Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation 9783839454626

Table of contents :
Content
Preface
Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation
1. The Global Spaces of the Present
The Global Promise of Contemporary Art
Present, Presence, Presentation
Visible/Unvisible Present
Exhibiting Earth History. The Politics of Visualization in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Painting, Photography, Polychronicity: Lang Jingshan’s Portrait of Zhang Shanzi
Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art
The Presentness of a Minority. Notes on the Indian Twelver Shia
2. The Present in Art. Perspectives from Art History
Time and Form: The “Unthought Known”
Rhythmical Presentness. On the ‘Rhythmology’ of Perception. Maldiney—Cézanne—Rilke
Temporal Concepts of the Present and their Aesthetic Negotiation in Black Arts Movement and ‘Black Atlantic’
The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing
“There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself.” The Spectral Present of Control and the Strategies of Performance
3. The Presentation of Presentness and Presence
Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities
Extreme Situations of the Political. Hannah Arendt’s Article “The Concentration Camps” (1948)
“Fortrollende Gegenwart:” Psychopathology and Epical Present Tense in Georg Heym’s Der Irre and Der Dieb
Now-time Explosion. The Experience of Time in Social Revolution
Histories of the Present—a Media Philosophical Approach
Biographical Notes

Citation preview

Gabriele Genge, Ludger Schwarte, Angela Stercken (eds.) Aesthetic Temporalities Today. Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation

Image | Volume 185

Gabriele Genge Ludger Schwarte Angela Stercken (eds.)

Aesthetic Temporalities Today. Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation

The essays collected in this publication are based on contributions to the annual conference of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Priority Program “Aesthetic Temporalities,” which was held in June 2018 under the title “Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Presentation” at the ICI Kulturlabor. Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. The conference enjoyed the support of the DFG, the publication of the conference proceedings has been made possible by the generous funding from the Priority Program “Aesthetic Temporalities: Time and Presentation in the Polychrone Modernity” (SPP 1688).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders for the photographs and reproductions used in this publication prior to going to press. Copyright holders and illustration references (quoted illustrations / “Bildzitate”) are mentioned in the lists of figures. If something was overlooked during the examination of the image rights, we would be grateful if you could provide us with any missing information.

Cover Image: Lars Breuer, S c h o c k , 2011/2020 Book Concept: Angela Stercken Book Design: art & sciences, Munich Proofread: Kerstin Meincke Translation: Paul Bowman Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5462-2 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5462-6 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839454626

Content Preface | 9 Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation | 11 Gabriele Genge, Ludger Schwarte, Angela Stercken

1_ The Global Spaces of the Present The Global Promise of Contemporary Art | 17 Gabriele Genge

Present, Presence, Presentation | 31 Boris Groys

Visible/Unvisible Present | 39 Johannes F. Lehmann

Exhibiting Earth History. The Politics of Visualization in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century | 57 Patrick Stoffel, Christina Wessely

Painting, Photography, Polychronicity: Lang Jingshan’s Portrait of Zhang Shanzi | 67 Tim Trausch

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art | 87 Nkiru Nzegwu

The Presentness of a Minority. Notes on the Indian Twelver Shia | 101 Stefan Binder

2_ The Present in Art. Perspectives from Art Histor y Time and Form: The “Unthought Known” | 113 Mieke Bal

Rhythmical Presentness. On the ‘Rhythmology’ of Perception. Maldiney—Cézanne—Rilke | 129 Boris Roman Gibhardt

Temporal Concepts of the Present and their Aesthetic Negotiation in Black Arts Movement and ‘Black Atlantic’ | 143 Angela Stercken

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing | 169 Christine Ross

“There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself.” The Spectral Present of Control and the Strategies of Performance | 183 Francesca Raimondi

3_ The Presentation of Presentness and Presence Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities | 197 Ludger Schwarte

Extreme Situations of the Political. Hannah Arendt’s Article “The Concentration Camps” (1948) | 207 Iris Därmann

“Fortrollende Gegenwart:” Psychopathology and Epical Present Tense in Georg Heym’s Der Irre and Der Dieb | 219 Maximilian Bergengruen

Now-time Explosion. The Experience of Time in Social Revolution | 239 Samuel Strehle

Histories of the Present—a Media Philosophical Approach | 249 Maria Muhle

Biographical Notes | 267

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Preface

The present volume of essays is based on contributions to the annual conference of the DFG program “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten. Zeit und Darstellung in der polychronen Moderne.” This fourth conference—entitled “Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Presentation”—took place in June 2018 at the ICI Kulturlabor. Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. The essays collected here stem from the talks and presentations given at the conference. They also include papers from individual research projects within the program which, from their respective scholarly perspective, take up questions of the present in art and offer methodological reflections on a term, which now—in times of Covid-19—is gaining unprecedented actuality. The enduring experience of a global pandemic, the replacement of physical presence by digital representation and the complete shutdown of social and cultural institutions currently confront us with modified time-regimes we are not yet able to handle properly. It will be the urgent task for future research to deal with these global political and cultural scenarios and to question them with regard to those temporal structures, timings, forms of indication and time boundaries that are already today causing significant social and cultural effects. For the large number of contributions, the suggestions and encouragement, and the help we received when preparing and holding the conference, we extend our heartfelt thanks to all involved colleagues, including the members of the ICI Berlin. First and foremost, our gratitude goes to Michael Gamper, Michael Bies, and Steffen Richter for their collaboration in drafting the conception and lending their varied support in preparing and organizing the conference and publication.

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We would also like to warmly thank the authors to this collection for the lively and thoughtful discussions. Their presentations and texts have first breathed life into the topic and given us the opportunity to capture the varied spectrum—across many disciplines and contexts—of disputes about the present today. Many thanks to our translator, Paul Bowman, for his perceptive and differentiated rendering into English. That the cover design of the publication deals with time point and durée, protention and retention is due to Lars Breuer, who created the work S c h o c k for which he deserves our sincere thanks. We would also like to warmly thank the staff at the Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Katharina Bruns and Alexandra Linneweber, for their unstinting support in putting together this volume. Our sincere thanks also go to Kerstin Meincke for the final proofreading of the volume. The publication of the conference proceedings was made possible by funds from the German Research Foundation, for which we are exceedingly grateful.

The Editors

Aesthetic Temporalities Today

Gabriele Genge | Ludger Schwarte | Angela Stercken

Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Re-Presentation

1

The present seems familiar to us, hardly worth mentioning. But, has it always been like this? And what does the present really signify, if we consider that its idea and meaning have shifted considerably since its emergence in the 17th and 18th centuries? In recent years, the historicization of the concept of a present has gained momentum2 and its “birth” at the dawn of modernity increasingly been examined.3 A marked theorization of the present has also only recently been undertaken. As important as the orientation on the present has become for politics and business, for science and design, and many other social and cultural areas since then, it is no longer available seamlessly or unrestrictedly. This is also particularly noticeable in art. If since the 1960s the term ‘contemporary art’ has proven to be a suitable vehicle to supplant the ideology of modernism and its associated idea of progress,4 this domination of the present is now itself coming under increasing scrutiny: the suggestion is that an ‘eternal 1| We would like to warmly thank Michael Bies and Michael Gamper for jointly preparing the conference exposé, which serves as the basis for this introduction. 2| Cf. Maria Muhle, “History will repeat itself. Für eine (Medien-) Philosophie des Reenactment, in Körper des Denkens. Neue Positionen der Medienphilosophie, ed. Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann, Christine Voss (Munich / Paderborn: Fink, 2013), 113-134; Doris Gerber, Analytische Metaphysik der Geschichte. Handlungen, Geschichte und ihre Erklärung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012). 3| Cf. Achim Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart. Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt o.M.: Fischer, 2014). 4| Christine Ross, The Past is the Present; It’s the Future Too. The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York /London: Continuum, 2012); Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung

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present,’ instituted by technical dispositifs, has now ousted the preserving of the present from the false promises of the future.5 Considering the media, technological, economic, and not least the political upheavals, more and more voices are proclaiming the ‘end of the present’ as a time we are familiar with and which can be interpreted and stabilized with the help of traditional semantics,6 while, in reference to art, the end of ‘contemporary art’ and a reorientation towards a ‘future art’ is demanded.7 Closely connected to the notion of the present are concepts like presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit] and re-presentation [Vergegenwärtigung], both of which point to how the present is always also a phenomenon of perception and consciousness, one that implies a promise of contemporariness,8 i.e. a “shared time.” The fulfilment of this promise is yet to be achieved, although the globalization of the economy and the media seems to have long brought it about.9 Asking what it actually means to be ‘contemporary,’ how the present and presentness are even possible, and how and through which media, techniques, and processes they can be produced—these issues are virulent right now. Right now? These perceptions of a globalized present provoke far more fundamental questions as to the functions ascribed to re-presentation in transcultural fields of reference. In recent disputes about the present, it has become clear that it can hardly be conceived of as a universal present because this would have to be coupled to a geopolitical opening, the establishing of contact, and the perception of relational authority.10 If the present in this sense is understood as at once a glo(Hamburg: Junius, 2013). Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013). 5| Cf. Geoffrey C. Bowker, “All Together Now. Synchronization, Speed, and the Failure of Narrativity,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 564-576; or also Marcus Quent, ed., Absolute Gegenwart (Berlin: Merve, 2016); Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London/ New York: Verso, 2014), 38-41. 6| Cf. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, Anmerkungen zur Metamoderne (Hamburg: Textem, 2015); Armen Avanessian and Suhail Maik, ed., Der Zeitkomplex. Postcontemporary, trans. Ronald Voullié (Berlin: Merve, 2016). 7| Cf. Ludger Schwarte, Notate für eine künftige Kunst (Berlin: Merve 2016). 8| Cf. particularly Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary,” in What is an Apparatus? And other Essays, ed. id. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54. 9| Cf. Gabriele Genge, “Kunstwissenschaft,” in Handbuch Moderneforschung. Interdisziplinäre und internationale Perspektiven, ed. Friedrich Jaeger, Wolfgang Knöbl, Ute Schneider (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2015), 132-142, and Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, ed., Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2008); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 10| Saloni Mathur, The Migrant’s Time. Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Williamstown: Yale University Press, 2011); Mieke Bal, “Heterochrony in the Act. The Migratory Politics of Time,” in Art and

Aesthetic Temporalities Today

bal and relational ‘contemporariness,’ then it stands obliquely to those theories which suggest a renouncement of historicity and anchor cultural alterity in the allochronic temporality of “presence cultures.”11 Belonging to the traditional residues of the metaphysics of presence is, for example, the “ethnological present,” the tense of the former conventional field research reports that undertook to describe the specific present of the other.12 Also of relevance here is the discussion, ignited by Michael Fried in the 1960s, about the concept of the “presence” of works of Minimal Art. Fried criticized as “presence” the experience of metaphysical, corporeal alienation, and thus an inappropriate—because it is “indeterminate, open-ended— and unexacting”—relation between the viewer and the work. However, “presence” advanced to an aesthetic category of performative art, allowing and generating materiality and resistance in art as ambiguous aesthetic experience of cultural alterity.13 In contrast, ideas of the present as shared contemporariness have been formulated by Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with their programs for a symmetrical anthropology, as has Achille Mbembe in his theses on the current time regimes of a “black” enlightenment.14 An understanding of the present characterized by ‘present tense’ and ‘presence’ cannot set out relying exclusively on considerations about contemporariness. Rather, it also needs to be accompanied by reflections which more emphatically relativize their temporal perspective. The present could thus be sounded out with respect to its relationship to semantics of the historical, in so far as these semantics continue to have an effect in the present, disperse in the global or transnational conglomerate, and are exposed to other time forms and chronologies. But this would also entail opening these discontinuities of the present into the future, or “to puncture [them] with FUTURITY.”15

Visibility in Migratory Culture. Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, ed. id., and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 211-238. 11| Prominent here is for example Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79. 12| The concept was first critically examined by Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 80. 13| Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood (1967),” in id., Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172, 155. Cf. on the aesthetic alterity discourse in object and thing concepts, Gabriele Genge and Angela Stercken, ed., Art History and Fetishism Abroad. Global Shiftings in Media and Methods (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014). 14| Cf. particularly Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphsics, trans. and ed. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley /Los Angeles /London: University of California Press, 2001). 15| Schwarte, Notate, 15.

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Only when it is precisely analyzed on what the presentness of the present is based, is it possible to not only render present this present, but also to re-present it. A definition distinguishing between the neighboring phenomena of presentness and re-presentation needs to be drawn. Presentness is to designate the modus of a subjective or collective ‘being-in-the-present’, while re-presentation refers more to the media, techniques, and actions through which the present is respectively produced. In the process, the present, presentness, and re-presentation are to be examined as phenomena which are polychronic, which entwine a striving for duration and eternity with brevity and elusiveness, and which can stand out through a hypostasizing of the ‘now’, through a yearning for the ‘just-now,’ and the promise of the ‘immediate now’; but they are also phenomena which can be grasped as the results of particular temporal configurations and regimes, whereby these in turn mold specific times and temporalities, and not least structure understanding as to what characterizes the time “just right now” [Jetztzeit].16 The present volume is divided into three parts. The first, “The Global Spaces of the Present,” examines positions in cultural studies and political science which call for definitions of the present in the nexus of globalization, post-colonialism, and transculturality. Pivotal here is the dimension of the geopolitical that, as a form for negotiating the social, necessarily shapes the present and coalesces with almost every experience and generation of it. The focus is on examining temporally induced patterns for the formation of collectives (contemporariness) as well as reflecting on philosophical postulates of (Western) Enlightenment or, respectively, the global South. The second part, “The Present in Art. Perspectives from Art History,” deals with the present from a perspective that is markedly shaped by Art History, whereby its aesthetic ideologies of time and contemporaneity are considered. Put up for debate here are the demands for a spatial-temporal dissolution of disciplinary boundaries and the search for modern and current determinations of re-presentation, addressing in particular art and artistic practice. At the same time, forms of re-presentation and their anchoring in regimes of time are examined, so too articulations of a nomadic and transnational present and contemporariness. The third part, “The Presentation of Presentness and Presence,” is devoted to the phenomenological perspectives on the act of generating a present, focusing especially on presentness and presence. Approaches from media studies and media philosophy serve as the subject area, which take into account the transposing and transforming effects of mediation and discuss their temporal implications. An important aspect of the aesthetic forming of presentness concerns language, whose phenomenological articulation of physical and psychological awareness, imagination and agency are reflected as expressions of temporality and historicity. | 16| Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in id., Selected Writings: 1938–1940, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Press, 1992), 395.

_The Global Spaces of the Present

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

Gabriele Genge

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

The concept of contemporary art has become a global-political challenge and provocation in recent years. Above all in art theory and philosophy, those conceptions of the contemporary, presence, and presentness, as well as their varied connections to questions of contemporaneity, are under discussion which put forward counter models to the economically- and politically-informed globalization discourse.1 Whereas the globalization in www appears to affirm a promise of copresence or inclusion, cultural theories point out polychronic temporalities and fractures: the present is defined as a fictional category that becomes discernible and visible in a specific way through art. In the following, those processes of a gathering discussion about the present in art history will be examined; they range from anchoring the present in moder-

1| While the German term “Gegenwartskunst” evokes more strongly the processes of “Vergegenwärtigung” (re-presentation), the English “contemporary” emphasizes a shared or common present. As concepts of style, both are used synonymously, although currently the critical aspects of “contemporary” are virulent, in particular in the context of geopolitical conceptions. Cf. Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2013), 12. On the geopolitical discussion, see Hal Foster, “Contemporary Extracts,” E-Flux-Journal 12, (2010): 1–6, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61333/contemporaryextracts; Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition. Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity & Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016); Gary Wilder and Jini Kin Watson, The Postcolonial Contemporary. Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, ed., Former West. Art and the Contemporary after 1989 (Utrecht / Cambridge, MA/ London: BAK Basis voor Actuele Kunst/ The MIT Press, 2016). Economic counter models are discussed for example in Ai-hwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, ed., Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); cf. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, ed., Der Zeitkomplex. Postcontemporary (Berlin: Merve, 2016).

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nity, its assuming independence as an epoch, through to its current dissolution and its new opening to the past for delineations of the present gained from the future.

The Present and Modernity The dispute igniting over the concept of the “present” in art history is far older than the idea of contemporary art and from the very outset is tied to the historical semantics of the “modern:” the dialectic between modernus and antiquus, which fixed the Christian present and pagan antiquity into a constant relation, intensified over the course of the 17th century into an extensive discussion on the possibility of defining a modern present as a simultaneous contemporariness, one that increasingly sought to bring the body and its senses into play and include sensory perception as an instrument of re-presentation. This can be traced in the Oxford English Dictionary since the 17th century, where the scope of the term not only describes a temporal togetherness and a contemporariness, but also takes up the epistemological questions deriving from them, including amongst others David Hume’s associational psychological thesis on the genesis of causation. “Contemporary” is assigned the meaning of a temporal belongingness: “1.a. Belonging to the same era or period as another person, thing, or event; living, existing, or occurring together in a particular period; coexisting”; but also an associative simultaneity: “2. Happening or taking place simultaneously; occurring together at the same time; simultaneous”; or a contemporariness: “3. Having existed or lived from the same date; equal in age, coeval.”2 Similar contexts for perceiving the present and presentness are also demonstrable in the use of the German word “Gegenwart” since the 17th century, albeit, as Lehmann has convincingly shown, still without including the idea of a constantly changing and incomprehensible experience of the present: “A temporalized present presupposes reflection on an internal and interconnected complexity, temporally dynamic and variable in social structure, that is also coupled to methods for rendering them visible and observable.”3

Moreover, in 17th century France the perceived presentness had, in a particular way, contoured the concept of what is aesthetically modern in the context of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes. As often related, the academics contended the aesthetic primacy of color as a contingent sensory appearance and the foundation 2| “Contemporary adj. and n.,” in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/40115. Cf. Terry Smith, “Introduction,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, and id. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–19, 7f. 3| Cf. Johannes Lehmann, Visible / Unvisible Present in this volume, 41. Cf. Achim Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart. Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt o. M.: Fischer, 2014).

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

of a new non-figural pictorial understanding, the “composition pittoresque,” which broke away from the rational fetters of the drawing or the emulation of antiquity and sought to take into account the political present of the age of Louis XIV in the academic discourse on art theory.4 But the phenomenon of the present and its sensory requirements first become one of the most important desiderates of Enlightenment discourse in the 18th century, whereby this discourse now also names variable forms of experiences of temporality which accompany the increasing geopolitical expansion of the West through trade activity and colonial scientific exploration beyond the boundaries of Europe to Africa, the Americas, and Asia.5 Here a contemporariness seems to be in play that names acts of reciprocal perceptions and meetings, whereby the physical involvement also entails the emancipation from historical normativity and necessitates new ways of thinking the historical. They lead to identifying an experience of time wherein the subject is forced to move out of a familiar situating in a time, to seek distance to the time of a tradition, and to grasp the temporal present as one that conceives of the past anew and understands the future from anticipatory modes.6 Ideas of contemporariness are formulated anew in connection with a universal history governed by exclusions and inclusions, the establishing of contact verifiable mainly through travelogues or pictorial material, which construct cultural alterity as difference, but also allow for forms of political or social participation. Irruptions in the normative orders are thus discernible in these materials and their interpretation and they led to discussions, translation processes, and exchange. Not only a traceable iconographic pictorial program of cultural alterity develops,7 but also an ambiguation of the perceived, which opens up concepts of the subject, initiates exchange processes, and involves temporal obscurities and gaps. Exemplary here is the geopolitical entity of the Black Atlantic, wherein the economic regimen of the transatlantic slave and commodities trade generated radical upheavals in philosophical value systems. In this context, the political and 4| Cf. Max Imdahl, “Kunstgeschichtliche Exkurse zu Perraults ‘Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes’,” in Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688–1696), ed. H.R. Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), 65-81; Hans Körner, Auf der Suche nach der ‘wahren Einheit.’ Ganzheitsvorstellungen in der französischen Malerei und Kunstliteratur vom mittleren 17. bis zum mittleren 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1988). 5| Cf. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz. Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Jonas, 2014), 267–291. 6| Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary,” in What is an Apparatus? And other Essays, ed. id. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54. 7| Gabriele Genge, “Survival of Images? Fetish and Concepts of Image between Westafrica and Europe,” in Art History and Fetishism Abroad. Global Shiftings in Media and Methods, ed. id. and Angela Stercken (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 29-56.

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aesthetic imagination of a convergence between man and commodity objects becomes equally virulent, while Christian notions of God open up to the fetish, which now advances to become the epitome of cultural alterity. Temporal semantics step in to compensate, including the dynamic historical constellation of a “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.”8 In the work of William Hogarth this aesthetic temporalization of the modern present is mediated in the ontological pattern of a “waving line,” which is believed to govern acts of perception in nature and art. As Hogarth indicates in his A na l y s i s o f B e a uty from 1753, the dynamized line, as a category of beauty, underlies perception. This line even enables—taking the example of black skin color—the visual of physiological alterity that is yet to be specified in conceptions of race: blackness arises in the act of drawing crisscrossing lines, which the artist demonstrates in the engraved illustrations (fig. 1) to his theory of art.9 Presentness and modernity (still) seem to be intimately connected here.

Contemporary Art: A Questionable Epoch Concept With the 19th century, in which aesthetic modernity became consolidated, aesthetic contemporariness, while albeit brittle had remained in place, was now finally dislodged and a shift ensued towards allochrony as a model in which cultural alterity was relocated into the anthropological and biological temporality of the primitive and race, i.e. a temporality of the ‘others,’ who Western historical thinking anchored, needing new ways of creating anthropological meaning, in a perpetual “ethnographic present.”10 While modernity since the 20th century becomes verifiable as a universal epochal concept, which with its dialectic between autonomy and avant-garde, strong orientation on the future, and demand for ongoing progressiveness, represents the universalizing claims of the West, the promise of contemporariness and a shared notion of the present seem to be realized as soon as national institutions could confirm the participation of all as a civil right. After 1945, “contemporary art” is initially detectible in the founding of national institutes and museums, who 8| Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8: “We must, rather, learn to discover the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in our history.” 9| Gabriele Genge, “William Hogarth’s Blacks. Die Vermittlung ‘fremder’ Zeitllichkeit in seinen narrativen Bildzyklen,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts 30, no. 2, Zeitkonzepte. Zur Pluralisierung des Zeitdiskurses im langen 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (2006): 221-237, 232. 10| Cf. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 80; Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870–1960) (Paderborn/ Munich: Fink, 2005), 395.

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combined with this title the presentation of art that was to be considered as the “most recent modern, but a modern with a moderated, less ruptural futurity.”11 As the counterpart to modernity and its ever increasingly rigid ideological narratives of high modernism, a contemporariness of art is evoked in response. However, the pleas for the “political participation” of art, which in conventional periodizations characterize the phases of the critique of capitalism, the renewal of the avantgardist idiom, especially post-1945, in the 1960s, or the postmodernist criticism of modernism in the 1980s, mostly remain imprisoned in an universalistic idiom, whereby the regimens of temporality failed to impact on the Western chronologies established since the 19th century.12 Soon “contemporary” gained the status of an art epoch following modernism and postmodernism, was granted its very own place in the linear chronological order of Western museums. Since documenta 11, a broadened present of art also encompasses those non-Western actors who, as 11| Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, New York: Verso, 2013), 16. 12| Cf. Alexander Alberro, “Periodising Contemporary Art,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (New York: Wiley, 2012), 64–71.

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the protagonists of a global present, could be included in contemporary art. The Brazilian curator Cutaemoc Medina has described this concept of “contemporary art” as the “vague descriptor of aesthetic currency,” whereby its “lack of substance” can be seen as residing in the very “facility with which it lended itself to practical adjustments.”13 These periodizations of “contemporary art,” each of which makes phases of political emancipation into the catalyst of a contemporary consciousness discernible in art that constantly reshapes what is modern, can be conceived of and described differently. As early as the 1930s, a cultural counter-movement begins to form, paradigmatically in the Black Atlantic, that looked to supersede the temporal consciousness of contemporary art and its unvarying parameters of order. Beyond Western epochal models, the “contemporary” becomes a temporal model for art that replaced colonially-informed modernity with ideas of an aesthetic temporality and its traditions.14 Initiated by the Bandung Conference of 1955, a “Global South” soon began to articulate itself, and with further art biennales and conferences held at regular intervals it became a visible presence in the contemporary field and confronted the hegemonic “North,” compromised by the Holocaust and national racist political ideologies, with new conceptions of transnational emancipation and critical approaches to capitalism, but also with the cultural, philosophical, and geopolitical prerequisites for a new definition of contemporariness.15 That these actors remained unnoticed in contemporary art was due to the specific conditions of an aesthetic regimen that affirmed the epistemological conceptions of allochrony even when it, oriented on the precepts of Marxism, championed the causes of antiracism and humanism.16 The transnational collective of the South positioned itself on the other hand in a space outside the national institutions of the art discourse, i.e. outside academies, museums, and universities, and their temporalities, which organized forms of participation principally into modern conceptions of historicity and futurity. 13| Cuauthémoc Medina, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses,” E-Flux-Journal 12, (2010): 10–21, 11, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61335/contemp-t-orary-eleven-theses. 14| Nkiru Nzegwu, “The Concept of Modernity In Contemporary African Art,” in The African Diaspora. African Origins and New World Identities, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 391–427. 15| Cf. Arif Dirlik, “Global South: Predicament and Promise,” The Global South 1, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 12–23; Anthony Gardner, and Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 442–455. Dipesh Chakabarty, “Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 46 (November 2005): 4812-4818. 16| Decisive here is the Marxist-inspired critique in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous foreword to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthology of African Poems from 1948, wherein the prospect of the vanishing of Negritude is considered, cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2012). Cf. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy. Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (New York: Seagull Books, 2011), 29.

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

“Contemporaneity” and the Aesthetic Experience of the “Present” in Art The motives to examine the concept of the “contemporary” in the 21st century stem from the need to re-approach and understand the discourses, in the past only in part institutionalized, of a geopolitical opening and a new definition of participation in times of digital globalization. While this may be due to a wish for political equality, it misses the mark if it amounts to nothing more. The challenge of the contemporaneity of the present is exemplarily evident in the debates at the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Paris in 1956 following the Bandung Conference. During the debate on how to characterize transnational African contemporariness, Richard Wright referred to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s conception of a “culture négro-africaine,” describing it as “a poetic world, rich, dynamic, moving, tactile, rhythmic,” while also not sparing his doubts as to its inappropriateness: “This is not hostility; this is not criticism. I am asking a question of brothers. I wonder where do I, an American Negro, conditioned by the harsh industrial, abstract force of the Western World that has used stern, political prejudices against the society (which he has so brilliantly elucidated)—where do I stand in relation to that culture? [...] The modern world has cast us in the same mould. I am black and he is black; I am American and he is French, and so, there you are. And yet there is a schism in our relationship, not political but profoundly human.”17

The rupture in the analysis of the present, described here by Wright as a “schism,” marks the unmanageable constellation of a present that ultimately stems from the historical time regimens of the transnational spatial entity of the Black Atlantic, and which the advocates of Négritude were subjected to no less so than their transatlantic contemporaries. The “splitting of times,”18 which encompasses anachronies, delays, standstills, traumata, anticipations, and temporal remnants, needs to be approached and understood as the challenge of global contemporaneity. The failure of shared chronologies becomes particularly tangible in Wright’s querying of the construct of Négritude which Senghor had presented publically for the first time at the conference. Senghor had drawn on a philosophy of black African culture which he then, employing a seemingly essentialist reading of Henri Bergson, sought to move beyond the racist Western allochronies. He took La philosophie bantou as his orientation, reflections on African philosophy by the missionary and Franciscan pater

17| Cf. “Débats, 19 septembre à 21 h,” Présence Africaine, no. 8-9-10, Le 1er congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, Paris-Sorbonne, 19-22 septembre 1956 (June-November 1956), numéro special: 66-83, 67. 18| Maria Muhle, “Aufteilung der Zeiten – Die Anachronie der Geschichte,” in Kunstgeschichtlichkeit. Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Eva Kernbauer (Paderborn: Fink, 2015), 51–66.

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Placide Tempels published in 1945 that had caused a furor.19 Still influential in debates today, Tempels’ work is based on an idea of a time intrinsic to Africa, based on the animistic postulate that the whole universe is a dynamic spiritual community of humans, their ancestors, animals, and plants, and in which a secret powerful energy is at work. The complex order of this closed society must necessarily—so the thesis—remain incomprehensible and alien to the West. Senghor complemented this ontology with a reading of Henri Bergson, the concept of the “force vitale” and its inherent idea of rhythm flowing into the text of his lecture.20 Senghor’s physiopsychological self-description of ‘the negroe’ made use of ethnological conceptions of ancestry as well as totemic and astral cosmologies, all of which Richard Wright, the radical author of the African-American civil rights movement, considered—understandably—to be obsolete. But encapsulated in this was not just Senghor’s strategy of a return to a “Graal-Négritude” already left behind in 1949.21 Only slightly modified, the same theses were published the same year under the title L’esthétique négroafricaine, now directing attention more intensely on his real interest, the case for an aesthetic temporality that he had described in 1939 exclusively on the basis of an analysis of “art nègre.” From the poetry of the ancestors and the “art nègre,”22 violently wrested away in the traumatic events of deportation and colonialism, as well as the prehistorical rock paintings of Africa,23 a rhythmic and mystical pictorial concept is to be garnered, for which he formulated the term “image idéogramme” as a structural element of abstract temporal experience.24 This “image idéogramme” first found its material correlate in the painting of the French artist Pierre Soulages, whose discovery Senghor described as a “shock,” as a reenactment of Pablo Picasso’s discovery of African art in the Musée de Trocadéro, moving him in a way similar at the sight of a Dan mask. If Picasso had 19| Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L'esprit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture négro-africaine,” in Le 1er congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, 51–65, 53. 20| For Tempels cf. Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, 83f. On the debates surrounding ethno philosophy by the African philosopher Paulin Hountondji cf. Franziska Dübgen and Stefan Skupien, Paulin Hountondji. African Philosophy as Critical Universalism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 19f. On the racist ontology of Henri Bergson, cf. Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy. Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 21| Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Le message de Goethe aux nègres-nouveaux (1949),” in Liberté I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 83–86, 83. 22| Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ce que l'homme noir apporte (1939),” in id., Liberté I, 22–38, 24, 35. 23| Here he employed theses formulated by Leo Frobenius and his modernist reevaluation of African rock painting, shown in a large-scale exhibition cycle in Europe and the U.S., cf. Jean-Louis Georget, Hélène Ivanoff, and Richard Kuba, ed., Kulturkreise. Frobenius und seine Zeit (Berlin: Reimer, 2016); Karl-Heinz Kohl, Richard Kuba, and Hélène Ivanoff, ed., Kunst der Vorzeit. Felsbilder aus der Sammlung Frobenius (Munich/ London/ New York: Prestel, 2016). 24| Léopold Sédar Senghor, “L'esthétique négro-africaine (1956),” in Liberté I, 202–217, 210.

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

celebrated the incursion of an allochronic temporality of the primitive, for Senghor, Pierre Soulages becomes the guarantor of an overlayering new idea of the image, one in which the temporality of the ancestors can also be visualized. As Soulages himself had revealed, the aesthetic of an “art contemporain”25 becomes apparent in the “image idéogramme.” The genesis of the painted black image signs on a yellow to white background in the works of Pierre Soulages, one of which Senghor purchased (fig. 2), furnishes in turn an insight into a time-specific constellation of the postwar West, wherein consideration and reflection on the experience of the present is of particular importance. Comparable to Hannah Arendt’s conception of a crisis of the present, embroiled in a struggle with the past and the future, the artist had only first gradually—via obstructed pictorial architectures—found his way to the large-format signs which Senghor understood as ideogrammatic pictorial representation.26 25| Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Pierre Soulages (1958),” in Liberté I, 232–236, 232: “La première fois que je vis un tableau de Pierre Soulages, ce fut un choc. Je reçus, au creux de l’estomac, un coup, qui me fit vaciller, comme le boxeur, touché, qui soudain s’abîme. C’est exactement l’impression que j’avais éprouvée à la première vue du masque dan.” Cf. Sunday O. Anozie, Structural Models and African Poetics: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Literature (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 94; Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, Ein Afrikaner in Paris: Léopold Sédar Senghor und die Zukunft der Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018), 132. 26| Natalie Adamson, “Vestiges of the Future. Temporality in the Early Work of Pierre Soulages,” Art History 35 (2012): 126–151. Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future,” in id., Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London/ New York: Penguin, 2006), 3–15. For “crisis” as a concept of time, see Koselleck, Conceptual History, 238–39: Koselleck understands “crisis” as “central interpretament for both political and social history” that “pointed towards the pressure of time:” “The knowledge of uncertainty and the compulsion toward foresight were part of almost every mention of crisis in order to prevent disaster or to search for salvation.”

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The “image idéogramme” realized the claim to a specific (African) experience of time that Senghor’s critical contemporary and cofounder of Négritude, Aimé Césaire, had put forward in a letter announcing his resignation from the French Communist Party the same year. A singular historical experience, which was separate from those “awful avatars” belonging only to them, was to be included into the present and considered for future political and cultural action.27 No longer able to find a place in an international political utopia, this cold only occur by embarking on their very own path. Four years prior to the congress, Frantz Fanon had countered Senghor’s aesthetic vocabulary with a phenomenological “objecthood” of the black body, describing it as the uncircumventable and enforced experience of physical presence in the context of the politics of racist exclusion.28 Then at the congress Fanon reiterated his critique of a specific essentialist African temporality of the culture, whereby in his view the relationship to the present could not be retrieved through aesthetic experience.29 All the numerous voices of a common experience of the present in the Black Atlantic are searching to transgress a universal time concept of modernity, discernible in conceptions which combine philosophy, aesthetics, and politics in new and unconventional ways and utilize fragments of Western epistemologies, at times paradoxically, for their interests. Their methods are comparable to similar interpolations of the historical in the experience of the present in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and they share their plea for the interpenetration of political measures, semantics, and material-aesthetic practices of temporality.30 They bring the phenomenological concept into play, evkoking the flesh of words31 or the presence of images, but also a history of living ancestors, who deconstruct metaphysical, allochronic correlates of the aesthetic and thus cultivate fundamental framings and obstacles to contemporariness. The claims placed on the complex discussion of contemporaneity were first described by Terry Smith and Peter Osborne in the context of a global, i.e. transnationally conceived artistic field, emerging in the mid-1980s and becoming virulent 27| “(…) coupée de terribles avatars qui n’appartiennent qu’à elle,” cf. Aimé Césaire, “Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956),” in Lire le "Discours sur le colonialisme" d'Aimé Césaire, ed. Georges Ngal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994), 136. 28| Cf. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 109. 29| Frantz Fanon, “Racisme et culture,” in Le 1er congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, 122-131. 30| Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 13. 31| Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (1998), trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

The Global Promise of Contemporary Art

as postmodernism receded. Here Osborne draws on Heidegger’s formulation of an “ekstatic character of temporality” or a “primordial outside of itself,”32 which ties the condition of this contemporaneity to a “temporality” lying outside subjective experience, deriving the anticipation of something future from the experiences of something past: “Having-been arises from the future, in such a way that the future that has-been (or better ‘is in the process of having-been’) releases the present from itself. This unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been is what we call temporality.”33

Osborne examines the associated meaning forged by the temporal experience and its metaphysical correlates in relation to a historical hermeneutic, one that now mainly challenges art in its fictional re-presentation of history and the accompanying anticipations. “Contemporaneity” is now the new task of contemporary art: “This is of particular concern because what seems distinctive and important about the changing temporal quality of the historical present over the last few decades is best expressed through the distinctive conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries—as if time itself is indifferent to this existing together—but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally present ‘temporalities’ or ‘times,’ a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times.”34

The challenges it places on art are quite obvious: as the fictional entity of a connectedness between everyone, who however can never be mutually present, there nonetheless exists the expectation not only to be able to bring about this coming together, but also to deal with all the related problems. The fiction of a transnational contemporaneity demands renouncing a clearly-defined shared future, it looks for new formulations of the past, which without a political imperative nonetheless assembles and merges the various times of the respective actors, unhinges the universal, and simultaneously makes links visible. And yet gaps remain here too: Osborne’s exclusive consideration of a “post-conceptualism” is scarcely able to provide transcultural approaches to an aesthetic temporality that would do justice to its demanding and ambitious task— to formulate “prehistories” of geopolitical constructions of the present from a dispersed contemporariness.35 As touched on above, engaging the temporal ex32| Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. and ed. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 302. 3 3| Heidegger, Being and Time, 300. 3 4| Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 17. 35| “The historical motto, ‘to each present, its own prehistory,’ must thus be interpreted to mean: to each geopolitically differentiated construction of the present, its own prehistory. In this respect, we can distinguish the subject of the contemporary (the contemporary’s ‘I’) from that of a classical modernity.” Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 25.

