
cluded with an external overview of the SNIA Viscosa's corporatist new town. It
takes the reader inside the SNIA Viscosa factory through each and every step of the
rayon production process. The process is understood, not as the transformation of
dead matter into living forms, but instead as at once a trick and a transfiguration-
a trick inasmuch as, in its course, both the laws of nature and the wily silkworm
are outwitted by modern science; a transfiguration inasmuch as the "deep life of
Swedish fir-forests now subject to an Italian discipline of temperatures" is induced
by artificial means (including baths, boilers, basins, and bobbins) to transmute itself
into a radiant rayon "light=flesh," a light=flesh readily confused with a worker's
arm and the perfect medium for "the coming revolution in male fashions." Whereas
in The Poem of Viscose Tower the nonhuman consisted in the attribution of
hyperbolic passions to plant life and to abstract mechanical nemeses, here it is associ-
ated instead with a glistening metallic world in which automation has endowed ma-
chines and viscous liquids with humanlike powers of agency and autonomy. It is
their alternately ecstatic, riotous, and bellicose story that unfolds with "not a human
in sight." Not a human in sight, that is, aside from the poet, who has slipped in "as
if into a parenthesis full of automata." He is there to reassure us that, though nonhu-
man, the parenthesis in question is hardly inhuman. It summons up no specters of
alienation, exploitation, or mass unemployment. On the contrary, the parenthetical
microcosm is enframed by two superhuman promises: that of a heroic nation-state
wrapping the planet in its radiant mantle and that of an airborne humanity, "cheek
73. Marinetti, typescript, E T. Marinetti Papers, accession no. 920092, box 6, folder
29.

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to cheek" with the sun, fulfilling the thwarted dream of Daedalus, artificer of artifi-
cers (fig. 31).
The tenacious efforts of numerous peoples-the Italian not least

among them-to compete with the silkworm by creating wearable female
and male clothing or better a tender elastic equivalent to the human epi-
dermis are well known.
My fierce yearning for thoroughly Italian female fashions and for
agile male fashions unlike the fussy Nordic uniforms74 that we usually
don led me to the machinery and laboratories of Royal Venice75 to see for
myself the degree of perfection attained by plant-derived silk.
To this end I set off in a sleek automobile that had already trium-
phantly trampled the sibylline savagery-all traps of water and caked
mud-of the Athens-Delphi road.
Beautiful cadenced velocities of this our geometrical superhighway
that the gaze threads like the soul of a long-range cannon piercing the
horizon line's skeptical gray distances with bold explosive novelties.76
My inborn hatred for the worship of all things foreign77 a vice that
74. Marinetti's anti-Nordic polemic represents the flip side of his pro-Mediterranean
campaigns of the 1930s. Though its roots extend back to the intense anti-Austrian and anti-
German sentiments of futurism's pro-interventionist activities before World War I, it be-
came particularly pronounced in documents such as Thayaht and Marinetti's "First Futurist
Manifesto of Italian Fashion" (1932): "Until now, the Nordic capitals (London, Paris, New
York, Berlin) have laid down the law as concerns all aspects of modern dress, whether for
men or for women. The time has come for a new turn in world taste and it is incumbent
upon Italy to bring the joys of sleekness, speed, and color to the masses assembled in public
squares, theaters, and on the boulevards" (Thayaht and Marinetti, "First Futurist Manifesto
of Italian Fashion," typescript, E T. Marinetti Papers, accession no. 850702, folder 172, p. 1).
75. "Royal Venice" here refers to greater Venice, including the Friuli region, the loca-
tion of the SNIA Viscosa's Torviscosa facilities.
76. Much like Hitler's Autobahn system, the autostrada system was one of Mussolini's
showpiece public works projects. Marinetti's mention of it here is suggestive, inasmuch as
road building will be the topic of two other poems contained in The Non-Human Poem of
Technicisms: "Simultaneous Poem of the Coastal Highway Dressed in Wheels" ("Poesia sim-
ultanea della litoranea vestita di ruote") and "Simultaneous Poem of the Coastal Highway
Speed Watering Trough" ("Poesia simultanea della litoranea abbeveratoio di velocith").
Both come immediately after the "Simultaneous Poem of a Milk Dress" and further develop
the weaving/road building connection: in the first, the coastal highway is imagined as a
"long long brown loom with leaping black automobile spools that pumps out the brand new
textile like a train" (Marinetti, "Poesia simultanea della litoranea vestita di ruote," II Poema
non umano dei tecnicismi,in Teoria e invenzione futurista, p. 1171); in the second, the poet sees
"bobbins bobbins of rolled-up roadways liquefying themselves into ribbons of breathtaking
lightness" (Marinetti, "Poesia simultanea della Litoranea abbeveratoio di velocit," II Poema
non umano dei tecnicismi, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, p. 1177).
77. The Italian word is esterofilia, or "foreignophilia": an increasingly important Mari-
nettian theme during the fascist decades.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
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FIG. 31.-"Weaving an empire through exports." Display from the National Texti
Exhibition of Rome. From La rivista illustrata del popolo d'Italia, Dec. 1937.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:19 UTC
still imperils Italy's artistic industrial supremacy78 sped up my wheels and

blood as I became acquainted with the molecular drama of cellulose be-
ing soaked in cold caustic soda.79
An immense splendid hall harbors the deep life of Swedish fir forests
now subject to an Italian discipline of temperatures.
For this purpose large ammonia-filled compressors churn and chill
while they are watched over by the intermittent flutter of white and red
pilot lights reminiscent of the luminous nocturnal telegraphy of moun-
tain artillery duels. As on the Trentine front80 where the few soldiers were
often invisible here one would be hard put to spot fifteen hundred fac-
tory workers.
Step by step the cellulose is decanted purified pressed milled with
no intrusion of human hands.
It is alive, no doubt: indeed, it requires a mysterious period of re-
pose. I sense it transforming itself in enormous horizontal tanks whose
slow rotations make them into the stomachs of gigantic silkworms.
The monstrous patience genius of legions of chemists long ago dis-
covered the formula for achieving solubility: so let alkaline cellulose wed
the carbon bisulfide to which it was betrothed so that it may liquefy8' in
a xanthogenate82 orange- and rust-colored like a bloody weapon amidst
the festive drumbeat of belts that fearlessly stretch between lower and
upper wheels.
Left to sit the solution turns purple in an acid bath that causes it to
precipitate into the thread's base components solid flocks or floss.
Not a human in sight.
I insinuate myself like a mute word into the chemistry lab as if into a
parenthesis full of automata delicately extending silk threads across metal
resistance meters.
On the wall magnified cross sections of the threads and floss whose
ragged edges insure a more elastic absorption of dyes recalling the great
sawmills of the fir forests.
The haunting sickly-sweet scent of sulphur guides me towards
78. The word primato encompasses meanings that include the notions of supremacy,
sovereignty, preeminence, and the achievement of a championship or record (in the sense
of "land speed record").
79. The Italian term is macerantesi, literally a reference to the process in which the
cellulose is detached by being steeped or slaked, like flax or hemp, so as to remove the fiber
from the woody tissue of the reeds; the technical term for this process is retting. The overlap
between this text and "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light" begins with this passage.
80. Among the most active fronts during World War I, the Trentine front was the site
of much of Marinetti's military service.
81. Marinetti's use of liquidarsi in the sense of "to liquefy" is archaizing. In standard
usage the term means "to liquidate," in the sense of liquidating debts or of annihilating.
82. In the original, santogenato, a learned technical term based on the Greek xanthds
(yellow), referring here to a viscous, golden brown solution whose principal ingredient was
cellulose xanthate in a sodium hydroxide solution.

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squared-off basins filled with sulphuric acid and sodium sulfate where
the viscose, now beatified thanks to its latest transfiguration and fully
filtered through sheets of wadding, enjoys a final rest before its defini-
tive travail.
Up to this point its mysterious day has unfolded under science's
watchful eye and its molecular weight remains unknown and will remain
so until after the impending marvel.
The vast hall thrusts in my face the feverish multiple noisemaking83
of spinning machines to a depth of three hundred meters.
Air of urgency of battles and revolutionary rallies so greatly do the
double files of bobbing bobbins resemble orators' shouting mouths and
machine gun barrels. All are aimed at the fearless observer who is deter-
mined to find out at any cost why and how in the aforementioned filtra-
tion process the solution that has now been extruded through a golden
spinneret84 coagulates into a thread leaping up onto the bobbin around
which it speedily coils. One meter per second.
Prodigy of this convulsive repetition of infinite prodigies. Imperturb-
ability of machines that command other machines in military fashion. On
rails massive cars roll by spitting up the insolent animality of radiant silk.
To the touch hands are fooled into enjoying fresh bread or the warm
flesh of a beautiful woman.85
They vanish in the ample hall devoted to the twisting of threads.86
The scent of sulphur becomes one with the orange-colored taste battling
the furious din of cicadas on red-hot August roadways.
Chirping insanely drunk in fact with uncontainable joy the other
thousand wheels stage a mock bicycle race seen from a glass-ceilinged
basement.
Hilarity hilarity inexaustible hilarity of wheels happy to have de-
feated the sacred silkworm mantled in Chinese regality.
The hilarity spreads to motors in the adjoining room that stir up a
tidal wave of resplendent skeins. Their boiling and frenzied desulphuriza-
tion and their deeply affecting joyous bleachings find expression in a
83. In the original, polirumorismo. The term refers back to Luigi Russolo's 1913 mani-
festo, The Art of Noise. See Luigi Russolo, L'arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista (Milan, 1913).
84. The process being described is the literal spinning of the rayon that here, as in
present industrial practice, is accomplished by forcing chemically treated cellulose through
tiny apertures in thimble-shaped platinum nozzles known as spinnerets. (The latter term is
borrowed from the insect world, referring to the organs with which insects such as silk-
worms and caterpillars produce silk or thread.) The resulting rayon filament is subsequently
hardened by drying or by chemical treatment, and/or is cut into short lengths that are then
woven into yarn.
85. In the original, femmina, a term that bears stronger animal, and therefore sexual,
connotations than donna.
86. The reference is to a process technically akin to the torcitura della seta or "throwing
of silk," by means of which processed filaments are twisted into threads.