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perience of the present and its historical condition took place prior to the time of concept art initiated by the West; it begins—amongst others with an African and African-American critique of modernity—not least with the artistic positioning in the context of Négritude. In Achille Mbembe’s vision of the “contemporary,” the “prehistoric” temporality is the result of an enlightened “black reason” that seeks to apprehend the “facticity”36 of a conception of Africa in the primitive. The allochronic time concepts, which in The Postcolony Mbembe also describes in reference to their aesthetic forming in the “grotesque” and the “fetish,” simultaneously furnish the starting point for a messianic promise that Mbembe has characterized as “time in the state of becoming.”37 In this he is also averting the “dialectic disappearing”38 that shadows numerous African epistemological conceptions of “contemporaneity” since the 1960s: under the suspicion that the so-called Afrocentric conceptions would bring forth a black, racist metaphysics of presence, from the Western perspective they were regarded as ideologically compromised needing to be disavowed.39 Mbembe’s description of a global future of “Afropolitanism,”40 distilled from polychronic models of the present in the Black Atlantic, indirectly takes up Neil Beloufa’s video work K e m p i n s k i from 2007 (fig. 3): with a group of amateur actors Beloufa staged the spectacle of an Afro-futurist journey in the nighttime darkness of a meadow in the suburbs of Bamako. As imaginary informants of a distant future, herdsmen, in the light of their technoid neon tubes and accompanied by the acoustic signals of an invisible space shuttle, tell of wondersome, absurd, and inconsistent experiences, wishes and hopes, which are already realized. In the ethnographic temporal modus of the present tense, the figures emerging out of the 36| Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3f, 11. 37| Cf. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 11, 102f. Mbembe is here probably drawing on Derrida’s conceptual use of “messianicity:” “Messianicity (which I regard as a universal structure of experience, and which cannot be reduced to religious messianism of any stripe) is anything but utopian: it refers, in every here-now, to the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that is, to the most irreducibly heterogeneous otherness. Nothing is more ‘realistic’ or ‘immediate’ than this messianic apprehension, straining forward toward the event of him who/ that which is coming.” Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” trans. and ed. Kelly Barry, in Ghostly Demarcations. A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London/ New York: Verso, 1999), 213–269, 248. 38| Diagne, African Art, 31f. 39| Cf. Wilder, Freedom Time, 8: “Scholarship long promoted one-sided understandings of Césaire and Senghor as either essentialist nativists or naïve humanists. Tied to the territorialism that dominated histories of decolonization, Negritude, whether embraced or criticized, was treated as an affirmative theory of Africanity rather than a critical theory of modernity.” Cf. Wilder and Watson, The Postcolonial Contemporary. 4 0| Cf. Sarah Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe,” Transition 120 (2016): 28–37, 29.

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shadows also recall prehistoric imaginations: life in animal communities, telematic experiences of time, and scenarios of a dissolution of the boundaries of time and space. As an impossible and simultaneously already materialized form of futurity, this African scenario conveys a global vision of technoid progress that has currently come to a stagnation: “The film exposes the lack of alternatives and a difficulty to envision a framework for being together in a way that isn’t customary, yet urges that we need to nevertheless continue seeking what means are necessary to move out of the stand still of the contemporary.”41 |

41| Qtd. after Maria Hlavajova, “Kempinski, 2007. Neïl Beloufa,” in Former West (March 19, 2013), https://formerwest.org/DocumentsConstellationsProspects/Contributions/Kempinski, n.p. Cf. Kodwo Eshun, “Weiterführende Überlegungen zum Afrofuturismus,” in Ethnofuturismen, ed. Armen Avanessian, and Mahan Moalemi (Leipzig: Merve, 2018), 41–65.

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Figures Fig. 1

William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, pl. 2, 1753, copper plate, and engraving, 37,2 x 49,0 cm, British Museum London; qtd. from Robert Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works (London: Print Room, 1989), no. 196.

Fig. 2

Pierre Soulages, Peinture 81 x 60 cm, 3 déce m b re 1956, 1956, oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm; qtd. from Hans Belting, and Andrea Buddensieg, Ein Afrikaner in Paris: Léopold Sédar Senghor und die Zukunft der Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018), 135, fig. 25; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Fig. 3

Neil Beloufa, Kempinsk i, 2007, video installation, 14’, https://vimeo.com/100106460; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Present, Presence, Presentation

Boris Groys

Present, Presence, Presentation

1

The word present can be understood at least in two different ways. Thus, we can speak about the presence of the present—about the ways in which the world presents itself to us. It is a traditional topic of philosophy. From Plato through Heidegger and until our own time one mostly thematized the experience of here and now, the immediate openness of the world to our senses. But speaking about our relationship to the world we can also ask a different question: how do we present ourselves to the world? In other words, we can reverse the usual subject/object relationship: instead of asking how do we see the world, we would ask how does the world see us? Obviously, it is a more difficult, dangerous and even fateful question because the way in which the world sees us determines our place in the world—in some cases it is a question of life and death. Here the present takes a form of con-temporaneity. Contemporaneity is the synchronization of my personal time and the world time—and it is not always reflected on and consciously practiced. Often enough I overlook the world—being immersed in my own private problems. And the world seems not to be interested in me, not to like me and not to target me. But there are also moments in which I take a conscious effort of synchronization between myself and world in a twofold way: I look at the world and let the world look at me. In our own present the primary medium of such an operation of conscious synchronization is the Internet. Indeed, when we ask ourselves what does happen 1| The present contribution is based on the widely unchanged opening lecture, which Boris Groys gave under the title “Internet and Presenting of the Present” on occasion of the 4 th Annual Conference of the German Research Association (DFG) Priority Program “Aesthetic Temporalities Today: Present, Presentness, Presentation.” The conference took place on June 13–15, 2018 at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

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in the world right now we mostly turn to the Internet. And when we want to let the world know who we are and what we are thinking or doing we post some information about our own life on the social media. The genealogy of the Internet started with the press—with newspapers and magazines. However, today the Internet made the technology of media coverage potentially accessible to every individual. Everyone can use a photo or video camera to produce images, to write commentaries to them and to distribute the results on the global scale—avoiding any censorship or selection process. In this respect, the Internet functions not so much as a medium of information but, rather, as an artistic medium. Indeed, in our culture art is the privileged medium of self-presentation: through art the subject practices self-objectivation and, thus, offers itself to approval or rejection by the world society. So, one could believe that in the age of the Internet the traditional art institutions—with all their rituals of selection and presentation—became obsolete. However, in our time one can see the growth of the museums of contemporary art all over the world and one registers the fact that the public of the big exhibitions of contemporary art, such as Venice Biennale or Documenta in Kassel, is also permanently growing. Why is it so? If one asks the people who are not professionally involved into art why they are going to these big, global exhibitions they answer mostly: we want to see what happens in the contemporary world. So let me now to discuss and compare these two very different mediums: the Internet and the global art exhibition. Let us begin with the Internet. At the first glance, the Internet seems to be global, universal. And it is how many people still see it. But after some years of the Internet’s functioning it is becoming increasingly evident that the space of the Internet is not unified and universal but, rather, extremely fragmented. Of course, under its current regime all the Internet data is globally accessible. But in practice the Internet leads not to the emergence of the universal public space but to the tribalisation of the public. The reason for that is very simple. The Internet reacts to the user’s questions—to the user’s clicks. In other words, the user finds on the Internet only what he or she wants to find. The Internet is, actually, an extremely narcissistic medium—it is a mirror of our specific interests and desires. It does not show us what we do not want to see. In the context of the social media we also communicate mostly with the people who share our interests and attitude—be it political or aesthetic attitudes. Thus, the non-selective character of the Internet is an illusion. The factual functioning of the Internet is based of the non-explicit rules of selection according to which the users select only what they already know or are familiar with. Of course, some search programs are able to go through the whole Internet. But these programs have also always certain particular goals and are controlled by big corporations and not by individual users. In this respect the Internet is the opposite of, let say, an urban space where we permanently have to see what we

Present, Presence, Presentation

not necessarily want to see. In many cases we try to ignore these unwanted images and impressions, in many cases they provoke our interest but in any case in this way we expand our field of experience. Now let me suggest that the curatorial choices may also let us see what we would not chose to see, what even was unknown to us. Indeed, these choices are interesting and productive when they are transgressive, when they cross the usual boundaries of websites and chat groups. One can hear time and again that contemporary art is elitist because it is selective– and that it should be put under control of a democratic public. Yes, indeed, there is a certain gap between the contemporary art exhibition practice and the tastes and expectations of the audience. The reason for that is simple: the audience of every particular exhibition is local—but the exhibited art is often international. That means: contemporary art has not a narrow, elitist but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective that can irritate the local audiences. It is the same kind of irritation that nowadays migration provokes in the European countries. Many people also say that the acceptance of migration is “elitist”. Here we are confronted with the same phenomenon: the broader, internationalist attitude is experienced by the local audiences as elitist—even if the migrants themselves are far from belonging to any kind of elite. We are living inside the system of the national states. The societies of these states are, in their turn, divided along the lines of different cultural identities and their particular interests—and these divisions are also reflected in the fragmentation of the Internet. But inside every national cultural there are institutions that embody the universalist, transnational projects. Among them are universities and art museums. Indeed, the European museums were from their beginnings the universalist institutions—they wanted to present the universal art history and not only the national art history. Of course, one can argue that this universalist project reflected the imperial policies of the European states in the 19th century. And to some extent it is true—but only to some extent. The European museum system has its origin in the French Revolution. It was the French Revolution that turned the things that were earlier used by church and aristocracy into the artworks, i.e. in the objects that were exhibited in the museum, originally in the Louvre, only to be looked at. The secularism of the French Revolution abolished the contemplation of God as the highest goal of life—and substituted it by the contemplation of the “beautiful” material objects. In other words, art itself was produced by revolutionary violence—and was from its beginnings a modern form of iconoclasm. The European museums began to aesthetically suspend their own cultural traditions before they aestheticized and suspended non-European cultural traditions. It is this revolutionary transformation of the Louvre that Kant has in mind when he writes in his Critique of the Power of Judgment:

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“If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I do not like that sort of thing (…); in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things (…). All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at issue here (…). One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in the matter of taste.”2

Actually, the protection of the art objects can be compared to the socialpolitical protection of the human body. I mean the protection through the human rights—also introduced by the French Revolution. There is a close relationship between art and humanism. According to the principles of humanism, the human being can be only contemplated—but not actively used: killed, violated, enslaved etc. The humanist program was summarized by Kant through the famous formulation: in the enlightened, secular society man is supposed to be never treated as a means but only as a goal. That is why we see slavery as barbaric. But to use an artwork in the same way as we use other things and commodities also means to act in a barbaric way. And what is most important here: the humans are defined by the secular gaze only as objects having a certain, namely, human form. The human gaze does not see the human soul—that was the privilege of God. The human gaze sees only the human body. Thus, our rights are related to the image that we offer to the gaze of the others. That is why we are so much interested in this image. And that is also why we are interested in protection of art and being protected by art. Now our current museums of modern and contemporary art are not only heirs of the 19th century museums but also of the strategies of the avant-garde. The artists of the avant-garde rejected their national cultural identities. They wanted their art to become universalist, to develop a visual language that would be accessible to everyone beyond the traditional cultural borders. Modern and contemporary art museums are heirs of this project. The museum is selective. But museum’s selection should be, so to say, anti-selection, transgressive selection. In this sense this curatorial selection re-instates the universalist project of the modern and contemporary museum. In other words, here the selection does not create fragmentation but, on the contrary, works against it by creating a unified space of representation in which the different fragments of the off-line culture and of the Internet become equally represented. However, today the universalist project does not have a political, institutional support because the universal, global state does not exist. And so one can say, 2| Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), § 2, 90.

Present, Presence, Presentation

that the today’s art system plays a role of the symbolic substitution of such an universal state by organizing biennials, the Documenta and other exhibitions having a claim to present the universal, global art and culture—that means art and culture of the non-existent, utopian global state. Our time is characterized by a lack of balance between political and economic powers, between public institutions and commercial practices. Our economy operates on the global level, whereas our politics operates on the local level. Here the museums and big international exhibition play a crucial political role by at least partially compensating the lack of the global public space and global politics. But the question remains: how can art circulating on the Internet be presented inside the museum or, more general, art exhibition space? In the context of the Internet the artists function as content providers. It is quite a shift in the fate of art. For the traditional art the content providers were Jesus Christ, Holy Virgin and the Christian Saints as well as gods of the ancient Greek pantheon and important historical figures. The goal of the artist was to give to these contents a shape, a form. The artist was a form giver—not a content provider. Of course, the shift happened much earlier than the emergence of the Internet. But on the Internet the artwork is necessarily represented as combination between images and texts. These combinations always take the character of documentary realism. When the artists use these combinations they function as freelance journalists. That means that they use the same means of production and distribution as mass media—but do it in a personalized, subjective way. In other words here artists are not primarily form givers, indeed. They use the forms that created by other people and made accessible to the artists through the Internet technology—with all its formatting and protocols of use. Instead, these artists are content provider in a double sense: they document a certain ‘objective’ content but they do that in a somewhat ‘subjective’ way—thus turning their own personality into a particular content. This content can be produced by the artists themselves—as actions performances and processes initiated by the artists and then documented by them. Indeed, the development of art during the last hundred years can be described as a movement from the art object to the art event. This movement started already with Futurism and Dada. Accordingly, we can watch—also in our museums of contemporary art—the increasing presence of art documentation, instead of the traditional art works. The cumulative effect of these strategies is not far away from the 19th century realism as the artists combined the conventional means of documentation and representation with a certain personal touch. Art becomes identical with the journalism—and both of them become individualized, personalized in their content even if both of them remain standardized in their form. The theoreticians of the 20th century formalism, for example, Roman Jacobson, believed that the artistic use of the of the means of communications en-

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tails the suspension or even annulment of the information, of the content—in the art context the content becomes totally absorbed by the form.3 But in the context of the Internet the form remains identical for all the messages—and, thus, the content becomes immunized from its absorption by the form. The Internet re-establishes on the technological level the conventions of the content presentation that dominated in the 19th century. The avant-garde artists protested against these conventions because they believed them to be purely arbitrary and merely culturally determined. But in the context of the Internet such a revolt against these conventions makes no sense because they are inscribed into the Internet technology itself. Obviously, this documentary art operates not by traditional realist pictures but by combinations of pictures, photos, videos, sound sequences and texts. In the context of the Internet all these components build a kind of meta-sentence, meta-narrative. In the context of the museum they are presented in a form of installation. Already the conceptual artists organized the installation space as a sentence conveying a certain meaning—analogous to the use of sentences in language. With conceptual art, artistic practice became meaningful and communicative again—after a certain period of the dominance of a formalist understanding of art. Art began to make theoretical statements, to communicate empirical experiences and theoretical knowledge, to formulate ethical and political attitudes and to tell stories. We all know the substantial role that the famous ‘linguistic turn’ played in the emergence and development of conceptual art. The influence of Wittgenstein and French Structuralism on conceptual art practice was decisive—to mention only some relevant names among many others. But this new orientation towards meaning and communication does not mean that art became somehow immaterial, that its materiality lost its relevance, or that its medium dissolved into message. The contrary is the case. Every art is material—and can be only material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the ‘linguistic turn’ precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. By these philosophers the thinking was understood as a use of language. And language was understood as being material through and through—as a combination of sounds and visual signs. Thus, the equivalence, or at least a parallelism was demonstrated between word and image, between the order of words and the order of things, the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space. That explains also the main difference between artistic or curatorial installations and traditional exhibitions. The traditional exhibition treats its space as anony3| Roman Jacobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, ed. id. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1987), ch. 7, 62-95.

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mous, neutral one. Only the exhibited artworks are important—but not the space in which they are exhibited. On the contrary, the installation—be it an artistic or curatorial installation—inscribes the exhibited artworks into the contingent material space having a certain specific configuration. And here the real problem emerges of translating the Internet art—all kinds of digital images, videos and texts and their combinations—into the museum space. If the presentation of art on the Internet became standardized—the presentation of art in the museum became de-standardized. Today, the standard white cube is a thing of the past. And that means that the curator has to find a specific form—a specific installation, a specific configuration of the exhibition space for presentation of the digital, informational material. Here the question of the form becomes the central one again. However, the form-giving shifts from the individual artworks to the organization of the space in which these artworks are presented. In other words, the responsibility for the form-giving becomes transferred from the artists to the curators who use the individual artworks as contents—this time as contents inside the space that the curators created. Of course, the artists can reclaim their traditional form-giving function—but only if they begin to function as curators of their own work. Indeed, when we visit an exhibition of contemporary art the only thing that truly remains in our memory is the organization of the spaces of this exhibition—especially, if this organization is original, unusual. The form-giving remains the main occupation by art in the museum. However, if the individual artworks can be reproduced, the installation can be only documented. And such a documentation, if it is put on the Internet, becomes a content—and, thus, becomes to be open again for a form giving operation inside the museum. So the exchange between museum and Internet takes a character of exchange between content and form: what was a form in the museum becomes a content on the Internet—and vice versa. But here I would like to make a final remark concerning the role of the museum as an archive. Meanwhile we acquired a habit to look to the Internet if we want to find some information, including historical information. Thus, the impression emerges that the Internet is a truly global archive. However, as I have already said, the Internet cannot be stabilized in time because it is privately driven. On the Internet all the data permanently emerge, disappear or get modified. There is no fragment of the Internet that would be publicly owned—and, thus, also publicly protected. That means that the traditional archives, including the museums, still function as normative archives—also in our time. Meanwhile these institutions increasingly get a representation in the Internet by digitalizing their archived materials. But it only confirms the fact that the ability of the Internet to become an archive is depending on the offline institutions, including museums. That means that at the end the emergence of the Internet affected the functioning of the museums

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less than it often assumed. The Internet gives to the museums additional possibilities to present their collections and activities but it does in no way undermine the role that the museums traditionally played in our culture. |

Visible/Unvisible Present

Johannes F. Lehmann

Visible/Unvisible Present

When we take it for granted that there is a ‘present’ in which we are living and about which we speak, which we can compare with the ‘past’ and observe with respect to possible developments of the ‘future,’ then we owe this to a linguistic positing that first took place in the final third of the 18th century: the noun ‘present’ [‘Gegenwart’] shifts from serving as a spatial to a dominant temporal concept.1 Directly tied to this is the concurrent rise of the abstract nouns: ‘the past’ and ‘the future.’2 Previously one could have spoken about the ‘current century,’ the ‘current course of time,’ or indeed even ‘the time now’ and the ‘present time,’ but not about ‘the present’ in the sense of a permanently changing, synchronic, overarching social nexus, whether this be that of a territory, a nation, or the world. The hallmark of this present as a synchronic nexus of all the “signs of our time”3 is its conflictive transitoriness. In his text Ueber den Geist des Zeitalters in Teutschland (1790) the philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold formulated this as the diagnosis of the present:

1| Ingrid Oesterle, “‘Es ist an der Zeit!’ Zur kulturellen Konstruktionsveränderung von Zeit gegen 1800,” in Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. Walter Hinderer, Alexander von Bormann and Gerhart von Graevenitz (Wuerzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 91–121, 101. Johannes F. Lehmann, “Editorial: ‘Gegenwart’ im 17. Jahrhundert? Zur Frage literarischer Gegenwartsbezüge vor der ‘Sattelzeit,’” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) 42, no. 1 (2017): 110–121. 2| Lucien Hölscher, “Von leeren und gefüllten Zeiten: Zum Wandel historischer Zeitkonzepte seit dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Obsession der Gegenwart: Zeit im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Alexander C.T. Geppert and Till Kössler (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 37–70. Cf. id., Die Entdeckung der Zukunft, 2. ed. (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2016). 3| Karl Leonhard Reinhold, “Ueber den Geist des Zeitalters in Teutschland,” Der neue teutsche Merkur 1 (1790), 3 rd piece, 225–255; 4 th piece, 337–378, 228.

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“The most striking and peculiar feature of the spirit of our age is an unsettling of all hitherto known systems, theories, and ideas, the breadth and depth of which is unprecedented in human history. The most diverse, indeed the most flagrantly contradictory signs of our time lead back to this feature, which announce to all and sundry an endeavor, more animated than ever before, to establish new forms everywhere on the one hand, on the other to support the old. Whether the old will finally be supplanted by the new, or the latter by the former; then would humanity be permitted to win, and if so what exactly?”4

This, according to Reinhold, is something the “unbiased independent thinker” dare not decide. The present is contoured as a transitional time, the contradictory unity of which resides in how ‘the old’ wrestles with ‘the new’ to gain future legitimacy, and it is precisely this that makes talk of the ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ as metonymic designations for distinctive times plausible since the final third of the 18th century. More recently however, historians of the early modern period interested in the rise of the press and journalism have sought to date the “birth of the present” back to the 17th century, foremost amongst them Achim Landwehr and Daniel Fulda.5 This perspective has failed to precisely determine the type of historical change mentioned in each respective case and to adequately take into consideration the reflexive capacity of the concept of ‘the present.’ It is undeniable that the burgeoning journalism (and other media, for example, as Landwehr has impressively shown, the calendar) contributed to increasing awareness about the events taking place at the time and initiating discussion. It is also irrefutable that knowledge of the political events of the present was increasingly taken to be a norm for scholars. But when, at the end of the 17th century, Kaspar Stieler, a theorist of the newspaper, states in his book Zeitungs Nutz und Lust that those involved in running the affairs of the state need to be informed about their own time and have to know “who is the Nuntius Apostolicus in Vienna: and / whether the Pope is / called Alexander / Innocentius / Paulus or Coelestinus,”6 then this may show that the present is thought of in 4| Reinhold, “Ueber den Geist,” 3 rd piece, 225–255; 4 th piece, 337–378, 228. 5| Achim Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart: Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt o.M.: S. Fischer, 2014); Daniel Fulda, “Wann begann die ‘offene’ Zukunft? Ein Versuch, die Koselleck’sche Fixierung auf die ‘Sattelzeit’ zu lösen,” in Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartung in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung, ed. Wolfgang Breul and Jan Carsten Schnurr (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 141–172; ibid., “Um 1700 begann die ‘offene’ Zukunft. Zum Ausgang der Aufklärung von einer allgemeinen Unsicherheitserfahrung,” in Um 1700: Die Formierung der europäischen Aufklärung. Zwischen Öffnung und neuerlicher Schließung, ed. ibid., Jörn Steigerwald (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 23–45. See also: Stefanie Stockhorst, “Zeitkonzepte: Zur Pluralisierung des Zeitdiskurses im langen 18. Jahrhundert,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 30, no. 2 (2006): 157–164. 6| Kaspar Stieler, Zeitungs Lust und Nutz, ed. Gert Hagelweide, complete reprint of the original edition from 1695 (Bremen: Schünemann, 1969), 4. Changes like these were then given their own publication, for:

Visible/Unvisible Present

terms of its difference to the past, but it certainly does not prove the idea of a synchronic social, cultural, political, and economic overarching nexus that is ‘the present’ and is constantly changing, as formulated at the end of the 18th century by Mercier for example: “The art of printing, gunpowder, the discovery of the new world, the post, the promissory note, and the ostensible balance of Europe have thrown the entire old system into disarray.” And a page further on: “The man who is modified by government forms, laws, habits, becomes a completely different species as he once was.”7 For Stieler in contrast, the “variety of the present”8 resides merely in how one name takes the place of another; a socio-cultural transformation, as is reflected since the middle of the 18th century and which thus makes plausible the necessity of an abstracting category ‘the present,’ is not given. As important as Landwehr’s evidence is for proving the enhanced status of the present in the 17th century, a distinction still needs to be drawn between this enhancement and the temporalizing of the present.9 A temporalized present presupposes reflection on an internal and correlative complexity that is variable in its temporal dynamic and social structure, one that is simultaneously coupled to methods capable of rendering it both visible and observable. I will develop this problematic of the visible/invisible present in three steps. In the first, conceptual and practical, I look to think of the ‘present’ in its interdependencies as an overarching nexus, to gather pertinent observations and turn it into a (discursive) object of intervention. This concerns the discourse of world history and the reflection on the practices of ‘policing.’ Secondly, I show how, parallel and simultaneously in the discourse on the genius, privileged viewing positions were discussed from where invisible simultaneities (of the present) could be rendered visible. In the third step, I shall explicate an example of this rendering visible of the present, drawing on the fragment Der tugendhafte Taugenichts by J.M.R. Lenz. “The heads in Europe have changed so much in just a few years / that there are very few serene Houses to be found / wherein no significant deaths have occurred. This has been remarked on in writings now and then/ but because the gallant youth and many other curious minds prefer to see such remarks together in a compendium / these brief notes have been put up on demand.” So [Johann Gottfried Gregorius], Das jetzt lebende Europa Oder Genealogische Beschreibung aller jetzt lebenden Durchlauchtigsten Häupter. Von Melissantes (Franckfurt/ Leipzig: Niedtens, 1715), Preface, pl. 2 (recto and verso). 7| Louis Sébastien Mercier, Neuer Versuch über die Schauspielkunst, aus dem Französischen von Heinrich Leopold Wagner, mit einem Anhang aus Goethes Brieftasche, facsimile print after the edition of 1776, with an epilogue by Peter Pfaff (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1967), 198/199. In a list of the changes in the present Mercier follows a passage from a Voltaire text: Anmerkungen über die Geschichte überhaupt (Remarques sur l’histoire, 1742), in ibid, Erzählungen, Dialoge, Streitschriften, ed. Martin Fontius (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1981), vol. 3, 217–222, esp. 220/221. 8| Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart, 201. 9| For more on this see the detailed discussion of the contributors to the IASL thematic issue: “‘Gegenwart’ im 17. Jahrhundert? Versuch einer Antwort,” ed. Stefan Geyer and Johannes F. Lehmann, IASL 42, no.1 (2017): 110–278, 257–278.

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I. Present as Nexus (Universal History, Police) To make a substantive time concept of ‘the present’ plausible, the prevailing relations of the time, in particular social-economic relations, need to be grasped as an interconnected nexus, and indeed as one that is observable and discussable in terms of its changes, although it is invisible or unseeable in its wholeness. The Gottingen historian August Ludwig Schlözer formulates in Vorstellung der Universal-Historie (1772) a distinction between the “relationships of the real nexus,” which describes the diachronic and “visible”10 relations of cause and effect, and the “the nexus of the time,” which means the mere simultaneity of countries, peoples, or events which do not possess any “visible connections:”11 “The mere temporal connection has incidents and events which are not based in one another, but are simultaneous; that is under facts which occur in very different countries, or in different parts of the world, but at the same time. […] Here it is the claim of universal history to combine all the simultaneous facts, to imagine at once the situation of the world in this given age, and in such a way think every single incident synchronistically.”12

Schlözer’s “ideal of a universal history,” so the subtitle prefixed to the table of contents, aims to furnish an abstracting and synthesizing perspective, one in which a “general view that encompasses the whole”13 is to consider the whole of history under “one single aspect.” Only so can it create “a system through which diversity can be grasped at once.”14 Elsewhere, Schlözer writes: “this sweeping gaze recasts the aggregate into a system, returns all states of the globe into a unity, the human species, and evaluates the peoples of this globe solely in terms of their relations to the large revolutions of the world.”15 A system of synchronic relationships is to be distilled from the real causal relations. The diversely employed optical metaphors (view, gaze, painting, mosaic painting, stage, etc.) aimed to provide an abstracting representation of invisible simultaneities in a nexus that itself is unimaginable. In the form of its representation as an interconnected system, world history 10| Ludwig August Schlözer, Vorstellung der Universal-Historie (Goettingen / Gotha: Dieterich, 1772), reprint, in ibid., Vorstellung der Universal-Historie (1772/73), with appendixes, edited, introduced and commented by Horst Walter Blanke (Hagen: Rottmann, 1990), 46. 11| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 22. 12| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 48f. 13| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 18. There is also mention of a “gaze that apprehends everything at once” (34). The opposition between aggregate and system, which Schlözer ties to a specific way of looking at connections and their nexuses, was later taken up repeatedly in the philosophy of history; for the example of Schiller, see: Thomas Prüfer, Die Bildung der Geschichte: Friedrich Schiller und die Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 289–297. 14| Both quotes Schlözer, Vorstellung, 22. 15| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 18f.

Visible/Unvisible Present

is to ultimately simulate a vantage point that can “see through the concatenation of all things on our earth,”16 or in other words: the vantage point of God. Schlözer’s position in the history of world historiography and in the heated controversy that ensued from his Vorstellung is less conclusive than the quotes above initially seem to indicate.17 A few of the visual metaphors like the mosaic and the use of synchronistic tables in his text follow the principle of the older universal history, which one could characterize as a kind of additive or tableau-like synchrony, the “classical form of representing history”18 in the Middle Ages. In his polemical review of Schlözer’s Vorstellung, Herder accordingly criticized that it would have been better to “craft more of a picture, a whole continuum, from history.”19 On the other hand, with his formulations Schölzer is aspiring to precisely this idea of a lively and organic connective nexus of cultural history, finding a powerful formula for this with the opposition between aggregate and system.20 Fundamental to Schlözer’s innovative idea of a world or universal history is not only the inclusion of all nations and peoples, which was already standard in the older examples of universal history and their chronological tables21 (which he also still used and modified),22 but the integration of as many facets and aspects as possible which constitute the respective social-structural, economic, and cultural 16| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 49 (emphasis J.L.). 17| Hölscher tends towards simplifying tensions and ambiguities: “Von leeren Zeiten,” 48f. He places Schlözer’s synchronistic thinking in an analogy to the concurrently emerging concept of the ‘Zeitgeist’ and Herder’s idea of the ‘Volk spirit.’ While this is by no means wrong, it does however play down the proximity to the older synchrony and the distance to Herder. 18| Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft. Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart / Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012), 35. 19| Johann Gottfried Herder, “Schlözers Vorstellung seiner Universal-Geschichte,” Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, no. LX (28.7.1772): 473–478, 477. In the controversy between Schlözer and his Gottingen colleague Johann Friedrich Gatterer Herder defended the latter with this review. 20| Schlözer expressly claims this formulation to be his own discovery: “From amongst the new authors not one is known to me who makes this general view that encompasses the whole into the character of world history, and in such a way distinguishes system from aggregate.” Schlözer, Vorstellung, 23. For more on this formulation, see: Manfred Riedel, “System, Struktur,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1990), 285–322. 21| Universal history lectures using chronological tables were held in Gottingen since the founding of the university and themselves in turn based on older traditions. See André de Melo Araújo, Weltgeschichte in Göttingen. Eine Studie über das spätaufklärerische universalhistorische Denken, 1756–1815 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012). The chronological tables of Johann David Köhler (1684–1755) are still the foundations for his successor Johann Christoph Gatterer. On the dispute between Schlözer and Gatterer about the priority of a world history as a system and the role Herder played, see: Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft, 365–386. 22| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 88–94 and 109–112.

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‘presents.’ The aim is to furnish an overview of and “insight into the connection”23 between the political, social, economic, technological, and other relevant factors of a time; to identify the “course of culture, of industry, or in a word, the course of humanity in a nation.”24 Accordingly, Schlözer is interested in the history of tobacco, of the strangest inventions, of the postal service, and the French colonies in America.25 The focus is to be shifted from the history of rulers to socio-economic conditions and the connective nexus. “‘A history of tobacco’—this would always be as an interesting subject for world history as ‘the history of the great Tamerlane,’ or ‘the history of the ancient Assyrian empire.’ Assuming namely, that the connection a historical subject has with important changes in the world, as a cause with effects, is the sole criterion determining its worth for universal history.”26

The relevance of such a socio-economic nexus was formulated in similar terms by Schlözer’s archenemy Gatterer; despite aggregative listings into tables for grouping special histories, he too was interested in identifying the simultaneous nexus: “The highest degree of the pragmatic in history would be the idea of a general nexus of things in the world (Nexus rerum universalis). For no incident in the world is, as it were, insular. All depends on one another, occasions one another, begets one another, is occasioned, is begotten, and occasions and begets again. The incidents of the noble and the lowliest, individual people and all together, of private life and the greater world, indeed even the brutish and lifeless creatures and people, all are entwined and connected in one another.”27

That everything is interconnected, the estates of society amongst themselves and humans with animals and things—this leads to an observational attitude that aims to ‘see’ intersections between cultures. And precisely the explicit inclusion of animals and, in particular, things will be of significance in what follows. These ‘images’ are not to represent a tabular chronometric parallel, but an interdependent intertwining. Against the background of the move towards a secular universal history, formulated for the first time by Turgot in the middle of the 18th century,

23| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 45. 24| Schlözer, Vorstellung, 44. 25| Cf. Horst Walter Blanke, “Einleitung,” in Schlözer, Vorstellung, 9–26, 21. 26| August Ludwig Schlözer, “Erste Bekanntwerdung des Tobaks in Europa, besonders in Deutschland,” in id., August Ludwig Schlözers Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts, Dritter Theil, Heft XIII–XVIII (1778), 3 rd ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1780), book 15, 153–165, 153f. 27| Johann Christoph Gatterer, “Vom historischen Plan, und der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen (1767),” in Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Horst Walter Blanke and Dirk Fleischer, vol. 2: Elemente der Aufklärungshistorik (Stuttgart / Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990), 621–662, 659.

Visible/Unvisible Present

history is to be the history of culture and humanity.28 A representation of the historical sequence of nexuses of the present is—as Turgot explicitly states—concerned with the respective “coupe of history.”29 History consists of a “succession of time levels structured in such a way.”30 Accordingly, Turgot also needs the nouns ‘past’ and ‘present’ to describe this nexus sequence and the respective “tableau of the present:”31 “Mais la géographie, par là même qu’elle est le tableau du présent, varie sans cesse; et puisque tout de qui est passé a été présent, l’histoire, qui est le récit du passé, doit être une suite de ces tableaux de l’histoire du monde pris dans chaque moment. Je parle de l’histoire universelle.”32

Without having a noun ‘the present’ at his disposal, in Schlözer’s thought this idea is formulated somewhat differently: the whole “situation of the world at the one given time”33 is to be represented. Such a formulation indicates ex negativo the necessity or the need for a noun ‘present.’ A little later in a historico-philosophical reflection, Adam Weishaupt arrived at a similar formulation in a passage on the progress and development of mankind: “Along with the development of the same [power of the mind and needs] so the way of life changes along with them, the moral and political state, the notions of happiness, the conduct of people towards one another, their relations to one an-other, the whole situation of the concurrent world at the one given time.”34 28| Cf. Johannes Rohbeck, “Erklärende Historiographie und Teleologie der Geschichte,” in Zwischen Empirisierung und Konstruktionsleistung: Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörn Garber and Heinz Thoma (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 2004), 77–99. Cf. ibid., “Turgot als Geschichtsphilosoph,” in Turgot: Über die Fortschritte des menschlichen Geistes, ed. ibid. and Lieselotte Steibrügge (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), 7–87. 29| Turgot, “Entwurf zu einem Werk über die politische Geographie” [1751], in id., Über die Fortschritte des menschlichen Geistes, ed. Rohbeck and Steinbrügge 168–220, 166. In original: “La géographie politique est, si j'ose anisi parler, la coupe de l’historie.” Turgot, “Plan d’un ouvrage sur la géographie politique,” in id., Oeuvres et Documents le concernant, avec Biographie et Notes, par Gustave Schelle, Tome 1 (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1913), 255–274, 258 (emphasis J.L.). 30| This is the formulation given by Rohbeck, “Turgot,” 45. 31| Rohbeck, “Turgot,” 166. 32| Turgot, “Plan d’un ouvrage,” 257. “Aber die Geographie verändert sich unaufhörlich, weil sie eben ein Bild der Gegenwart ist, und da alles, was vergangen ist, einmal Gegenwart war, muß die Geschichte, die eine Erzählung der Vergangenheit ist, aus einer Abfolge dieser Bilder der Weltgeschichte bestehen, genommen in jedem Augenblick. Ich spreche von der Universalgeschichte.” Turgot, Entwurf, 166 (trans. modified by J.L.). 3 3| Turgot, Entwurf, 259. 3 4| [Adam Weishaupt], “Anrede an die neu aufzunehmenden Illuminatos dirigentes,” in Nachtrag von weitern Originalschriften, welche die Illuminatensekte überhaupt, sonderbar aber den Stifter derselben Adam Weishaupt, gewesen Professor zu Ingolstadt betreffen, und bey der auf dem Baron Bassusischen Schloß zu Sandersdorf, einem bekannten Illuminaten-Neste, vorgenommenen Visitation entdeckt, sofort

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The “whole situation of the concurrent world at the one given time”—this is the complex expression for precisely the complex situation of a simultaneity of elements and conditions of a ‘world’ interconnected at one time, which change with one another in and through time and whose synchronic nexus is to be thought of as a succession of simultaneities at each time, i.e. also as different from one another, but itself is not directly observable. In other words: as synchronic cuts through a nexus of relations, whereby to enable a temporal reflection, the spatial concepts of ‘situation’ and ‘relation’ and that of presence are transformed into time concepts. As a concept of time, the noun ‘present’ functions in rhetorical terms like an ellipsis or a metonym—the expression characterizes the time of the present by refraining from concretely marking what in itself in particular and in relation is present, i.e. is there. By omitting the concrete, the ‘present’ signifies all that which appears simultaneously in a time respectively and the new substantive concept is explicitly marked: while the noun “the present” in the dictionaries of the 17th and early 18th centuries is not even entered, an entry in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary since 1755 reads: “The Present. An elliptical expression for the present time.”35 A potent testament of the usage of this nominalization was the formulation of the title given to the encyclopedic universal history published in London since 1736, its inclusion and translation history reaching to the Gottingen universal historians: An Universal History, From the Earliest Account of Time to the Present.36 While the elliptical concept of the present refers to something that, on the one hand, appears in time and, on the other, that consists precisely in how that which appears concurrently forms and develops relations and conditions that permanently change and elude accompanying perception, the ‘present’ alternates between visibility and invisibility from the outset. As such an object of observation, discourse, and governance, the present constituted itself first in the second half of the 18th century, and precisely—so my thesis—as a correlate to the power techniques of policing and the burgeoning modern public sphere.37 auf Churfürstlich höchsten Befehl gedruckt, und zum geheimen Archiv genommen worden sind, um solche jedermann auf Verlangen zur Einsicht vorlegen zu lassen: Zwo Abtheilungen (Munich: Lentner, 1787), II, 44-121, 53f. 35| Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Samuel Johnson (London: Consortium, 1755), 382. 36| Cf.: Helmut Zedelmaier, Der Anfang der Geschichte. Studien zur Ursprungsdebatte im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2003), 143–163. The translation of Universal History provided by Baumgarten since 1744 dispenses with the subtitle, i.e. the term ‘Gegenwart’ is missing: Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten, Uebersetzung der Allgemeinen Welthistorie, die in England durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten angefertigt worden, Ersther Theil (Halle: Gebauer, 1744). 37| Cf. Johannes F. Lehmann, “Literatur der Gegenwart als politisches Drama der Öffentlichkeit. Der Fall Robert Prutz und seine Voraussetzungen im 18. Jahrhundert,” in: Dramatische Eigenzeiten des Politischen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Gamper and Peter Schnyder (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017), 191– 214.

Visible/Unvisible Present

It is not only the more recent universal historian who, looking back, seeks to identify cuts through historical presents; the contemporary gaze of power and governments attempts to observe the connections not immediately visible and turn them into the object of a recursive observing tool of governance and control. In 1760 Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, the self-proclaimed scientist of police and policing, writes: The most noble characteristic of a good police is, consequently, an unwavering, tireless attention for the current state of the country or the city it administers and regulates: and that for all the noticeable changes which bring forth a different direction and relationship in the objects and final ends of the policing, it also changes its institutions and arrangements. 38

As described by scholars since the middle of the 18th century, the police is the medium of an observant constitution of the present and—through policing laws—also an agent of its change. Indeed, the changes in time are the object to which the policing legislation has to react to with measures limited to a fixed time. One can see this as the introduction of a reflective temporality into governmental action: “It is therefore certain that the police laws cannot always remain the same, but are subjected to change more than others laws.”39 Despite the problematic that frequently changing laws is possibly damaging to a government’s authority, von Justi advocates a “public revocation” of police laws which “no longer suit the current state of the community.”40 Because circumstances “change from time to time”41 and the police press for unstinting improvement (“the police is never beyond improvement”)42 in its efforts to keep actualizing, it is an agent of enmity to tradition. With the battle cry of “plus ultra” and “on and on” it takes the fight to all those who “believe to dishonor the ashes of their fathers whenever they deviate even just an inch from their habits and customs, and, complying with the saying as

38| Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Die Natur und das Wesen der Staaten (Berlin/ Stettin/ Leipzig: Rüdiger, 1760), 476. 39| Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Grundsätze der Policey-Wissenschaft, 2 nd strongly enlarged ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1759), 296. See also Joachim Georg Darjes, Erste Gründe der CameralWissenschaften drinnen die Haupt-Theile so wohl der Oeconomie als auch der Policey und besondern Cameral-Wissenschaft in ihrer natürlichen Verknüpfung zum Gebrauch seiner academischen Fürlesung entworfen (Jena: Johann Adam Melchiors Wittwe, 1756), 3 rd part, § 25, 407: “Police arrangements can be of a long duration.” 4 0| Justi, Grundsätze, 307. See Joseph Vogl, “Staatsbegehren. Zur Epoche der Policey,” DVjs 74 (2000): 600–626. Focusing on welfare and insurance, Vogl thus identifies and elaborates on police references to the future. I would like to add however that this presupposes observing the present. 41| Georg Heinrich Zincke, “Von der Policey-Wissenschaft,” in id., Cameralisten-Bibliothek, 2 nd part (Leipzig: Jacobi, 1751), 337. 42| Zincke, “Policey-Wissenschaft,” 337.

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damaging as it is common, leave everything as it is.”43 The police mobilizes energy against the inertia towards improvement, but also against the obsession with reform. In order to avoid doing too much or too little, the police “has to make sure that it never loses sight of the connection of the whole,” and it must permanently keep under observation “the connections of the body politic” and the “current state of the community.” These observations of the changing present connections have to also be made the topic of continuous communication.44 Von Justi again: “The law-giving cleverness must therefore constantly strive to investigate the current condition of the state thoroughly and reliably; on the one hand, make thorough knowledge available to the attentive administration of the affairs; and on the other, through the reports of the authorities and servants, if they are in agreement with one another from different sides, do the same with other reviewed information, so that the condition of the body politic is sufficiently inspected in all its parts.”45

Through specific practices of observing and communicating, which have to be thought of synchronically, it is nevertheless possible to make the respective current interconnecting relationships visible at certain points as a nexus. The new in the cameralistic understanding of the police since the middle of the 18th century lies in this focusing on empiricism as an authority and foundation of governmental action.46 In the foundational texts of cameralism, police science appears as a sub-discipline: “Almost all of the matters of regulation covered by the older police doctrines are also presented here, albeit now ordered into a coherently interconnected economic purpose.”47 It is the rationality of the economy and its “planning-prognostic element” that makes it plausible to attain the necessary knowledge of the actual state of not only persons but also objects and things in the

4 3| Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Zincke (the son of the publisher Georg Heinrich Zincke) in a speech for the birthday of the Duke of Brunswick “Von dem in Oeconomischen Policey-Cammer- und Finanz-Sachen höchstnöthigen: Plus ultra,” in Leipziger Sammlungen von Wirtschafftlichen, Policey- Cammer- und FinantzSachen, IX (1753): 478–508, 486. Zincke justifies the economically necessary “Plus ultra” and “on and on” (“Oeconomische Policey-Cammer,” 487) anthropologically with man’s drive to find happiness. 4 4| Justi, Grundsätze, 295 f. Cf.: Friedrich Wilhelm Tafinger, Von der Lehre der Policeywissenschaft auf teutschen Universitäten (Tuebingen: Fues, 1767), 8f.: “Precisely for this reason the police must make every effort to keep an eye on the relationship between all these different goods and donations at all times […].” 4 5| Justi, Grundsätze, 296. In his book: Die Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glückseeligkeit der Staaten; oder ausführliche Vorstellung der gesamten Policey-Wissenschaft, zweyter Band (Koenigsberg / Leipzig: Gebhard Ludewig Woltersdorfs Wittwe, 1761), 472, Justi adds a detailed note to this sentence in which he makes it clear that this is not to be done by spying (“scouts”). 4 6| As part of the economy, policing now refers in essence to the “food supply” and its organization and improvement. See Zincke, “Von der Policey-Wissenschaft,” 323. 47| Thomas Simon, “Gute Policey.” Ordnungsleitbilder und Zielvorstellungen politischen Handelns in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt o.M.: Klostermann, 2004), 452.

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framework of the political economies arising in the 18th century.48 If early modern politics and police (politia) were limited to maintaining order with respect to associations of persons, the oikinomia, at first strictly separated, requires through the inclusion of factual goods and possessions and their connections, a stronger intensity in its controlling and other virtues: “The primary virtue of the economist is not justice, wisdom, or bravery, but diligence and ‘omnipresence.’”49 To the degree that the economy—in the sense of an “administering”50 economy—becomes the foundation of politics and surpasses its limitation to persons due to the economic consideration of goods and possessions, then the empiricism of the present and its methods for observing the present become the centerpiece of police practice.51 Within the framework of its setting of economic purpose, to continuously improve the ‘machinery of the state’ with all its component parts,52 there emerges the idea of the permanent observation of all its parts53 and an awareness of the connection of all parts among themselves: “The prosperity of the subjects has extensive limits, and can be considered from various standpoints, and all of them, even the most minute circumstances belong to the chain of incidents which lead to such an ulti4 8| Simon, Gute Policey. Simon shows how the individual voices formulating ideas on an economic and empirical foundation of politics were already marginalized in the 17 th century (namely Johann Joachim Becher, Wilhelm von Schröder, and Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk) and their projects primarily failed “to acquire a reasonably reliable picture of the commercial structures and circumstances of the country.” Simon, Gute Policey, 381–416, 415. 4 9| Simon, Gute Policey, 428. For the increasing need of governance due to the setting of economic goals, see: 533–542. 5 0| In his text Oeconomie in Form einer Wissenschaft (1717), Amthor distinguishes between natural, acquisitive, and administrative political economy. See Simon, Gute Policey, 441. 51| It is repeatedly emphasized that with its observing willingness to change, the police focus on not just people but goods and property: “If the science of policing and the police is to teach how to come up with and apply prudent laws and arrangements, and through this enable a thriving food situation in the country and for the subjects, and the comfort of life is promoted, through all this however the ready fortune of the prince is be established, increased, and maintained: then both the goods and properties as well as the persons with which this science is concerned inevitably demand increased knowledge and curative improvement at all times.” Zincke, “Oeconomische Policey-Cammer,” 492. 52|For this metaphor, see: Barbara Stolberg-Rilinger, Der Staat als Maschine: Zur politischen Metaphorik des Fürstenstaats (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986). 5 3| The “alert and divining eye” of the ruler “must constantly have an overview of this machine in all its parts.” Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi, “Auf was Art die Regierung den Zusammenhang und das Aufnehmen des Nahrungsstandes durch die Abgaben leiten kann,” in Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi. Gesammelte Politische und Finanzschriften über wichtige Gegenstände (Copenhagen/Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Rüdiger, 1761), 614–632, 616. Justi argues for the consideration of the consequences and sideeffects of taxes and levies with respect to the overall economic nexus and warns against focusing solely on increasing the revenues of the state.

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mate purpose.”54 To take a look at the “most minute circumstances” and be guided by an idea of a “chain of events” also touch on—as we shall see—aesthetic and poetological questions of looking at the present.

II. Seeing the ‘Present’ (Genius) Besides, and in a sense parallel to, the police in the 18th century, an aesthetic regime for rendering the invisible present visible developed in analogy and rivalry, namely in the form of an aesthetics and poetology of the genius. Contrary to the usual reconstruction of the aesthetics of the genius as the breakthrough of a male, autonomously free creative force of a God-subject, it needs to be stressed that the function of the concept of the genius in the second half of the 18th century actually lies in the attempt to conceptualize authors in terms of their relationship to the present and to obligate them to subordinate themselves to the world and the present. Considering the descriptions of the genius in the eighteenth century, the first thing that is noticeable is how visual metaphors are employed to constitute a viewing position. As the concept of the ‘situation,’ whether this be the political or the military or indeed the world at large, presupposes a position from where this situation should be able to be surveyed in its synchronic and changeable complexity,55 the figuration of the genius sets the task that what is simultaneously there, and as the simultaneous is invisible, is to be seen and made visible nevertheless. The emphasis on the visuality in the description of the specific achievement of the genius implies that the specific creative force is not autonomous, but one that subordinates itself to that which is present, both visible and invisible. The locus classicus—and frequently either incompletely quoted or read—is Shaftesbury’s essay Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1711), wherein he characterizes the true author as a “second Maker,” albeit—and this addition is decisive—as “a second Maker: a just Prometheus under Jove.”56 This author “under Jove” is the antithesis to an author who is “injudicious” in their use of “wit and fancy.” Rather, the true author ‘creates’ under Jupiter by giving a precise rendering of the latter’s world and creatures: “but for the man who truly and in a just sense deserves the 5 4| Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer, Lehrbegriff sämtlicher oeconomischer und Cameralwissenschaften, vol. 2 (Mannheim: Schwan, 1770), 13. 5 5| Vgl. Günter Oesterle, “‘Coup d’œil’ und ‘point de vue.’ Korrespondenz und Kontrast des Feldherrn- und Soldatenblicks im stehenden Heer des Absolutismus,” in “Es trübt mein Auge sich in Glück und Licht.” Über den Blick in der Literatur, Festschrift for Helmut J. Schneider on his 65 th birthday, ed. Kenneth S. Calhoon et al (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), Philologische Studien und Quellen 221, 146–158. 56| Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author [1711],” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein, Karl Ameriks, and Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70–161, 93.

Visible/Unvisible Present

name of poet, and who is a real master or architect in the kind can describe both men and manners and give to an action its just body and proportions,”57 it this poet alone who, thanks to self-knowledge and virtue, is intimately versed in “the inward form and structure of his fellow creatures,”58 and is an authorial genius because he is capable of describing the proportions of the world’s structure as complexly and “accurately” as he perceives them. This is clearly not the “autonomy of the creative human,”59 or if so, the autonomy here is one whose foundation is an intensive relationship to the world, an autonomy that, setting and obeying its own laws, subordinates itself 60 to the proportions and laws of the world. Shaftesbury thus conceives of writing as practiced by the genius as “mirror writing,”61 as working with a “pocket mirror” or a “looking glass,”62 taking on the task to “draw the several figures of his piece in their proper and real proportions.” In his novel Tom Jones, Henry Fielding also explicitly refutes what he considers to be the false assumption that the inventiveness of the genius is a “creative Faculty,” stating instead that “by Invention is really meant no more (and so the Word signifies) than Discovery, or finding out; or, to explain it at large, a quick and sagacious Penetration into the true Essence of all the Objects of our Contemplation.”63 Optical metaphors of this kind emerge in Germany in the age of the genius, including in Lenz when he refers to the “specific grind of the lens”64 the genius has at his disposal, and in Goethe, who speaks of the “sharp eye for proportion.”65 The object of seeing is now no longer the object itself and its given structure however, which, as it were, visually unfolded, but the relations and proportions of a world that is thought of as itself being changeable. The central function of the concept of the genius and the generation of the position of the corresponding viewpoint—this seems plausible enough to conclude—is to decouple the author from the system of the literary arts and mark the self-adopted coupling with the ‘world’ and thus with the present, namely with that 57| Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy,” 93. 5 8| Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy,” 93. 59| Jochen Schmidt, Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur. Philosophie und Politik 1750–1945, vol. I: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), 258. 6 0| It would be a separate task to trace how the transmission and criticism of the genius aesthetics as a figuration of ‘male’ creative autonomy was involved in rendering the ‘female’ aspects of the genius (in the sense of a heteronomous relationship to the world and the present) invisible and thus forgotten. 61| Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy,” 86f. 6 2| Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy,” 86f. 6 3| Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling [1749] (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 430. 6 4| Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, “Remarks on the Theatre,” in Selected Works by J. M. R. Lenz, trans. Martin Wagner and Ellwood Wiggins (New York: Camden House, 2019), 263. 6 5| Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in German Essays in Art History, ed. Gert Schiff, trans. John Gage (New York: Continuum, 2004), 33–40, 39.

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which precisely now appears as the vital world surrounding the genius—in stark contrast to the timeless treasures of the written tradition. The old argument, already used in antiquity, that it is not possible to produce a genius through learning alone, is now radicalized to the point that learning is identified as a hindrance to the genius in as far as the learned medium of writing disguises direct access to the world and the present. As Wieland claimed, precisely the lack of a “classical education”66 is the reason why Shakespeare became a genius, for instead of undergoing a school education through texts, he learnt directly from life, from experience untainted by learning: “his own observations; keen senses as the tools; a precise attention to the immediate impressions objects have on him—this is what develops the genius.”67 The present states and conditions to be observed are thus not only correlates to the observational and power techniques employed by the police; rather, the ‘present’ emerges as the other of writing and learning—the present arises as the invisible visible that surrounds the poet, and that he then can see and render as a coherent connection when he stays away from learned traditions and immersed in life. Or however, he understands writings and books to be something that appear in his present and are an expression of this present—a possible option for understanding the ubiquitous referencing of texts from the Sturm und Drang to texts of the immediate present. In its intensity this is certainly a new phenomenon in the history of literature around 1770, that current literature is frequently quoted in the texts of the time—and thus the present is also reflected in the mirror of newly published texts.68 Not only does Goethe have Werther delve into Emilia Galotti, published just two years before, the students in Lenz’s Hofmeister attend a performance of Minna von Barnhelm. Lenz is a master of this technique of rendering visible the complexity of the present by referring to contemporary texts. He not only practices the visual poetics of taking a standpoint, as he had described them in Remarks on the Theater as a specifically Christian technique for mirroring the immediate present—here I recall only the note that the poet “takes a standpoint—and then he must combine in that way”69 —but he also presents literally in his theatre the synchronic connection between what is happening simultaneously in his present—and indeed as a connection that reflects the theater as a medium of appearance, as a stage of the present, and a visualized reflection of and on it.

66| Christoph Martin Wieland, “Einige Nachrichten von den Lebens-Umständen des Herrn Willhelm Shakespear” [1766], in ibid., Gesammelte Schriften, 2. Abteilung: Übersetzungen II (3): Shakespeares theatralische Werke. Sechster bis achter Teil, ed. Ernst Stadler, reprint 1 st ed., Berlin 1911 (Hildesheim: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1987), 558–569, 560. 67| Wieland, “Einige Nachrichten,” 561. 6 8| See Stefan Geyer, “Aktualität im Vollzug-Formen der Intertextualität bei Lessing und Goethe,” in Aktualität. Zur Geschichte literarischer Gegenwartsbezüge vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Stefan Geyer and Johannes F. Lehmann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2018), 219–240. 6 9| Lenz, “Remarks on the Theatre,” 264.

Visible/Unvisible Present

III. Showing the Present (Lenz) To conclude I would like to briefly show this with reference to the drama fragment Der tugendhafte Taugenichts. Although clearly recognizable in the tradition of Diderot’s tableau theater, the play also goes far beyond this reference point: while Diderot justifies his theater reform and the presentation of tableaus on the stage as a depiction of connections and relations, which in turn are to documentarily represent a permanently changing social world (“new estates are emerging every day”), but at the same time limiting them to family roles, Lenz expands the scope of the tableaus to depict well-nigh global synchronicities of his present. A brief mention of the play’s subject: Drawing on Schubart’s Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens, which Schiller will also use as the basis for his first drama The Robbers, the story revolves around two unequal aristocrat brothers and their relationship to their father. The play opens with the father giving his sons mathematics lessons, which the younger, Just, quickly understands, and the older, David, doesn‘t. His honor offended by the inability of his son, the father threatens to banish him from home and forbid him from using the family name in the future. Although David clearly fails to grasp mathematics, in secret he is working on plans for fortifications, so that it is not quite clear just how dull he really is; but he conceals this work on military fortifications from his father, who disapproves of the military and has threatened to punish his sons with disinheritance should they merely think of becoming soldiers. The father does like fancy dancers and singers however, keeping them in his own serail, sleeping with all of them—an aspect more pointedly depicted in the second draft—and is very tolerant of the sexual adventures of his sons as long as they do not poach in his serail, constantly imagining them in the arms of some village beauty at night. David though has fallen seriously in love with one of the singers, and because there is no prospect of his love being requited and getting married, then he swaps clothes with the servant Johann and signs up as a simple soldier when Prussian recruiters come around—to either die or prove himself worthy to his father through military achievements. The text is singular in the history of theater and literature in two respects. Firstly, because in the next scene war, namely the Battle of Kolín from 1757, is brought to the stage as a physical presence, with shots being fired, men falling, getting up again and falling again, there’s screaming, wheezing and gasping as death swiftly approaches, men flee in desertion70 —and when the battle is over, the dead are plundered and robbed. The stage here shows—including beyond the war scenes—a physically real tableau of parasitic relationships, the recruiters live para-

70| See Johannes F. Lehmann, “Den Krieg im Rücken. Deserteure im Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Kriegstheater. Darstellungen von Krieg, Kampf und Schlacht in Drama und Theater seit der Antike, ed. Michael Auer and Claude Haas (Stuttgart: Springer, 2018), 173–188.

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sitically from the recruited soldiers, the deserters from those who die here, and the peasants from the dead who they plunder. That social relations in their interconnection, to be thought of synchronically, are parasitical relations, and as such also form a global present, is shown by the next and final scene of the fragment. The father, mourning his runaway son, no longer even has the stomach to drink his chocolate, for the “sweat of the savages is all over it.” To his servant he says: “Leypold: […] Look at this copperplate, it is from the Voyage à l’Isle-de-France—you’re like scoundrels when you complain about our whims, look at this nigger, could have our Lord Christ suffered more than them, and all that so that we can tickle our palates— make no more chocolate for as long as I live, and no more spices on my meals, tell the cook […]. Who am I that other people have to sweat blood because of me. They should be allowed to hit me on the head, then my money would be theirs—[…].”71

The book quoted here in the text, Voyage à l’Isle de France by JacquesHenri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, is for Lenz contemporary literature, first published in 1773, i.e. only two, at the most three years before he wrote the play. A German translation was published in 1774. The copperplate (fig. 1) is based on a sketch by Jean-Michel Moreau, while the figure the father mentions has the following caption: “Ce qui sert à vos plaisirs est mouillé de nos larmes.”72 By quoting the book Lenz brings to the stage a tableau that creates a relationship of visible simultaneity between events in Bohemia/Prussia and the drinking of chocolate with the colonial situation on Mauritius. The medium that renders visible these relationships between wars in Europe and colonial exploitation in Africa and elsewhere appears on the stage as book and tableau, as plausible knowledge of the present. Bernardin’s text is positioned as the narratively unfolded subscriptio to the emblematic tableau, with the scene on the right in the middle distance described as the element of a story: “Sometimes, when grown too old to labour, they are turned out to get their bread where they can. One day I saw a poor creature, who was nothing but skin and bone, cutting off the flesh of a dead horse to eat—it was one skeleton devouring another!”73 71| Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, “Der tugendhafte Taugenichts,” in Werke, vol. 1, 499–526, 518f. 72| Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Voyage à l’isle de France, à l’isle de Bourbon, au cap de bonne-espérance, et avec des Observations nouvelles sur la nature et sur les Hommes, par un officier du Roi, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez Merlin, 1773), 277. Apart from the title copperplate, it is the only engraving in the first volume. There is another engraving in the second volume, but this cannot be the one referred to, for here slavery is in fact presented as idyllic under bearable conditions. For this context, see Robin Howell, “Bernardin de Saint-Pierres Founding Work: The Voyage à l’île de France,” Modern Language Review 107 (2012): 756–771. 73| [Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre], A Voyage to the Isle of France, the Isle of Bourbon and the Cape of Good Hope; with observations and reflections upon nature and mankind [1773], 1 st engl. trans. 1800 (London: Cundee, 1800), 114.

Visible/Unvisible Present

While the father in his subjective and self-righteous perspective has an emotional fit of bad conscience, induced by this (narrated) picture, that in the very next moment makes way for other emotions, the picture of slavery and the connection between chocolate, delighted taste-buds, and gold in Prussia with sweating blood in the colonies are brought into visible existence in a manner recalling Büchner’s The Hessian Land Courier. With the book brought to the stage, Lenz is implicitly evoking the context of the other two global voyages of the time, those of Bougainville and Cook, while choosing however with Bernardin’s Voyage the account that best fits to his own subjective, Christian poetology of the present: where Lenz’s standpoint aims to subordinate itself to the viewpoints of the lowliest,74 in the form of letters written in the respective present moment Bernardin focuses on the living realities and perspectives of the exploited, the Breton fishermen, the sailors, but above all the black slaves. He openly criticizes that all who turn away from this fact, “as if the disgraceful deed does not belong to our age, in which half of Europe is taking part.” Lenz is taking up exactly this when he brings Bernardin’s book and its detailed description of the reality of the slaves, which is simultaneously a precise explication of the copperplate prin74| “Alas, to see the great secret in many different aspects and each and every man to be able see it with his own eyes!” Lenz in July 1775 to Sophie von Laroche, in Werke, vol. 3: Gedichte und Briefe, 325. That this view and this standpoint, to be able to immerse oneself in the minutest detail, is the standpoint of Christ, is then noted by Lenz in his moral-theological treatise “Über die Natur unseres Geistes:” Christ had “concentrated the miseries of a whole world on himself to see through them. What only a God can do –.” Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, “Über die Natur unseres Geistes,” in Werke und Briefe in drei Bänden, ed. Sigrid Damm, vol. 2 (Frankfurt o.M./ Leipzig: Insel, 1992), 619–624, 622.

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ted in the book, to the stage. This simultaneously raises the question as to which side theater itself takes as the medium of the visualization of the present, a point addressed in Bernadin’s text: “Those beautiful rose and flame-colours, in which our ladies are dressed, cotton, of so general use, coffee and chocolate, now the only breakfast admitted to polite tables; the rouge with which the pallid beauty gives new bloom to her complexion—all these are prepared by the industrious hand of the enslaved and oppressed negro ! Ye women of sensibility and sentiment, who weep at the affecting story of a novel, or the representation of a tragedy, know, that what constitutes your chiefest delight, is moistened with the tears and died with the blood of men !”75

What can one do with the theater when it causes tears to be shed for enjoyment, while the clothes upon which the tears of enjoyment fall are soaked in tears of a very different kind (“mouillé”)? With this quoting of the copperplate, the bringingto-stage of this text, and the reflection on the tragedy, Lenz is radically calling theater itself into question. In his theater text he transforms it into a medium for rendering visible the complex synchronicity of the present. That Lenz enters into a conflict (still ongoing today) about the public visibility of images and knowledge about this invisible present is indicated by how Bernardin’s book was generally neglected by the public, occupying a marginal position. Due to its radically critical perspective on slavery in France it could only be published without the royal printing patent, while Lenz’s text remained unpublished altogether. As a medium of rendering visible the present of the time it remained invisible in this very present. |

Figures F ig . 1 Ce qui ser t à vos p lais ir s es t m ouillé d e n o s l a r m e s, 1773, copper plate, Jean-Michel Moreau (inv. 1772), D. Née (sculp.); qtd. from: Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Voyage à l’isle de France, à l’isle de Bourbon, au cap de bonne-espérance, ... Avec des Observations nouvelles sur la nature et sur les Hommes, par un officier du Roi, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez Merlin, 1773), pl. 4, 199.

75| Bernardin, Voyage, 123.

Exhibiting Earth History

Patrick Stoffel | Christina Wessely

Exhibiting Earth History. The Politics of Visualization in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Paris: Prehistorical Walks through the World Exhibition As the gates to the world exhibition on the Champ de Mars in Paris opened on April 1, 1867, visitors encountered, right at the center of the exhibition venue, the “Galerie de l’Histoire du travail,” also called the “musée rétrospectif.”1 Primarily serving the display of outstanding scientific, artistic, and technological achievements and thus already looking forward to the active molding of the future, here numerous nations presented for the first time prehistoric objects from the pre- and early history of humanity to a larger audience.2 The objects extracted from the rock strata along the Somme in northwest France, demonstrable proof that humankind possessed a pre- and early history reaching far back beyond the written sources and the accounts of the Bible, had been found and verified as such only a few years before the world exhibition.3 Within this context, the great age of humanity could 1| This article is based on a lecture given at a conference hosted by Peter Schnyder in November 2017 in Neuchâtel: “Erdgeschichten. Literatur und Geologie im langen 19. Jahrhundert.” Another version has been published in German: “Urzeit und Umwelt. Philipp Leopold Martins Museum der Urwelt in Berlin,” in Erdgeschichten. Geologie und Literatur im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Peter Schnyder (Wuerzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020). 2| Cf. Charlotte Quiblier, “L’exposition préhistorique de la Galerie de l’Histoire du travail en 1867. Organisation, réception et impacts,” Cahiers de l’École du Louvre. Recherches en histoire de l’art, histoire des civilisations, archéologie, anthropologie et muséologie [en ligne] 5 (2014), 67–77. 3| Cf. Claudine Cohen, La méthode de Zadig. La trace, le fossile, la prevue (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 203–212.

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be presented and exhibited as the latest discovery, in particular by France. The renowned archaeologist and anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet, initiator of the Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistorique, which took place for the second time at the world exhibition in Paris after being held the previous year in Neuchâtel, curated the prehistoric hall for France and wrote a special guide, the Promenades préhistoriques à l’Exposition universelle, that led visitors on “prehistoric walks” through the exhibition grounds. This turn to the past only seemingly contradicts the idea of progress pointing to the future, an idea the format of the world exhibition was fully committed to supporting. To possess a prehistory, to reconstruct and exhibit it, to present it, and thus “bring it into the present” in the sense of its Late Latin meaning, was in fact considered proof of a ‘successful’ and pioneering history, particularly in relationship to the first world exhibition in London in 1851, where, although exhibits from the earth’s history were featured, there were none devoted to telling the pre- and early history of humankind.

London: The Colonization of the Earth’s History Presented in an Amusement Park On June 10, 1854, Queen Victoria opened a large amusement and education park in the London suburb of Sydenham; in its middle was the Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton in the style of the cast-iron and glass architecture (fig. 1). The Crystal Palace Company, specially formed for the purpose, had dismantled the landmark of the 1851 London Grand International Exhibition held in Hyde Park and reconstructed it in Sydenham with a few modifications. The first thing catching the eye of visitors traveling on the train to Sydenham were the gigantic inhabitants of long bygone worlds. They now inhabited several islands, replicating past geological epochs, in the middle of a large artificial lake. On the islands, visitors could romp about between long extinct prehistoric creatures, while in the background the Crystal Palace bore witness to progress and heralded the possibilities of the future. Built by the English sculptor and illustrator Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs—unlike the fossil remains on display in the British Museum at the time—were not characterized by their age and originality, but by their visual appeal and symbolism. The standing iguanodon (see fig 1, bottom right) was, according to Hawkins, the “largest [model] of which there is any record of a casting being made.”4 It is made out of four iron columns, 600 bricks, 650 5-inch 4| Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “On Visual Education as Applied to Geology, Illustrated by Diagrams and Models of the Geological Restorations at the Crystal Palace,” Journal of the Society of Arts 78, no. 2 (1854), 444–449, 447.

Exhibiting Earth History

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half-round drain-tiles, 900 plain tiles, 38 casks of cement, 90 casks of broken stone, 100 feet of iron hooping and 20 feet of cube inch bar.5 The iguanodon is thus one of the earliest examples of reinforced concrete construction, the pioneering technology presented at the 1867 Paris world exhibition that will eventually make it possible to build of skyscrapers. Reconstructed out of the depositional environment, the primeval worlds on the grounds of Crystal Palace Park were to parade, mirroring the aim of the exhibits in the main exhibition, outstanding scientific, artistic, and technological achievement and the seemingly limitless possibilities of progress. As the paleontologist Richard Owen, the appointed scientific director, put it in the Guide, it would be simply impossible to create these primeval worlds without this interplay.6 Floutingly shown off as the result of the enormous productive capacity currently achievable in different sectors of cultural creativity, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were gigantic monuments of an empire that was continuously extending the scope of its power and influence with the help of new technologies, driven by the wish to dominate the world in the future as the dinosaurs had once dominated the reptilian age. Created by God to “inhabit and precede us in possession of this part of the

5| Cf. Waterhouse Hawkins, “On Visual Education,” 447. 6| Cf. Richard Owen, Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854), 7.