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stormy orchestra of whinnies jingle-bells cracks-of-the-whip87 a cursing

entanglement of wheels and horses.88
Let the substance now be rebaptized shiny radiant light=flesh be-
cause there is no disjunction between the delicate white skin of the work-
er's arm and the skein that she hands me.
Let the remarkable variety of its hues be enriched by the Futurist
genius of Prampolini, Depero, Benedetta, Dottori, Fillia, Tato, Munari,
etc.89 and so many other inventors of lines= tones lightning-flash nuances.
This shall be the most suitable material for the coming revolution in
male fashions.
Speed of reflexes and of almost fleshly pliancies amidst the mirror
action of aeronautical aluminium competing and comingling with sheet-
metal9o wings at an altitude of three thousand meters cheek to cheek with
a less remote sun, the new wingZed tailor for feathered humans and rival
to the electrical searchlights that so divinely cut the heavy cloth of night.
So it is that our artistic industrial pride will drape the earth's curves
in soft and resilient Italrayon racing against Marconi's short and long
radio waves.9'
87. The typescript reads "schioppi di frusta" or, literally, "carbine of whip," one of
several transcription errors that I have had to correct. Schiocchi difrusta is the correct form
of the expression.
88. The overlap with "Simultaneous Poem of Woven Light" ends with this sentence.
89. The references are to various key members of Marinetti's futurist entourage: the
painters and set designers Enrico Prampolini (1894-1956) and Depero (1892-1960);
Benedetta Marinetti Cappa (1897-1977), Marinetti's wife and the author of Viaggio di Gar-
ard: Romanzo cosmico per teatro (1931) and Astra e il sottomarino: Vito trasognata (1935); the
painter Gerardo Dottori (1884-1977); the painter and sculptor Fillia (Luigi Colombo;
1904-36); the painter Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni; 1896-1974); and the graphic artist, de-
signer, and painter Bruno Munari (1907-), responsible for the original layout of The Poem
of the Milk Dress.
90. The original reads "compensati di metallo." Compensato occurs more commonly in
phrases such as legno compensato (plywood) and here appears to refer to the relatively recent
practice of building airplane bodies out of pop-riveted metallic skins.
91. The analogy is stronger than it might at first appear since rayon comes in short
and long thread varieties. Italrayon was the trademark developed by the SNIA Viscosa in
the early 1930s in order to confer a national identity upon its rayon products.

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Culture and Finance Capital
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
REFERENCES

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
Culture and Finance Capital
Fredric Jameson
Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century is remarkable for, among

many other things, producing a problem we did not know we had, in the
very process of crystallizing a solution to it: the problem of finance capi-
tal.' No doubt it swarmed around our heads in the form of vague per-
plexities, quizzicalities that we never paused long enough over to form
into real questions: Why monetarism? Why is investment and the stock
market getting more attention than an industrial production that seems
on the point of disappearing anyway? How can you have profit without
production in the first place? Where does all this excessive speculation
come from? Does the new form of the city (including postmodern archi-
tecture) have anything to do with a mutation in the very dynamic of land
values (ground rent)? Why should land speculation and the stock market
come to the fore as dominant sectors in advanced societies, where ad-
vanced certainly has something to do with technology but presumably
ought to have something to do with production as well? All of these nag-
ging questions were also secret doubts about the Marxian model of pro-
duction, as well as about the turn of history in the 1980s, stimulated by
the Reaganite/Thatcherite tax cuts. We seemed to be returning to the
most fundamental form of class struggle, one so basic that it spelled the
end of all those Western Marxist and theoretical subtleties that the cold
war had called forth. During the long period of the cold war and of West-
1. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times (New York, 1994).

The extract from Cultural Mutation: Tracking the Postmodern is reprinted with kind permission of the publishers, Verso.
246

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ern Marxism-a period one really needs to date from 1917-a complex
analysis of ideology needed to be developed in order to unmask the per-
sistent substitutions of incommensurate dimensions, the passing off of
political arguments in the place of economic ones, and the appeal to al-
leged traditions: freedom and democracy, God, Manichaeism, the values
of the West and of the Judeo-Christian or Roman-Christian heritage as
answers to new and unpredictable social experiments. This analysis was
also needed to accommodate the new conceptions of the operation of the
unconscious discovered by Freud and presumably at work in the layering
of social ideology. In those days the theory of ideology constituted the
better mousetrap. Every self-respecting theorist felt the obligation to in-
vent a new one, only to be met with ephemeral acclaim by curious specta-
tors always ready to move on to the next model at a moment's notice,
even when that next model meant revamping the very name of ideology
itself and substituting episteme, metaphysics, practices, or whatever.
But today many of these complexities seem to have disappeared, and
faced with the Reagan-Kemp and Thatcher utopias of immense in-
vestments and increases in production to come, based on deregulation,
privatization, and the obligatory opening of markets, we sense that the
problems of ideological analysis are enormously simplified, and the ideol-
ogies themselves far more transparent. Now that, following master think-
ers like Hayek, it has become customary to identify political freedom with
market freedom, the motivations behind ideology no longer seem to need
an elaborate machinery of decoding and hermeneutic reinterpretation;
and the guiding thread of all contemporary politics seems much easier to
grasp, namely, that the rich want their taxes lowered. This means that an
older vulgar Marxism may once again be more relevant to our situation
than the newer models; but we also face more objective problems about
money itself, which had seemed less relevant in the cold war period.
The rich were certainly doing something with all this new income
that no longer needed to be wasted on social services; rather than go into
new factories, it seemed to get invested in the stock market. Whence a
second perplexity: The Soviets used to joke about the miracle of their
system, whose edifice seemed comparable only to those houses kept
standing by the swarm of termites eating away inside them. But some of
us had the same feeling about the United States. After the disappearance
(or brutal downsizing) of heavy industry, the only thing that seemed to
keep it going (besides the two prodigious American industries of food
and entertainment) was the stock market. How was this possible, and
where did the money keep coming from? And if money itself rested on so
Fredric Jameson is professor of French and comparative literature

at Duke University. His latest book is entitled The Seeds of Time (1994).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
248 FredricJameson Culture and Finance Capital
fragile a basis, why did "fiscal responsibility" matter so much in the first
place, and on what was the very logic of monetarism itself grounded?
The dawning suspicion that we were in a new period of finance capi-
talism was not given much theoretical encouragement or nourishment by
the tradition. One old book, Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital of 1910,
seemed to give a historical analysis of an economic and a structural situa-
tion: the techniques of the great German trusts of the pre-World War I
period and their relations with the banks and eventually the Flottenbau
required the concept of monopoly, which Lenin appropriated in this
sense for his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.2 It
too seemed to do away with finance capital by changing its name and
displacing it onto the power relations and competition between the great
capitalist states. But these "highest stages" now lie well in our own past;
imperialism is gone, replaced by neocolonialism and globalization; the
great international financial centers do not (yet) seem the locus of fero-
cious competition among the nations of the capitalist First World, despite
a few complaints about the Bundesbank and its interest policies; imperial
Germany meanwhile has been replaced by a Federal Republic that may
or may not be more powerful than its predecessor but that is now part of
an allegedly united Europe. So these historical descriptions do not seem
to do us much good, and here the teleological ("highest stage") does seem
fully to merit all the opprobrium called down upon it in recent years.
But where the economist could only give us empirical history, it re-
mained for a historical narrative to give us the structural and economic
theory we needed to solve this conundrum. Finance capital has to be
something like a stage in the way it distinguishes itself from other mo-
ments of the development of capitalism. Arrighi's luminous insight was
that this peculiar kind of telos need not lie in a straight line but might
well organize itself in a spiral (a figure that also avoids the mythical over-
tones of the various cyclical visions).
It is a picture that unites various traditional requirements. Capital-
ism's movement must be seen as discontinuous but expansive. With each
crisis, it mutates into a larger sphere of activity and a wider field of pene-
tration, of control, investment, and transformation. This doctrine, most
forcefully argued by Ernest Mandel in his great book Late Capitalism, has
the merit of accounting for capitalism's resiliency,3 which Marx himself
already posited in the Grundrisse (but which is less evident in Capital itself)
and which has repeatedly unsettled left prognostications (immediately
after World War II and then again in the 1980s and 1990s). But the objec-
tion to Mandel's positions has turned on the latent teleology of his slogan
2. See Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital, trans. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon
(1910; Boston, 1981), and V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, trans. pub.
(New York, 1939).
3. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (New York, 1975).

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late capitalism, as though this were the last stage conceivable, or as though
the process were some uniform historical progression. (My own use of the
term is meant as a homage to Mandel and not particularly as a prophetic
forecast; Lenin does say "highest," as we have seen, while Hilferding,
more prudently, simply calls it the '"jingste," the latest or most recent,
which is obviously preferable.)
The cyclical scheme now allows us to coordinate these features. If we
position discontinuity not only in time but also in space, and if we add
back in the historian's perspective, which clearly enough needs to reckon
with the national situations and the uniquely idiosyncratic developments
within the national states, let alone within the greater regional groupings
(Third versus First Worlds, for example), then the local teleologies of the
capitalist process can be reconciled with its own spasmodic historical de-
velopments and mutations as they leap from geographical space to
space.
Thus, the system is better seen as a kind of virus (not Arrighi's fig-
ure), and its development is something like an epidemic (better still, a
rash of epidemics, an epidemic of epidemics). The system has its own
logic, which powerfully undermines and destroys the logic of more tradi-
tional or precapitalist societies and economies. Deleuze and Guattari call
this an axiomatic, as opposed to the older precapitalist, tribal, or imperial
codes.4 But epidemics also play themselves out, like a fire for want of
oxygen; and they also leap to new and more propitious settings, in which
the preconditions are favorable to renewed development. (I hasten to add
that Arrighi's complex political and economic articulation of these para-
doxical turns, whereby winners lose and losers sometimes win, is far more
dialectical than my figures suggest.)
Thus, in the new scheme of The Long Twentieth Century, capitalism has
known any number of false starts and fresh starts, on an ever larger scale.
Bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy, the nascent commerce of the great
city-states: these phenomena and others evidently occurred in a petri dish
of modest proportions, which does not allow the new thing much in the
way of scope but which offers a still relatively restricted and sheltered
environment. The political form, here, the city-state itself, stands as an
obstacle and a limit to development, although this observation should not
be extrapolated into a thesis about the way in which form (the political)
restricts content (the economic). Then the process that is capitalism leaps
over into Spain, where Arrighi's great insight lies in the analysis of this
leap as an essentially symbiotic moment. We knew that Spain had an ear-
lier form of capitalism, of course, which was disastrously undermined by
the conquest of the New World and the fleets of silver. But Arrighi stresses
the way in which Spanish capitalism is to be understood in close func-
4. See Gilles Deleuze and FMlix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi,
vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 461.

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250 Fredric Jameson Culture and Finance Capital
tional and symbiotic relationship to Genoa, which financed the empire

and which was thus a full participant in the new moment. It is a kind of
dialectical link to the earlier Italian city-state moment, which will not be
reproduced in the later discontinuous history, unless one is also willing
to posit a kind of propagation by rivalry and negation, that is, the way in
which the enemy is led to take on your own development, to match it, to
succeed where you fell short.
Such is the next moment, the leap to Holland and the Dutch, to a
system more resolutely based on the commercialization of the ocean and
the waterways. After that, the story becomes more familiar; the limits of
the Dutch system pave the way for a more successful English development
along the same lines. The United States becomes the center of capitalist
development in the twentieth century, and Arrighi, fraught with doubts,
leaves a question mark about the capacity of Japan to constitute yet an-
other cycle and another stage, to replace an American "empire" in full
internal contradiction (the word is not strictly appropriate, according to
Wallerstein). At this point, perhaps, Arrighi's model is no longer useful,
and the complex realities of contemporary globalization may now de-
mand something else, of a wholly different synchronic mode.
Yet we have not come to the most exciting feature of Arrighi's history,
namely, the internal stages of the cycle itself, the way in which capitalist
development in each of these moments replicates itself and reproduces a
series of three moments (this may be taken to be the local teleological
content of his new "universal history"). These are modeled on the famous
formula of Capital: M-C-M', in which money is transformed into capital,
which then generates supplementary money, in an expanding dialectic of
accumulation. The first phase of the tripartite process has to do with
trade, which, in one way or another, and often by way of the violence and
brutality of primitive accumulation, brings into being a quantity of money
for eventual capitalization. In the second classic moment, then, that
money becomes capital and is invested in agriculture and manufacture.
It is territorialized and transforms its associated area into a center of pro-
duction. But this second stage knows internal limits, which weigh on pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption alike. They are worked by a
falling rate of profit endemic to the second stage in general: "profits are
still high, but it is a condition for their maintenance that they should not be in-
vested in further expansion."5
At this point, the third stage begins, which is the moment that pri-
marily interests us here. Arrighi's treatment of this-the recurrent mo-
ment of a cyclical finance capitalism-is inspired by Braudel's remark
that "the stage of financial expansion" is always "a sign ofautumn."6 Specu-
5. John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (Oxford, 1969); quoted in Arrighi, The Long
Twentieth Century, p. 94.
6. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (New York, 1984); quoted in ibid., p. 6.

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lation-the withdrawal of profits from the home industries, the increas-

ingly feverish search, not so much for new markets (those are also
saturated) as for the new kind of profits available in financial transactions
themselves and as such-is the way in which capitalism now reacts to
and compensates for the closing of its productive moment. Capital itself
becomes free-floating. It separates from the concrete context of its pro-
ductive geography. Money becomes in a second sense and to a second
degree abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense), as
though somehow in the national moment money still had a content. It
was cotton money, or wheat money, textile money, railroad money, and
the like. Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it separates
itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight. We
know today only too well (but Arrighi shows us that this contemporary
knowledge of ours only replicates the bitter experience of the dead, of
disemployed workers in the older moments of capitalism, of local mer-
chants and dying cities as well) that the term is literal. We know that there
exists such a thing as capital flight: the disinvestment, the pondered or
hasty moving on to the greener pastures of higher rates of investment
return and cheaper labor. This free-floating capital, in its frantic search
for more profitable investments (a process prophetically described for the
U.S. as long ago as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital of
1966),' will begin to live its life in a new context: no longer in the factories
and the spaces of extraction and production, but on the floor of the stock
market, jostling for more intense profitability. But it won't be as one
industry competing with another branch, nor even one productive
technology against another more advanced one in the same line of
manufacturing, but rather in the form of speculation itself: specters of
value, as Derrida might put it, vying against each other in a vast, world-
wide, disembodied phantasmagoria.8 This is of course the moment of
finance capital as such, and it now becomes clear how, according to
Arrighi's extraordinary analysis, finance capital is not only a kind of
"highest stage" but the highest and last stage of every moment of capital
itself. During its cycles capital exhausts its returns in the new national
and international capitalist zone and seeks to die and be reborn in some
"higher" incarnation, a vaster and immeasurably more productive one,
in which it is fated to live through again the three fundamental stages: its
implantation, its productive development, and its financial or speculative
final stage.
All of which, as I suggested above, might be dramatically heightened,
for our own period, by a reminder of the results of the cybernetic "revolu-
7. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American
Economic and Social Order (New York, 1966).
8. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
tion," the intensification of communications technology to the point at

which capital transfers today abolish space and time, virtually instantane-
ously effectuated across national spaces. The results of these lightninglike
movements of immense quantities of money around the globe are incal-
culable, yet already they have clearly produced new kinds of political
blockage and also new and unrepresentable symptoms in late-capitalist
everyday life.
For the problem of abstraction-of which this one of finance capital
is a part-must also be grasped in its cultural expressions. Real abstrac-
tions in an older period-the effects of money and number in the big
cities of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, the very phenomena
analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his
pathbreaking essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"9-had as one sig-
nificant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts.
In this sense, modernism faithfully-even "realistically"-reproduced
and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Le-
nin's "imperialist stage." Today, what is called postmodernity articulates
the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively
and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on
Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism: the
finance capital moment of globalized society, the abstractions brought
with it by cybernetic technology (which it is a misnomer to call postin-
dustrial except as a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older,
"productive" moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance
capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural
production to map its effects; indeed, mass cultural production and con-
sumption itself-at one with globalization and the new information tech-
nology-are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late
capitalism and as fully a part of the latter's generalized commodity
system.
Now I want to speculate on the potential uses of this new theory for
cultural and literary interpretation, and in particular for the understand-
ing of the historical or structural sequence of realism, modernism, and
postmodernism, which has interested many of us in recent years. For bet-
ter or for worse, only the first of these-realism-has been the object of
much serious attention and analysis in the Marxist tradition, the attacks
on modernism being on the whole largely negative and contrastive, al-
though not without their occasional local suggestivity (particularly in the
work of Lukaics). I want to show how Arrighi's work now puts us in a
position to frame a better and more global theory of these three cultural
stages or moments, it being understood that the analysis will be staged
on the level of the mode of production (or in brief, that of the economic)
9. See Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," On Individuality and Social
Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), pp. 324-39.

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rather than on social classes, a level of interpretation which I argued in

The Political Unconscious we need to separate from the economic frame in
order to avoid category mistakes.10 Arrighi's work gives us new themes
and materials to work with in this area; and it is worth vulgarizing that
work by suggesting that it offers us a new, or perhaps we should simply
say a more complex and satisfying, account of the role of money in
these processes.
Indeed, the classical political thinkers of the period, from Hobbes to
Locke and including those of the Scottish Enlightenment, all identified
money far more clearly than we do as the central novelty, the central
mystery, at the heart of the transition to modernity, taken in its largest
sense as capitalist society (and not merely in narrower cultural terms). In
his classic work, C. B. MacPherson has shown how Locke's vision of his-
tory turns on the transition to a money economy, while the ambiguous
richness of Locke's ideological solution was predicated on the positioning
of money in both places, in the modernity that follows the social contract
of civilized society, but also in the state of nature itself. Money, MacPher-
son demonstrates, is what allows Locke his extraordinary dual and super-
imposed systems, of nature and of history, of equality and of class conflict
at the same time, or, if you prefer, the peculiar nature of money is what
allows Locke to operate simultaneously as a philosopher of human nature
and as a historical analyst of social and economic change."
Money has continued to play this kind of role in the traditions of a
Marxian analysis of culture, where it is less often a purely economic cate-
gory than a social one. In other words, Marxist literary criticism-to limit
ourselves to that-has less often tried to analyze its objects in terms of
capital and value, in terms of the system of capitalism itself, than it has
in terms of class, and most often of one class in particular, namely, the
bourgeoisie. This is obviously something of a paradox. One would have
expected an engagement of the literary critics with the very center of
Marx's work, the structural account of the historic originality of capital-
ism, but such efforts seem to have involved too many mediations (no
doubt in the spirit in which Oscar Wilde complained that socialism re-
quired too many evenings). It was thus much simpler to establish the
more direct mediation of a merchant and business class, with its emergent
class culture, and the forms and texts themselves. Money enters the pic-
ture here only insofar as exchange, merchant activity and the like, and,
later on, nascent capitalism determine the coming into being of some
historically original burgher or city merchant, and, more generally, bour-
geois class life. (Meanwhile, the aesthetic dilemmas of modern times are
10. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1981).
11. See C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
(Oxford, 1964).