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earth called Great Britain”7 —as their builder Hawkins declared during a lecture before the Society of Arts two weeks prior to the opening of the park—the dinosaurs embody hegemonic claims embracing both space and time. Helping to make this dual claim possible was historical geology; reconstructed by British (and French) geologists and paleontologists from rock strata they primarily determined temporally as the manifestations of different epochs, it was a particularly suitable medium in the 19th century to produce and depict globality, for local stratigraphy could be employed to extrapolate a geological categorization valid for the whole earth.8 That this symbolically entailed an imperialist gesture became markedly evident subsequent to the primeval worlds of Crystal Palace, in Arthur Canon Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912). In Doyle’s late excursion into the genre of the “Imperial Romance,” an expedition party from London under the leadership of Professor Challenger encounters not only the “room for romance,”9 believed to have long vanished from the world, on a high plateau in the Amazon basin, but also discovers a primeval world which, cut off from the rest of the world, has survived the passing of time. The South American high plateau is populated by dinosaurs whose fossil remains were excavated in the so-called heroic age of Victorian paleontology at sites in southeast England that gained fame under the name “Wealden.” After a long journey, the expedition members find in faraway South America what they and the readership of the novel know from the park at Crystal Palace—they come across their homeland in prehistoric condition. From the high plateau, christened “Maple White Land” in a gesture of imperial land grabbing, Professor Challenger brings back a pterosaur to London to underline the credibility of his travel account, but also to bolster the hegemonic claim of British science. The pterosaur is a living specimen of the species pterodactyls, which had also populated Britain in prehistoric times and of which several sculptures are to be found in Crystal Palace park. With the path forged by science, the hegemonic claims of the British Empire now also cover the South American high plateau. “Maple White Land” is now a territory free for colonization. Beginning with the 1851 exhibition, visualization practices were employed in London to create a prehistoric age, global in its expanse, that was in turn to legitimate claims to global hegemony, opening a channel for colonizing the very history of the earth.

7| Waterhouse Hawkins, “On Visual Education,” 444. 8| Cf. Bernhard Fritscher, “Erdgeschichtsschreibung als montanistische Praxis: Zum nationalen Stil einer ‘Preußischen Geognosie’,” in Staat, Bergbau und Bergakademie. Montanexperten im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Hartmut Schleiff and Peter Konečný (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 205–229, 222–224. 9| Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World [1912] (Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.

Exhibiting Earth History

Berlin: Nation Building in the Museum of the Primeval World The focus of the 1867 world exhibition in Paris was on the pre- and early history of humanity. But those geological periods without humans were also represented. Amongst the objects and reconstructions of this prehistoric time was a group of primeval animals made by Philipp Leopold Martin, a taxidermist at the natural history collection in Stuttgart, which were shown as part of the objects of the Kingdom of Württemberg in the class 89, “Requirements and Methods of Lessons.”10 These sculptures of primeval animals, which Martin created privately in addition to his work in the natural history collection, had already been shown (at least in part) in 1865/66 at two exhibitions in Stuttgart.11 Martin was not a willing contributor to the Paris world exhibition however: as he saw it, the “location is completely unsuitable for the subject.”12 The kind of location he envisaged is described in a letter Martin sent to the Prussian Ministry of Religion, Education, and Culture the very same year. Prior to his position in Stuttgart, Martin, born in 1815 in Silesia, was deputy assistant at the Royal Zoological Museum in Berlin, and shortly before the letter he had sent a sculptural reconstruction of an “antediluvian lion,” which had also featured in Paris, to Berlin as a gift for the king;13 in the letter he requests support for the founding of a museum of the primeval world in Berlin, in particular suitable premises. In Stuttgart, he explains, “the situation is too confined” and the “disturbing particularism” too pronounced for the founding of a new museum to ever be a success.14 In Prussia, which the year before had emerged victorious and more powerful than ever from the Austro-Prussian War, the situation and opportunities would be somewhat greater, or at least this was Martin’s hope. The living conditions of long bygone times to be exhibited in a museum are thus connected from the outset to the situation of the museum itself. The museum of the primeval world was to respond to the public’s “keen interest” in the earliest periods of the earth’s history and give these “new stature and new life through images and form.”15 The twelve main epochs of the earth’s history, spanning “the beginnings of organic life itself 10| Cf. Königl. Württembergische Ausstellungs-Commission, Allgemeine Pariser Ausstellung von 1867. Beschreibender Katalog der Erzeugnisse des Königreichs Württemberg (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1867), 141. 11| Cf. Philipp Leopold Martin, Katalog zur vermehrten Ausstellung urweltlicher Thiere, versteinerter Ueberreste, Gypsabgüsse solcher und geologischer Charakterbilder (Stuttgart: Fr. Müller, 1866). 12| MdU, 17. Here and in the following the abbreviation MdU and page number refers to: GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium, Vc Sekt. 2 Tit. X XIII Litt. A Nr. 75, vol. 1: Gründung eines Museums urweltlicher Gebilde in Berlin durch den Inspektor Martin vom archäologischen Museum in Stuttgart, 1867. 13| Cf. Ilse Jahn, “Ein Pionier der ‘Museumsdermoplastik:’ Leopold Martin (1815–1886),” Der Präparator 41 (1995), 53–62, 60, and MdU, 1. 14| MdU, 17. 15| MdU, 13.

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through to the emergence of man,” was to be represented “sculpturally and visually” in twelve large tableaus, so that each tableau provided “a clear as possible picture of physical and organic life at the time.”16 Thanks to the sequential arrangement of the tableaus, the periods of the earth’s history, inconceivably long from the perspective of a human lifespan, were to become tangible and the primeval world perceivable as an entity. Without the term being mentioned, these tableaus would have entailed using habitat dioramas, a medium of representation new for the purposes of natural history and for which Martin would later set out the theoretical and practical basics in his three-volume Praxis der Naturgeschichte (1868–1882). Mounted in a niche, such a diorama (or tableau) was to be constructed in Martin’s vision as follows: the background and side walls are to be clad with a large landscape painting that captured the characteristic features of the respective epoch. The central space is filled with three-dimensional groups of plants and animals. Fossils or castings are to be placed in the foreground. A picture from the present is to be positioned above the niche enclosing the diorama to show the “contrast between then and now.”17 16| MdU, 19. 17| MdU, 20.

Exhibiting Earth History

An idea of what such a diorama would have looked like in the never-realized museum of the primeval world in Berlin is provided by a contemporary photograph (fig. 2). It shows the mammoth later reconstructed by Martin and presented to the public together with other models of prehistoric creatures at the 1875 exhibition “Museum of the Primeval World to the Present” held in the Nill’schen Thiergarten in Stuttgart.18 As this was a temporary exhibition, the diorama is not installed in a niche; the large landscape painting is mounted on partition screens, while there is also no contrastive picture of the present. With his idea, specifically envisaged for the museum of the primeval world in Berlin, to make “pictures of the present” a central element of his exhibition concept, Martin was responding to the aesthetic problem of how to visualize time periods defying human comprehension. In the main, two principles seem to have been followed in the selection, not elaborated on by Martin. Firstly, he decided for landscape pictures whose appearance resembled the prehistorical epochs they accompanied. This analogical conclusion is evident with reference to the Carboniferous period—the landscape of the Brazilian jungle is chosen to illustrate the dense, damp forests of this epoch with its leaved canopy and no cycle of seasons.19 The landscape pictures of the tableaus 1–3 and 8–12 appear to be selected on the basis of this principle (see fig. 3). In other cases he adopts landscape pictures wherein the geological epochs they accompany were excavated from sediment rock on the earth’s surface. This principle is the basis for the tableaus 5–7. A consideration of the geographical distribution of these pictures from the present reveals the following: while the use of pictures chosen on the basis of analogy show that prehistoric times as a whole were a global phenomenon, and hence replicate the stratigraphy of the English and French layouts mentioned above, for the pictures from the present in tableaus 5–7, which are based on metonymy, landscapes from the Kingdom of Prussia and Helgoland, an island Prussia laid claim to, were chosen. With the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, precisely those epochs forming the Mesozoic, or the ‘middle ages’ of the earth, are metonymically represented in the Prussian landscape. These are the epochs of the earth’s history which, according to the Austrian paleobiologist Franz Unger, Martin’s most important authority supporting the founding of his museum, “were populated by the largest and

18| For a detailed description of the exhibition, see Uwe Albrecht, Bilder aus dem Tierleben. Philipp Leopold Martin (1815–1885) und die Popularisierung der Naturkunde im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden: Tectum, 2018), 138–147. 19| See the notes on the “Carboniferous period” in the commentary to Franz Unger’s atlas of the primeval world, which Martin claimed to be the model for the background images of the respective Carboniferous period diorama: Franz Unger, Die Urwelt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsperioden. 14 landschaftliche Darstellungen mit erläuterndem Texte / Le monde primitif à ses différentes époques de formation. 14 paysages avec texte explicatif (Vienna: no publishing details, 1851), 14–17.

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Images from the present Geographical distribution 1. Silurian period 2. Devonian period 3. Coal age 4. Dyas period 5. Triassic period 6. Jurassic period 7. Cretaceous period 8. Eocene period 9. Milocene period 10. Pliocene period still undetermined

11. Glacial period 12. Pile-dwelling period

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mightiest creatures ever to live in the primeval world.”20 And they are precisely those ages used to advance the British Empire’s colonization of the earth’s history at Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham. The visualization of earth history through dioramas and images from the present in effect establishes a relationship between human history and earth history, indeed it seems plausible to even go further: the history of the earth seems to prefigure human history, so that a look back at this past becomes a look forward to the (possible) future. The Kingdom of Prussia, so the earth history presented in the museum of the primeval world seems to be suggesting, has reached a new pinnacle and turning point after the victorious Austro-Prussian War of 1866, one in which the situation resembles that of prehistoric life in the earth’s ‘middle ages.’ The dominance of the dinosaurs in the reptilian age, which the British Empire had already sought to lay claim to in Crystal Palace Park, returns in the hegemonic claims of Prussia. It is hardly possible to misunderstand the message: the landscape image from the present accompanying the Jurassic period tableau shows Hohenzollern Castle. The ancestral castle of the House of Hohenzollern is located on Mount Hohenzollern, an outlier of the Swabian Jura. The Jura was seen as being unique amongst all rock strata. The Prussian geologist Leopold von Buch, who systematically examined the development of Jura formations and their locations, considered it to be a special case: whereas all other (main) rock strata of the geological timescale are to be found across the globe, there is no Jura strata in the southern hemisphere at all; in the north it is only evident sporadically and is completely ab-

20| Unger, Die Urwelt, 29.

Exhibiting Earth History

sent in America.21 The Jura is however of salient importance for Germany’s “geognostic structure.” Stretching across the “greater part of Germany,” the Jura is also “genuinely part of Germany” where political circumstances dictate that it is called the French Jura. This German Jura forms a “gigantic frontier stronghold,” its ramparts enclosing “a large part of Germany.”22 As the historian of science Bernhard Fritscher has explained, the term “formation” used by von Buch differs however from the idea of strata prevalent in British and French stratigraphy; while the latter aims to provide a universal classification for earth history, the former is concerned with the “spatial order of the rocks and the processes of their individual development.” For this reason, concludes Fritscher, it is feasible to speak of a distinctive—in particular vis-à-vis British geology—“Prussian geognosis,” a discipline for which the “founding of German nation state” was constitutive. With a view to the “territory of a (future) German nation state,” Prussian geognosis focused on the “‘specific German’ sedimentation of rock layers.”23 Earth history and the concomitant question as to the development and spatial ordering of rock layers were turned into arenas reflecting the political goals and tensions of the time. In Martin’s museum of the primeval world, where the natural and political order come together in how the “Jura ramparts” enclosing Germany find their metaphorical correspondence in Hohenzollern Castle, the German nation—eventually founded five years later as Imperial Germany—is already firmly rooted in the ground and thus, from a geological perspective, “primordial.” Whether Paris, London, or Berlin: in the second half of the 19th century, the future was envisaged using visualizations of long bygone epochs in the earth’s history. |

21| Cf. Leopold von Buch, Über die Juraformation auf der Erdfläche. Aus dem Monatsbericht der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. December 1852 (Berlin: Akademische Buchdruckerei, 1853). 22| Leopold von Buch, Über den Jura in Deutschland. Eine in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 23. Februar 1837 gelesene Abhandlung (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1839), 1–5. 23| Fritscher, “Erdgeschichtsschreibung als montanistische Praxis,” 222–224.

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List of Figures F ig . 1 The Cr ys ta l Palac e f r om t he Gr eat Exhib it ion , installed at Sydenham (sculptures of prehistoric creatures in the foreground), 1864(?), color Baxter-process print by G. Baxter; qtd. from Wellcome Collection, London, Wellcome Library, no. 39566i. F ig . 2 D iorama with mammoth reconstructed by Martin in the exhibition “Museum der Urwelt bis zur Gegenwart” opened in 1875 in the Nill’schen Thiergarten in Stuttgart; contemporary photograph, qtd. from Karl Dietrich Adam, “Ein altes Thema in neuer Sicht,” Museumsmagazin 1 (1983), 5–8, 8. F ig . 3 The geogr ap hic al d is t r ib ut ion of t he p ic t ur es o f th e p re se n t d a y which Philipp Leopold Martin wanted to mount above the dioramas of the earth’s history in his museum of the primeval world in Berlin; graphical presentation by the authors.

Painting, Photography, Polychronicity

Tim Trausch

Painting, Photography, Polychronicity: Lang Jingshan’s Portrait of Zhang Shanzi “A truly global history of photography would include not only the previously excluded or marginalized spatial dimensions but also alternative temporalities.” (Gu Yi, 2013)1

Following Roland Barthes, painters—if not on the technical level, but certainly phenomenologically—invented photography in so far as the camera obscura reproduced the perspectival geometry of the Renaissance.2 Joel Synder points out that the camera needs to be placed in a history of (realistic) painting and approached as a tool designed to meet its requirements: “Cameras do not provide scientific corroboration of the schemata or rules invented by painters to make realistic pictures. On the contrary, cameras represent the incorporation of those schemata into a tool designed and built, with great difficulty and over a long period of time, to aid painters and draughtsmen in the production of certain kinds of pictures.”3 Although the invention of photography, presupposing it is even possible to speak of photography and its intervention in the singular, cannot be related clearly

1| Gu Yi, “Prince Chun Through the Lens: Negotiating the Photographic Medium in Royal Images,” Ars Orientalis 43 (2013): 125-138, 135. 2| Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 70-77, 71. Cf. also Robert Hirsch, who emphasizes that the camera obscura is a device for reproducing linear perspective. Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 3. 3| Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980), 499-526, 511.

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and directly to a foundation in one specific visual tradition or antecedent history,4 it is nonetheless feasible—both in terms of the technological dimension as well as the practices and discourses of photography—to assume interactions with established visual and media cultures as well as concomitant aesthetic conventions and ontoepistemological contexts.5 The close entwinement between practices of painting and photography appears as a global phenomenon that needs to be differentiated in its diversity and heterogeneity and examined as to the specific characteristics of its respective concrete reference points. This also—and indeed in particular—applies when the purported “child of the Western pictorial tradition,” as Peter Galassi has described photography,6 is inserted into artistic contexts whose main lineaments do not imitate the “perspectival geometry of the Renaissance” with its mathematical grounding of the world. The referential level of Chinese ink painting, decisive for the “composite photography” (jijin sheying 集锦摄影) of art photographer Lang Jingshan 郎静山 (1892-1995), presents an alterity to representational, perspectival painting, which, according to Roland Barthes, had been made the reference of photography.7 Here a specific aesthetic of time emerges, one that becomes inscribed in the technical arrangements and practices of photography. The main (historical) currents of Chinese conceptions of time are less concerned with a strict separation into past, present, and future, favoring instead passages and transitions, processes and transformations. This is evident in the dominant discourses of intellectual history and artistic media practices, both of which are directly linked to one another. Renowned as the supreme art, ink painting and in particular ‘mountain-water’ painting (shanshuihua 山水画), considered the essence of aesthetics and the epitome of the philosophy of life, as a significant example of pre-apparative art and media practice. Instead of past, present, and future, the main elements in thinking about time in the aesthetics of ‘mountainwater’ painting are the categories shi 时 (“moment,” also “season”) and jiu 久 (“duration”).8 Unlike the representational claim of the central perspective and the 4| Cf. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4 th ed. (London: Laurence King, 2006), 1. 5| In respect to painting, this may pertain in particular to the first 100 years of photography. In 1936 László Moholy-Nagy critically remarked: “Photography has until now worked in a rather rigid borrowing from the traditional forms of expression in painting.” László Moholy-Nagy, “fotografie: die objektive sehform unserer zeit,” in Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, ed. Bernd Stiegler (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2018), 45-49, 48. 6| Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12. 7| “Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting [...]; it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 30. 8| Stefan Kramer, “Innen- und Außenräume der Repräsentation. Zur Struktur des medialen Wahrnehmens in China,” in Globalizing Areas, kulturelle Flexionen und die Herausforderung der Geisteswissenschaften,

Painting, Photography, Polychronicity

vanishing point, its parallel perspective or transitional / transformative perspective and the conventional format of the entice a journey, i.e. a movement of simultaneous and successive perception, which gains a specific rhythm through a predefined sequence.9 It is constantly referring to the infinity of time and space, which are inseparable. Painting, says the Dao-inspired Shitao 石濤 (ca. 1641-1707) in the third chapter (Bianhua 变化, “Change and Transition”) of his tractate Huayulu 画语录 (Recorded remarks on Painting, ca 1700), gives expression to the intrinsic rule of the ever-changing world.10 The theory and practice of mountain-water painting thus show an endless process rather than divisible time. Between the two poles of the mountain and the water, a ceaseless alternation of flowing-into-one-another, mediated through an emptiness, represented for instance by mist or clouds, takes place.11 The aesthetics of Chinese ink painting marks the primary reference point in the work of the photographer Lang Jingshan. Initially taking pictures for newspapers and magazines in 1920s Shanghai, Lang soon gained renown amongst other photographers for his composite photography,12 a method he developed in the 1930s; Lang’s composite photography and its implications for the aesthetics of time will be the focus of the present considerations, with particular attention paid to his portrait of painter Z h a n g S h a n z i 张善子 (1882-1940) in the second half of this article.13 On the basis of Lang’s method, I aim to show how temporality unfolds and pluralizes in its own unique way through the interplay of Chinese painting and the parameters of the technological, apparatus-based medium of photography, and the aesthetic practices situated between them. The connection between photography and time may initially seem less evident than in the case of “time-based” media like film. One influential hypothesis on photography that explicitly considers time stems from Roland Barthes, who dis-

ed. Günther Heeg and Markus A. Denzel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011), 157-173, 161-162; Cf. François Jullien, Über die “Zeit.” Elemente einer Philosophie des Lebens, 3 rd ed. (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010). 9| Cf. Albert Breier, Die Zeit des Sehens und der Raum des Hörens: Ein Versuch über chinesische Malerei und europäische Musik (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2002), 40-42. 10| Shitao, Huayulu (Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe, 2001). 11| Cf. François Cheng, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 37-38. 12| Mia Yinxing Liu, “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits: Lang Jingshan’s Photography of Zhang Daqian,” Trans Asia Photography Review 6, no. 1 (2015), 1, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0006.106?view=tex t;rgn=main. 13| The dating may refer to—not unusually for Lang Jingshan’s works—parts of the picture, in this case the photograph of Zhang Shanzi, whereas the composite photograph could well have first been created later in the 1930s. On the question of dating Lang Jingshan’s composite photographs see Edwin Kin-keung Lai, “The Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan (1892-1995),” (PhD diss., University of Hong Kong, 2000), 208.

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cerned “that-has-been” to be its noema.14 According to Barthes, photography generates “not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing […] but an awareness of its having-been-there” and hence simultaneously a “new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority.”15 Consequently, “PHOTOGRAPHY” is a technology for certifying presence.16 Unlike painting, photography would make it credible that something had been (there), that someone/something had been in front of the camera, and had looked like this, etc. Implicit here is a dictate of representation that was inscribed into the technological, apparatus-based media of industrial modernity, and thus appeared to surpass (representational) painting by how it proved capable of providing direct representation through technical equipment, i.e. without the intervention of a human agent.17 This is related to the reality effect ascribed to photography and the notion of indexicality. Charles Sanders Peirce designates photography to be a prominent example for indexical signs, i.e. signs which demonstrate “a real connection with its object.”18 Influenced by Peirce, Barthes sees 14| Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77. On Barthes’s theoretical considerations of photography, see also Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in id., Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. I (Stanford/ CA: Standford University Press, 2007), 264-298; Ronald Berg, Die Ikone des Realen: Zur Bestimmung der Photographie im Werk von Benjamin, Talbot und Barthes (Munich: Fink, 2001). 15| Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in id., Image – Music – Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32-51, 44. 16| “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87. 17| A thought that repeatedly haunts (in particular analog) photography. Bazin formulated it as follows: “For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time, an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.” André Bazin, What is Cinema?, ed. Jean Renoir and Hugh Gray, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 13. The great names given as the inventors of photography (or the processual, multiple inventions of what has retrospectively been subsumed under the generic term “photography”), Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot, and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, all insisted on the neutrality and directness of the pictures they created, which they saw as an act of nature. In 1839 Daguerre states: “(..) the daguerreotype is not an instrument which serves to draw nature; but a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.” Daguerre, “Daguerreotype” [1839], quoted after: Warner Marien, Photography, 72. Even if we may share the intended perspective of a photographer/artist, the effect of photography, claims Brooke Bergan following Roland Barthes, is the apparent immediacy: “In looking at a photograph, we quite literally share the artist’s vision. Paradoxically, we seem at the same time to be viewing something directly, without mediation. The camera has recorded what was there, after all. It is the ‘pencil of nature.’ The intervention is mechanical, not human. The photographer can position himself, choose his light, pose his subjects, even manipulate his prints, but there is no arguing the realness of the moment, no arguing that it did happen.” Brooke Bergan, “A Wedge in Time: The Poetics of Photography,” The Antioch Review 48.4 (1990), 509-524, 518-519. 18| Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893-1913) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 163.

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the signifier and the signified, “at least at the level of the literal message,”19 as being in a relationship of transference rather than one of transformation. Accordingly, the photographic image is determined by its referent, as both André Bazin and Walter Benjamin had already set out.20 Speaking of PHOTOGRAPHY in general earnt Barthes the reproach of an ontologization.21 Dismissive of the notion of photography possessing an indexicality and hence striking out in a direction contrary to that of Peirce and Barthes, André Rouillé proposes a turn toward the specific cultural practices and contexts of photography, as they are examined here with regard to Lang Jingshan’s composite photography. This is similar to the approach formulated by Herta Wolf, who also emphasizes that photography is not to be thought of as a unified, homogenous concept, but rather needs to be approached by tracing the plurality of its practices, i.e. the multitude of its concrete applications and characteristic manifestations in the context of visual culture(s).22 At the same time, it should be pointed out that what Rouillé characterizes as ontologization is not completely ignorable, for it is Rouillé himself who, as Bernd Stiegler has elaborated, is to a certain extent responsible for the ontologization (and essentialization) of Barthes,23 known as a supreme analyzer of specific cultural contexts and codes.24 The ontology of the photographic image and the power of the referential are anchored in the purported essence of photography as a luminous imprint. And as such, in the sense of Peirce, the object acts upon the sign. Yet, this “trace of the real” is, according to Dubois, not to be automatically thought of in terms of mimesis; furthermore, it is “only one moment in the whole photographic procedure,” with countless human decisions and cultural codes preceding and subsequent to it, thus calling into question the power of the reference and the singularity of photography.25 In Lang Jingshan’s photography it becomes clear that the moment of the luminous imprint is in fact interwoven with those of preceding and subsequent actions and codes, that a whole series of decisions and luminous imprints can flow or pass into one another, and how the purported (enclosed) unified moment 19| Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 32-51, 44. 20| Cf. Philippe Dubois, Der fotografische Akt: Versuch über ein theoretisches Dispositiv (Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst, 1998), 50. 21| André Rouillé, La Photographie: Entre Document et Art Contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 22| Herta Wolf, ed., Paradigma Fotografie: Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, vol. I (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2005), 13. 23| Bernd Stiegler, ed., Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2018), 71-74. 24| Stiegler characterizes this as the paradox in Barthes, who, like André Bazin, interprets photography as “objectivity and language.” Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 345. Cf. Dubois, Der fotografische Akt. 25| Dubois, Der fotografische Akt, 54f. See also Snyder, who once again emphasizes that it is not the object in question that actively affects the film, but it is the light that imprints on it. Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” 507-508.

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is subject to new openings. The trajectory of Lang’s artistic references, his production practices, and the aesthetics of his images are geared to processuality. Peirce’s theory of signs and its link or application to photography is perhaps most helpful when we follow and emphasize its processual relations. Drawing on Michel Serres, Uwe Wirth has pointed out that most of Peirce’s signs are in interference (and so are in inter-reference).26 The three categories of sign elaborated by Peirce (indexical, symbolic, and iconic) are hardly ever discussed in pure form, but almost exclusively considered as intermingled and in processual relations. In this way Peirce has also left an indelible impression on Derrida (who with The Deaths of Roland Barthes presented his own reading of Barthes’s Camera Lucida) and his notion of the trace, which Derrida sought to introduce as a “dynamic metaphor for a general concept of writing.”27 Signs can be at once index and symbol, the trace can be at once imprint (whether of light or the brush) and inflow of conventions. In the chapter devoted to Roland Barthes in his Theoriegeschichte der Photographie, Bernd Stiegler also emphasizes that in Peirce’s work signs “generally do not appear in pure form and they first attain their signification in a concrete application.”28 For our examination of Lang Jingshan’s photography, it is thus the aesthetic practices which have priority, without however detaching them from the questions of ontology and the dispositif of photography. Lang’s method of composite photography—in technical respects essentially a procedure of combination printing—aims to produce a picture from various negatives while observing specific aesthetic principles of harmonious composition, principles established in the canon of Chinese painting, in particular the crucial six rules for judging a picture (huihua liu fa 绘画六法).29 Lang has described his technique as follows: the photographer already considers the purpose when shooting the pictures and the intention to produce a new composite photograph out of the different elements. The individual shots do not have to be perfect themselves because they were perhaps taken merely for a single tree, rock face, or cliff. The 26| Uwe Wirth, “Zwischen genuiner und degenerierter Indexikalität: Eine Peircesche Perspektive auf Derridas und Freuds Spurbegriff,” in Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungskunst und Wissenkunst, ed. Sybille Krämer (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 55-81, 58. 27| Wirth, “Indexikalität,“ 55. 28| Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte, 343. 29| These rules, turned into fundamental concepts of art criticism, are ascribed to the painter and poet Xie He 谢赫 (ca. 500). They are: qiyun shengdong 气韵生动 (“Rhythmic Vitality”), gufa yongbi 骨法用笔 (“Use of the Brush to Form Anatomical Structure”), yingwu xiangxing 应物象形 (“Accurate Conformation in Shape with the Objects Portrayed”), suilei fucai 随类赋彩 (“Glazing of the Objects to Show Their Appropriate Colours”), jingying weizhi 经营位置 (“Design and Composition of the Painting” and chuanyi moxie 传 移模写 or in Lang chuanmo yixie 传模移写 (“Modelling on Classical Patterns by Clever Translation”). Lang Jingshan [Chin-San Long], Techniques in Composite Picture-Making (Taibei: The China Series Publishing Committee, 1958), n.p.

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photographer makes a selection from the gathered material and draws a sketch of the planned composition on a sheet of white paper, which in size matches that of the silver bromide paper to be used for the print. Step-by-step, the desired pictorial elements from the various negatives are projected onto the silver bromide paper. After the first section is projected, its position is marked with charcoal (preferably with a charcoaled willow branch that is easy to wipe off again) so that the position is precisely given for where the second section is to be projected, and so on. The pictures are composed or combined in one of two ways: either the undesired parts of the image are painted over on the negative, or a piece of glass with black paper attached is held between the projector and the silver bromide paper.30 In terms of technique, Lang’s method is not all that different from other approaches; the distinctive feature lies rather in how it draws on the aesthetic principles of Chinese painting and the practices ensuing from their implementation. His socialization with canonical Chinese painting, informed by processuality and multiperspectivity, flows into his photographic practice, which, however, is not so much a “natural” extension or a culturally determined continuation, but rather a cultural (and thus also a political) statement that—in so far as it is to be understood as a conscious positioning—is not to be detached from the purported technical determinacy of the apparatus (and its entwinements with the guiding aesthetic currents of Europe). Lang Jingshan’s cultural-political concern ensues primarily from the historical, colonial conditions of photography in China, which are briefly discussed in the following.31 Photography spreads through China from the 1840s onwards, in particular in the wake of the First Opium War and the enforced opening of five Chinese trading ports as laid out in the Treaty of Nanking. It continues apace as the Peking Convention of 1860 permits foreign visitors to travel beyond the confines of the five trading ports and into the interior of the country. If initially the photography trade is almost exclusively in the hands of Western officials, travelers, and traders, in the 1860s the Chinese now become increasingly involved (often starting out as assistants to Western photographers before branching out on their own).32 Imbued with a colonial gaze, Western photography in China (re-)produces the prevailing negative stereotypes and constructs a hegemonic image of the country and its population 30| Lang Jingshan, Techniques in Composite Picture-Making (Taibei: The China Series Publishing Committee, 1958), n.p. 31| On the history of photography in China, see Terry Bennett, History of Photography in China, 3 Vol. (London: Quaritch, 2009-13); Ma Yunzeng 马运增 [et al.], Zhongguo sheying shi 中国摄影史 1840-1937 (Beijing: Zhongguo sheying chubanshe 中国摄影出版社, 1987). 32| Cf. Edwin K. Lai, “The History of the Camera Obscura and Early Photography in China,” in Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China, ed. Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 19-32, esp. 22-29; Claire Roberts, Photography and China (Durrington: Reaktion Books, 2012), 24-31.

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as firmly rooted in (“premodern”) time;33 this perspective is occasionally also taken up and reinforced by Chinese photography companies, owing to the existing market for constructions of the other.34 At the same time, the discursive processes of photography with its global technical standards and local forms of appropriation are influenced by painting practices, while in turn photography exerts an influence on painting.35 Like paintings, photographs are also mounted on silk brocade and inscribed with calligraphy, or reworked with brush and ink, creating multimodal and multimedia texts.36 Portrait photography as well was often understood not as a final “certificate of presence” in the social and artistic media practice of late imperial and republican China; rather, it frequently functioned as a scale and template which enabled portrait painters, working on the basis of this verification, to combine a fidelity to form (xingsi 形似) with the rendering of spirit (chuanshen 传神), and so to transcend the model furnished by photography.37 Special attention was paid to the face of the sitter: beginning in the 1860s, Chinese portrait painters used photographic grid templates to accurately copy faces in charcoal, with the body and costume only added later.38 Alterations to the photograph templates were identifiable in the retouching of the eyes of the sitter with brush and ink—an act that underlines the status of the photographic positive as an artistic source, while the changes themselves obviously aimed at producing presentness and presence. As another line of tradition of photography in China, portrait painting is closely connected with the ritual character of ancestral portraits. These serve primarily a practice of visualizing and producing the presence of deceased ancestors. Already prior to the photography age, portraits of ancestors for ritual purposes were completed while these persons were still alive and thus bear within them the idea of

3 3| Cf. Sarah E. Fraser, “The Face of China: Photography’s Role in Shaping Image, 1860-1920.” Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 39-52. 3 4| Cf. Roberts, Photography and China, 31-32. 35| Cf. Ulrich Pohlmann and Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, ed., Eine neue Kunst? Eine andere Natur! Fotografie und Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 2004); Alain D'Hooghe, Autour du Symbolisme. Photographie et peinture au XIX siècle (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). For China see f.e. Cody and Terpak, Brush & Shutter; Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue, ed., Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (London: Routledge, 2017). 36| Gu Yi, “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840-1911.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 120-138, 123. 37| Cf. Claire Roberts, “Chinese Ideas of Likeness: Photography, Painting, and Intermediality,” in Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan, 97-116. 38| Wen C. Fong, Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 35.

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outliving death as well as their future usage.39 In this sense, their present is always already opened into a future. The aesthetic conventions of ancestral portraits were reproduced by the American photographer Milton Miller, who was born in 1830 and lived in Hong Kong between 1860 and 1863, in his construction of a Chinese style of portrait photography. As Wu Hung has described it, Miller’s famous photographs of supposed Chinese officials and businessmen are in fact staged costume photographs of dubious historical credibility, which are then leant fictional documental quality through the use of labels.40 Serving a market of Western clients, Miller took part in constructing an Other, clearly evident in how his shots were set up. Generally shot in symmetrical front view, with the portrayed person looking directly into the camera, their pose rigid and seemingly frozen, and the background empty and absent of spatial depth, the photographs clearly show that Miller took his orientation from Chinese ancestral portraits, which he reproduced photographically to construct an essentialized, timeless Chinese portrait style.41 Where Miller at the same time fostered some artistic aspirations, which aimed to reveal the character of the portrayed, a stereotype of purported Chinese portrait photography became estab-lished in the wake of his work. The approach developed in the 1930s by Lang Jingshan, whose portrait of Zhang Shanzi eschews using the aforementioned aesthetic conventions of ancestral painting or the supposed Chinese style of portrait photography in the line of succession following Miller, is to be understood as a reaction to this colonially-informed, exoticizing image of China. Although he wished to create a counter to this image through his connections to the principles of painting,42 Lang’s photographic approach seems itself entangled with an essentialist rendering of Chinese culture when in his theory he acts on the assumption of unchanged traditions and wishes to (re-)produce and confirm an unbroken continuity of a purported intrinsic ‘Chineseness’ and in the process inevitably has to deal with the photographic apparatus and its technical dispositif.

39| On ancestral painting, see Mette Siggstedt, “Forms of Fate: An Investigation of the Relationship between Formal Portraiture, Especially Ancestral Portraits, and Physiognomy (xiangshu) in China,” in Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Chinese Art History: Painting and Calligraphy, ed. National Palace Museum, Taiwan (Taibei: National Palace Museum, 1992), 717–741; Jan Stuart, “The Face in Life and Death: Mimesis and Chinese Ancestor Portraits,” in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 197-228; Dora C. Y. Ching, “The Language of Portraiture in China,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 136-157. 4 0| Wu Hung, “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller,” in Brush & Shutter, 69-90, 78. 41| Wu Hung, “Inventing,” 83. 42| Cf. Lu Jiaojiao 吕姣姣, “Qian xi Lang shi jijin sheying: Sheying yishu dui Zhongguo yijing de biaoxian yu zaixian” 浅析郎式集锦摄影: 摄影艺术对中国意境的表现与再现. Sheji 设计 5 (2015): 96-97.

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Lang Jingshan confirms the canon of Chinese painting in its present presence and apparative usability. At the same time, he actualizes and updates its aesthetic principles under new technical conditions, just as he connects the medium of photography with the past, meaning that the media-conditioned time levels become interlocked. Lang appreciated photography for its communicative possibilities capable of transcending time and space (in particular national and linguistic boundaries).43 In this view, the apparatus also entailed spatial-temporal restrictions, which could only be overcome through the method of composite photography that draws on a canon of Chinese art and media practices. Because, according to Lang, photography with its apparatus-inscribed mono-perspective lacks the capability to represent the world comprehensively and ideally, he wishes to rupture and break open its restrictive hold,44 enrichening it with the missing qualities by means of the canonical teachings on Chinese painting, so that elements of differing perspective and distance can be combined into one image without the effect of losing sharpness.45 “With Composite pictures, photographers can now do just the same as Chinese artists: they now have the choice among natural objects: they may now make their own compositions in photography. Neither time nor space need hereafter be an obstacle. [...] Through the lens, front view (subjects in focus) is often clear and sharp, and the distant view (subjects out of focus) dim and obscure. Yet the Chinese painters are painting according to what the human eyes see. Therefore, to them, what is within two yards is almost the same as that which is within twenty yards (provided always that there is no defect with one’s eyes). Now we are able to make a photograph according to the human visual impression, too, and are no longer restricted by the deficiencies of machinery.”46

Lang’s concern is an ideal image whose “seams” are to be concealed as perfectly as possible. To erase or merge (the lines of) the various elements, Lang advises to use mist or clouds. Both are of course conventional motifs in the mountain-water painting, pointing to the infinite and inexhaustible, and especially to the processuality of mountains and water (in so far as clouds consist of water and resemble mountains).47 Lang even warns against violating the rules of perspective and when drawing on pictures to ensure that the plants and birds selected do indeed appear in the corresponding season. He thus understands his technique explicitly as connected to the canonical doctrine on Chinese painting and is ever striving to produce an ideal picture. 4 3| Lang Jingshan, “Jingli qiankun qishizai” 镜乾坤七十载. Taiwan Shibao 台湾时报, 10. November 1978. 4 4| Cf. Lu, “Qian xi Lang shi jijin shying,” 96-97. 4 5| Cf. Gu Rongjun 顾荣军, “Zhongguohua lifa dui Lang Jingshan jijin sheying zaoxing zhi yingxiang” 中国 画理法对郎静山集锦摄影造型之影响, Da wutai 大舞台 04 (2011): 124-125. 4 6| Lang Jingshan, Techniques, n.p. 47| Cf. Cheng, Empty and Full, 37.