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for Marxism almost exclusively linked to the problem of imagining some

equivalent and parallel class culture and art for that other emergent
group, the industrial working class.)
This means that Marxian cultural theory has almost exclusively
turned on the question of realism, insofar as that is associated with a
bourgeois class culture. And for the most part (with some famous and
signal exceptions) the analyses of modernism have taken a negative and
critical form: how and why does the latter deviate from the realistic path?
(It is true that in the hands of Lukaics this kind of question can produce
enlightening and sometimes significant results.) At any rate, I would
briefly illustrate this traditional Marxian focus on realism by way of Ar-
nold Hauser's The Social History of Art.12 I refer, for example, to the mo-
ment in which Hauser notes the naturalistic tendencies in the Egyptian
art of the Middle Kingdom at the moment of Ikhnaton's abortive revolu-
tion. These tendencies stand out sharply against the hieratic tradition so
familiar to us and therefore suggest the influence of new factors. Indeed,
if one persists in a much older anthropological and philosophical tradi-
tion for which religion determines the spirit of a given society, Ikhnaton's
abortive attempt to substitute monotheism would probably be explana-
tion enough. Hauser rightly feels that the religious determination re-
quires a further social determination in its turn, and unsurprisingly he
proposes a heightened influence of commerce and money on social life
and on the emergence of new kinds of social relations. But there is a
hidden mediation here, which Hauser does not articulate: the matter of
the history of perception as such and the emergence of new kinds of per-
ceptions. Herein lies the unorthodox kernel of these orthodox explana-
tions, for it is tacitly assumed that with the emergence of exchange value
a new interest in the physical properties of objects comes into being. Their
equivalence by way of the money form (which in standard Marxian eco-
nomics is grasped as the supercession of concrete use and function by an
essentially idealistic and abstract fetishism of commodities) here rather
leads to a more realistic interest in the body of the world and in the new
and more lively human relationships developed by trade. The merchants
and their consumers need to take a keener interest in the sensory nature
of their wares as well as in the psychological and characterological traits
of their interlocutors. These new interests develop new kinds of percep-
tions, both physical and social-new kinds of seeing, new types of behav-
ior-and in the long run create the conditions in which more realistic
art forms are not only possible but desirable, and encouraged by their
new publics.
It is an epochal explanation or account, which will not be satisfying
for anyone seeking to scrutinize the individual text. The proposition is
12. See Arnold Hauser, The Social History ofArt, trans. Hauser and Stanley Godman, 2
vols. (New York, 1951).

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also subject to radical and unexpected dialectical reversals in the later

stages. Above all, except for the obviously suggestive implications for plot
and character, the relevance of the account for language itself is less clear.
It would be abusive to assimilate the one great theoretician of the rela-
tions between realism and language, Erich Auerbach, to this schema,
even though a notion of expanding social democratization tactfully un-
derpins his work and informs an insistence on the transfer of popular
language to writing, which is however by no means his central emphasis.
This is no Wordsworthian emphasis on plain speech and speakers but
rather, I would like to suggest, an immense Bildungsroman whose protago-
nist is Syntax itself, as it develops throughout the Western European lan-
guages. He does not cite Mallarme: "Quel pivot, j'entends, dans ces
contrastes, ' l'intelligibilite? II faut une garantie-La Syntaxe-.""3 Yet
the adventures of syntax down the ages, from Homer to Proust, are the
deeper narrative of Mimesis: the gradual unlimbering of hierarchical sen-
tence structure, and the differential evolution of the incidental clauses of
the new sentence in such a way that each can now register a hitherto
unperceived local complexity of the Real. This is the great narrative and
teleological thread of Auerbach's history, whose multiple determinants
remain to be worked out but clearly include many of the social features
already mentioned.14
It should also be noted that in both these theories of realism the new
artistic and perceptual categories are grasped as being absolutely and
fundamentally linked to modernity (if not yet modernism, of which how-
ever realism can be seen here as a kind of first stage). They also include
the great modernist topos of the break and the Novum, for whether it is
with the older hieratic conventions of a formulaic art, or the cumbersome
inherited syntax of a previous literary period, both insist on the necessar-
ily subversive and critical, destructive, character of their realisms, which
must clear away a useless and jumbled monumentality in order to de-
velop their new experimental instruments and laboratories.
This is the point at which, without false modesty, I want to register
the two contributions I have felt able to make to some as yet unformu-
lated and properly Marxian theory of modernism. The first of these pro-
poses a dialectical theory of the paradox we have just encountered,
namely, realism as modernism, or a realism that is so fundamentally a
part of modernity that it demands description in some of the ways we
have traditionally reserved for modernism itself: the break, the Novum,
the emergence of new perceptions, and the like. What I proposed was to
13. St6phane Mallarme, "Le Mystere dans les lettres" Divagations (Paris, 1917), p. 289;
trans. Bradford Cook, under the title "Mystery in Literature," Mallarnu: Selected Prose Poems,
Essays, and Letters (Baltimore, 1956), p. 32: "What sure guide is there to intelligibility in the
midst of these contrasts? What guarantee? Syntax."
14. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.
Willard Trask (Garden City, N.Y., 1953).

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see these historically distinct and seemingly incompatible modes of real-

ism and modernism as so many stages in a dialectic of reification, which
seizes on the properties and the subjectivities, the institutions and the
forms of an older precapitalist lifeworld in order to strip them of their
hierarchical or religious content. Realism and secularization are a first
Enlightenment moment in that process; it is dialectical when it leaps and
turns from quantity to quality. With the intensification of the forces of
reification, their suffusion through ever greater zones of social life (in-
cluding individual subjectivity), it is as though the force that generated
the first realism now turns against it and devours it in its turn. The ideo-
logical and social preconditions of realism-its naive belief in a stable
social reality, for example-are now themselves unmasked, demystified,
and discredited; and modernist forms-generated by the very same pres-
sure of reification-take their place. And, in this narrative, the superces-
sion of modernism by the postmodern is, predictably enough, read in the
same way as a further intensification of the forces of reification, which
has utterly unexpected and dialectical results for the now hegemonic
modernisms themselves.
As for my other contribution, it posited a specific formal process in
the modern that seemed to me much less significantly influential in either
realism or postmodernism but that can be linked dialectically to both.
For this "theory" of modernist formal processes I wanted to follow Lukaics
(and others) in seeing modernist reification in terms of analysis, decom-
position, and, above all, internal differentiation. Thus, in the course of
hypothesizing modernism in various contexts, I found it interesting and
productive to see this particular process in terms of autonomization: what
were formerly parts of a whole become independent and self-sufficient.
It is something that can be observed in the chapters and their subepi-
sodes in Ulysses, and also in the Proustian sentence. I wanted to establish
a kinship here, not so much with the sciences (as is customarily done
when people talk about the sources of modernity), but with the labor
process itself. And here the great phenomenon of Taylorization (contem-
poraneous with modernism) slowly imposes itself: a division of labor (the-
orized as long ago as Adam Smith) now becoming a method of mass
production in its own right by way of the separation of different stages
and their reorganization around principles of efficiency (to use the ideo-
logical word for it). Harry Braverman's classic Labor and Monopoly Capital
remains the cornerstone of any approach to that labor process and seems
to me full of suggestions for the cultural and structural analysis of mod-
ernism as such.'5
But now, in the period some people like to call post-Fordist, this par-
ticular logic no longer seems to obtain; just as in the cultural sphere,
15. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1974).