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Lang’s photography and its description in his treatise Techniques in Composite Picture-Making make it abundantly clear that his method is conceived to improve and perfect the world or “nature,” as art is supposed to in his view: “We are often disappointed to find a good piece of scenery spoiled by an unneeded tree, or ruined by an ex-crescent bit of rock, which can only be photographed as it is, or not at all; but with the advent of composite pictures, such disappointment can at last be remedied: we can now eliminate what is not wanted and add in what is lacking; we can now make up an ideal picture out of various individual photographs without losing any of the effects or qualities that are necessary to a photograph. Nature is often imperfect as the say-ing goes, and now it is within our power to perfect her.”48

As with the “scenery” / “landscape” (jingwu 景物) or “nature” (ziran 自然), the technical dispositif and the inherent possible applications of photography also need to be perfected. The traditional schools of Chinese painting, according to Lang, did not aim to produce a copy of external nature but painted from memory. Composite photography now makes it possible to produce a corrected and retouched version of nature. The question of the relationship between photography and art, as well as the idea of the artistic/photographic perfecting of nature, also played a prominent role in “Western” discourses on photography, for example in the work of Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), who compared and enriched his photographic practice with the principles of painting.49 The American portrait photographer Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894), accredited with being instrumental in establishing the daguerreotype as art, put it as follows: “Nature is not all to be represented as it is, but as it ought to be, and might possibly have been.”50 These debates and practices of European and North American art photography influence Chinese photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.51 In particular the international movement of pictorialism, popular around 1900, gained a foothold in China and left its mark on the work of Lang Jingshan and other photographers. Pictorialism is generally considered to be a counter movement to industrialized, mass-produced commercial photography and as such moved away from notions of faithful reproduction and towards expressive images with atmospheric effects. The photographs considered part of the movement frequently worked with diffusive focus, elements like mist and shadows, and the reworking of negatives and positives. Borrowings of this sort from painting and the reworking of negatives were already part of the repertoire of photography before. Works like those 4 8| Lang Jingshan, Techniques, n.p. 4 9| Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers (London: Piper & Carter, 1869). 5 0| Albert Sands Southworth, “The Early History of Photography in the United States,” in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 41, quoted after: Warner Marien, Photography, 64. 51| On art photography in China, see Edwin Kin-keung Lai, The Life and Art, 10-69.

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by Edouard Baldus (1813-1889) or Gustav Le Gray (1820-1882) witnessed the creation of images based on several negatives, while their practices called into question the notion of an objective rendering of reality.52 Closely aligned to pictorialism, in 1902 the American photographer J. C. Strauss explicitly stated that the photographer has control over the camera and the media dispositif: “(…) the photographer is not helpless before the mechanical means at his disposal. He can master them as he may choose, and he can make the lens see with his eyes, can make the plate receive his impressions.”53

It is precisely this approach that is observable in Lang Jingshan’s work. Lang, who adhered to the concept of pictorialism until the end of his life, was, as Edwin K. Lai has shown, influenced and inspired by the works of the Swedish-British painter and photographer Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875).54 Employing the technique of combination printing, in 1857 Rejlander creates his legendary photograph Two Ways of Life, an image comprised of 30 individual subjects and negatives. It is assumed that Henry Peach Robinson taught his renowned technique, presented across the globe in omnipresent publications, to Rejlander.55 Lang’s treatise on composite photography, however, makes no mention of either these photographers nor their works. Lang obviously draws his inspiration instead from the canonical aesthetic principles of Chinese painting, from which he derives the specific characteristics of his practices.56 It is foremost through the specific use of perspectivity and distance derived from this source that Lang’s work distinguishes itself from that of the aforementioned photographers. Lang Jingshan’s portrait known as Z h a ng S h a nzi xi a ns h e ng 张善子先生 (“Mr Zhang Shanzi”) (fig. 1)—or Z h a n g S h a n z i h u a n g s h a n k a n s on g 张善子黄山看 松 (“Zhang Shanzi contemplates a pine on Huangshan”)— exemplifies the intertwining of pre-apparative Chinese aesthetics and artistic practice with the photographic apparatus and dispositif. The method of composite photography enables Lang to combine elements from different negatives and evoke the effect of a three perspectives / distances—a well-established feature of Chinese (mountain-water) painting since the Song Dynasty (960-1279).57 Discernible in the photograph are gaoyuan 高遠 (high distance), pingyuan 平遠 (flat distance), and shenyuan 深遠 (deep distance), a differentiation that goes back to the Song Dynasty

52| Cf. Warner Marien, Photography, 50-55, 69, 170-172. 5 3| J. C. Strauss, “Photography as Art,” Current Literature 32 , no. 3 (March 1902), 355, quoted: Christian A. Peterson, “The Photograph Beautiful, 1895-1915,” History of Photography 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), 192; Cf. Warner Marien, Photography, 50-55, 69, 170. 5 4| Kin-keung Lai, The Life and Art, 166. 5 5| Cf. Warner Marien, Photography, 87-88. 56| Lang Jingshan, Techniques, n.p. 57| Cf. Roberts, Photography and China, 89-90.

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painter and theoretician Guo Xi 郭熙 (1020-1090).58 With this schema Guo Xi delineated the three distances evident when observing mountains: the view from below to the summit (gaoyuan), the view beyond a range (shenyuan), and finally the view from a close-by mountain to one further away (pingyuan). In a dynamic process the distances and perspectives can be combined into a single ink picture, producing comprehensive multidimensional views of the world and giving the viewer a sense of being able to walk through the terrain and thus animate the picture itself. The inbetween the distances or levels—as in the portrait of Zhang Shanzi—is frequently characterized by an aesthetics of emptiness, indicating the infinite. Despite the prominence accorded to the portrayed figure, by adopting this tripartite configuration of distance and the composite perspective Lang Jingshan’s photography refuses the compulsion of a central perspective inherent to the medium. Instead of the single angle of vision or a moment frozen in time, he emphasizes a dynamic and processual picture featuring multiple perspectives, similar to the transformative or transitional perspective evident in ink painting. Rather than isolating a point in time, the portrait rests on the interpenetration of the elements of past, present, and future. The picture showing the painter Zhang Shanzi, a friend of Lang’s, as a Daoist immortal sitting on a rock in a contemplative pose is known in two versions: in the already discussed portrait Zhang Shanzi xiansheng 张善子先生 (“Mr Zhang Shanzi”), the figure of the painter is placed above a pine tree. In contrast, another photography from around 1939 entitled Gaoshan liushui 高山流水 (“lofty mountain, flowing water”) (fig. 2)—a popular metaphor for friendship that goes back to the titles and history of the famous musical compositions Gaoshan 高山 and Liushui 流水—shows waves splashing against the rock in the foreground. Both versions deliberately employ motifs and attributes popular in Chinese ink painting: rocks, regarded as concentrations of energy, are not substantially separate from humans and can stand for character traits;59 mountains and waters symbolize the ongoing process of world creation that unfurls between these two poles and finds its correlation in the microcosm of painting;60 the pine is considered a symbol of longevity and durability as well as a sign of ethical steadfastness.61 Like the rock, a pine can thus represent character traits and functions here as an attribute of the portrayed figure.62 The latter’s appearance as a Daoist immortal is also to be understood as the incorporation of a common cultural motif, and can 5 8| Guo Xi 郭熙, Linquan gaozhi 林泉高致 (Hefei shi: Huangshan shushe 黄山书社, 2016). 59| Cf. Jonathan Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute, 1985). 6 0| Cf. Cheng, Empty and Full, 83-87. 61| Cf. Shane McCausland, “Figure Painting: Fragments of the Precious Mirror,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 115-135. 6 2| Cf. Ching, “The Language of Portraiture in China,” 136-157, 136, 154.

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be understood as another reference to the infinity and inexhaustibility characteristic of ink painting and in particular its aesthetic of emptiness and fullness. In both photographs the figure of Zhang Shanzi appears in the same pose and is obviously derived from the same negative. As such, it functions as starting point and basis for ever new pictorial variations which in composite photography (jijin sheying 集锦摄影) are creatable still in the dark room and by using multiple exposures are already inherently possible as seamless pictorial combinations of landscapes, still lives, or portraits, a potential described by Mia Yinxing Liu.63 This also reveals a parallel to the practice of creation from and the new combination of motif templates compiled in the pattern books commonly used in Chinese ink painting. One prominent example is the Jieziyuan huazhuan 芥子园画 传 (“The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting”)64 published in the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a theoretical textbook on painting and a practical compendium featuring templates for mountains, trees, plants, animals, and human figures. Based on established pictorial conventions and geared towards combining single elements, these pattern books come close to epitomizing pictorial standardization processes, offering at the same time however a sheer inexhaustible source for possible new combinations. Such manuals also provided key motifs for portrait painting: “Painters created portraits based on verbal descriptions by relatives or friends of the dead and on the pictorial vocabulary provided by face books, stock images that offered a repertoire of facial structures and features for painters to select and reassemble into new portraits.”65

With regard to a mainstream or canon of Chinese art and media practices, Lang’s reassemblage does not appear as the resistive other, but as something taken for granted. Along the vertical margins of the portrait of Zhang Shanzi (see fig. 1), which utilizes the format of a hanging scroll, is an inscription from the hand of Zhang Daqian 张大千 (1899-1983), the brother of Shanzi. It is from 1962, a period when Lang Jingshan was also developing several portraits of Zhang Daqian, retaining the costuming and the method of composite photography. In the context of the photograph, the inscription can be seen as a trace of pre-apparative art and media practices and a supplementary modality of encoding and condensing time. In the inscription Zhang Daqian refers to his meanwhile deceased brother and concretely

6 3| Mia Yinxing Liu, “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits,” 1. 6 4| Wang Gai 王槩 [et al.], ed., Jieziyuan huazhuan 芥子园画传, 4 Vol. (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe 人民美术出版社, 2017). 6 5| Gu Yi, “What’s in a Name?” 126.

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names the time and place of the earlier shot.66 Also evoked is a journey the three friends undertook together to Huangshan, the mountain range known as a model and source of inspiration for painters, which is said to have first motivated Lang Jingshan to experiment with the method of composite photography.67 The inscription does not name an abstract time, but a concrete moment in the lives of the three human actors—an actualized memory trace. Adopted from painting, the practice of inscription enriches the photographic condensation of time in several respects, for it illustrates not only the converging of past(s) and present(s) from “premodern” aesthetic practices into “modern” pictorial media. Moreover, through the interplay between the reflective presenting of time and place (of the photo taken of Zhang Shanzi) with the reference to the death of the portrayed figure, elements of futurity and past (of the recollected moment in the life of the portrayed) become implicit. Adopting comparable practices from ink painting, the inscription also refers to the opening and extension of spaces of communication and possibility, to the practice of ongoing creation and the processual ongoing life of the picture. The portrait of Zhang Shanzi is therefore characterized in equal measure by its ambiguity and polychronicity. Without discerning a contradiction, the picture—defined by its multiperspectivity and the evoking of the infinite and the inexhaustible— is augmented in its spatial-temporal aspects by further overlapping and interpenetrating time levels through Zhang Daqian’s inscription. Here we may once again recall Roland Barthes’s concept of the photographic punctum, which can designate a detail that pierces through the studium of the picture, i.e. the field of cultural conventions. It can however also be a temporal dimension, a punctum of density: “This will be and this has been.” This is particularly evident in historical photographs: “There is always a defeat of time in them: that is dead, and that is going to die.”68 Stiegler has described this dimension as the new punctum of time, which “appears as ghost, death, or sorrow.”69 In Barthes’s work, and in particular in Camera Lucida, photography is closely entwined with death (programmatic for the text is the absent and simultaneously omnipresent photograph of his deceased mother). This impression is confirmed in Derrida, who discusses in The Deaths of Roland Barthes the relationship between punctum and studium as well as the connection between death and referent, identifiyng the reference to death as a necessity of writing, from which the writing with light would be inseparable.70 Derrida’s 66| Mia Yinxing Liu translates the inscription as follows: “My late second brother Shanzi visited Huangshan at the age of 51; Mr. Lang Jingshan took a picture of him by Qipingsong in Shizilin.” Mia Yinxing Liu, “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits,” 4. 67| Xiao Yongsheng 萧永盛, Huayi, jijin, Lang Jingshan 画意,集锦,郎静山 (Taibei: Xiongshi 雄狮, 2004), 120; cf. Liu, “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits,” n.p. 6 8| Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96 (emphasis R.B.). 6 9| Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte, 349. 70| Cf. Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte, 354.

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reading of Barthes does not discuss punctum and studium as the binary opposites they appear to be, but as a metonymic composition, one in which the singular, individual punctum becomes coded, plural and intersubjective, i.e. translatable.71 Derrida’s consideration to not simply take punctum and studium as opposites, can be taken even further and varied here: in Lang the punctum of time appears as a component of the very cultural conventions which mark studium; studium thus culminates in punctum and vice versa, so that their distinction ultimately dissolves. What does it mean when Zhang Shanzi, who in the sense of Barthes “is dead and going to die,” appears as an immortal, when the temporal dimensions of the photographic shot (or the photographic shots in plural), their reworking and later inscription mutually pervade one another and the mode of handling the apparatus-based medium actualizes pre-apparative media practices? Here time appears less to be defeated, than to be condensed and extended, interweaved in pervasive layers actualizing and updating each other. For Susan Sontag, photography means, similar to Barthes, to always be participating in the mortality of a thing.72 One could counter, or rather add, that photography means to take part in the infinite and the immortal at the same moment. This is in particular the case when, as in the photography of Lang Jingshan, a process finds expression, when time condenses and unfolds. The practice of painting that serves Lang Jingshan as a template and influences his pictorial language reenacts the gestures of creation and simultaneously takes part in it73 —not in the sense of a singular act of creation but rather as a dynamic process of continuous transitions. In the work of Barthes and Sontag time appears as a catastrophe—incessantly it passes, mercilessly it melts away. By cutting out and freezing a moment, photographs, according to Sontag, witness “time’s relentless melt.”74 Brooke Bergan adds that photography would at the same time also create a feeling of now, an eternal presentness.75 Neither the photographic effect (pointing to the past) of “having-been-there” nor the feeling of “nowness” mentioned by Bergan must be denied with regard to Lang’s portrait of Zhang Shanzi: both are inscribed in the photograph as elements of the unfolding and condensing of time, without however petrifying into a hegemony or a substantial separation of temporality(-ies) (or to stumble into a duality, as inherent to Bergan’s theory). Lang Jingshan’s photography presents itself as polychronic, in the sense that various concepts and forms of temporality appear together and communicate with one another in constant reciprocal referencing and actualizing—a communication process that involves the artist and the viewer as it does the media/technology and the soci71| Derrida, “The Deaths,” 353. 72| Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), 15. 73| Cf. Cheng, Empty and Full, 119-120. 74| Sontag, On Photography, 15. 75| Bergan, “A Wedge in Time,” 515.

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al context. The concept of polychronicity is employed here with caution, however, for firmly inscribed in it is the notion Chronos, marking expiring time (and hence closely related to death). The concept of Chronos, which did not exist in this form in China, needs therefore to be relativized: polychronicity can thus only mean the diversity, heterogeneity/ heterogenization, and plurality/pluralization of phenomena of temporality in the sense of an expansive concept, one that is not inevitably focused on passing and/or divisible time. Lang’s portrait of Zhang Shanzi can serve as an occasion for us to once again bring into play the notion of duration, which the age of photography helped to expel according to Barthes.76 The moment purportedly captured in time, permeated by references to past and future, intertwines briefness and fleetingness with the duration and the eternal. Here—much in the spirit of a hegemonic “premodern” Chinese aesthetic of time, the moment and the duration are not opposites. The moment (shi) in Chinese is not posited as a frozen point in time. Rather, it is considered an incessant coming-into-effect in extension and condensation. In this sense the moment is thought of as endless, as without beginning and end, without past, present, and future.77 And so too in the photograph by Lang Jingshan and its processual ongoing life a condensing and extending of time becomes evident. Past, present, and future are not substantially separated from one another. What is past is brought to the present and actualized into duration. It is less the difference between past and present or different presents that are emphasized, but rather the culmination of past(s), present(s), and futurity(-ies). |

76| Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92-94. The concept of duration can be related to the Chinese concept of jiu (and its relationship to the “moment”, shi) as well as Bergson’s durée, both emphasizing a process of unceasing actualization. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mineola: Dover, 1998). 77| François Jullien, “Über die ‘Zeit’,” 171; Kramer, “Innen- und Außenräume,” 157-173, 161-162.

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Figures

F ig . 1 Lang Jingshan, Z hang S hanzi xians heng 张善子先生 (“Mr Zhang Shanzi”) aka Zhang Shanzi huangs-han kan song 张善子黄山看 松 (“Zhang Shanzi contemplates a pine on Huangshan”), 1932, composite photograph, gelatin silver print, inscription by Zhang Daqian 1962; qtd. from Mia Yinxing Liu, “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits: Lang Jingshan’s Photography of Zhang Daqian,” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, no. 1 (2015), fig. 5, https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tapic/x-7977573.0006.106-00000005/1?subview-detail;viewentry. F ig . 2 Lang Jingshan, Gaos han lius hui 高山流水 (“Lofty Mountain, Flowing Water”), c. 1939, composite photograph, gelatin silver print; qtd. from Lang Jingshan, Lang Jingshan sheying zhuankan 郎静山摄影专刊 (Shanghai: publisher unknown, 1942), pl. 8; Edwin Kin-keung Lai, “The Life and Art Photography of Lang Jingshan (1892-1995)” (PhD diss., University of Hong Kong, 2000), fig. 4.477.

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

Nkiru Nzegwu

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

Disciplinary boundaries in Western academy routinely disallow counter evidence and discordant facts that challenge Western orthodoxy and confound its ontology. Written off as unimportant anomalies, these dismissed data, usually from Africa, in particular, or the Third World, in general, pile up to expose the weaknesses of theories that are mired in suppositions of hegemony and false homogenization. In the short run, the dismissal works to protect master narratives and entrenched regimes structuring Western knowledge, but in the long run the structure of knowledge is collapsing under barrages of critiques from the rest of the world.1 As far back as 1997, I argued that the concerns of 20th century African artists were fundamentally different from those of Western artists, who, after the appropriation of African and non-Western stylistics,2 were consumed by issues of pure forms, neutral spatialities, and aesthetic “avant-gardism.” It was not lost on African artists of the time that all these investigations, though focused on understanding the stylistic details of African art, were designed to obscure the African and non-Western roots of modernism. As if calling out the racism of the appropriation, Africans utilized the term ‘contemporary’ to describe our own modern art. Interestingly, the use was nonideological, merely identifying 20th century art by recourse to temporal, present mo1| See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views From the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580; Enrique Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism,” Nepantla: View from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 465–478, and The Invention of the Americas, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1994); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review, 1989); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, Heinemann, 1986) and many more texts. 2| See William Rubin, Primitivism in 20 th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984).

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ments. Each “present moment” injects contemporaneity to the art objects produced in a decade; and the sum total of works created in all the “present moments” of the 20th century became Africa’s “contemporary art.” Hence, ‘contemporary’ functioned differently here than in Western art. Enu oyibo (or age of the white people), the extended period of European colonialism, racial logic, racism, and logocentricity, influenced much of this contemporary art that ruptured the tradition and ontology of the Old World’s art. By “Old World,” I mean the sociocultural world and values that predated colonialism and any European influences. Colonialism came with the mystifying clock, that set in place “clock-time” and an accompanying rigidity of properties. It sought the radical alteration of people’s experiencing of reality by emphasizing schedules, punctuality, and precision.3 It produced actions and a female-devaluing culture that curtailed women’s autonomy and creativity. Under enu oyibo, the stabilization of people’s cultural identity was paramount to fend off the psychological attacks of colonial racism and colonial temporality. Hence, during the early phases of the new art, artists were more concerned with combating the ravages of colonial hermeneutics of domination that were destroying vast numbers of people, than they were in contesting the colonizer’s artistic proclamations and poetics of erasures of Africa and its art.4 Over time this seeming indifference to the West’s racism in art changed.5 Very much a product of the continent’s rape, Nigeria’s 20th century art ardently challenged colonial subjugation and colonial clock-time. The people’s sociocultural perception of time had been based on celestial bodies, the rhythm of seasons, and agricultural cycles. Artists such as Aina Onabolu, Akinola Lasekan, and Ben Enwonwu captured these in drawings, paintings and sculptures. But as products of their age, they also painted new developing temporal trends and new professions created by clock-time. By the 1960s as political independence swept through the continent, artists responded euphorically to the changing political dy3| See Edward T. Hall, “The Paradox of Culture,” in In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm, ed. B. Landis and E. S. Tauber (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 218–235; and The Silent Language (New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1959). 4| The first Nigerian artist in the contemporary art style, Onabolu, adopted the little known Yoruba àkógraphy mode of naturalism to present his people and culture realistically. On àkó-graphy, see Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and on Onabolu, see Nkiru Nzegwu, “The Concept of Modernity in Contemporary African Art,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Self-Fashioning, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 391–427. 5| A number of African theorists have addressed the psychological impact of colonialism on the colonized. See the works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Onwuchekwa Jemie Chinweizu and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decol-onization of African Literature (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983); and Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, Writing and Speaking from the Heart of My Mind: Selected Essays and Speeches (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012).

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namics by centering the aesthetics and stylistics of their cultures. These old stylistics acquired a “new-ness” and “now-ness” through contemporization. Sidestepping the powerful ideological pull of Western art and aesthetics allows us to see that the corpus of Nigeria’s “contemporary art” manifests important similarities and philosophical traits with the art of the Old World. Like the latter, it functioned as oríkì, which art historian Rowland Abiodun had theorized, was a conceptualization of art forms as spatio-temporal, historical-cum-cultural capsules.6 They are dense and can be difficult to understand.7 Composed of symbolic abstract forms, visual art as visible oríkì could be figures of speech, critical analysis of a form or subject, historical narrative, or even a cultural treatise (ibid.). Now, if we deploy this concept of oríkì in theorizing Nigeria’s contemporary art, we will have to rethink the present overemphasis on visuality in artistic analyses. When art becomes visual capsules, encapsulating dense narratives and discursive treatises, the role of ontology, the function of temporality, and the character of spatiality in art and aesthetics become paramount.8 A question that then comes to mind is, what are the visual capsules ‘stating’ or ‘presenting’ about' the existential conditions of life in post-1980s Nigeria? For an answer, I turn to the compelling fiber-ceramic-burlap-rope-wax works of the period that Nnenna Okore presented in 2008 in her “Ulukububa: Infinite Flow” exhibition at the October Gallery in London.9 Treating art objects as visible oríkì, as concretized perceptions of memory, and as spatially-bound sociohistorical narratives of moments in time, raises questions about historicity that are often obscured in contexts of multitemporal transculturality. It also reveals a stylistics that stems from what I call the “el” philosophy of creativity after El Anatsui, Okore’s art professor in Nigeria. “El” denotes an expansive aesthetic sensibility, a critical experimental mind-set, and the utilization of locally available materials and tools in artistic production. Because creativity occurs in moments in time, I will also address the issue of how artistic innovation of forms arise and media experimentation occur in their polychronal timescapes.

6| Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language. 7| Abiodun, Yoruba Art, 12. 8| For an extended discussion on this concept see Nkiru Nzegwu, “‘When the Paradigm Shifts, Africa Appears:’ Reconceptualizing Yoruba Art in Space and Time,” Journal of Art Historiography 18, (2018): 1–29. 9| Nnenna Okore, Ulukububa: infinite flow, Nnenna Okore and Polly Savage, exh. cat. October Gallery, London (London: October Gallery, 2008); Nnenna Okore: Ụkwa Ruo Oge Ya Ọ Daa—There’s a Time for Everything, exh. cat. October Gallery, London, ed. Kimberly L. Cleveland (London: October Gallery, 2017).

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1

Multilocality and Transculturality Nigeria is fashioned from plural ethnicities and ethnic-localities, it possesses a multilocal, multiethnic reality. Transculturality, a culture that cuts across the multiple cultures, emerged in the forging of a nationally-shared culture that cuts across ethnicity borders and connects salient aspects of every culture. Beninoise cultural theorist Olabiyi Yai reminds us that in a polychronic 10 environment that embodies the sociotemporal flexibility that clock-time lacks, oríkì takes us beyond superficial knowledge of a work or a subject. The inherent “critical historiography” of all oríkì embody three important features of historicity: temporal sequence of events, territorial centering of traditions and intellectual heritages, and illuminative discourses that aid enlightenment.11 Abiodun expands on these traits exhaustively explaining that “art is not bound or limited by time or space,” because like culture, it is “infinitely generative.” It “always adapts to current circumstances,” and so it is “always 10| For definitions of ‘polychronic’ and ‘monochronic,’ see Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983). 11| Olabiyi Babalola . . Yai, “In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘Tradition’ and ‘Creativity’ in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space,” Research in African Literatures 74, 4, (1993): 29–37, see 30–31.

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contemporary.”12 Yai’s historicity features address the specific character of polychronic manifestations of spatiality and temporality in art. Polychronic time may be flexible and cyclical, but its deliberations and objectives are robust and precise. The heritages and discourses that oríkì centers reveal the meaning of the works of art in that space. The perception of time as cyclical, nevertheless encourages an analytical engagement with the empirical and philosophical dimensions of history, while a focus on globalization compels us to think about how to classify the art of an African transnational artist. Although produced while a resident in the United States, the works of art in Nnenna Okore’s “Ulukububa” exhibition fall under the category of contemporary Nigerian art even though Okore’s transnational subjectivity suggests they may be categorized as African diaspora art, Nigerian American art, African American art, or American art. The exhibition and the works displayed imaginatively and aesthetically inhabit a polychronic timescape in which multiple events occur simultaneously, and temporal perception is linked to seasonal or cyclical time. Regardless of classification, the works—Variation VI (Ashioke Series, 2008, fig. 1) and Her Pride from 2007 (fig. 2)—are suffused with social meanings and historical references about Nigeria’s cultures and reality. Although globalization and the notion of a globalized present situates Nigeria and the United States in the same space12| Abiodun, Yoruba Art, 284.

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time, they are not necessarily in the same time-space. The perceptions of time in both settings are different. The monochronic temporality of America’s capitalist base differs from the polychronic temporality of Nigeria given the latter’s still under-capitalized economic base. However, because Okore produced the works while living in the United States, some might argue that heterochrony, the notion of multitemporality, should prevail in understanding Okore’s artistic creations. But while Mieke Bal defines heterochrony as “multi-temporalizing,”13 that is, simultaneously living in different spatialities and different temporalities, it does not imply equivalence of experiences in the different spatialities. Moreover, the complex notion of heterochrony embodies an inherent complication. The temporalities of the two spaces, Nigeria and the United States, are divergent. The differences between the two spatialities mean that their timescapes are not equivalent. They have dissimilar weights and unequal importance in the artistic interpretations of Okore’s art. In fact, the polychronal temporality of Nigeria is more dominant in explaining her art than the monochronic temporality of the United States. Giving further weight to this analysis, the principle of coevality, which is, the notion of two or more cultures existing in or belonging to the same temporal space, reveals the greater importance of the Nigerian influence over the American one. Because the spatio-temporal configurations of the two societies do not overlap, it would be a mistake to automatically privilege the art values of the American space due to the global power of the United States. Thinking about time, historically, chronologically, narratively, durationally, and rhythmically, we should also consider how previous “presents” engage the “now” in Nigeria’s post-1980s art, including those produced by Nigerian artists living in the diaspora. The idea of art as oríkì offers a way to do this, since art as visual capsules contain temporal sequences as well as territorial and conceptual

13| Mieke Bal, “The Time It Takes,” Contra Narrativas: Reconstructed Temporalities and Overflowed Spatialities #0, ed. Instituto de Industrias Culturales y de las Artes/CENDEAC (2018): 8–21, http://cendeac. net/base/imgCK/files/CONTRANARRATIVAS%20%230%20(3).pdf.

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

spatialities that provoke informative discussions and discourses. It is important to underscore that though oríkì speaks reflectively about the past, it never stays in the past. It constantly pivots to the future, ensuring that historical memory is not linear. This allows the creative objectives, artistic concerns, stylistic movements, and aesthetic conventions of artists, including those living in the diaspora like Okore, to circumvent the strictures of monochronic time. The “Ulukububa” exhibition offers an answer of how polychronic temporality is experienced and functions transnationally. ‘Ulukububa,’ the Igbo word for “butterfly,” which also names the exhibition, was borrowed from a Nigerian colleague Chijioke Onuora, and centers an Igbo reality. Notwithstanding residing and working in Chicago for a number of years, Okore’s works or visible oríkì—Igba Nkwu (2008), Oriaku (2008), Omalicha (2009), Agbogho I & II (2010), Akwa Ocha (2009), Ulukububa (2008), Nwaada (2009), and Rapa from 2008 (fig. 3)— state unequivocally that her creative vision and artistic sensibilities are here anchored in an Igbo space. It is from this location that she engages the complex globalized world she lives in. But Okore is not rigidly Igbo as Nigeria is a transcultural, multi-temporal environment. Nigerians interact culturally and aesthetically creating transethnic culturality that has become a defining feature of contemporary life. As earlier indicated, transculturality was forged from the intersection, interaction and convergence of multiple cultures, multiple timelines, and multiple spatialities in the process of shaping a national culture. This social phenomenon becomes visible when Okore utilizes the word “Ashioke” rather than the correct Yoruba spelling, as.o. -òkè, strip-woven cloth, to describe a Yoruba textile and attire. Creations such as Variation I (Ashioke Series), Ashioke I (2007), Variation II and III (Ashioke Series) from 2007, Va r i a t i o n V I (Ashioke Series) from 2008 (see fig. 1), and Variation VIII (Ashioke Series) consist of arrays of round ceramic rings and multiple, differently colored ceramic vertical lines, fastened onto burlap to evoke the Yoruba handwoven textile that bear that name. Although speaking transculturally, Okore still experiences the world as an Igbo female, but without intending any disrespect with her spelling. The spelling merely signals an epistemological standpoint that openly values Yoruba as. o. -òkè textile and fashion sense but is not versed in Yoruba orthography. Transculturality is not anathema to ethnicity. Modern, sophisticated, and accomplished Nigerians declare their ethnicity with pride. These ethnics have complex identities as they are neither outside time, nor trapped in the crevasses of history. The exhortation—“abum onye Igbo,” “I am Igbo,”—manages expectations and sorts out identities in a culturally-plural environment. It is a strategic declaration that while cosmopolitanism is a transcultural marker, ethnicity foundationally anchors identity; hence, it is not negative. It is a valuable way for navigating a complex, complicated globalized world that strips non-Whites of their humanity. And so, Okore has very good reason to announce her ethnicity in this globalized world. She was born in Australia, raised in Nsukka, partially educated in Iowa, working in Chicago,

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and constantly traveling the world professionally. This “multi-temporalizing,”14 this temporarily inhabiting of spaces, this living in different spatialities and temporalities create rootlessness and anonymity. In professional and migratory travels, in crossing borders and time zones, one loses aspects of one’s self that declaring one’s ethnicity helps to thwart the imposition of pseudo-temporalities or false identities. It allows one to critically command one’s spaces. The upshot is that strategic avowals of ethnicity not only rent the veils of invisibility and anonymity, it allows one to announce one’s multi-faceted personhood.

Oríkì Worldsense The worldsense of oríkì shifts monochronic cognitive priorities and experiences to the aside in preference for deep dives in transcultural exploration of the sociality. The examination of fabric in the lives of Nigerian women calls upon the senses—sight, sound, tactile, emotive, and others—that uncover past intersectional conflicts between women in the uses of lace clothing. Possessing an intimate understanding of Nigerian culture, Okore states that people “attach a lot of sentiment to the type and brand of fabric they wear” and that fabric “is integral to [their] self-esteem and carriage.” Her observation is spot on as “the richer the quality of the fabric, the higher the self-esteem of the wearer.” The result she elaborates is “sensational crowds and groups of Igbo women floating around in expensive sheer lace fabrics feeling fabulous and glamorous.”15 The fragility of gossamer material enveloping the ladies flitting from place to place and from person to person is evocative of ulukububa (butterflies). But unlike butterflies these human variants are figures of social importance, who by their very actions, were establishing new fashion trends, and whose activities call for critical historicization of fashion trends. It is instructive that Okore zeros in on a 1980s moment in Nigeria’s transcultural reality and thereafter draws the narrative on cloth forward to 2008. This focus raises pertinent questions about what actually initiated Igbo women’s interest in sheer lace fabrics? Historicization uncovers a long-forgotten fashionista war that was fought in Lagos between Yoruba and Igbo women less than thirteen years after the end of the Biafran (Nigerian civil) war. The fashion war began after elite Lagosian Yoruba women sneered at elite Lagosian Igbo women for seemingly dressing inexpensively, and demonstrating what they perceived to be an Igbo perchance for cheapness.16 14| Bal, “The Time It Takes,” 10. 15| Exh. cat. October Gallery, 2008, 1. 16| This “fashion war” occurred between 1982–1984 while I was living and working in Lagos as a radio producer for Voice of Nigeria. I learned of the “war” on the Igbo side, from some of the affluent leading fashion pacesetters and women traders in Balogun market, and on the Yoruba side, from Yoruba women fashionistas

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

The latter did not take kindly to the cut since it was directed to the one-and-a-half yards of lace materials they (Igbo women) use for their blouse rather than the full cost of their outfit of ojije na ntu kwasi, two george rapa [wrappers], a blouse, and . head-tie. In contrast, Yoruba women’s outfit at the time consisted of only three-anda-half yards of lace materials from which they managed to make their ìró, one large rapa, and bùbá, blouse. The intricately crafted pieces—Igba Nkwu, Oriaku, Omalicha, Agbogho I and Agbogho II, Akwa Ocha, and Rapa (fig. 3)—are the spatially-bound forms of Okore’s multimedia sculptures. These works do not exist just for visual attention, they narrate a history conveying information about wealth and refinement that raise penetrating questions about a society’s valuation of its people. The beginning of Igbo women’s shift to lace for their outfit began with Yoruba women’s utilization of lace in flaunting wealth and their erroneous assumption that the cloth was beyond the reach of Igbo women. This was the catalyst that set off the fashion war. The tension that followed shifted the meaning of lace and fashion from ordinary cloth and dressing to a politically-charged experience. The shift and perception of lace as omalicha beautiful, also highlighted differences in experiential timelines between the Igbo and Yoruba women. Living outside Igboland in the Yoruba geographical zone of Lagos, the Igbo women’s timeline “read” the sneer against the high human and financial costs of the Biafran war. It reminded them that in their moment of de-feat, it was the Yoruba Obafemi Awolowo, who, as the Federal Minister of Finance, pushed through the privatization of the economy after earlier pushing through a policy that stripped the Igbo of all their pre-war bank savings and wealth. These two economic policies financially incapacitated the Igbo and ensured that they could not pose a threat to the Yoruba domination of key sectors of the Nigerian economy. As a result, they experienced lace as another battle against Yoruba aggrandizement. Polychronic time encompasses a multiplicity of timelines, some converging, some diverging, and others running parallel. This means that given an event-catalyst that triggers certain memories for an ethnic group, that same event may initiate different kinds of experiences and different timelines for a different group. So while the disparaging comment of the Yoruba women was a fresh reminder to Igbo women of their people’s post Biafra war economic losses, to the Yoruba women, the sneer was simply an off-the-cuff diss to what they saw as Igbo pretensions and their own assertions of the refined taste of Yoruba women. Though living in the same spatial environment that is Lagos, both groups of women were experiencing realities and time differently. Yoruba women, for whom Lagos was part of Yoruba land, were sensorially absent to Igbo women’s fashion styles and did not realize their full cost, and lace retailers in the famed lace trading district of “Gutter” at Balogun market. I followed this fashion war with great interest for three years. Towards the end of the third year, Igbo women had increasingly moved on to sourcing, designing, and appliqué-ing, the Yoruba strip-woven cloth, as. o-òkè. .

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a clue that their temporalities did not converge. They were not aware that taken as a whole the ojije na ntu kwasi outfit of Igbo women was more expensive than their . own ìró and bùbá even when made from the pricey Austrian lace materials. Their outfit yardage is always three-and-a-half, which they accessorized with gèlè, headtie, and ìborùn, shawl, selected from their previously-owned, locally-woven as.o. -òkè, strip-woven cloth, made from luxurious sányán, silk cloth, or àlàári, ruby-red handwoven cloth. But the outfit of Igbo women always consisted of 8-yards of imported high-priced Intorica-george fabric, blouse sewn from one-and-a-half yard of Austrian lace fabric, and two yards of richly embroidered matching Hays taffeta head-tie.17 The visible oríkì that Okore fabricated invert time to reveal that Igbo women were hyper-sensorially present to the full cost of Yoruba women’s fashion. To disabuse their Yoruba peers of their assumed “cheapness,” Lagosian Igbo women raised the ante in nzagwalu, the answering-back or talk-back strategy of responding to an insult which Ifi Amadiume had described elsewhere, which may or may not include a performance.18 Performing nzagwalu, in this instance, large groups of Igbo wom-en coordinated and created complete outfits of o. jije na ntu kwasi from the most expensive Austrian lace materials and Hays head-tie. In contrast to the Yoruba three-and-a-half yards of lace material, the Igbo purchased ten-yards of material, eight yards for two sets of wrappers, and two yards for the blouse. For shock value, those groups of Igbo women coordinated their outings and wore the most current and expensive lace at any festive occasions—weddings, university graduations, birthday parties, title-taking ceremonies. With the style of their lace blouse declaring their affluence, and their jaunty, elegantly perched head-tie proclaiming their fashion sense, they openly gushed that they were unaccustomed to dressing up in skimpy three-and-a-half yards of cloth. It is pertinent to note that economics and cloth converge in this performance of nzagwalu. Igbo women foray in lace textiles shifted market dynamics. Initially, the procurement and importation of these pricey fabrics was the preserve of Yoruba women traders. But Igbo women’s interest produced fierce competition from Igbo traders, who subsequently wrested control of the trade from Yoruba women traders. Still smarting from their end of war experiences which the sneer resurrected, Igbo women then vowed not to purchase lace from Yoruba women traders in order not to contribute to their economic success. Time may have dimmed the memory of this fashion war, but it was time that created the conditions for it together with Igbo women’s expansion of their wardrobe and fashion sense.

17| Intorica-george fabric is an imitation of Indian madras cloth. “Intorica” is the label of ABC (originally Arthur Brunschweiler & Co). All the inlay patterns of the textile are woven by machine in the ABC factory in Manchester, England. 18| Ifi Amadiume, Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (London: Zed Books, 1997), 4.

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

Ontology, Temporality and Memory Because oríkì embody ontology, it makes sense to ask, how do they articulate temporalities and historicization? Let’s begin with ontology, a people’s ways of being, and their linkage with time. People’s way of life reflects a conceptualization of time that structures their way of seeing and shaping their reality. In Nigeria’s transcultural environment, encompassing the Igbo polychronic timescape, time is cyclical, moving from season to season endlessly that connects past events to present ones and shaping future events. Cycles of past events become present in rites and initiations that project them forward. Visual oríkì are more than simply physical objects oriented towards decorations or beautification. Igba Nkwu, the wine-carrying rite that signifies engagement, is a cycle of development that announces one’s age and a reminder of the time of one’s birth. The object temporally ties the past to the present in a life cycle that proclaims one is of a marriageable age. In the critical treatment of time, polychronic time in Nigeria embodies precision. The cycle of time is chronicled by Eke, Oye, Afo, Nkwo, the Igbo four-day week or izu, that cycles to become the grand eight-day 2-weeks that, in turn, cycles in 7-weeks to became izu isa/asa, the 28-day lunar month. The Igbo conception of time is tied to a cosmogony that offers a comprehensive view and order of the world that establishes intrinsic connections between humans and the universe at large, regardless of the cyclical nature of time, the multiplicity of timelines, and the flexibility of human actions in time. Cosmologically, time keeping was/is a precise task. The lunar and solar cycles comingle to effectively mark seasons that are continually evolving and regulating the times for community festivals and celebrations. Visible oríkì like Igba Nkwu, Nwaada (daughter), and Agbogho I & II (young maiden), brilliantly tell time and sociocultural practices while displaying intricate lacy, spiral patterns of elegant gossamer fabric prevailing in the 1980s. They define a mode of the past being-in-the-present through deployment of clothing and fashion choice. In the course of telling time, the exhibition highlights two critical social discourses or treatises on the culture of cloth. Oriaku, fabricated with round rings of clay and rope, introduces this discourse by its name. ‘Oriaku’ is an appellation for fortuitous women who are socially referred to as “consumers of wealth.” By its name, this visible oríkì opens a discourse on cosmopolitanism and consumerism that underscores that dressing in expensive Austrian lace fabrics conveys affluence, refined taste, and flamboyance. But at another experiential level, it speaks about conspicuous consumption of the elite in a context of high unemployment and sharp economic disparity. That Austrian lace was then in high demand signals wealth, travel and cosmopolitanism. But in flamboyantly declaring wealth oblivious to the rising poverty and impoverishment of lower-class Nigerians, lace becomes a sad commentary on the insensitivity of the elite class to the economic deprivation of a vast number of Nigerians.

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History as a flow of sequential time allows us to shift attention to relevant points of interest in 1970–2008. Art always adapts to current circumstances, and so it is always contemporary. Its temporal arc can be segmented by decades. Though each segmentation or unit appears distinct and different, in reality they are not. The segmentations of time are abstractions and are in fact illusory. However, in unraveling the cultural moments of each unit, works of the period speak to their “contemporary” issues and events, and are spatially identifiable by style, artists, schools, and messages. In a manner of speaking, this is because art works embody cultural norms, cultural legacies and social ontologies as well as national histories. Take for example, “Set Setal,” Senegal’s postindependent, politically-conscious art movement that reacts to postindependent disenchantment of neocolonialism. The art produced by that 1980s movement conveyed the concerns, philosophies, and politics of young Senegalese. Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf noted that while the “movement redefined the spaces and logics of sociability in public places,” it did not “break with nationalist memory” rather, it sought “the reorganization/ recomposition of historical heritage.”19 In line with the critical historiography of oríkì, Set Setal galvanized people into action and strengthened nationalist aspirations with heritage pride. The same can be said for the ulism movement of the Nsukka school that centered uli, Igbo women’s much older stylistics as the base of creativity.20 Regardless of ethnicity (I have in mind the Yoruba Tayo Adenike), ulism sensitively interweaves abstract forms and ideograms in socioaesthetic proclamations that advance new transcultural nationalist identities and heritages. Through this creative maneuver, ulism upstages artistic coloniality and the Western prescriptions of what art is or should be. Contemporary Nigerian art is unabashedly local and adapts to current circumstances. It is simultaneously historical and challenges art disciplinary historiography. It is in a three-way conversation with the artists, the collectors, and the politics of the time; hence, its ontology and modern character are incontestable.

19| Mamadou Diouf, “Wall Paintings and the Writing of History: Set/Setal in Dakar,” Gefame: Journal of African Studies 2, no. 1, (2005), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4761563.0002.102. 20| “Ulism” is a contemporary artistic movement that is based on an artistic style and system known as uli that was developed by Igbo women. The modern twist on this older stylistic heritage is seen in the lines, spatial configuration and sense of movement.

Temporality, Oríkì and Nigeria’s Contemporary Art

Ulukububa, Forms and Invention Before closing, I will quickly consider how new forms emerge in time. Existentialism rather than the theoretics of “avant gardism” is the path of change. By the late 1980s, the neoliberal agenda of economic globalization had unleashed a rapacious form of neocolonialism that created dysphoria in Africa. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescribed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) conditionalities that crippled the economies of almost all African countries. The ruinous prescription amplified corruption, hyper-inflation, military coup d’état and dictatorships, deregulation, reduction in government spending, austerity measures, contracting job market, and joblessness. People responded in a variety of ways to the unimaginable stresses created by existential expectations and vertiginous disappointments. Some turned to religious fundamentalism, for others transnational migration became a viable option. In the arts, these socioeconomic forces produced a rebelliousness that drove artists to succeed. They unleashed in talented artists, aesthetic reimaginings that produced explosive images that spoke purposefully and powerfully to “present” local conditions, and globally to strength and resilience. Neoliberalism reshaped the trajectory of Nigerian art, leading to what I call the ‘el’ philosophy. The skyrocketing costs of Western-manufactured art materials threatened the art sector that most artists began to adopt El Anatsui’s strategy of employing locally-sourced materials in creativity. Ultimately, this philosophy and its radically new ways of engaging art pioneered new stylistics that pushed the repurposing of scrap and discarded metals to high art form. Olu Amoda’s utility-based highart residential metal sculptures Windows of Dreams and Doors of Paradise and the water sachet installations of Bright Ugochukwu Eke are excellent cases in point. Okore too acknowledged that “El [Anatsui] helped me broaden my scope beyond the canvas, beyond the paper, and challenged me to bring my environment and other experiences into my works.”21 As the 1990s rolled by, a newer generation of talented sculptors—notably, Olu Amoda and Ndidi Dike led by El Anatsui—broke all boundaries of artistic production. They created imaginative sculptures that were as direct, confrontational, tormented, conflicted, and soulful as their personal histories and experiences. Thinking not just outside the box but as though no box existed, they reinvented sculpture through choice of media. Old wooden troughs that had been used in manufacturing palm oil found new leases of life as sculptural forms. Carpenters’ planks were transformed into “canvases” while chainsaws and blowtorches became the preferred tools for “drawing” forms that had never existed before. With no conceptual box constraining artistic imagination, junk metal littering roadsides, reminders of tragic car accidents, were boldly and tastefully repurposed. Imaginatively, ropes, plastic bags, rubber tires, fabric scrapes, leather, twine, newspapers, 21| Exh. cat. October Gallery, 2008, 3.

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and discarded cardboard boxes were reclaimed and transformed into breathtaking forms. Even the lowly clay that had been ignored for most of the twentieth century acquired new life in bold experimental projects. In short, the entire process of reinvention, overhauled and transformed sculptural production. There is no universal understanding of the “present” or “globalized present” outside of the narratives that formulated the terminologies. We must not forget the systematic deployment of the concept and discourse of globalization in marginalizing Africa and Africans politically, economically and artistically. The forms in “Ulukububa” exhibition emerged out of the fervent artistic narratives of 1980–2000, and uniquely shaped by the “el” philosophy that seeks yet unimagined realities and artistic forms from everyday materials in the environment. The formulation of “contemporary art” in Nigeria is not rooted in the concerns theorized by American and European modernist art critics and theorists that created the basis for interrogating what the future would be. In Nigeria, transculturality, based on transethnicity, has freed artists to draw from their cultural traditions, stylistics, artistic values, clothing styles, and mannerism of any ethnic group. With national identity complicated and complex, multi-faceted and transcultural, valid interpretation of art requires grasping ongoing sociocultural transformations. For this reason, contextualization is especially useful in foregrounding aesthetic issues and heterochrony that are crucial to understanding artistic objectives. Minimally appreciated in aesthetics is the extent to which social facts and cultural knowledge elucidate understanding and the enhance apprehension of meanings. The strength of Okore’s art is that her creative principle speaks cogently about her worldsenses. Her exploration of materiality through fragility, keeps faith with the economic impoverishment of the country, and occurs with discarded newspapers, wax, cloth, rope, clay and sticks, that she weaves, twists, sews, dyes, waxes and rolls. Her art rises above economic despair, accentuating textures by focusing on the constructive potentialities of materials, rather than on their ephemerality or irrelevance. Giving voice to these materials elevated reclamation to a vital artistic principle. |

Figures Fig. 1

Nnenna Okore, Variation VI (Ashiok e Series), 2008, clay and burlap, 71 x 89 x 10 cm; photo by Jonathan Greet; © Nnenna Okore.

Fig. 2

Nnenna Okore, Her Pride, 2007, clay, twine, and burlap, 71 x 89 x 10 cm; photo by Jonathan Greet; © Nnenna Okore.

Fig. 3

Nnenna Okore, Rapa, 2008, clay and rope, 198 x 249 x 16 cm; photo by Jonathan Greet; © Nnenna Okore.

The Presentness of a Minority

Stefan Binder

The Presentness of a Minority. Notes on the Indian Twelver Shia

The assumption of an inherent incompatibility between religion and modernity, i.e. the theory that modernization inevitably entails secularization, or at the very least the banishment of religion into the domain of individual and private beliefs, appears to be refuted. Whereas the erstwhile theorists of secular modernity speak of the return, resurrection, or—due to globalization—new advent of religion in the politics and public sphere of a “desecularized” or “postsecular” present,1 a more fundamental critique of secularization theory indicates a deeper entanglement between religion and modernity, asserting that religion, whether public or private, is not returning, for it never went away; accordingly, the concept of religion employed by secularization theory reveals itself to be a central product and construct of modernity.2 Contrarian juxtapositions of religion and modernity rest frequently on temporal arguments, or a distinction between religious and secular times and the

1| Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington: Eerdmans, 1999); Jürgen Habermas, “Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 53, no. 4 (2008): 33–46. 2| See Hans G. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Tomoko Masuzawa, The invention of World Religions: or, how European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Patrick Eisenlohr, “Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, and the Secularity of Pluralism,” in Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere: Postsecular Publics, ed. Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw and Eva Midden, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,) 195–209.

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social forms enabling them or, conversely, enabled by them.3 The nation state and capitalism are equally considered to be the most potent (and reciprocally determining) socio-political institutions of a homogenous, linearly progressing, and thus modern period, one however that only acquires meaning and contour in distinction from “other” times classified as religious or specific to a culture. Frequently, secular time is at least implicitly presupposed as the simply given, “natural” time, on the basis of which other temporalities only then appear, or can be generated through cultural history and cultural techniques and practices, first and foremost tradition, ritual, and belief. This article will not focus primarily on the philosophical and cultural deconstruction of the purported naturalness or ontological priority of secular time,4 which would, for instance, demonstrate its dependence on the technological dispositif of the clock in the context of capitalist modes of production; instead, I aim to investigate the temporal conditions under which specific forms of religion in modernity attain presence in the present. Taking the example of the Muslim minority of the Twelver Shia in the South Indian city of Hyderabad, I would like to discuss how the colonially-imbued socio-political category of “religious minority” goes hand in hand with specific possibilities and compulsions to embody presentness and make it perceptible. The guiding thesis is that presentness or being-present as a religious minority in a postcolonial nation state does not result from a simple presence in the present of a homogenous, linear time, but in fact represents a socially and politically contested achievement and an “aesthetic intrinsic time” that is historically shaped and religiously marked. What does presentness mean for the twofold religious minority of the Twelver Shia in the globalized and “super-diverse”5 context of an Indian metropolis? Which means, discourses, and infrastructures enable or impede attaining a visible or otherwise aesthetically perceptible presentness as a minority? On what kind of temporal difference is the relationship between a “religious minority” and an implicitly presupposed “majority” of the nation based?

3| Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Nancy D. Munn, “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 93–123. 4| C.f. among others: Matt Hodges, “Rethinking Time’s Arrow: Bergson, Deleuze, and the Anthropology of Time,” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4 (2008): 399–429. 5| Steven Vertovec, “Super-Diversity and its Implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (November 2007): 1024–1054.

The Presentness of a Minority

I. Communalism in India Making up around 15 per cent of the population, Muslims are not only the largest religious minority in India, they are also, in both historical and current external and self-perceptions, the most significant. Although the term “religious minority” appears self-evident as a demographic category, it is the result of a long colonial and political history of naturalization: its heyday begins in the 19th century and the later partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, which culminates with their independence in 1947, has ever since profoundly shaped the political and social discourse of both states as well as their relationship to one another. Already over the course of British colonial rule and in the anticolonial independence movement across south Asia, religion or religious affiliation, alongside the so-called caste system, had become established as a fundamental analytical and political category for describing, controlling, and governing India. Vis-à-vis the ideal horizon of a peaceful and cooperative coexistence in a pluralistic composite culture, the critical idea of communalism emerged to describe the political mobilization of religious or religiously legitimated communities as clearly distinct and antagonistic collective identities. Above all outbreaks of violence between Hindus and Muslims were thus quickly classified as a “symptom” and symbol of communalist relations. Depending on the respective political attitude towards colonial rule or the partition of India and Pakistan, the interpretations of communalist violence have alternated between seeing it as an essential characteristic of Indian society or a regrettable repercussion of an external influence stemming from colonial rule.6 The temporality of communalism is already discernible here in so far as the critical potential of the term derives from the assumption that it, like the violence ensuing from it and independent of the respective views on its formative historical conditions, bursts into the present of the secular nation state out of the past, a factor thus disturbing civil society and the political process of parliamentary democracy. Here I want to underline that the association forged between religious communalism and a premodern and pre-democratic past is itself an effect of secularist interpretations: historical research has shown that communalist political practices and social theories in today’s sense first emerged and became firmly established with modernity and the gradual introduction and broadening of voting rights and colonial demographics. A decisive factor in this context was the introduction of the principle of religious neutrality in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, which prohibited the colonial government from involvement in religious affairs. Precisely because access to the sphere of official politics was heavily restricted for colonial subjects, 6| Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Peter T. van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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religious practices in public space, into which the colonial government no longer could or wished to intervene, thus advanced to an important medium of the political, consolidating communalism as a specific formation of religious politics and political religion.7 As a consequence—one still reverberating into the postcolonial present in India—of this logic of colonial governmentality, self-consciousness as a political subject is possible while drawing on public, religious symbols, and practices as well as an antagonistic “communalist unconscious” as a religious subject.8 Crucial in this respect is that the distinction between political religion or the collective exercise of religion in the public domain and individual piety no longer has any bearing because they are mutually constitutive and a medium of expression for one another. This is the foundation on which the still hegemonic topoi of a “composite culture” and “unity in diversity” developed as the essential feature of the Indian nation, which was thus not only defined as religious but also as pluralistic. In independent India it therefore became possible for both state strategies of representation and civil practices of civil subjectivation to be largely placed on the foundation of a public demonstration of one’s religious affiliation and external assignability to a religious community within a broader ensemble of religious plurality.9 And this entailed, in turn, that religious affiliation and assignability needed to be perceivable and thus inevitably required public performance and aesthetic forms, while simultaneously ensuring than an underlying or —depending on one’s view—superordinate national unity was not called into question. The crux for the precariousness of Indian Islam lies in the category of the religious minority, for subjectivization as a Muslim inevitably means being constituted as a minority, whereby its national belonging is not forclosed per se, but is exposed, at the very least, to a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion. The aesthetic conditions of national belonging available to Muslims in India simultaneously run the risk of providing the very grounds for their exclusion; namely, whenever the quantifying

7| Freitag, Collective action and community. 8| Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 209; Sudhir Kakar, “Some Unconscious Aspects of Ethnic Violence in India,” In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 135–145. 9| Christopher Pinney, “The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and ‘Popular’ Politics in India: 1878– 1995,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 4 (1997): 834–867; Patricia Uberoi, “‘Unity in Diversity?’ Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, no. 1–2 (2002): 191–232; Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Uma M. Bhrugubanda, Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

The Presentness of a Minority

logic of the discourse of minority and majority are overlaid with topoi of otherness.10 In the present case this pertains above all to the historical topos of the Muslim invasion and rule of medieval India and, on a more general level, the affiliation to the Muslim Ummah as a global or transnationally imagined community. In her analysis of Islamic poster and calendar art for example, Sandria Freitag has shown how an awareness of the ambivalence between national affiliation and extraterritorial loyalty is reflected aesthetically and visually. Although Islamic and Hindu calendar art were part of a much broader south Asian visual culture, Muslim motifs came under comparatively greater pressure to represent moral propriety. Moreover, since the 1920s motifs are observable which have depicted the relationship between the individual and society increasingly through Shiite content, such as martyrdom and the sacrifice of the individual for the community and just rule.11 This finding is all the more astonishing because the differences between Shiites and Sunnites over the same period intensified continuously, eventually turning into a kind of sectarian antagonism.12 In the following I shall therefore look more closely at the specific role of the Shiites as a “double minority,” for the aesthetic possibilities of subjectivization as a minority are ultimately not abstract but always tied to the historical specifics of a particular minority.

II. The Visual Presence of the Twelver Shia in Hyderabad Beyond the field of tension marked out by national unity and plurality, the problematic and ambivalence of communalism arise primarily from the projection of homogenous and historically stable religious identities onto a social field that is not only shaped by intra-religious diversity but also by a complex intersectionality of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and linguistic or regional identity.13 In its political functionality, religious communalism encounters its limits insofar as it suggests for example that the political, social or individual interests of a Bengali-speaking, Sunni day laborer in rural northeast India would coincide with those of an Urdu-speaking female descendant of the Shiite aristocracy in urban Hyderabad in southern India

10| Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Public Planet Books, 2006). 11| Sandria B. Freitag, “South Asian Ways of Seeing, Muslim Ways of Knowing: The Indian Muslim Niche Market in Posters,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, no. 3 (September 1, 2007): 297–331, 303. 12| Justin Jones, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 13| Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000).

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solely due to both belonging to the “world religion”14 of Islam. A few pivotal factors therefore need to be considered, which function as local and historically contingent conditions that influence the visibility or aesthetic visualization of the Hyderabadi Twelver Shia as a specific minority. At this point it is necessary to note relevant aspects of Hyderabad’s regional history: up until 1948 Hyderabad is the capital of a nominally independent Muslim princely state which, while under British sovereignty, is nevertheless not directly governed as part of the British Raj. After the princely state is annexed militarily into the Indian Union and its territory divided amongst the bordering federal states, primarily Andhra Pradesh, several decades of political agitation ensue before, in 2014, a new federal state (Telangana), corresponding approximately to the original territory of the princely state of Hyderabad, is formed with Hyderabad City as the capital.15 While the population of Telangana is, in line with the national average, predominantly Hindu (ca. 85 per cent), Muslims make up one-third of the inhabitants of Hyderabad and, moreover, they can draw on their history as the political and cultural elite of the city. This is particularly the case for the Twelver Shia (ca. ten per cent of Muslims and thus ca. three per cent of the whole city population), for the city, founded in the 17th century by the Shiite Qutb Shahi dynasty, not only enjoyed close ties to the Persian (Shiite) Safavid empire but has also functioned well until into the 20th century as a key nexus point for diverse transnational links within

14| For a critical discussion of the idea and concept of “world religion,” see: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999); Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity; David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 15| Pucha Raghunadha Rao, History of Modern Andhra Pradesh (New Delhi: Stosius, 1988); Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); V. Janardhan and P. Raghavendra, “Telangana: History and Political Sociology of a Movement,” Social Change 43, no. 4 (2013): 551–564.

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the “Muslim world.”16 Besides this global embedment, the epoch of the Qutb Shahis—even more so than the succeeding Sunnite Asaf Jahi dynasty (1724–1949)—is to this day generally regarded to be an outstanding example of precisely the “composite culture” and religious tolerance that formed the background against which the discourse on India’s national “unity in diversity” unfolds. This rather brief sweep through the variegated history of Hyderabad focuses attention less on how the collective identity of the Twelver Shia is based on a specific historical narrative—which could be shown for most identities—but gravitates towards the question as to which quality of a historically “subscripted” presentness enables precisely this narrative. The presentness of the Twelver Shia appears to be permeated in multiple ways by a past that is simultaneously constitutive and destabilizing. Through the identification with the city founders, the Twelver-Shiite community can conceive themselves literally as the foundation of Hyderabad’s present and, precisely because of this, the community remains tied to an ethnically “foreign” descent from the Turkmenian Qutb Shahis shaped by Persian influences—and this may exceed any genuine genealogical connections: their presentness entails a spatial dislocation. While perpetuated in the history of Hyderabad’s Islamic cosmopolitism, it also enables at the same time a continuous displacement in a trans- or extranational “elsewhere” that can be both positively and negatively connoted. Here, especially religious reform movements and their narratives of origins play an important role, as they tend to orient themselves to the Middle East and, in the case of the Shia, particularly to postrevolutionary Iran. In particular the incorporation of Hyderabad into the independent Indian nation state, achieved through violent annexation, represents a decisive and traumatic break, one that retrospectively separates a glorious past from a present that is marked by communal violence, migration, socio-economic decline, political marginalization, and cultural atrophy.17 In summary, these multiple inci16| Kavita Saraswathi Datla, The Language of Secular Islam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013); Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 17| Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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sions and incursions of the past into the present entail that the presentness of the Twelver Shia is formed as an “intrinsic time” in the mode of nostalgia.18 As the example of calendar art demonstrated, Shiite religious symbols and ritual practices of sacrifice and martyrdom harbor a particularly opportune repertoire, enabling the community to make use of both the general communalist and quantifying compulsion to constitute itself as a religious minority as well as the compulsion, resulting from the history of Hyderabad, to do so in a present “attuned” to a nostalgia of the past—whereby “compulsion” is here understood in the Foucauldian sense of being both restricting and enabling. On the ritual level, elaborate practices of mourning and atonement, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain along with his family and followers at the battle of Kerbela (located in present-day Iraq) in the 17th century, are characteristic for the Twelver Shia. Of prime importance are the acts of bloody self-flagellation (khuni matam), which, while also controversial within the Twelver Shia, attract enormous public attention. Although the Iranian Revolution showed that Shiite symbols and images are suited to political mobilization19 —and there are reform movements in Hyderabad oriented in this direction—the majority of the Twelver Shiites follow a quietist interpretation.20 The martyrdom of Imam Hussain and his supporters is taken to be a divinely 18| Shireen Mirza, “Lost Worlds: Perspectives of Decline Among Shias of Hyderabad Old City,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 51, no. 2, 2017, 221–248. 19| Michael M.J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge/ MA: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980). 20| The dominance of quietist positions amongst Muslim communities beyond the specific case of the Twelver Shia is also to be understood in relation to Indian communalism. Particularly in the wake of Hyderabad’s “accession” to the Republic of India, Muslim communities were clearly defined and constituted, but could not represent their political interests as communal, i.e. as specific Muslim interests, because

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preordained and thus soteriologically necessary act of heroic self-sacrifice, an act that has ultimately enabled the survival of the “true” Muslims as a minority—and this means an existence in the midst of a more or less hostile and unjust world. In the historical context of Hyderabad, Shiite mourning rituals thus fulfill a whole series of functions: in terms of their essential structure as remembrance practices and to a certain degree also as a ritual enactment of a historical primal scene, they firmly bind the present Shiite community into an Islamic interpretative framework that depends on notions of authentic origins leading to a temporal and spatial “elsewhere.” At the same time, Shiite rituals like the public procession of flagellants have become true symbols of Hyderabad and its venerable “Shiite” history (fig. 1a and b). It is precisely the presence of and the participation by Sunnis and Hindus that makes this history venerable, for they indicate an Indian “composite culture.” A politically and historically produced quietism, which is also capable of being legitimated theologically, enables in this way a public visualization of religious identity and communalist difference, while simultaneously integrating them with their “extraterritorial” and temporal dislocations into a higher-level national unity and present.

III. Conclusion These considerations on the conceptual history of communalism and the Twelver Shia in Hyderabad clarify how presentness can be understood as a historically conditioned form of being-in-the-present. In so far as this presentness is not simply a matter of being present, it is reliant on concrete conditions and practices of representation and therefore this possesses what Sara Ahmed has called—from a phenomenological perspective—“histories of arrival,” or of “emergence.”21 The conditions of the category of “religious minority” considered here evince their own specific ambivalence for the postcolonial Indian context: it resides in the fact that the religious difference which Shiites have to publicly stage and perform in order to be perceivable in the framework of a pluralistic definition of the Indian nation threatens to undermine their legitimate presentness as part of a nation increasingly defined by Hindu majoritarianism. This ambivalence also characterizes the increase—observable since at least the 2000s—in both extensiveness and intensiveness of Shiite ritual practices in the public domain and their increasing mediatization and digital “amplification” in various social media (fig. 3); and this all the more so because the theological of the prevailing political climate, epitomized by the extremely violent and traumatic partition into a “secular” India and an “Islamic” Pakistan (see Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India). 21| Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 38.

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and ritual foundations of the Twelver Shia seem particularly suited to make themselves available for a communalist minority discourse and, moreover, can claim the status of a significant local (and national) cultural heritage in the mode of nostalgia. Besides the more general symbolic repertoire of martyrdom, it is precisely the intensive forms of ritual self-flagellation that harbor an aesthetic potential of the “sensational,” a potential that in the framework of the specific economy of attention in digital media worlds is aptly suited to creating a spectacle and marking difference. Twelver Shiites in Hyderabad are becoming increasingly aware of how they (above all from a political and socio-economic viewpoint) are at once marginal and overpresent, or hypervisible. Their “sensational” aesthetic visualization is always open to negative interpretations as a religious fanaticism that is marked as deviant and potentially dangerous, and hence excluding—a fanaticism that constantly needs to be disavowed in the discursive context of communalism. Beyond the concrete example of the Hyderabadi Twelver Shia, the concept of presentness opens up an analytical perspective on the complex entanglements of temporal and aesthetic conditions for the always differential “appearance” of religions in various social and historical contexts. In Europe and the United States, the debates on post-secular societies, the topos of the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” bans on minarets and burkas, and growing Islamophobia, not only show that distinct religions have at their disposal very different conditions for visualization; moreover, a focus on the differential compulsions, possibilities, opportunities, and ambivalences of religious subjectivization for distinct groups and identities can also contribute to a general understanding of the relationship between religion and modernity. |

Figures Fig. 1

a| Public p r oc es s ion on A s hur a, 1 0 M uhar ra m 1440, 9.21.2018, old city of Hyderabad/ India; photo by Stefan Binder; b|T he h a n d i n g ov e r o f a v o ti v e o f fe ri n g to an important symbolic representation of Imam Hussain during the Ashura Procession on 10th Muharram 1440, 9.21.2018, old city of Hyderabad/ India; photo by Stefan Binder.

Fig. 2

Videos recordings of a mour ning ritual on 01 Saf ar 1438 produced for local television stations and internet live streams, 9.21.2018, Musheerabad, Hyderabad/ India; photo by Stefan Binder.

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Time and Form: The “Unthought Known”

Time’s Formlessness In spite of George Kubler’s brave attempt to argue for the contrary, time has no form, no shape (1962). It can leave shapes, in the sense of historically specific styles, which is more in line with Kubler’s essay, but time itself is formless. It can be used in rhythm, which can sometimes create the illusion of form, something we take from music and rhythmic poetry. But it is not time that has that form, it is the music, verse, or even the rhythmic breathing that espouses time, that has a form. Formlessness does not entail invisibility, however. The choice is not to either see fully shaped forms or to see nothing, but, as Silverman puts it, to learn to practice a “visual habitus” that enables us to see what, by lack of recognizable form, seems invisible. In general, as the time passing in the everyday, “all the time,” time is so self-evident that one would not wonder about its potential form. It only accedes to awareness when its apparent flow is interrupted. This can be due to nature or manmade disasters, traumatogenic events, which change the course of time, in one way or another.1 In a project of what is called “artistic research” (the currently most used term) or “art-based learning,” an approach created by Jeroen Lutters, I am currently

1| George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). Kubler (1912–1996) answered criticisms in his essay “The Shape of Time. Reconsidered,” Perspecta 19 (1982): 112–121. For the concept of formlessness, I refer to the well-known follow-up on Bataille’s view: Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). The witty phrase “time is there all the time” was coined by philosopher Kristin Gjesdal in her essay: “The Passing of Time,” in The Passing (of Time), ed. Jeannette Christensen (Oslo: The Academy of Fine Arts, 2017), n.p. This article is part of an ongoing project. It is related to an earlier article, “Activating Temporalities: The Political Power of Artistic Time,” Open Cultural Studies 10.1515/culture-2018–0009, 2018.

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pursuing an artistic experimentation with video that attempts to explore the potential visualization of the form of time. This is possible only when interruption is the starting point. This project is a collaboration between Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen, who came up with the idea, and myself. She has been working on an ongoing series of polaroid photographs, The Passing of Time, that take paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) as their interlocutor. My share in the project is a series of video installations responding to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote (1605/1615).2 Christensen re-photographs the same models in the same poses at decadelong intervals (fig. 1a, b). Between sittings, the sitters get older and the polaroids change format and materiality, thus making process and time part of the artwork. This coincides with a temporality on the level of the diegesis of the picture. In the 2| Christensen’s polaroids have been published in different forms. One is the book Fragments of Matter: Jeannette Christensen (Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2009) for which I wrote the text published in 2009, but already in 1998, I published the book Jeannette Christensen’s Time (Bergen: Center for the Study of European Civilization) on her art. On this project we are now undertaking, an article has been published in 2019: Mieke Bal and Jeannette Christensen, “An Aesthetics of Interruption: Stagnation and Acceleration,” ASAP/ Journal 4, no. 1 (January 2019): 85–112. Jeroen Lutters defended his dissertation on Art-Based Learning (in Dutch) in 2012. His recent book on Gerhard Richter in English EMA (Nude on a Staircase): Studies in Art-Based Learning (Arnhem: ArtEZ Press, 2017) gives a very good impression of this method. If I use the first person singular in this text, it is to take full responsibility for it. But it must be clear that the ideas came forth from the many conversations about the project I had with Christensen.

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everyday life of the woman in the pictures, something happens that makes time suddenly tangible. She was involved in art—in making music. This simple fact harbours an idea about art: the female figure shown was interrupted in her art-making. But conversely, this drew attention to the idea that art interrupts the everydayness of the everyday. To say that art interrupts, is refraining from defining art ontologically—to say what it is—and instead, saying what it does; this means considering art as an act. And indeed, acting with the agency it implies, takes place in time, interrupting time’s self-evident, hence, imperceptible stream. Adorno, who defended the autonomy of art but not as opposed to its social functioning, would agree. “Art cannot live, qua art, within the everyday as the everyday,” writes British philosopher of art and time, Peter Osborne, quoting from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. “Rather, it necessarily disrupts the everydayness of the everyday from within, since it is, constitutively, both ‘autonomous’ and a ‘social fact.’”3 Through a probing of this issue of temporality given form in being interrupted, I plead for the integration of thinking, let’s say, academically, and making, artistically. Recently Christensen has been working with video. After such a long time of working with images that are supposedly still, but demonstrating the dynamism and materiality, the step to video seems a consistent one. She slowed down three 3| Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 255, quoted from: Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, New York: Verso Books, 2013), 140.