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forms of abstraction that in the modern period seemed ugly, dissonant,

scandalous, indecent, or repulsive have also entered the mainstream of
cultural consumption (in the largest sense, from advertising to commod-
ity styling, from visual decoration to artistic production) and no longer
shock anyone. Our entire system of commodity production and consump-
tion today is based on those older, once antisocial modernist forms. Nor
does the conventional notion of abstraction seem very appropriate in the
postmodern context; and yet, as Arrighi teaches us, nothing is quite so
abstract and deterritorialized as the finance capital that underpins and
sustains postmodernity as such.
At the same time, it also seems clear that if autonomization character-
izes the modern, it is still very much with us in postmodernity. The Euro-
peans were the first, for example, to be struck by the rapidity of the
editing and the sequence of shots that characterized classical American
film. It is a process that has everywhere intensified in television editing,
where an advertisement lasting only half a minute can today include an
extraordinary number of distinct shots or images without in the least pro-
voking the modernist estrangement and bewilderment of the work of a
great modernist independent filmmaker like Stan Brakhage. So a process
and a logic of extreme fragmentation still seems to obtain here but with-
out any of its earlier effects. Is one then to imagine, with Deleuze and
Guattari, that we here confront a recoding of hitherto decoded or axiom-
atic materials, something they posit as an operation inseparable from late
capitalism, whose intolerable axiomatics are everywhere locally turned
back into private gardens, private religions, vestiges of older or even ar-
chaic local coding systems? It is however an interpretation that raises em-
barrassing questions. In particular, how different is this opposition that
Deleuze and Guattari develop between the axiomatic and the code from
classical existentialism-the loss of meaning everywhere in the modern
world, followed by the attempt locally to reendow it, either by regressing
to religion or making an absolute out of the private and the contingent?
What also militates against the concept of recoding is that it is not a
local but a general process; the languages of postmodernity are universal,
in the sense in which they are media languages. They are thus very differ-
ent from the solitary obsessions and private thematic hobbies of the great
moderns, which achieved their universalization, indeed their very social-
ization, only through a process of collective commentary and canoniza-
tion. Unless entertainment and visual consumption are to be thought of
as essentially religious practices, then, the notion of recoding seems to
lose its force here. Put another (more existential) way, it can be said that
the scandal of the death of God and the end of religion and metaphysics
placed the moderns in a situation of anxiety and crisis, which now seems
to have been fully absorbed by a more fully humanized and socialized,
"culturalized" society. Its voids have been saturated and neutralized, not
by new values, but by the visual culture of consumerism as such. So the

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anxieties of the absurd, to take only one example, are themselves recap-
tured and recontained by a new and postmodern cultural logic, which
offers them for consumption fully as much as its other seemingly more
anodyne exhibits.
It is thus to this new break that we must turn our attention, and it is
in its theorization that Arrighi's analysis of finance capitalism makes a
signal contribution, which I first propose to examine in terms of the cate-
gory of abstraction itself and in particular of the peculiar form of abstrac-
tion that is money. Worringer's pathbreaking essay on abstraction linked
it to distinct cultural impulses and concluded that it finally drew its force
from the intensifying assimilation of more ancient and nonfigurative vis-
ual materials into the West's "imaginary museum," which he associates
with a kind of death drive. But the crucial intervention for our purposes
is Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in which the processes of
the new industrial city, very much including the abstract flows of money,
determine a whole new and more abstract way of thinking and perceiv-
ing, radically different from the object world of the older merchant cities
and countryside. What is at stake here is a dialectical transformation of
the effects of exchange value and monetary equivalence; if the latter had
once announced and provoked a new interest in the properties of objects,
now in this new stage equivalence has as its result a withdrawal from older
notions of stable substances and their unifying identifications. Thus, if all
these objects have become equivalent as commodities, if money has lev-
eled their intrinsic differences as individual things, one may now pur-
chase as it were their various, henceforth semiautonomous qualities or
perceptual features; and both color and shape free themselves from their
former vehicles and come to live independent existences as fields of per-
ception and as artistic raw materials. This is then a first stage, but only a
first one, in the onset of an abstraction that becomes identified as aes-
thetic modernism but that in hindsight should be limited to the historical
period of the second stage of capitalist industrialization-that of oil and
electricity, the combustion engine and the new velocities and technologies
of the motorcar, the steamship and the flying machine-in the decades
immediately preceding and following the turn of the century.
But before continuing this dialectical narrative, we need to return to
Arrighi for a moment. We have already spoken of the imaginative way in
which Arrighi exfoliates Marx's famous formula M-C-M' into a supple
and cyclical historical narrative. Marx began, as will be remembered, with
an inversion of another formula C-M-C, which characterizes commerce
as such: "the simple circulation of commodities begins with a sale and
ends with a purchase." 16 The merchant sells a commodity and with the
16. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 2 vols. (Har-
mondsworth, 1976), 1:249.

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money received buys another commodity: "the whole process begins

when money is received in return for commodities, and comes to an end
when money is given up in return for commodities."'7 It is not, as one
can readily imagine, a very profitable trajectory, except in those instances
between trading regions in which very special commodities such as salt
or spice can be transformed into money as exceptions to the general law
of equivalence. Besides this, as has already been said, the centrality of the
physical commodities themselves determines a kind of perceptual atten-
tion, along with the philosophical categories of the substance, that can
only lead to a more realistic aesthetic.
It is however the other formula that interests us, M-C-M', which will
be the dialectical space in which commerce (or if you prefer, merchant
capital) is transformed into capital tout court. I abridge Marx's explana-
tion (in chapter 4 of the first volume of Capital and merely observe the
gradual imposition of the prime on the second M: the moment in which
the focus of the operation is no longer on the commodity but on money,
and in which its impulse now lies in the investment of money in commod-
ity production, not for its own sake, but to increase the return of M, now
M'. In other words, riches transform into capital itself; this is the auto-
nomization of the process of capital accumulation, which asserts its own
logic over that of the production and consumption of goods as such, as
well as over the individual entrepreneur and the individual worker.
Now I want to introduce a Deleuzian neologism (this time very rele-
vant and his most famous and successful, I believe), which seems to me
dramatically to enhance our sense of what is at stake in this momentous
transformation. "Deterritorialization," which will immensely clarify the
meaning of Arrighi's story, has become very widely used for all kinds of
different phenomena; but I wish to assert that its first and as it were foun-
dational meaning lies in this very emergence of capitalism itself, as any
patient reconstruction of the central role of Marx in Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia would demonstrate. The first and most fateful deterritorialization
is then this one: what Deleuze and Guattari call the axiomatic of capital-
ism decodes the terms of the older precapitalist coding systems and "lib-
erates" them for new and more functional combinations. The resonance
of the new term can be measured against an altogether more frivolous
and even more successful current media word, decontextualization; it
properly suggests that anything wrenched out of its original context
(if you can imagine one) will always be recontextualized in new areas
and situations. But deterritorialization is far more absolute than that
(although its results can indeed be recaptured and even occasionally
"recoded" in new historical situations). For it rather implies a new onto-
17. Ibid.

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logical and free-floating state, one in which the content (to revert to Heg-
elian language) has definitively been suppressed in favor of the form, in
which the inherent nature of the product becomes insignificant, a mere
marketing pretext, while the goal of production no longer lies in any spe-
cific market, any specific set of consumers or social and individual needs,
but rather in its transformation into that element which by definition has
no context or territory, and indeed no use value as such, namely, money.
So it is that in any specific region of production, as Arrighi shows us,
there comes a moment in which the logic of capitalism-faced with the
saturation of local and even foreign markets-determines an abandon-
ment of that kind of specific production, along with its factories and
trained workforce, and, leaving them behind in ruins, takes its flight to
other more profitable ventures.
Or rather that moment is a dual one, and it is in this demonstration
of the two stages of deterritorialization that I see Arrighi's most funda-
mental originality and also his most suggestive contribution for cultural
analysis today. There is a deterritorialization in which capital shifts to
other and more profitable forms of production, often enough in new geo-
graphical regions. Then there is the grimmer conjuncture, in which the
capital of an entire center or region abandons production altogether in
order to seek maximization in nonproductive spaces, which as we have
seen are those of speculation, the money market, and finance capital in
general. Of course, here the word deterritorialization can celebrate its own
kinds of ironies; for one of the privileged forms of speculation today is
that of land and city space. The new postmodern informational or global
cities (as they have been called) thus result very specifically from the ulti-
mate deterritorialization, that of territory as such-the becoming abstract
of land and the earth, the transformation of the very background or con-
text of commodity exchange into a commodity in its own right. Land
speculation is therefore one face of a process whose other one lies in the
ultimate deterritorialization of globalization itself, where it would be a
great mistake to imagine something like the globe as yet a new and larger
space replacing the older national or imperial ones. Globalization is
rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ulti-
mate dematerialization, as messages that pass instantaneously from one
nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material
world.
I now want to offer some speculations as to the way in which this
new logic of finance capital-its radically new forms of abstraction, in
particular, which are sharply to be distinguished from those of modern-
ism as such-can be observed to operate in cultural production today or,
in other words, in what people have come to call postmodernity. What is
wanted is an account of abstraction in which the new deterritorialized
postmodern contents are to an older modernist autonomization as global
financial speculation is to an older kind of banking and credit, or as the

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stock market frenzies of the eighties are to the Great Depression. I don't
particularly want to introduce the theme of the gold standard here, which
fatally suggests a solid and tangible kind of value as opposed to various
forms of paper and plastic (or information on your computer). Or, per-
haps, the theme of gold would become relevant again only to the degree
that it was also grasped as an artificial and contradictory system in its own
right. What we want to be able to theorize is a modification in the very
nature of cultural tokens and the systems they operate in. If modernism
is a kind of cancelled realism, as I have suggested, one which segments
and differentiates some initial mimetic starting point, then it might be
likened to a largely accepted paper money, whose inflationary ups and
downs suddenly lead to the introduction of financial and speculative in-
struments and vehicles.
I want to examine this point of historical change in terms of the frag-
ment and its destiny throughout these various cultural moments. The
rhetoric of the fragment has been with us since the dawn of what the
Schlegels identified as modernism. It will be understood that I think it is
something of a misnomer, since the image contents in question are the
result, not of breakage, incompletion, or extreme wear and tear, but
rather of analysis. But the word is convenient for want of a better one,
and I'll go on using it in this brief final discussion. I want to begin by
recalling Ken Russell's seemingly jocular remark that in the twenty-first
century all fiction films will last no longer than fifteen minutes apiece;
the implication is that in a Late Show culture like our own, the elaborate
preparations we used to require in order to apprehend a series of images
as a story of some kind will be, for whatever reason, unnecessary. But
actually I think this can be documented by our own experience. Everyone
who still visits movie theaters has become aware of the way in which inten-
sified competition by the film industry for now-inveterate television view-
ers has led to a transformation in the very structure of the preview. It has
had to be developed and expanded, becoming a far more comprehensive
teaser for the film than it formerly was. At length the viewer of these
enforced coming attractions (five or six of them precede every feature
presentation and replace the older kinds of shorts) is led to make a mo-
mentous discovery, namely, that the preview is really all you need. You
no longer need to see the "full" two-hour version (unless the object is to
kill time, which it so often is). Nor is this something that has to do with
the quality of the film (although it may have something to do with the
quality of the preview, the better ones being cunningly arranged in such
a way that the story they seem to tell is not the same as the "real story" in
the "real film"). Nor does this new development have much to do with
knowing the plot or the story, for, in any case, in contemporary action
films, the story has become little more than a pretext on which to suspend
a perpetual present of thrills and explosions. Thus these images are pro-
vided in the seemingly brief anthology of shots and highlights offered by