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videos to the extreme as a logical continuation of the polaroid series. Based on Vermeer’s oil painting Woman Interrupted at her Music (1660–61), five seconds have been stretched to 11 minutes (fig. 2a, b). A seated figure slowly turns to look at the viewer, breaking the spell of the fictional character’s prior absorption. This turn shows the interruption of the sitter’s fictional, timeless universe. Vermeer’s interrupted woman breaks the confinement of the fictional world and enters ours. And as viewers, we, in turn, interrupt our everyday life of haste and work to participate in the slowness offered. She began this video work after the publication of an artist book that collects many of the polaroids, in sequences that display the passing of time.4 Inspired by the exasperating slowness, the uncertainty about the status of Christensen’s images between still and moving, I brought in my own perspective. Interruption, I added to this, can lead to stagnation. The halting of time, the impossibility to live “in” time: this characterizes trauma. Traumatized subjects are no longer in charge of the time in which they live. Something is halted, stagnates, and assaults them as if from the outside. The possibility to make viewers experientially engage with disturbed temporality and through this experience, with trauma, is a fundamental experiment of the collaborative project, but not exclusively. This is mostly the trauma of others; viewers are enticed to engage with, and develop a sensitivity to that possibility. But they may as well have different associations, sensations, when immersed in the installation. For immersion is the heart of the aesthetics we try to develop. I have made a videography of frenzy where the flow of time is no longer manageable, titled Don Quijote: tristes figuras (fig. 3). The main character is played by French actor Mathieu Montanier, here in a photograph by Mari Luz Bañón. Without going into the question of causality, I consider the main character of Don Quijote as severely traumatized, rather than just funny, ridiculous, or heroic. His adventures demonstrate that time is both constantly halted, interrupted, and hectically continuing. This is where the two parts of the project join forces. Everything that happens, everything that interrupts a routine, makes an event. In the dialogue between the works and its viewers, making the unimaginable interruption of lives by trauma, imaginable, hence, sharable, without turning trauma into a theme, breaks new ground in the search for social functions for art. The project thus probes art’s potential for an aesthetic exploration of time, trauma and violence, and its subsequent potential to be the equivalent of a constructive witness; the kind of witness that can break the social isolation that is so often the lot of the traumatized who are disbelieved, considered mad, or otherwise ostracized. The starting point of the project is the idea that art can assist society in this search for sympathetic 4| The most recent publication of Christensen’s project was that artist book from 2017. Oslo-based literary and art scholar Marit Grøtta proposed the title we took over for our project, “an aesthetic of interruption,” in a review (in Norwegian).

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witnesses, and that sensitizing audiences to the sensate form of time made experiential through interruption, is a step in that direction.5

The Unthought Known: Struggling for Form The notoriously elusive concept of form remains as crucial to art as it is ungraspable. Refraining from attempts to define, hence, to limit and fixate form, I consider it as a manifestation of thinking, as an integral part of the process of art making as rendering visible the invisible, as much as in the creativity of research. In this I am motivated by British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. To many, his dynamic formulation of thinking is both recognizable, familiar, and strange, defamiliarizing: “I often find that although I am working on an idea without knowing exactly what

5| Sympathy is here to be taken in the etymological sense of “suffering with.” The novel’s author was traumatized by his five years of slavery in Algiers. See Maria Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville, Tennesse: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002) and her edition of a contemporary witness (2011). The precarious but important connection between that historical fact and the novel’s form will be discussed at the end of this essay. The classical study of the role of the witness remains Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York/ London: Routledge, 1992). In a collaborative video project from 2012, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I have worked with psychoanalyst of trauma Françoise Davoine to explore the potential of the audiovisual medium to assist the social encouragement in this matter. See Davoine (2014) for the theoretical argumentation, partly in discussion with Freud, proposed in the creative form of a fictional story.

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it is I think, I am engaged in thinking an idea struggling to have me think it.”6 Minimally, this sentence suggests that ideas need a form to be thinkable. It also intimates the active participation of what a deceptive binary opposition would call an object: the idea in the process of being thought. The sentence expresses adequately the search that thinking is. And that searching quality is what this activity has in common with the making of an artwork. The strangeness lies in the personification of the verb “struggling,” and the mutuality this entails. Thinking art: this phrase counters the notion that art is purely static, and making it, purely intuitive; and that it can be distinguished from thinking, with is considered to be rational and logical. Such a distinction can only be relative; and that distinction does not help us in the difficult but important task to understand both art and thought as practices, which are so intimately intertwined in art academies and universities.7 Bollas’s sentence personifies thought and the ideas it engages and produces. But this personification is not simply a metaphor. What it brings forward —form—is dynamic, in process. It is also key to memory, and to the subjectivity that is the body where memories can take place. This brings that personification into the orbit of subjectivity. My next step is to bring Bollas’ formulation closer to the thought of American cultural theorist Kaja Silverman. She brings the concept of form explicitly up when she suggests the importance of memory in her indispensable discussion of unconscious memories, which will lead to another personification: “If, in trying to make sense of this strange account of unconscious memories, I am unable to avoid attributing to them the status of a subject, that is because subjectivity itself is in its most profound sense nothing other than a constellation of visual memories which is struggling to achieve a perceptual form.”8

Now, it is that constellation, a form of sorts, that does the struggling. Silverman’s work binds memory to both time and to the participation of unreflected, indeed unconscious memories in cultural life; hence, their political effect. Both the modest, seemingly innocuous interruption of Vermeer/ Christensen’s woman’s occupation across four centuries, with its potential for disturbance as well as for contact; and the traumatic incapacitation of a madman that keeps popping up through the times of war, capture and enslavement, while questioning who is madder, the madman or his allegedly sane antagonists, have social effects that can be valued, denigrated, and re-valued.

6| Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 10. 7| On Adorno’s philosophical poetics of form, see Josh Robinson, Adorno’s Poetics of Form (Albany, NY: SUNY Press 2018). The thought quality of visual art is explained in a forthcoming study by Hanneke Grootenboer, The Pensive Image (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, in press). 8| Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89; emphasis added.

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In an earlier study, Silverman introduced what she calls “an ethics of vision” through an explanation of the workings of memory. She writes: “The unconscious ‘time’ of any given perception can last as long as a life span, and bring about a much more radical transmutation of values than can its conscious revision. To look is to embed an image within a constantly shifting matrix of unconscious memories, which can render a culturally insignificant object libidinally resonant, or a culturally significant object worthless. When a new perception is brought into the vicinity of those memories which matter most to us at an unconscious level, it too is ‘lit up’ or irradiated, regardless of its status within normative representation.”9

Silverman’s work is especially important in its bond between perception—an act that is the key to visual art—and form. In an aesthetic encounter of the kind the artworks discussed here aim to stage, trigger, and facilitate, the interruption has the function of bringing a new perception “into the vicinity of those memories which matter most to us” so that the social fabric can be healed where it is disrupted, and enhanced where the interruption leads to new contact in an enriching aesthetic encounter.10 The “constellation of visual memories” actively seeks perceptual form, as did Bollas’ incipient ideas. The active nature, as opposed to the object status of both thoughts and memories join a similar activity as the most important characteristic of art. This is also the place where art making becomes research, and research achieves artistic form. This can be seen as yet another struggle performed by seemingly static “things.”

Movement and Memory Time At stake is the relationship between the still and the moving image. This relationship casts doubt on the distinction itself. They share something fundamental that is a property of images as objects of perception. In addition to silence and lack of movement as Christensen foregrounds it, two other aspects of art in relation to aesthetics and its time, and the possibility to interrupt it—of the possibility, or not, of a still image—are memory and form. These are two key aspects of the history of art. But in the preceding section I have called on Bollas and Silverman in order to keep these aspects alive—literally. For the conjunction of these qualities, the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is needed. Mostly recognized in film studies as relevant, Bergson’s work is, through the writings of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), connected to baroque philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz, and hence, to the baroque aesthetics and ethics of Vermeer’s and Cervantes’s time. Bergson rejects the tendency to divide time up, to measure it as if it was a space. Hence his 9| Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 3–4; emphasis added. 10| Silverman, The Threshold, 4.

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insistence on duration. On form in relation to matter, Bergson also came up with an extremely important formulation that enhances its dynamic mutuality. He wrote the following in his best-known and most directly relevant book, Matter and Memory: “(…) forms applicable to things cannot be entirely our own work (…) if we give much to matter we probably receive something from it.”11 This statement relates the idea of form to the sensate experience in public space, that I have often cited as ideas derived from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten as the key to aesthetics. This adds to the attempt, through Bollas’ personification, to make form both more concrete and dynamic.12 The title of Bergson’s book seems a fitting description of Christensen’s work with time and its impact on matter in Woman Interrupted (fig. 4) as well as many of her other works, such as sculptures made of ephemeral materials, most famously jello. The memory of Vermeer’s painting, that utterly still work of art, as made dynamic through the notion of interruption, then through time in the fourcenturies stretch in which the work moves, the relatively short-term effect of the decay of the materiality of polaroid, accompanied by the aging of the models and the style of their hair and dress, then made into a moving image, yet so slow that the movement cannot easily be perceived by the eye, or experienced by the body, but cannot be erased either. It seems as if this accumulative, hectic sentence reflects even in its syntax what is at stake: both slowness and frenzy. As mentioned, Bergson’s legacy has become of prime importance to cinema studies, but to grasp our project, I want to emphasize that as a consequence, conversely, cinema has become a model for other visual and audiovisual cultural expressions. This is an 11| Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 223. 12| Gilles Deleuze’s commentaries on other brilliant philosophers are a gift to intellectual life, and also prepare the ground for an aesthetic inflection. His short studies on Bergson Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988) and his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), then a longer one on Leibniz The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. and foreword Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), together shape the idea of the baroque in their brilliant summing up of the main ideas. From the beginning of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, a misconstrued Kantian perspective has prevailed over the founding view of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. To squeeze a 900-page treatise written in Latin into a single sentence: for him, aesthetics is based on an experience of binding through the senses in public space. He published his Aesthetica in 1750. As far as I know there is still no accessible English publication of this influential treatise. I use the German edition from 2007, as well as relying on other trustworthy scholars. See Tomáš Hlobil, “Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten: Ästhetik,” Estetika 46, no. 1 (2009): 105–110 for an informative review. Jill Bennett’s 2005 book can be considered a thorough, albeit implicit deployment of Baumgarten’s view of aesthetic. Id., Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). She is more explicit about it in her 2012 book Practical Aesthetics: Event, Affect and Art After 9/11 (London: I.B. Tauris).

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instance of the kind of anachronistic thinking I have called “preposterous history.”13 Bergson had a profound influence on Deleuze, who was to become such an important cultural philosopher of our time, because he took visual artefacts seriously as partners in thinking. This hold especially for his vision of cinema, as Paola Maratti has explained with exemplary lucidity. Such publications as Deleuze’s approximate the idea of artistic research.14 Bergson’s book Matter and Memory from 1896 starts with a thesis about perception. Bergson claims that perception is not a construction but a selection. The subject makes that selection from among all the perceptible things in the world around her, in view of her own interests. Perception, in Bergson’s view, is an act of the body and for the body as it is positioned in the midst of things to select from. This is why texture, colour, and dimensions matter, as much as figures, space, and perspective. It also brings the viewer into the orbit of what art does, and thus qualifies art’s autonomy with its sociality. Crucially, perception is an act of the present, performed in the present tense. But this needs some reflection, too, for it might entail a naïve presentism—a narrowing of time to the brief moment of now, a temporal selfie—if it wasn’t for the participation of memory, especially when memory is reconsidered through Silverman’s personification. To sum up succinctly Bergson’s thoughts on this matter: occurring in the present, perception is bound to memory. Without memory, the portion of the visible 13| Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 14| Paola Maratti, Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, trans. Alisa Hartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

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world we see would not make enough sense to be selected and thus acquire form. To achieve the required form, the subject’s participation is needed. Bergson’s point is that, since it is the subject’s interest in the present that motivates the selection that perception is, a perception image that is not infused with memory images would make no sense at all. Nor would it have a sensuous impact, since we perceive with as well as for the body. This is why the body also remembers. At the end of his book, Bergson writes how memory participates in perception. That participation accounts for the subjective nature of perception, even if the things we perceive exist outside our consciousness. He writes: “In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition.”15

This theory of memory does justice to the role of intuition, both in thought and in art, as Bollas and Silverman have argued in tandem, according to the way I join the two quotations above. This also explains why Bergson insisted so strongly on duration. As Deleuze wrote in Bergsonism, “Bergsonian duration is (…) defined less by succession than by coexistence.”16 And duration is the primary tool of Christensen’s video works. Stretching out duration is the artist’s strategy to make a moving image still, and a still one moving. This provides yet another argument in favour of the active nature of art. The coexistence of different moments (of memories) has a spatial aspect to it. It is a timespace. And this timespace is given shape in art. We see the articulation of space and time together through movement. They are both only understandable and functional in relation to the subject of perceiving. The effect of visual art, the fact that artworks affect us, is the consequence of the heterogeneity and, at the same time, the subjectivity of timespace. Timespace is perhaps most typically visible in the art form of video installation. The two screens, facing each other in Christensen’s work, as well as the scattered monitors on stage in Tristes figures, each give shape to, hence, create a form for the videos in their appearance as installations. The simultaneous presence of—and hence the simultaneous movement on—multiple screens embodies the coexistence of duration and different moments. It is a visible instance of Bergson’s plurality of moments contracted into “a single intuition.”17 This view of perception is best understood as a “middle voice”—the Greek verb form that relativizes the subject/object opposition in that it is neither active 15| Bergson, Matter and Memory, 218–19; emphasis added. 16| Deleuze, Spinoza, 60. 17| For an extensive discussion of video installation in its specificity as an art form that has time and space as its primary material, see my book on the subject: Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) .

Time and Form

nor passive. To appreciate the continued presence of the middle-voice involvement of the viewer in her relationship to space, the concept of "psychic space" is helpful. This is based on the real, existential connection between the subject and the space around her. Hence, we must understand the place of the index in the concept of psychic space. The index is a sign that is physically or causally connected to its meaning. Linguistic deixis is a specific form of indexicality. It has as specificity that it is bound to the subject, as his or her extension in Bergson's sense. Psychic space is material, and the primary thrust of political art lies in that materiality (see fig. 4 above).18 For the concept of psychic space, the best source is once more Silverman. In her theory of the formation of subjectivity and the place of the body therein, she argues that “(...) one's apprehension of self is keyed both to a visual image or constellation of visual images, and to certain bodily feelings, whose determinant is less physiological than social.”19

This statement explains how the relationship between the subject as individual and the culturally normative images we interact with on an everyday basis in the social and political domain, is bodily without being "innate" or anatomically determined. This relationship is both materially solid and subject to change. If the subject can change, and if that change can happen in the social domain, then art can contribute to such change. Political artworks perform an insistent interrogation of the indexical relationship between image and viewer on the basis of cultural memories and myths mixed with contemporary realities.

Tying Up the Broken Thread of Memory Finally, to make the point about temporality and trauma more concrete, I now wish to say a bit more about the installation Don Quixote: tristes figuras. Cervantes wrote one of the world’s primary best-sellers, and the first modern, perhaps postmodern novel, after experiencing five years of captivity as a slave in Algiers (1575–1580). The duration of five years only ended when the subhuman situation ended; while still a captive, between endless waiting and the quickening of the desire to get away, Cervantes cannot have had a sense of time. After four failed attempts to escape, in the awareness that such attempts were usually punished by torture and death, it just so happened that he was redeemed. The novel, in two parts—the first 18| On the relevance of the middle voice, see the seminal article by Maria Boletsi, “From the Subject of the Crisis to the Subject in Crisis: Middle Voice on Greek Walls," The Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2, no.1 (2016): 3–28. Her analysis takes on graffiti art in a situation of economic crisis, in her case, in Greece. But her conclusions are philosophically extremely relevant and extendable. 19| Silverman, The Threshold, 14; emphasis added.

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published in 1605, the second in 1615—at first sight reads like a parody of medieval epics and romances, and as a precursor of later novels that mock adventure stories, such as 18th Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (Denis Diderot, 1765–1770) and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Lawrence Sterne, 1759). But it also resonates with postmodern novels of the 20th century. As a consequence, the best films on the subject—none of them really convincing to me—are emphatically postmodern.20 Most importantly, and for me, the motivation that drives the project, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha stands out in its intensity and creative expression of prolonged hopelessness, leading to trauma. At this point I want to caution against the over-use of this notion, which is thereby in danger of losing its specific meaning. In this video work, “trauma” is a state of stagnation and the impossibility of subjective remembrance that result from traumatogenic events; not the events themselves. It is to make the point of this combination, that an integration of the concept of trauma and the social need to collectively deal with the trauma of others is at the heart of the inquiry, while refraining from representing any specific traumas.21 If such a literary work has managed to achieve and retain the world-wide status as a masterpiece it has, it is not primarily due to the postmodern jokes we can read in it. It is first of all because it has not lost any of its actuality. Not coincidentally, the novel is based on what the great specialist of Cervantes, María Antonia Garcés, has called, in the subtitle of her edition of a contemporary witness statement, “an early modern dialogue with Islam.” Formerly, in deep history, things 20| Succinctly put: all films impose linearity where there is none, and ridicule the old knight. Terry Gilliam’s recent film (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, 2018) is a clear case of pulling the novel into postmodernism, at the expense of its other important aspects, such as the traumatic. As with the collaboration with Christensen, I feel compelled to use the first-person singular to take responsibility for my views. But the project was initiated by actor Mathieu Montanier, with whom I have developed the first draft of a synopsis, and without whom I would not even have undertaken this project (see fig. 3). I also owe a lot to conversations with Françoise Davoine on trauma and with the Cervantes scholar María Antonia Garcés on the poignant life of Cervantes in Algiers. Having herself been captured and held for seven months by terrorists in Colombia, Garcés knows better than anyone what she is talking about. For a psychoanalytic reading of the novel, see Françoise Davoine, Don Quichotte, pour combattre la mélancolie (Paris: Stock, 2008), and Françoise Davoine et Jean-Max Gaudillière, A bon entendeur, salut! Face à la perversion, le retour de Don Quichotte (Paris: Stock, L’autre pensée, 2013). 21| In this respect the project is radically different from attempts to study artworks that represent trauma, as discussed, for example, by Miriam Haughton, Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), who analyzes performances that stage trauma, or by Margaret Iverson on trauma “in” photography (Photography, Trace and Trauma (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). The latter equates photography as such, even modernity, with trauma. I cannot abide with such facile generalizations. These studies fail in accounting for the fact that trauma itself is, precisely, un-representable.

Time and Form

happened that still happen, or happen again, today. Hence, “formerly is today.” With a research group at the Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, where scholars are articulating alternatives for such problematic terms as “postcolonial,” we could call it “concurrences.”22 Every epoch knows of such situations that push human beings out of humanity. The novel carries not only the traces of the absurdity and madness that suggest the inevitably traumatic state in which its creator must have been locked, upon his return to Spain, as transpires in the stories told. But it also foregrounds this consequence of war and captivity in the madness of its literary form. The sheer-endless stream of “adventures” makes all film adaptations more or less hopeless endeavours. One can barely read, let alone watch all those pointless attempts to help others, the repercussions of which involve cruelty and pain. If I nevertheless decided to make an audio-visual work based on this novel, it is because the aftermath of violence, of hopeless stagnation in situations of which the end is not in sight, needs and deserves exploration. Thus, viewers can learn from it for dealing with their own experiences of the violence contemporary society can generate, their own as well as those hinted at by others in their surroundings, in order to repair what Cervantes called the “broken thread” of memory, and we must add, social connectivity. The specific genre of video production we have called in other productions, “theoretical fictions;” and this is the genre underlying the scattered installation pieces as well. This is the deployment of fiction to understand difficult theoretical issues, and even to develop theory through what fiction enables us to imagine. The challenge to make a video project based on Don Quixote appeals to two desires. First, the current situation of the world makes a deeper, creative reflection on trauma and its assault on human subjectivity, an urgent task for art. The insights the novel harbours uniquely connect to other experiences of war, violence, and captivity. Second, a well-thought-through video project can explore and transgress the limits of what can be seen, shown, narrated, and witnessed, specifically in relation to trauma. As a mostly narrative medium, film seems the least apt to do justice to the turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incongruous “adventures” told in the novel. Yet thanks to its capacity for audio-visualization, rather than a linear film, a video installation consisting of different, non-linear episodes may instead be more effective in showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma occurs but violence-generated traumatic states. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ending of his Tractatus (1921), “Of what one cannot speak, one should keep silent” was modified later into 22| See Diana Bryson, Peter Forsgren, and Gunlög Fur, ed., Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds (Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 2017). I have an increasingly close collaboration with this group, and also with another research group at the Linnaeus University, devoted to the study of intermediality. I am grateful to Johan Höglund, Lars Elleström, Niklas Salmose, Dagmar Brunow and their colleagues for their sustained interest in this collaboration.

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“Of what one cannot speak, one can still show”. The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an engaged activity against the indifference of the world. I titled my 2010 book on Doris Salcedo’s art after Wittgenstein’s dictum.23 In order to do justice to the peculiar, cyclic, perhaps even “hysterical” form of the novel while pursuing these two goals, only an equally “incoherent,” episodic artwork can be effective. But this artwork must exceed a plain similarity of form, at least in the common understanding of form. As I argued with Bollas and Silverman, form is as dynamic and active as is art more in general. In view of the need for witnessing, such a form enables and activates viewers to construct their own story, and connect it to what they have seen around them. Thus, I aim to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection on communication beyond the boundaries that madness draws around its captive subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. The hectic, frenzied feel of the installation is not due to what happens on each screen, but on the large number of screen where the things we see do not hang together in any coherent way. To achieve this, I expected that the creation and production of singular installation pieces facilitates experimenting with the episodic nature of the literary masterpiece. These pieces, presenting “scenes,” are presentations of situations. To give insight into the stagnation that characterises the adventures, the pieces are predominantly descriptive, in a Proustian way; for it is narrative that subjects in traumatic states cannot perform. In this descriptive mode, they join Christensen’s slowness. Any attempt at narrative will be “stuttering,” repetitive, without any sense of development, and often, the images will not match the dialogues. What French psychoanalyst and theorist of madness, Françoise Davoine, calls, citing historian Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling situations, moments, over the stage or throughout the gallery space. Thus, the tenuous line of a single narrative yields to an installation that puts the visitor in the position of making her own narrative out of what is there, on the basis of their own baggage, while witnessing the events, in an ever-changing temporality.24

23| See the final sentence of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Francis Pears and Brian McGuinnes (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). On his change of opinion see Philosophical Investigations #41, commented on by Davoine and Gaudillière, 17, 51–52, who quotes Maurice O’Drury, Conversations avec Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. J.-P. Cometti (Paris: PUF, 2002), 159, 170, 173. For more on Salcedo’s work, see my book Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 24| Braudel is a historian who wrote seminal studies on early-modern Mediterranean culture. His descriptions position Cervantes in a region where nation-states were still quite unstable (as they are again today). Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. [1972], trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 43–4.

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This is adequate to the state of traumatism presented in the pieces, and to the need to stretch out a hand to, instead of turning away from people hurt so deeply. This calls for an incursion into the biographical information; this is something I never do, but here I must. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in captivity as a slave without any sense of an ending to his disempowered state and his suffering, looms over the entire installation, and determines its form. Therefore, the main character’s ostensive and much commented-upon madness, and the main character of the one narrative unit we select for a narrative element, “The Captive’s Tale,” merge as incarnations of the desperate attempt to recover from the world’s most horrid crime: to destroy the subjectivity of others by captivity. Also, in order to include, while questioning it, the narrativity that is, after all, the novel’s primary mode, “The Captive’s Tale” is developed in four scenes. It is the one “captivating” story of captivity; an embedded novella, with a plot of sorts, of a soldier taken in slavery, clearly based on autobiography, supplemented with dreams of wish fulfilment. The Captive is played by the same actor who plays Don Quixote. This allows viewers to reflect on, and decide, how they consider narrative itself. These four scenes may also be edited as a single short narrative film.25 The form of these pieces is experimental in many different ways, so that a contemporary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation of long ago that, as befits the halted temporality of trauma, persists in the present. Where possible, long, enduring shots predominate. Sound-wise, some are quiet, some loud. This allows the simultaneity, the proximity, and even the superposition of different scenes.

25| The Captive’s Tale (as told in DQ I, chs. 39–41) was filmed in four episodes as a pedagogical experiment at Linnaeus University, Växjö/ Sweden.

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They consist of single-shot pieces and remain, as far as possible, uncut. Another experimental form concerns the dynamic relationship between visibility and invisibility, image and writing. A frequent deployment of voice-off without synchronicity with the images—also a novelty in our work—foregrounds this tension. The actor Mathieu Montanier, co-initiator of the project, is visible, but so are, sometimes, the letters of inscriptions, in association with other texts, to foreground the nature of video-graphy as a form of writing. We also experiment with different combinations of sequences, including mounting multiple images on a screen; this, also, for the practical purpose of facilitating the project to travel and to be combined with other artworks. Hence, through experimenting with possible forms of the art of video, we sought to invent new forms for the formlessness of trauma (see fig. 5 for a possible installation). If, then, I end this essay on a kind of proposal for an artwork, it is because the probing of time, in its formlessness, demanded an artistic mode in order for it to come up from its struggle to access to awareness. For time, in relation to, on the one hand, the question of its form, or visibility; and on the other, its interruption as a condition of that visibility, is what is most profoundly interrupted when violence makes the everydayness of time unsustainable. “Artistic research,” I hope to have suggested, is indispensable in order to grasp what seems out of our grasp. |

Figures F ig. 1a, b

Jeannette Christensen, The Passing of T ime ( Hans) , 1998/ 2009, two Polaroid photographs; photos by the artist; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

F ig. 2a, sb Jeannette Christensen, Woman Int er r up t ed a t h e r Mu si c ( R a z a n ) , 2018, video, looped, two screenshots by the artist; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020. F ig. 3

Mathieu Montanier enacting Don Quixot e, 2019; photo by Mari Luz Bañón; © Mieke Bal.

F ig. 4

Jeannette Christensen, Woman Inter r upted, 2018, 3D simulation of installation; screenshot by the artist; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

F ig. 5

Mieke Bal, Don Quixote: Tristes figuras, 2019–20, sketch floor plan of installation; © Mieke Bal

Rhytmical Presentness

Boris Roman Gibhardt

Rhythmical Presentness. On the ‘Rhythmology’ of Perception. Maldiney—Cézanne—Rilke

Rhythmical Aesthetics in Maldiney: The Production of Presentness Rhythms, states the philosopher Henri Maldiney, do not flow nor are they explicated in time; rather, they contain and generate time.1 Maldiney’s thesis is weighty: aesthetic perception implies an intrinsic, rhythmically-structured temporality that is distinct from measurable, linearly elapsing time. This addresses a dimension of time that, while always latently shadowing or running with physical time, forms and orders the latter into a distinctive experience, setting it off from the stream of passing time. This temporality is distinct from both the isolated point of a now in the present, which is permanently actualizing itself, and forms of time like remembering and expecting, which, driven by a stronger emphasis on intentionality, are oriented on something that fills time. When Maldiney argues that our perception is always already rhythmed, he does not understand this rhythmical perception as a sudden turning inwards of awareness and apprehending of another time—rhythms

1| “Un ryhtme ne se déroule, ne s’explique pas dans le temps. Il l’implique;” “Il est sa propre transformation,” Henry Maldiney, L’art, l’éclair de l’être (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 10. The book was published posthumously; cf. Maldiney’s foundational essay “L’esthétique des rythmes,” in id., Regard Parole Espace (Lausanne: Éditions l'Âge d'Homme, 1973): 147-172 Boris Roman Gibhardt, and Johannes Grave, “Rhythmus,” in Formen der Zeit: Ein Wörterbuch der ästhetischen Eigenzeiten, ed. Michael Gamper, Helmut Hühn and Steffen Richter (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2020), 314-323.

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occur necessarily in physical time, and can therefore never be fully experienced in their difference to time. What they do draw attention to however, so Maldiney, are specific temporal operations in aesthetic experience. Rhythms implement different and in part contrary directions of perception in a process that is nevertheless indivisible.2 The conclusion to be drawn and put pointedly:3 it is the conflicting moments and tensions which generate time in the sense that they make apparent the very processuality of perception and thus evade any swift insertion into linear time. But the hypothesis immediately spawns its own opposition. For the experience of time is invariably coupled with a sense for what fills it—with a view to the future, a sense of foresight or expectation is there, and with a view to the past one of reflection or remembrance: presentness relates to a non-present; time can therefore hardly condense into a ‘whole,’ gathered in itself, that is intuitively viewable or coherently structured.4 It was not by chance that, already in antiquity, an intuition of a rhythmical essence of the world, a continuous regeneration of balance, was the preserve of the gods, while a mortal can at most reflect in his/her own temporal being, i.e. what evades disposable time.5 It is therefore imperative to take seriously Maldiney’s pointer to the implementing of contrary directions in an “indivisible process:” a temporality that is describable rhythmically obviously entails a doubling of dissolution and persistence, the relationship between them is conspicuous nonetheless as a stable connection. This implies however that rhythms are not to be separated from the sensory-eventful Jeweiligkeit of their appearing; in the rhythms something present gives itself for interpretation in what constitutes its very generation. Thus, to speak of rhythm is not to address in the first instance that which the present is linked with concretely, namely a feeling, a meaning, or an intentional act—in other words: the products of time-consciousness—but rather to take into 2| Cf. Maldiney, “L‘art, l‘ éclair,” 10, see also 18. 3| Maldiney’s standpoints are not simply summarized and explicated here and in the following; rather, Maldiney’s theses are understood against the backdrop of current debates on time and representation. For more on this theme, see also: Was sind Ästhetische Eigenzeiten? ed. Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014), without, as far as I can tell, any consideration of Maldiney. Pertinent for the research question independent of the rhythm problematic, see Martin Seel, “Form als eine Organisation von Zeit,” in Ästhetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten: 100 Jahre Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Josef Früchtl and Maria Moog-Grünewald (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007): 33-44. For Maldiney’s concept of rhythm in a narrower sense: Eliane Escoubas, “Le phénomène et le rythme. L’esthétique d’Henri Maldiney,” Revue d’esthétique 36 (1999): 141-148; Jean-Christophe Goddard, “Image et rythme dans l’esthétique d’Henri Maldiney et Gilles Deleuze,” in Bild und Zeit: Temporalität in Kunst und Kunsttheorie seit 1800, ed. Thomas Kisser (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), 419-430; Pierre Sauvanet, “La question du rythme dans l’œuvre d’Henri Maldiney. Approche et discussion,” in Henri Maldiney. Une singulière présence, ed. Renaud Barbaras et al. (Paris: Encre Marine, 2014), 169-188. 4| Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 137-153. 5| Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 145.

Rhytmical Presentness

account its process of becoming, i.e. whatever always already precedes the meaning because it is something that realizes itself temporally.6 What is intrinsic to rhythm is how it binds time together into a respective contraction (or forming, ‘compressing’) of temporality and its de-contraction (or dissolution, unfolding) in transpiring time.7 From this, the present of the rhythm determines itself: “Consequently, the time of the rhythm is the time of the present and not a time of the world.”8 An operativity of the rhythmical concept of time arises out of this doubling: within the very same process, the representation or objectification of time, which we explicitly conceive and produce through the forms of language, description, and imagination (chronothesis), and the insertion of these representations into ongoing renewing time, in which they are realized, actualized, or vanish (chronogenesis), mutually condition each other. The understanding is sharpened further with this relationality, for now rhythms stabilize perception by economizing and coordinating the forces required for perception, and thus serve the self-assertion of perception.9 Maldiney emphasizes the dissolving aspect: what is objectified out of the potentiality is lost as a possibility in this moment; but because the objectifying is performed in time and thus disperses in the perception as this proceeds, a new enabling arises. Perception in the temporal sense is never concurrent to the complex of objective circumstances that triggers it; rather, rhythm is the connecting, coordinating relatedness of complements. This expresses itself at first in an increasing or decreasing of intensities—i.e. in a relationship that is integrally mobile, onto which meanings cannot be affixed beforehand, and accordingly possesses only a temporal sense, and not a causal or symbolic one.10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have emphasized this point (and in doing so drawn on 6| In this sense, rhythms are to be distinguished from an understanding of the emphatic present as the entering of suddenness, for instance as explicated by Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins [1981] (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998). 7| Maldiney, “L’esthétique des rythmes,” 171. 8| Maldiney,“Ästhetik der Rhythmen,” 63. 9| For more on rhythm’s memory-supporting function or its enhancing of the skill of memorizing, see: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Rhythmus und Sinn,” in id., Präsenz (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2012), 223-240, 226. 10| This may also be understood as an objection to classical hermeneutics, based on signs and semiotics, which moves from the sign in the representation directly to the meaning without taking into consideration the moment of temporality, in poetry for example taking rhythm to be nothing more than a mere enlivening of the intended sense. But even the most detailed sculptured rhythmic of a poem, which for the reader can be traced back concretely to the stimulus of specific immovable words, never transports exactly the same meaning that the words transport. Rhythmic is performative, i.e. it produces a relationship between the (timeless in words) given and the respective, present temporality, in which the words are—as it were—taken possession of. Strictly speaking, a poem can never have the same rhythm twice. In this context, the foundations of the physiological reception are also of interest; cf. Raoul Schrott, Arthur Jacobs: Gehirn und Gedicht. Wie wir unsere Wirklichkeiten konstruieren (Munich: Hanser, 2011).

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a spatial-temporal model from biosemiotics): the rhythm of birdsong (ritornello) is determined by aligning the voice and body to the qualities of a given space and a given time (i.e. it is not an action but a preparation for actions), and the rhythmical perception of an artistic representation is not some functional grasping of meaning, but rather a becoming-expressive of qualities, an opening to a current stability (and through this mediated to an operativity of meaning, sense, or impulse).11 When rhythms come under consideration, the focus—and not only in Maldiney, as the examples below will show—is placed on the organization of perception in its subliminal spatial and temporal mediality, which accompanies the orientation towards an object and with this self-adapting and taking-possession-of simultaneously contributes something its own, something that resists the objectifying and dispersion in time, and condenses. Thus, in the rhythm a nexus emerges in its creative progression, whereby the relations are continuously changing and a fixed dichotomy between subject and object never eventuates.12 The sketched temporal complementarity occasions a constant transforming of occurring incoherency into coherency, with which a fullness or potentiality objectifies itself and, once objectified and linked, vanishes as such.13 The concept of rhythm is appropriate for those situations in which this usually subliminal process of contraction and de-contraction becomes conspicuous as such—or becomes co-conspicuous mediated via a phenomenon. In rhythm, the determination is completed with which a potentiality enters into time and diffuses itself in time, dissolves boundaries, and materializes. In rhythms, the production of reality occurs permanently out of a doubling of identity and superseding.14 Maldiney suspects that this temporality harbors a high degree of explanatory potential for explicating creative time and, mediated through 11| Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus, German trans. G. Ricke and Ronald Voullié (Berlin, Merve, 1992), 342-385 (section focussing on the relation of biological rhythm or ritornello and aesthetic rhythms in art). 12| Alfred North Whitehead, Prozess und Realität. Entwurf einer Kosmologie (1929), German trans. H.G. Holl (Frankfurt o.M: Suhrkamp, 1979), 74. 13| There are thus overlaps to Husserl’s description of the “stream of experience” (“Erlebnisstrom”) made up of protention and retention Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, ed. Rudolf Bernet (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2013); for this stream cf. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen. Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2012), 102. Whereas Husserl’s interest is the ‘streaming’ self-production of continuity, in the thinking of Maldiney and Deleuze/ Guattari rhythms are a tension that opposes the production of continuity which consciousness performs reflex-like. This tension can potentially draw attention more intensely to the mediality in which something appears or vanishes, and of which consciousness, due to its actualization mechanism, always already no longer knows—this is the reason behind Maldiney’s recourse to the unconscious (and psychoanalysis) and Deleuze and Guattari’s referrals to the spatio-temporal rhythmical behavior of animals prior to consciousness. 14| Rhythmical time is a temporality of change and adaption; this event-oriented thinking needs to also be distinguished from the structural identity thinking of Husserlian phenomenality; see also footnote 13.