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the preview, and they are fully satisfying in themselves, without the bene-
fit of the laborious threads and connections of the former plot. At that
point it would seem that the preview, as a structure and a work in its
own right, bears something of the same relationship to its supposed final
product, as a novelized film, written after the fact of the movie and pub-
lished later on as a kind of xeroxed reminder, is to the filmic original it
replicates. The difference is that in the case of the feature film and its
book version we are dealing with completed narrative structures of a simi-
lar type, structures similarly antiquated by these new developments.
Whereas the preview is a new form, a new kind of minimalism, whose
generic satisfactions are distinct from the older kind. It would thus seem
that Russell was imperfectly prophetic in his forecast: not in the twenty-
first century, but already in this one; and not fifteen minutes, but only
two or three!
Of course, what he had in mind was something rather different, for
he was evoking MTV, whose imaginative representations of music in vis-
ual analogues find their immediate predecessors, less in Disney and in
music animation, than in television commercials as such, which can at
their best achieve an aesthetic quality of great intensity. I want however
to turn in a more familiar direction (partly because of the difficulty of
illustrating ephemera of that kind) and to juxtapose an older practice of
the image fragment with this newer one. It thus seems instructive to con-
trast the full currency of Bufiuel's surrealist films, An Andalusian Dog
(1928) and The Golden Age (1930), or of the very different experimental
filmmaking of Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1965), with the junk bonds
of Derek Jarman's epic Last of England (1987).
As a matter of fact, we ought to note in passing that Jarman also
expressed the same formal interest in the innovations of MTV as Russell,
but, unlike him, Jarman deplored the temporal restrictions of the new
mode and dreamed of an immense epic-length deployment of this image
language, something he was to put into practice in just such a work as
the ninety-minute Last of England (the longer films by Bufiuel and Brak-
hage run some sixty-two and seventy-five minutes respectively, but it is
the comparative quality of their interminabilities that is here in question).
Yet, even in the modern, the practice of the fragment resulted in two
distinct and antithetical tendencies or strategies: the minimalism of We-
bern or Beckett on the one hand, and the infinite temporal expansion
of Mahler or Proust on the other. Here, in what some people call the
postmodern, we might want to juxtapose the brevity of the Russell con-
ception of MTV with the epic temptations of Jarman or the literal inter-
minability of a text like Gravity's Rainbow.
But what I want to bring out, for this speculative discussion of the
cultural impact of finance capital, is a rather different property of such
image fragments. It seems appropriate to characterize those of Bufiuel,
working at the very center of the classical modern movement, as a prac-

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tice of the symptom. Deleuze has indeed brilliantly characterized them

in his only apparently idiosyncratic classification of Bufiuel (along with
Stroheim) under what he calls naturalism: "The naturalist image, the
impulse-image [the image as drive or libido], has in fact two kinds of
signs: symptoms, and idols or fetishes.""18 The image fragments in Bufiuel
are thus forever incomplete, markers of incomprehensible psychic catas-
trophe, obsessions and eruptions, the symptom in its pure form as an
incomprehensible language that cannot be translated into any other.
Brakhage's practice is completely different from this one, as befits a dif-
ferent historical period and also virtually a different medium, that of ex-
perimental film (which I have elsewhere suggested is to be inserted into
a kind of ideal genealogy of experimental video rather than of cinema).
This could be described, in analogy with music, as a deployment of quar-
ter tones, of analytic segments of the image that are somehow visually
incomplete to eyes still trained for and habituated to our Western visual
languages: something like an art of the phoneme rather than of the mor-
pheme or the syllable. Both of these practices, however, share the will to
confront us with the structurally incomplete, which however dialectically
affirms its constitutive relationship with an absence, with something else
that is not given and perhaps never can be.
In Jarman's Last ofEngland, however, about which words like surrealist
have loosely been bandied, what we really confront is the commonplace,
the cliche. A feeling tone is certainly developed here: the impotent rage
of its punk heroes smashing about themselves with lead pipes, the disgust
with the royal family and with traditional trappings of an official English
life. But these feelings are themselves cliches, and disembodied ones at
that. One can certainly speak of the death of the subject here, if by that
is meant the substitution for some agonizing personal subjectivity (as in
Bufiuel) or some organizing aesthetic direction (as in Brakhage), a Flau-
bertian autonomous life of banal media entities floating through the
empty public realm of a galactic Objective Spirit. But everything here is
impersonal on the mode of the stereotype, including the rage itself. We
see the most familiar and hackneyed shots of a dystopian future: terror-
ists, canned music classical and popular, along with Hitler's speeches, and
a predictable parody of the royal wedding. All of this is processed by a
painterly eye in order to generate mesmerizing sequences that alternate
between black and white and color for purely visual reasons. The narra-
tive or pseudonarrative segments are certainly longer than anything in
Bufiuel or Brakhage, yet they sometimes alternate and oscillate, over-
print each other as in Dog Star Man, while generating an oneiric feeling
that is a kind of cliche in its own right and radically different from the
obsessive precision of Bufiuel.
18. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hab-
berjam (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 125.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
How to account for these qualitative differences, which surely them-

selves imply structural ones? I find myself reverting to Roland Barthes's
extraordinary insights in Mythologies: Jarman's fragments are meaningful
or intelligible, Bufiuel's or Brakhage's are not.19 Barthes's great dictum,
that in the contemporary world there is an incompatibility between mean-
ing and experience or the existential, was richly exercised in his Mytholo-
gies, which denounces the excess of meaning in his cliches and ideologies,
and the nausea that sheer meaning brings with itself. Authentic language-
or image-practice then tries to keep faith with some more fundamental
contingency of meaninglessness, a proposition that holds either from an
existential or a semiotic perspective. Barthes meanwhile tried to account
for the overdose of meaning in the stereotypical by way of the notion of
connotation as a kind of second-degree meaning built up provisionally
on more literal ones. It is a theoretical tool that he was later to abandon
but that we have every interest in reconsidering, particularly in the pres-
ent context.
For I want to suggest that in the modern moment, of both Bufiue

and Brakhage, the play of autonomized fragments remains meaningles
The Bufiuel symptom is no doubt meaningful as such, but only at a dis-
tance and not for us, meaningful no doubt as a kind of other side of th
carpet we will never see. Brakhage's descent into the fractional states
the image is also meaningless, although in a different way. But Jarman
total flow is only too meaningful, for in him the fragments have bee
reendowed with a cultural mediative meaning; and here I think we nee
a concept of the renarrativization of these fragments to complement Ba
thes's diagnosis of connotation at an earlier stage of mass culture. Wh
happens here is that each former fragment of a narrative, which was on
incomprehensible without the narrative context as a whole, has now b
come capable of emitting a complete narrative message in its own right
It has become autonomous, not in the formal sense I attributed to mod-
ernist processes, but rather in its newly acquired capacity to soak up con
tent and to project it in a kind of instant reflex-whence the vanishin
away of affect in the postmodern. The situation of contingency or mean
inglessness, of alienation, has been superseded by this cultural renarrati
vization of the broken pieces of the image world.
What does all this have to do with finance capital? Modernist abstrac
tion, I believe, is less a function of capital accumulation as such than o
money itself in a situation of capital accumulation. Money is here both
abstract (making everything equivalent) and empty and uninteresting,
since its interest lies outside itself. It is thus incomplete like the modernist
images I have been evoking; it directs attention elsewhere, beyond itself
towards what is supposed to complete (and also abolish) it. It knows
semiautonomy, certainly, but not a full autonomy in which it would consti-
19. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972).

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
tute a language or a dimension in its own right. But that is precisely what
finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need
neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does),
which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabo-
lisms and circulate without any reference to an older type of content. But
so do the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern
language; they suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is inde-
pendent of the former real world, not because as in the modern (or even
the romantic) period culture withdrew from that real world into an au-
tonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been
suffused with culture and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in
terms of which it could be found lacking. Stereotypes are never lacking
in that sense, and neither is the total flow of the circuits of financial specu-
lation. That each of these also steers unwittingly towards a crash I leave
for another essay and another time.

148.63.195.42 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:51:55 UTC
Books and Discs of Critical Interest
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 266-280
Accessed: 14-11-2022 13:52 UTC
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Critical Inquiry
Books and Discs of Critical Interest
Allen, Sister Prudence. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution,

750 B.C.-A.D. 1250. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1997.
583 pp. $35.00.
Althusser, Louis. The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. Trans. G. M. Gosh-
garian. New York: Verso, 1997.
Amato, Joe. Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self Albany, N.Y.: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1997.
Anderson, William S., ed. Ovid's "Metamorphoses": Books 1-5. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 578 pp. $49.95.
Andrew, Dudley, ed. The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Pho-
tography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. 347 pp.
Arnheim, Rudolph. Film Essays and Criticism. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1997. 265 pp. $54.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Averill, Gage. A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and
Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 248 pp.
$45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).
Bal, Mieke. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Trans. Anna-Louise
Milne. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. 284 pp. $49.50
(cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Balderston, Daniel and Donna J. Guy. eds. Sex and Sexuality in Latin
America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 288 pp.
Barlow, Tani E., ed. Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 453 pp. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).
Barr, John. The Hundred Fathom Curve. Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line
Press, 1997. 67 pp. $20.00 (cloth); $10.00 (paper).
Barrett, Eileen and Patricia Cramer. Virginia Woolf" Lesbian Readings. New
York: New York University Press, 1997. 288 pp. $55.00 (cloth);
$18.95 (paper).
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard
Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 152 pp.
$10.95.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York
University Press, 1997. 221 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Bell, Bernard W. et al., eds. W E. B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1997. 313 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmod-
266
erm Perspective. 2d ed. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Durham, N.C.: Duke

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 308 pp.
Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nine-
teenth-Century France. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 329
pp. $17.95.
Bewes, Timothy. Cynicism and Postmodernity. New York: Verso, 1997. 256
pp. $19.00.
Bishop, Tom. From the Left Bank: Reflections on the Modern French Theater and
Novel. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 314 pp. $29.95.
Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. 309 pp. $49.50 (cloth); $17.95
(paper).
Boeder, Heribert. Seditions: Heidegger and the Limit of Modernity. Trans. and
ed. Marcus Brainard. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997. 359 pp. $19.95.
Boullata, Issa J. and Terri DeYoung, eds. Tradition and Modernity in Arabic
Literature. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. 285 pp.
$32.00.
Brand, Julian and Christopher Hailey, eds. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold
Schoenberg and the Transformation of Twentieth Century Art. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1997. 232 pp. $42.00.
Bristow, Joseph. Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1997. 248 pp. $49.95
Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit
of the Whole. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. 285
pp. $39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Brown, Michael P. RePlacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism and Radical Democ-
racy. New York: Guilford Press, 1997. 222 pp. $42.95 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).
Buckley, J. E Desire, the Self the Social Critic: The Rise of Queer Performance
within the Demise of Transcendentalism. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna
University Press, 1997. 151 pp. $31.50.
Bloomer, W. Martin. Latinity and Literary Society at Rome. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. 327 pp. $39.95.
Brown, Homer Obed. Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. 250 pp. $29.95.
Caputo, John D., ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques
Derrida. Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1996. 219 pp. $25.00
Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 404 pp. $39.95
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the
268 Books and Discs of Critical Interest
English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky, 1997. 387 pp. $42.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Carter, Erica. How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and
the Consuming Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
286 pp. $54.50.
Cawelti, John G., ed. Leon Forrest: Introductions & Interpretations. Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1997. 332 pp.
$44.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Chapkis, Wendy. Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York:
Routledge, 1997. 248 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Ching, Barbara and Gerald W. Creed, eds. Knowing Your Place: Rural Iden-
tity and Cultural Hierarchy. New York: Routledge, 1997. 285 pp. $59.95
Cixous, H61&ne and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hdlne Cixous Rootprints: Mem-
ory and Life Writing. New York: Routledge, 1997. 254 pp. $17.95.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. 408 pp. $39.95
Cline, Sally. Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying. New York: New York
Cohen, Philip. Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpreta-
tion. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. 319 pp. $65.00.
Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Sharer. Ed. Daniel R. Schwartz. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1997. 280 pp. $35.00.
Corn, Alfred. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody. Brownsville, Oreg.:
Story Line Press, 1997. 146 pp. $10.00.
Corredor, Eva L. Lukdcs after Communism: Interviews with Contemporary Intel-
lectuals. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 209 pp. $49.95
Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 397 pp.
Cox, John D. and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English
Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 565 pp. $49.50
Cox, Kevin R., ed. Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local.
New York: Guilford Publications, 1997. 280 pp. $44.95 (cloth); $22.95
(paper).
Crisp, Colin. The Classic French Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University
Dalmia, Vashuda. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhdratendu Har-
i$chandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997. 490 pp. $39.95.
Daniel, E. Valentine. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Vio-
lence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. 270 pp. $49.50
Daniel, Jamie Owen and Tom Moylan, eds. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst
Bloch. New York: Verso, 1997. 246 pp. $20.00.
Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah Moore. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1997. 178 pp. $32.95.
DeShell, Jeffrey. The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's
Fiction. Madison and Teaneck N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1997. $32.50.
Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 234 pp. $45.00
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. Trans.
Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 288
pp. $65.00.
Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. 252 pp. $60.00.
Dobyns, Stephen. Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1997. 338 pp. $16.95.
Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left,
and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1997. 322 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Eagleton, Terry. Saint Oscar and Other Plays. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1997. 232 pp. $22.95.
Ebbs, Gary. Rule-Following and Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997. 368 pp. $42.50.
Egerer, Claudia. Fictions of (In) Betweenness. G6teberg, Sweden: Acta Uni-
versitatis Gothoburgensis, 1997. 199 pp.
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1997. 271 pp. $13.00.
Ermann, M. David, Mary B. Williams, and Michele S. Shauf, eds. Com-
puters, Ethics, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
340 pp.
Faes, Rosa M. Manuel del Busto. Oviedo: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos,
1997. 287 pp.
Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mus-
solini's Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 303 pp.
$40.00.
Feldstein, Richard. Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 232 pp. $18.95.
Ferrante, Joan M. To the Glory of Her Sex: Women's Roles in the Composition of
Medieval Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 304 pp.
$39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Ferris, Lucy. Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern
in Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1997. 169 pp. $27.00
Ferry, Luc and Alain Renaut, eds. Why We Are Not Nietzscheans. Trans. Rob-
ert de Loaiza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 244 pp.

$45.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).
Finch, Annie. Eve. Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1997. 72 pp.
$22.00 (cloth); $11.95 (paper).
Finkelstein, Haim. Salvador Dali's Art and Writing 1927-1942: The Metamor-
phosis of Narcissus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 350
pp. $75.00.
Fine, Michelle et al., eds. Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society.
New York: Routledge, 1997. 378 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Fontaine, Laurence. History of Pedlars in Europe. Trans. Vicki Whittaker.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 286 pp. $49.95 (cloth);
$17.95 (paper).
Forrester, John. Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. 319 pp. $27.95
Foster, Thomas, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry, eds. Sex Positives? Cul-
tural Politics of Dissident Sexualities. New York: New York University
Fowler, Doreen. Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Charlottesville: Uni-
versity Press of Virginia, 1997. 215 pp. $35.00.
Fowlie, Wallace. Journal of Rehearsals. Durham, N.C: Duke University
Press, 1997. 219 pp. $15.95.
Frank, Judith. Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and
the Poor. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. 230 pp.
$39.50.
Gaggi, Silvio. From Text to Hypertext: Decentering the Subject in Fiction, Film,
the Visual Arts, and Electronic Media. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1997. 192 pp. $34.95.
Gauthier, Jeffery A. Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism: Justice, Recognition
and the Feminine. Albany: State University of New York Press. 233 pp.
$18.95
Gelder, Ken and Sarah Thornton, eds. The Subcultures Reader. New York:
Genette, G6rard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E.
Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 427 pp. $59.95
Ghazoul, Ferial J. Nocturnal Poetics: "The Arabian Nights" in Comparative
Context. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997. 205 pp.
$40.00.
Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Ed-
inburgh University Press, 1997. 268 pp.
Gibson, Ann Eden. Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. 248 pp. $45.00.
Gilmore, John. Live Fast-Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean.
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1997. 254 pp. $22.00.
Girard, Ren&. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Trans.
and ed. James G. Williams. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Com-
pany, 1997. 168 pp. $24.95.
Giroux, Henry A. Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's
Youth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 256 pp. $22.95.
Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institu-
tion, 1850-1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 384 pp.
$54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Gray, Chris Hables. Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. New York:
Guilford Publications, 1997. 326 pp. $35.00.
Green, Archie. Calf's Head and Union Tale: Labor Yarns at Work and Play.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 283 pp. $34.95 (cloth);
$13.95 (paper).
Greenwald, Richard A., ed. Exploring America's Past: A Reader in Social, Po-
litical, and Cultural History, 1865-Present. Lanham, Md.: University Press
of America, 1997. 274 pp.
Griggers, Camilla. Becoming-Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1997. 154 pp.
Grosz-Ngat6, Maria and Omari H. Kokole, eds. Gendered Encounters: Chal-
lenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa. New York:
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, eds. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations
in Critical Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 357
pp. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Halliburton, David. The Fateful Discourse of Worldly Things. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1997. 415 pp.
Ham, Jennifer and Matthew Senior, eds. Animal Acts: Configuring the Hu-
man in Western History. New York: Routledge, 1997. 258 pp. $69.95
Handler, Richard and Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creat-
ing the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Harris, Susan K. The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 242 pp. $59.95 (cloth);
$17.95 (paper).
Harrison, Antony H., ed. The Letters of Christina Rossetti: Volume 1, 1843-
1873. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. 520 pp.
$49.50.
Hill, Mike, ed. Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University
Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corpo-
reality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1997. 344 pp.
$19.95.
Hillyer, Barbara. Feminism and Disability. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1997. 318 pp. $16.95
Hodgart, Matthew J. C. and Ruth Bauerle. Joyce's Grand Operoar: Opera in
"Finnegans Wake." Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 343

pp. $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of
Fiction. 2d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. 490 pp.
$54.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W Adorno. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 287 pp. $19.95.
Holton, Robert. Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of
History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 301 pp. $28.00.
Hooks, Bell. Reel to Reel: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York:
Routledge, 1996. 244 pp. $16.95.
Hornsby, Jennifer. Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the
Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
265 pp. $35.00.
Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University
Hiuppauf, Bernd, ed. War, Violence and the Modern Condition. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter and Co., 1997. 424 pp.
Hutchisson, James M. Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, N.Y.:
The Whitston Publishing Company, 1997. 257 pp. $29.50.
Jackson, Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson. Rational Meaning: A New
Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays. Ed. William
Harmon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. 640 pp.
$50.00.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York
James, Allison, Jenny Hockey, and Andrew Dawson, eds. After Writing Cul-
ture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. New York:
Routledge, 1997. 273 pp. $19.95.
Jay, Paul. Contingency Blues: The Search for Foundations in American Criticism.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 221 pp. $45.00 (cloth);
$17.95 (paper).
Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze.
New York: Routledge, 1997. 333 pp. $17.95.
Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity
in African-American Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1997. 266 pp. $15.95.
Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997. 384 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).
Kemal, Salim. Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction. New York: St. Mar-
tin's Press, 1997. 197 pp. $17.95.
Kennedy, Duncan. A Critique of Adjudication: (Fin de Sidcle). Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. 424 pp. $45.00.
Khubchandani, Lachman M. Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos.

Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996. 255 pp. $32.50.
Kinder, Marsha, ed. Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation. Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 370 pp. $49.95 (cloth);
$16.95 (paper).
Kipnis, Andrew B. Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self and Subculture in a
North China Village. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 240
pp. $49.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Kitsin, Peter J., ed. The Year's Work in English. Vol. 75. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1997. 932 pp. $150.00.
Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of
Memory. New York: Verso, 1997. 330 pp. $18.00.
Knight, Diana. Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing. New York: Oxford
Knight, Diana. Roland Barthes. Nottingham: University of Nottingham,
1997. 99 pp. $24.00.
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and
Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press,
1997. 185 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).
Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1996. 264 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Lahusen, Thomas and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Socialist Realism without
Shores. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 369 pp. $59.95
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 894
pp. $39.95.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. Look, Listen, Read. Trans. Brian J. Singer. New York:
Basic Books, 1997. 202 pp. $24.00.
Lightman, Bernard, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997. 489 pp. $70.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
Long, Kristi S. and Matthew Nadelhaft, eds. America Under Construction:
Boundaries and Identities in Popular Culture. New York: Garland Publish-
ing, 1997. 215 pp. $45.00.
Lord, Robert. Words: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Study of Language.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. 346 pp. $47.50.
Lyman, Stanford M. Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd: And Other
Essays on the "Nouvelle Vague" in American Social Science. Fayetteville: Uni-
versity of Arkansas Press, 1997. 392 pp. $34.00.
Lynch, Deidre and William B. Warner, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel.
$21.95 (paper).
Lyons, Bridget Gellert, ed. Reading in an Age of Theory. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 192 pp. $45.00.
Mackenthun, Gesa. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the
Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1997. 370 pp. $32.95.
Mancuso, Luke. The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruc-
tion, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship. Columbia, S.C.: Camden
House, 1997. 168 pp. $55.00.
Manderson, Lenore and Margaret Jolly, eds. Sites of Desire, Economies of
Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997. 367 pp. $19.95.
Marshall, Bill. Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke
Marty, Martin and Micah Marty. The Promise of Winter. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997. 111 pp.
McCormick, John P. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as
Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 352 pp.
$39.95.
McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1997. 149 pp. $39.95.
McGuinn, Patrick and the Blue Ravens. Patrick McGuinn and the Blue Ra-
vens. Eunuch Records 111325. Distributed by First Run Features, 1997.
Compact Disc. $11.98.
McHoul, Alec and Wendy Grace. A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and
the Subject. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 140 pp. $40.00
McLuhan, Eric. The Role of Thunder in "Finnegans Wake." Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1997. 340 pp. $45.00.
McRuer, Robert. The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature
and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York: New York
Merrell, Floyd. Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press. 384 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Mester, Terri A. Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams,
and Early Twentieth-Century Dance. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 1997. 224 pp. $30.00.
Miller, Joshua I. Democratic Temperament: The Legacy of William James. Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. 192 pp. $29.95.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. New
York: Verso, 1997. 243 pp. $19.00.
Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1997. 198 pp.
Moyers, Tony L. Wanderings: Exploring Moral Landscapes Past and Present.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. 269 pp. $34.00.
Moylan, Michele and Lane Stiles, eds. Reading Books: Essays on the Material
Text and Literature in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New

York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press,
1997. 238 pp. $49.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).
Murray, Stephen 0. and Will Roscoe, eds. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture,
History, and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 331
pp. $50.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Nava, Mica, et al. Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption. New
York: Routledge, 1997. 355 pp. $69.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
Nelson, Cary. Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1997. 254 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Devel-
opment of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1997. 403 pp. $17.95.
Nightingale, Virginia. Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real. New York :
Noyes, John K. The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism. Ithaca,
N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1997. 265 pp. $29.95.
O'Farrell, Mary Ann. Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and
the Blush. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 192 pp. $49.95
Oliver, Kelly. Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture. New York:
Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997. 410 pp. $18.00.
Olmos, Margarite Fernaindez and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds. Sacred
Possessions: Voudou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 322 pp.
Olson, Barbara K. Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century: Omniscient Nar-
ration in Woolf Hemingway, and Others. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univer-
sity Press, 1997. 152 pp. $29.50.
Oram, William Allan. Edmund Spenser. New York: Twayne, 1997. 347 pp.
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revi-
sions. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 276 pp.
$22.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Pells, Richard. Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Trans-
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444 pp. $30.00.
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York Press, 1997. 208 pp.
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Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997. 320 pp. $30.00.
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versity Press of Florida, 1997. 208 pp. $49.95.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Hor-
ror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 177
pp. $14.95.
Platt, Kevin M. E History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea
of Revolution. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. 293
pp. $45.00.
Pointon, Marcia. Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation
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Ransom, John S. Foucault's Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham,
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pp. $40.00.
Ryan, Mary P. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City dur-
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Schwartz, David, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel, eds. Keeping
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Scriven, Tal. Wrongness, Wisdom, and Wilderness: Toward a Libertarian Theory
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Press, 1997. 218 pp. $20.95.
Segal, Lynn, ed. New Sexual Agendas. New York: New York University
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Theall, Donald E James Joyce's Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of To-
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Back Matter
Source: Critical Inquiry , Autumn, 1997, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997)

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THE MODERN
LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides

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Every MLA member receives
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Joseph Francese
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Hypere xt.
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Critical
Inquiry
Forthcoming in the Next Issue
INTIMACY
Guest editor, Lauren Berlant
Lauren Berlant and Sex in Public

Michael Warner
Svetlana Boym On Diasporic Intimacy
Steven. Feld Licking Their Own Things

Deborah Grayson Surrogacy and the Law
Michael Hanchard Jody
Dagmar Herzog The German Sexual Revolution

Laura Kipnis Adultery
Mary Poovey Sex in America
Elizabeth Povinelli The State of Shame
Eve Kosofsky Sedgawick A Dialogue on Love
Joel Snvder and Coupling

Laura Letinsky
Caondace l gler Sex and Talk
1 00931896(199723)24:111111 1
0093-1896(199723)24:1;1 -I

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C.I., Autumn 1997, Vol. 24, n1

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m:rrclIqwS

1**).()hcI'I 1)(w-lic I LII'I'ISMI

Tht, 0011t, IV(Id

Senior Managing Editor James W. Williams

Editorial Assistants Zarena Aslami

Editorial Board Elizabeth Abel J. Hillis Miller

Editorial Correspondence W.J.T. Mitchell, Critical Inquiry, The University of Chicago,

Critical Inquiry (ISSN 0093-1896) is published four

Postmaster: send address changes to Critical Inquiry,

Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, Illinois and at

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1 Harlem on Our Minds

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 159 Blankness as a Signifier

On the cover: George Grosz and John Heartfield, The Petit-B

Subscriptions. Regular rates, U.S.A.: institutions, 1 year $100.00; individuals, 1

Manuscript Acceptance Policy. While it is our policy to require the assignment of

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997)

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humani-

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marching music of a defiant oppositional culture, is now the music of the

The current renaissance is characterized by a specific awareness of

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faults and purported limitations, which range from overdependence on

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To someone like myself coming to Caravaggio studies from outside, it's

Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997)

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canvases may be taken as faithful to Caravaggio's intentions.)' One of the

Michael Fried is Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at Johns

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i ~II?? ? ????~~g~i.?.?. i:??..??r ?i?~;i:.L

FIG. 1.-Caravaggio, Boy Biten by a Lizard, ca. 1596-97. O

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Much recent discussion of the Boy Bitten by a Lizard has focused on

3 vols. (1642; Vatican, 1995), 1:136:

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in present-day Caravaggio criticism; I will only observe, first, that Posner's

in terms of the attempts to depict psychological reactions-both of laughter and of

See Longhi, "Quesiti Caravaggeschi."

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assumed to be the main temporal register of Caravaggio's art, as in Gre-

13. Gregori, "Caravaggio Today," in AC, p. 37.

It is stupefied in a Medusa-effect" (DP, p. 163). See also Freedberg's inspired description of

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FIG. 2.-Henri Matisse, Self-Portrai

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composition, if it is seen as a disguised mirror-image of the artist-model's

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because Freedberg doesn't treat the self-portraits, he never addresses the

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intertwines with the seemingly ambivalent or ambiguous sexuality (the