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this, even a therapeutic-like possibility to intervene into time, namely the doubling of identity and superseding where it is determined by pre-established structures to feed back into its creative openness, to dissolve psychic encodings, and use the potential of taking-into-possession, which rhythms bear along with them, for working towards effecting change to the categories of existence.15 This psycho- or more precisely: ‘daseins’-analytical grounding of Maldiney’s approach is here only in one point of interest for the determination of rhythmic presentness: the presence-time of a rhythm is not punctual-now time, but carries something with it that it perspectives from the standpoint of a time configuration, a developing-like becoming in time. Rhythms impact through evoking surroundings and impact on receptive, always already present, previously developing sensibilities: one cannot be apprehended by a rhythm that is not one’s own. What is felt is always revived feeling, something sensitized out of the persistence and dissolution of lifetime. Where they become conspicuous, rhythms express something about the selfproduction of experience; they decode, as it were, relations in time or—with a view to the permanent linking of the revived (decoding) with something new to occupy (coding)—“transcode” them.16 Rhythms communicate sensorily and they communicate something temporal, the code or the meaning is thus always only given in that wherein it produces itself and disperses, and so becomes intrinsic: a sense for the genesis of signs in contrast to a deciphering of a result-oriented signified.17 In this sense, it can be said that rhythms are precisely then in the present, that they transform a becoming of time into an intrinsic, i.e. the movement temporalizes itself, and not mark the time point of the new, which in the metaphysical tradition is commonly understood as the intrinsic because it is a conscious positing of itself as a center.18 For time cannot be thought of from a present being [Seiende], because the movement of temporalizing is reduced to that which joins together into a sign and thus falls out from the movement of the open.19

15| Henri Maldiney, Verstehen, German trans. Sabine Metzger (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2006), 78-115; Maldiney draws in particular on Ludwig Binswanger, Traum und Existenz (Bern/ Berlin: Gachnang & Springer, 1992) and the formulation of the “pulse” of Dasein, the “systole and diastole” of which need to be found and traced in therapy. 16| For the concept of transcoding, see Deleuze/ Guattari, Tausend Plateaus, 345f.; cf. in this context below the rhythmical in Rilke and the conceptualization of transmutation. 17| For more on the code, see Roland Barthes, Das Reich der Zeichen, German trans. M. Bischoff (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 29-31; the self-production of signs in time could also be used to counter the aforementioned thesis of Gadamer, according to whom time can only be thought of in terms as ‘time for something’, i.e. as filled time. 18| Cf. on the critique of such a “classical metaphysics of presence,” Jacques Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen (1967), German trans. H.D. Gondek (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 39. 19| Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen, 116.

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In contrast, the ‘transcode’ of the rhythm is not sign-like in the classical sense because it is not extractable from its operativity. Rhythm is the form of perception as sensibility, i.e. of that dimension in which the perception enters into significance, becomes responsive and linking. Rhythm is less about the causal and propositional what of this significance than the how of its temporal beinglinked—the style of the linking, the predicable of a nexus, the mode of the relation, in contrast to causality, intentionality, and function—i.e. the relationships of mobility and stability in the dimension of time. In this how, a sensibility prior to the actual feeling and a temporality prior to the actual time of the meaning (of intentional occupation of time point with a feeling and vice versa) can be implied. 20 By contrast, to reconstruct an ordering and sequence of consciousness levels in time goes beyond the rhythm. Considering rhythms may be sensibly limited to that which steps into and out of significance, which is permanently immanent in time and space instead of referring to signs and symbols, and which attains a stability through this processual mobility, a stability that pure presenting with its always already symbolizing objectification does not possess.

Applications I: Aspects of the Rhythm Debate around 1900 and the example of Cézanne The sketched discourse of rhythm is to be situated in the somewhat broader argumentation context of aesthetics, according to which, in a brief characterization, art is not to merely depict the world, but is rather the creation of a world. The idea that what arises is always to be seen under the conditions of time, was related concretely by Konrad Fiedler for instance to the appearance of form in the late 19th century: “Form is not something that art comes upon, but something that first commences with its activity,” or more precisely “first gains existence through it.”21 Maldiney’s ambitious attempt to connect physiological perception and existential experience in a concept of rhythm is not least grounded in this enhancement of the productive autonomy of experience, as it was imagined by Fiedler and others: that which is not subjected to linear time because it expresses itself rhythmically, ‘comes’ in its own way ‘into existence’—and this ‘own’ time is potentially assigned nothing less than the task to intervene into physical time and to forge meaning in this way. With a touch more effort, this fundamental thesis of an intrinsic or own time could be represented as the common sense prevailing in the extensive debates on empathy, general

20| For the temporality of language prior to actually “understanding,” cf. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 21| Konrad Fiedler, Schriften über Kunst, ed. Hans Eckstein (Cologne: Dumont, 1977), 55.

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fine arts, Gestalt theory, and finally the philosophy of time, in particular Bergson.22 Differentiated, these explanatory attempts show however, for example in relation to the question if rhythms are to be related to a triggering aesthetic object, or are grounded in the creative self-projection of the perceiver—a dichotomy at home in the body-soul problematic which Maldiney never lets surface. For Maldiney, it is not about the origins of phenomena, but the nexus of becoming in which something that appears can be absorbed into—through the experience of how it appears—the categories of an intrinsic existence. Rhythm is thus more than a phenomenal appearance form of perceptual time; it is an organizational form, one in which the self can potentially enter into a new relationship with itself. It is Maldiney’s thesis that in aesthetic perception this configuration of time can become conspicuous precisely in its relation to what the perceiver brings from his/her own sensibility, and can therefore mediate insights which move far beyond the phenomenal relationship of a subject and aesthetic object. Not only the sketched proximity of this argumentation to therapeutic conceptions is noticeable here, but also, and stemming from a vastly different provenance, the transference of ideas from cultural philosophy into the realm of experience. Most prominent is Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea, directed against the physiological grounding of perception, that the aesthetic perceiver does not empathize with an object based on the spatiality and temporality it suggests, but always surpasses it and thus intervenes, as it were, into the appearance, or more precisely it adapts the mediated aesthetic impression to fit its needs, it translates it into its rhythm.23 This creative aspect of appropriating a world returns in Maldiney’s thought, albeit in a counterpoint to time, under the conditions of which there can be no appearance of form that does not also dissolve in time. Giving this thought 22| In this respect, the numerous portrayals and interpretations of the rhythm debate around 1900 need to be elaborated on. Cf. Georg Vasold, “Anschauung versus Erlebnis. Der Rhythmus in der deutschsprachigen Kunstforschung um 1900,” in Rhythmus. Harmonie. Proportion: Zum Verhältnis von Architektur und Musik, ed. Siegrid Brandt and Andrea Gottdang (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012), 36-41; Helmut Günther, “Historische Grundlinien der deutschen Rhythmusbewegung,” in Grundlagen rhythmischer Erziehung, ed. Gertrud Bünner and Peter Röthig (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979), 33-69; Christian G. Allesch, Geschichte der psychologischen Ästhetik: Untersuchungen zur historischen Entwicklung eines psychologischen Verständnisses ästhetischer Phänomene (Göttingen: WUV, 1987); Christine Lubkoll, “Rhythmus. Zum Konnex von Lebensphilosophie und ästhetischer Moderne um 1900,” in Das Imaginäre des Fin de Siècle, ed. id. (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2002), 83-110; Norbert Schneider, Rhythmus: Untersuchungen zu einer zentralen Kategorie in der ästhetischen und kulturphilosophischen Debatte um die Jahrhundertwende (Osnabrück, 1992). 23| On rhythm as compensation for and coping with suffering see primarily The Birth of Tragedy, whereby Nietzsche always also points out how the individual becomes entangled in this compensatory drive; cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, in: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 1 (Munich: dtv, 1980), 9-156. See also Friederike Felicitas Günther, Rhythmus beim frühen Nietzsche (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008).

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a pointed emphasis, Alois Riegel described rhythm as the reciprocal conditionality between physiological laws and a respective intrinsic forming: each perception corresponds to a drive that abstractly pervades it, unconscious but aware of a purpose, and it is under this impression that the phenomenal world is correspondingly transformed based on specific aesthetic standards.24 Maldiney not only turns the cultural theoretical impetus of historical debates on rhythm into the realm of individual and depth psychology; he also proceeds from the assumption that where latent structures of meaning of existence become conspicuous in their formation process, then there the directions of the meaning can also be changed because they are understood in their temporality (genesis, resumption, etc.) as open, as enabling.25 To find one’s own rhythm does thus not mean integrating experiences into the stream of continuity of an identity, but rather to become aware and mindful of the—implicit to time—possibility of insight into and the receptiveness for the open.26 What initially sounds as if it is ontologically inspired, can also be turned towards sign theory: the open is the self-signifying, it is not yet a deciphered sign and thus evades the (always belated, always too late) symbolizing fixation of time into the time points of subject constitution and remembering in representations.27 It is an operativity of a receptiveness enabled through renouncing and letting go, one that is then not simply occupied by the renewal of intention, but shows itself in its transmutation and in this way pushes back the deterministic reflex to fill and explicate time.28 For Maldiney, this is what the aesthetic performs. 24| On the definition of Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, see August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft (Leipzig/ Berlin: Teubner, 1905), 3. Riegl himself shaped the concept of rhythm with his work: Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn im Zusammenhange mit der Gesamtentwicklung der bildenden Künste bei den Mittelmeervölkern (Wien: Österr. Archäologisches Institut, 1901). Whereas Riegl understands rhythm to be an agent for the higher development of humankind, taking up this line of thinking, Wilhelm Worringer subsequently emphasizes the instinctual in rhythm, which does not permit any completed perfection; cf. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung [1907] (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996). Maldiney assigns this dissolving element to time, thus formalizing Worringer’s organic model. For Maldiney’s often implicit references to Riegl, Schmarsow und Worringer, cf. Andrea Pinotti, “Style, Rythme, souffle. Maldiney et la Kunstwissenschaft,” in Parole tenue. Colloque du centenaire Maldiney à Lyon, ed. Jean-Pierre Charcosset and Jean-Philippe Pierron (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2014), 49-59. 25| Maldiney, Verstehen, 78-115. 26| Maldiney,“L‘art, l‘ éclair,” 20. On the open as the opposition to the determinisms of a (sequential) development, see also Gaston Bachelard, La Dialectique de la durée, 2 nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1993), 42. 27| Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen, 48 [see note 18]. Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology bound to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ intersects in this point with Maldiney’s appeal for an existential phenomenology as sketched above. 28| Presence, claims Derrida, is subject to a “transcendental voluntarism:” sense wants to constantly signify itself, its experience is thus accompanied by presence “wanting-to-say-itself,” through which the

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This transferring of phenomenal premises into the relationship of time and representation is undertaken under the constellative guidance of two different notions. Firstly, Maldiney sees the rhythmical as the dimension in which the artistic process of forming takes shape in the interplay between existence and production time; the artist is thus the preferred example for cultivating the creative potentials of the experience of time. Secondly, the rhythmical is the dimension of perception from the perspective of the recipient—with the implication, moving beyond classical phenomenology, that the perception of an aesthetic object potentially occurs in relation to the existence of the perceiver and out of this forms a complex configuration of time transcending the act of reception. Intrinsic to the latter is something that does not become absorbed into the motionless materiality, but—in a pointed varying of Fiedler’s idea for individual psychology—shows itself in the appearance—or more precisely in that which, triggered through something material in the work, meets the temporality of existence, and herein releases into the openness of a difference as its own intrinsic time. From those examples Maldiney calls on to underpin this emergence of presentness it is that of Cézanne which stands out. Paul Cézanne’s unstinting dedication to painting Montagne Sainte-Victoire is for him the very epitome of a creative process that brings forth its own time: it is not the linear time of (original) subject and variation (referring to it), but that of a constant transformation—and this itself as a state of permanent receptivity—which makes up the temporal dimension of the Sainte-Victoire paintings (and not the appearance of the same subject in a variety of angles).29 Rhythmically integrating the energies of perception, this holding-in-motion of the representation is a moment of reception analogical to every single one of the later Sainte-Victoire paintings: as can be shown through the paintings in Basel (1904) and Zurich (1904-06), the “modelé” of the color fields does not match the contours of the ‘objects;’ the respective boundaries to these fields crash into each other, and out of this discontinuity there arises a movement in the pictorial appearance within which the viewer can focus on both what is represented as well as the color: something appears simultaneously as distinct, without the one being merely a metaphor or analogy of the other.30 Out of the absence of a clarity of signlike, linguistically constituted always outweighs the physical, non-linguistic (such as the voice) and partially conceals it; cf. Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen, 49 [see notes 18 + 27]. Maldiney‘s rhythmical aesthetics can thus be read as taking into account and inspecting the hidden dimension of the sign. 29| Maldiney, L’art, l’éclair, 27. In his considerations on Cézanne, Maldiney draws however on the artist’s self-portrayal in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1926), into which Gasquet seems to have so interfered to such an extent that it is barely possible to still speak of it as stemming from Cézanne. 30| Gottfried Boehm, Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), 464: “The meaning exposition of the pictorial appearance is at once this and that, and both in one, and additionally a third, etc.” See also Lawrence Gowing, Cézanne: La logique des sensations organisées (Paris: Macula, 1992), 26.

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form there arises a temporality in which seeing proceeds successively, but remains constant in the ephemera that accrues to the discerning of form under the conditions of temporality. The pictorial appearance turns out to be stable because no stable form is to be seen: the pictorial elements perpetually actualize themselves in their discontinuity while the gaze is held fastened precisely through this continuous withdrawal of a clear seeing of form.31 In this way the picture possesses its own temporality, i.e. one that is stable in itself, a temporality that does not entail bringing ephemeral presentness to a standstill, but through movement enables something that does not coincide with the painting in a material sense.32 At no point is the picture an image of the SainteVictoire, but a form in which the many movements, in which the object withdraws, appears as a continuous process and from the standpoint of this temporalization not only points towards a reality of painting but also existence—and it is this movement that Maldiney calls rhythm.33 Such a reality is not structured into any of the pictures as a meaning; it is rather grounded in the temporality of the form process. Drawing on the dasein-analytical impetus sketched above, Maldiney attains his concept of rhythm by characterizing Cézanne’s tireless painting of Sainte-Victoire as an understanding that, the more it is distributed across time, the more it connects with the whole of existence, moves on with existence, and accordingly carries its own horizon of meaning along with it.34 The rhythms thus direct attention to the temporality spanned between self and external reference that every movement implies as soon as it has a time in itself and also takes place in a given time, and hence contracts something temporal and yet also itself dissolves in time in order to connect anew. In many respects this concept of rhythm corresponds to the original determination given in classical antiquity and which Emile Benveniste has discussed.35 The idea of the mobility of form is moreover related to the aforementioned thinking of Nietzsche and Riegl, precisely 31| Maliney, L’art, l’ éclair, 31. On Maldiney and Cézanne also see Claudia Blümle, “Rhythm and Chaos in Painting: Deleuze’s Formal Analysis, Art History, and Aesthetics after Henri Maldiney,” in Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen and Stephen Zepke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 69-90. 32| Cf. Boehm, Hermeneutik, 463. 3 3| Cf. Maliney, L’art, l’ éclair, 260. 3 4| In this way Maldiney extends the scope of the considerations on the rhythmical in Cézanne, other commentators having focused on the compositional. Kandinsky for example describes Cézanne’s painting as rhythmical: „Durch Cézanne und später Hodler zum neuen Leben erweckt, bekamen diese melodischen Kompositionen zu unserer Zeit die Bezeichnung der rhythmischen. Das war der Kern der Wiedergeburt der kompositionellen Ziele,“ Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912), 7th ed. (Bern: Benteli, 1963), 140. For Maldiney on the contrary, rhythm does not lie in the composition but is thought relationally. 35| Also drawing on the sources of linguistic history, Benveniste defines rhythm from the linguistic-historical sources as “the form at the moment in which it is assumed by that which is mobile, moving, fluid”

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in how the motionless picture—in Riegl the ornament—is considered a transitive form in time, one in which an expressive will manifests itself under the conditions of time. However, Maldiney thinks of the transitiveness of form not as an organic process of development stages, but as a self-altering of relations. This transformation proceeds in the rhythm of a contraction, with which a potentiality objectifies or ‘temporalizes’ itself, and a dissolution, with which this intrinsical once again steps out of the significance and trails off or re-connects (and thus overall, does not progress towards a goal as in Riegl). Precisely because this relation occurs in time it is not merely some unvarying principle of switching or alternating, but a dynamic process in which experiences can condense and change, and in which accordingly this change itself becomes conspicuous as a perception of time or temporality and subsequently, in the self-reflexive relation, can bear within itself the possibility of an inspiration or insight. This is then however an event and not the stage—semiotically localizable in the object—in a logically consequential trajectory towards a goal.

Applications II: the Presentness of Language in Rilke Maldiney’s considerations on rhythmical time in poetry and prose are far less extensive than those on pictorial art; nonetheless—and despite the often strongly ontologizing conclusions—they almost certainly possess a hitherto scarcely exploited potential for shedding light on questions of time and representation with respect to language. For the most part, Maldiney draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s late poetry from the period of the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies. Maldiney formulates a far-reaching thesis. According to him, poetical language, and in particular that of the late Rilke, transports an openness, wherein every expression objectified in words remains integrated in a processuality and transitionality of meaning.36 From the standpoint of the temporal dimension, Maldiney’s thesis is by no means a retrograde step behind the turn in Rilke studies, whereby the ontological thematic of the middle and later works has been relativized and the relationship to phenomenal perception emphasized.37 For what is of interest to Maldiney is not to trace and and distinguishes the concept from analogies of consistently regular movements, Cf. Emile Benveniste, Probleme der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, German trans. W. Bolle (Munich: List, 1974), 373. 36| Maldiney, “L‘art, l‘ éclair,” 20. 37| That Rilke’s poetics do not hold ready any existential philosophy messages detachable from the word structures and poetical content is universally accepted since the phenomenological turn in Rilke studies in the 1970s (cf. for example Käte Hamburger: “Die phänomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes,” in Rilke in neuer Sicht, ed. id. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971). The assumption that Rilke’s intuition, secured in the visual or phenomenological, implies a distance that in a time and existential philosophical hermeneutic, for instance in Heidegger’s references to Rilke, is undermined, is also correct. Nevertheless, it seems to be a desideratum not to investigate Rilke’s poetry from the standpoint of just a phenomenal movement, in

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reveal an artist’s aesthetics or poetics; rather, he focuses on the tensions emerging from the generation of meaning under the conditions of time, through which language—like the picture in Cézanne—accrues a dimension of appearing, and thus its own presentness. Although Maldiney has not presented a Rilke interpretation, his relevant considerations are revealing: striking is the closeness of Benveniste’s interpretation of rhythm, quoted by Maldiney, to the central concepts found in the late Rilke. 38 In Rilke’s late poetry presentness can be—despite all the tentativeness—emphasized as that which draws attention to the migration of meaning—how it is always ‘en route’ somewhere, its resistance towards logic and concepts, its insistence on agility and changing direction.39 Poetry is ever retrieving and thus decoding, but not along a linearly progressing direction from sign to meaning, but rather “vertically steep” and thus obliquely to life with its flat timeline: its temporality is not one that falls into decay.40 That which cannot fall out of presentness is what counts—the “inexhaustible things,” the “most ancient of things” in the simpleness of their appearing, not the intentionally sought after.41 The productive in art resides less in the transference into something inward, timeless than in the capacity to “summon up the rhythm through which Nature attempts to recapture for itself what has become estranged from it and to weave it into the soothing music of a new harmony.”42

which perception and word are mediated. For movement in Rilke see among others Jana Schuster, ‘Umkehr der Räume:’ Rilkes Poetik der Bewegung (Freiburg: Rombach, 2011), where though movement is hardly discussed temporally, and Peter Krumme, “Eines Augenblickes Zeichnung.” Zur Temporalität des Bewusstseins in Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 1988). Despite the occasionally ‘Heideggerizing’ impetus, Maldiney’s approach therefore faces the desideratum, and tries to illuminate movement not only as recoverable through language, but as the production of temporality and presentness in the sense sketched above. 38| Cf. on Benveniste and Rilke: Thomas Forrer, “Rhythmischer Transport. Zur Trope von Rhythmus (Rilke, Benjamin),” in rhythmos. Formen des Unbeständigen nach Hölderlin, ed. Jörn Ethold and Moritz Hannemann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 209-234. 39| “Comme toutes les choses sont en migration [...],” is how a paragraph begins in a letter by Rilke to Sophie Giauque dated November 26, 1922, which is extremely revealing in this context. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe, ed. Rilke-Archiv and Ruth Sieber-Rilke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt o.M.: Insel, 1987), 488f. 4 0| Rainer Maria Rilke, An die Musik, in Werke in drei Bänden, vol II (Frankfurt o.M.: Insel, 1991), 111. Here would be the place to draw on the Romantic determination of temporality and rhythm; cf. Boris Roman Gibhardt, Nachtseite des Sinnbilds: Die romantische Allegorie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), for rhythm see 67-95. 41| Letter by Rilke to Hertha Koenig, March 4, 1921, Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Hertha Koenig, 19141921, ed. Theo Neteler (Bielefeld, 2009,) 129. 42| Letter by Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, September 10, 1921, referring to the example of the art of the artist Adolph Wölfli, Briefwechsel Rilke Andreas-Salomé, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt o.M.: Insel, 1989),

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This poetic of receptivity is already inherent to the Sonnets: in the orphic, which in Rilke’s understanding describes at the same time the basic situation of the modern poet. For Orpheus is not a poet who remembers, seeking to return to the origins of language and nature, but rather a perceiver who sharpens his sensibility for the voices of his predecessors, which have entered into nature.43 A present so configured is that which has receded from the primal experience of the present, from the identity of selfhood and accordingly appears rather in depletion, in wasting away, in a withdrawal than allowing itself to be taken possession of. This fragile time poetic may also be understood as a kind of defection from the paradigms of invention and the artistic altogether, embarking instead on a search for alternative categories of the poetical beyond style, expression, and the postulations of the artist figure.44 In artistic terms, Rilke calls rhythm the “higher bound form,” which arises out of the “whole personality” of the artist while writing prose or poetry,45 in other words, that which cannot be fixed to points in time, but rather, from out of the movement of existence, enters into the significance of language and becomes expressive: it is more something that has become than something created. From amongst his contemporaries Rilke is by no means alone in pursuing this poetological aspiration; in the broader context of his criticism of the modern age, Hugo von Hofmannsthal comes up with a cluster of formulations like “not the current but the eternal,” “rhythmical return of the same,” “the animated— the held together.” These formulations are characterizations of a publicist project Hofmannsthal had wanted Rilke to contribute.46 Here presentness could be understood as the becoming-conspicuous of what was already always there in its relationship to the now.47 In contrast to remembering, which proceeds point by point and 431; cf. Rilke and Andreas-Salomé, A Love Story in Letters, trans. Edward A. Snow and Michael Winkler (New York, W.W. Norton, 2006), 322. 4 3| Annette Gerok-Reiter, Wink und Wandlung: Komposition und Poetik in Rilkes ‘Sonette an Orpheus’ (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 1996); Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and poetic tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 4| This refers in particular to the subjectivism of the aestheticizing currents of the fin-de-siècle. Cf. in the sense of a turn towards modernism Wolfgang Riedel, “Homo natura.” Literarische Anthropologie um 1900 (Berlin: C.H. Beck, 1996); and (with reference to Hofmannsthal and the poetics around 1900) Sabine Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder: Das andere Medium in der Literatur um 1900 (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 2006). See also Karen Leeder, and Robert Vilain, Nach Duino: Studien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes späten Gedichten (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2010). 4 5| Rainer Maria Rilke, Moderne Lyrik, in Rainer Maria Rilke: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rilke-Archiv and Erich Zinn, vol. 5 (Frankfurt o.M.: Insel, 1955-1966), 360-394. 4 6| From the literary remains, quoted from Hugo von Hofmannsthal—Rainer Maria Rilke: Briefwechsel 1899—1925, ed. Rudolf Hirsch and Ingeborg Schnack (Frankfurt o.M.: Wallstein, 1978), 29. 47| In this context Hofmannsthal’s interest in the Romantics, for example Novalis, is revealing. Cf. Cristina Fossaluzza, “Revolutionärer Konservativismus als Modell. Vom späten Friedrich Schlegel zum spä-

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combines, Rilke is interested in the “transmutation” of things and meanings; and it is to be apprehended precisely in rhythm and how its movement secures life, and thus addresses the present as the open, as the changeable.48 In the Sonnets it is the archetypical simple and self-metamorphosing that can be carried through times and spaces in complex ways by poetic language as a medium of reduction.49 Poetic language cannot rely on fixating, for this would obstruct the imagination;50 by trusting its own agility, it fulfills its own purpose—to keep things in motion and to metamorphose the visible into the invisible, thus “transfiguring” it, as Rilke put it in a late letter, into a state of transpassibility.51 Maldiney’s considerations on rhythms entail a realm of understanding that refuses to yield and conform to a conceptual determination because it brings into play a notion of form as a crossover organization of contrary qualities of time. There is reason—and this was the purpose of these examples—to suspect that this temporal dimension leaves a deep impression on aesthetic experiencing and that it is transported not in the sign-bound mediation of meanings in the sense of classical hermeneutics, but rather via the text- or picture-immanent condensing and dissolving of temporal moments of tension. For the analysis of rhythms it is necessary to be astutely attentive to what only reveals itself in the movement of a dissolution.52 Where rhythms are at work, then contrary movements may be determined to and by one another so that they never come to a nameable end53 —and therefore precisely generate something that is to be taken seriously as a category of aesthetic presentness. |

ten Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” in Romantik erkennen—Modelle finden, ed. Stefan Matuschek and Sandra Kerschbaumer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018), 87–105. For a description of rhythmic presentness in the Romantics, see: Gibhardt, Nachtseite des Sinnbilds 67-95 and for temporality of Novalis: id., 15-19. 4 8| Cf. Rilke’s letter to Sophie Giauque dated November 26, 1925: “[...] nous voilà chargés de la transmutation, de la resurrection, de la transfiguration de toutes choses.” Rilke, Briefe, 488f. 4 9| Cf. Christoph König and Kai Bremer, ed., Rilkes ‘Sonette an Orpheus:’ Lektüren (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2016); see also footnote 43. 5 0| With reference to the poem “Transience,” language can be understood as “persistent, quiet dissolution even of a building blessed in fortune.” Rilke, “Vergänglichkeit” [1924], in Selected Poems. With Parallel German Text, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland (Oxford: the Oxford University Press, 2011), 251. 51| Rilke, Briefe, 148. On the “intime[n] und dauernde[n] Umwandlung des Sichtbaren in Unsichtbares, vom sichtbar- und greifbarsein nicht länger Abhängiges” cf. Rilke’s letter to Withold Hulewicz, undated [1925], in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot, 1921—1926, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel, 1935), 335. 52| Jacques Lacan, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 232. 5 3| Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981), 18.

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Temporal Concepts of the Present and their Aesthetic Negotiation in Black Arts Movement and ‘Black Atlantic’ “SAMO© AS AN END TO PLAYING ART. SAMO© FOR THE SO CALLED AVANTGARDE. SAMO© FOR THOSE OF US WHO MERELY TOLERATE CIVILIZATION. SAMO© AS A NEO ART FORM. SAMO© AS AN END TO MINDWASH RELIGION, NOWHERE POLITICS, AND BOGUS PHILOSOPHY.”1

The former underground musician and graffiti artist “SAMO” quickly becomes, as the visual artist and performer Jean-Michel Basquiat, the star of the New York art scene in the 1980s (fig. 1a–c). Due to his (omni-)presence in the urban public sphere and the media of the American art metropolis, and featuring in renowned international exhibitions, art critics and historians alike respond by elevating him to the rank of a “contemporary artist.”2 With relevant art institutions paying ever closer attention and distinguished New York galleries and museums for contemporary art now purchasing his works, Basquiat’s conceptual œuvre, spanning different genres 1| A few examples of the graffiti tagged by SAMO© (Jean-Michel Basquiat & El-Diaz) since the end of the 1970s at prominent places in New York (Brooklyn Bridge, TriBeCa, SoHo etc.); quoted from Village Voice, December 11 (1978); emphasis A.S. They highlight the significance of temporality—in the sense of an “end” or a “renewal”—but also the temporal location of art and cultural phenomena in Basquiat‘s early artistic statements. 2| Along with the daily and specialist press, see above all 1983 Biennial Exhibition, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, Mar 15–29, 1983, ed. John G. Hanhardt, Barbara Haskell et al. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983).

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and media, gains an international presence that continues until today. This is largely due to the complex, transculturally oriented visual language, invoking both the time concepts of the Black Arts Movements as well as the spatial-temporal dimensions of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (fig. 2a–c).3

The “Con-temporary” as Inclusion? Assigned the predicate “contemporary artist,” however, an individual African American is probably also declared a representative of “American art” for the first time. In line with this starting thesis, two previously separated fields and histories of art—the “Black” or “African American art,”4 and on the other hand the institutionally supported 3| See Angela Stercken, “[Arte]Fact, Object, Image: Jean-Michel Basquiat's Archives of the Black Atlantic,” in Art History and Fetishism Abroad: Global Shiftings in Media and Methods, ed. Gabriele Genge and id. (Bielefeld: Transcript (Image 54), 2014), 129–158. 4| The term “African American” is used here and in the following in a twofold way: firstly, to designate and discuss a seemingly closed field of art in the U.S. that down to the present day remains cut off from American art, a field whose definition is based on identitarian constructions and which are put up for debate here; secondly, a historical combination of notions introduced in the 1980s that, starting from art history and criticism (and in distinction to previous race- or color-related uses), was to document a seemingly more “neutral,” linguistic usage for the art and artists of “African descent.” Here, too, the designations partially still in use today (which above all in Germany and France are still erroneously translated with the (historical) term “Afro-American” (of the 1960s/70s)) serve to characterize a field of seemingly closed artistic

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U.S. (high) art—become closely interwoven in the reception of an artistic agent. This convergence is equally significant for the temporal localization of African American art as it is for the canonized temporalization and periodization strategies of western art history in total.5 Indeed, the contemporariness that is attributed to the diasporic artist Basquiat, already seems to have been taken up in (globally networked) contemporary art in the 1980s, which corresponds to an act of determined positioning against modernism. The closed Western concept of temporality, including the “most recent modernity” in the U.S., is thus already being broken up and counteracted. Although Basquiat is not under consideration, Terry Smith recognizes the shy beginnings of this fundamental change in the concepts of time and art since 1980s: “Contemporary art is a culture that matters—to itself, as its own subculture, to the local cultural formations in which it is embedded, to the complex exchanges between proximate cultures, and as a trendsetting force within international high culture. Its globalizing character is essential to it, but it also mobilizes nationalities, and even localisms, in quite specific and complex ways.”6 production existing apart from “American Art” in which “descent” or “ancestry” remain determining and still criticized criteria. See among others Lisa E. Farrington, African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxii–xxv, xxivf.; Gill Saunders and Zoe Whitley, In Black and White: Prints from Africa and the Diaspora (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2013). 5| Attaching temporal ascriptions of this kind to questions of art historical canonization (above all with a view to African American art) has hardly been considered until recently. In particular in the case of Basquiat, they appear to be overlaid with other aspects (marketing, etc.), as documented in the following anthology and essay: Jordana Moore Saggese, “Jean-Michel Basquiat and the American Art Canon,” in Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World, ed. Ruth E. Iskin (London/ New York: Routledge, 2017), 59–73. 6| Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 242. In contrast, Peter Osborne develops different concept of contemporary art: Now liberated from the criteria of

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Even though still far removed from Okwui Enwezor’s definition of contemporary art today—which he conceived as a “postcolonial constellation” due to its “complex geopolitical configuration” and emerging “as a consequence of globalization after imperialism”7 —the aspect of a process of cultural exchange in Smith’s concept of contemporary art already presages a spatial-temporal process of expansion for African American art and its early global interrelations. With his contextualization in the New York, national American and international contemporary art of the 1980s, Basquiat is simultaneously extricated from those segregated spaces and relationships which the dominating American art history had hitherto marked out for African American art. Since the Great Migration, and in particular the the cross-cultural, crossartistic and cross-media Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement, artistic production, despite its earlier periodization approaches and measured by a de-bordering of the arts, media and national social spaces of art, he dates her in the sense of a “space-time of the contemporary” as transnational “post-conceptual art” in the 1990s/2000s. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, New York: Verso, 2013), 16f. Cf. Antonio Negri, “Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, and Terry Smith (Durham NC a.o.: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 23–29, 24f. 7| Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent 2a-c

Transition,” in id., Condee, Smith, 207–36, 208.

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ghettoization, had become a visible part of cultural life in the art metropolises of the north. Thereby, race and origin-based term specifications for the art of the others (“Negro art,” “black art,” “Afro American art” or “African-American art”) always document the disciplinary exclusion from a general “American” history of art. Whereas these designations sometimes enable the respective artists and groups to position themselves socio-politically and art-politically or indeed to intentionally demarcate a realm for their own art production, the ‘official’ disciplinary segregations are primarily based on both periodizing and hierarchizing temporal concepts, which can only briefly considered here. The significance of art history’s positioning of Jean-Michel Basquiat (through a “white” and Western-dominated art system since the 1980s) and as a representative of “American” and “contemporary art”—which as we meanwhile know itself evolves into the bearer and showpiece of a foreign cultural policy pursuing national interests and embroiled in secret service activities after 19458 —becomes particularly clear when we look back at the history of the term in the United States since the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s/70s.

Contemporariness and Absence of Black Art Already in the introduction to her book Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, Susan Cahan notes: “The institutions that make up the art establishment determine what constitutes high art through a process of selective acquisition and display. Until the late 20th century, African Americans were virtually absent from this circuit as cultural producers and cultural consumers.”9 Her study accordingly focuses on those art institutions and interfaces between art history and the public which set out the fundamental specialist standards and structural conditions for perceiving and positioning art, including African American art. Condemned by the artists themselves, the invisibility (in both society and the cultural sector) reveals itself here to be the result of gaps in specialist personnel and blatant desiderate in canonical (Western/American) art history, which, despite wavelike rising interest in African American art, remain discernible in museums and exhibitions into the second half of the 20th century.10 Prior to 1967, Cahan has identified a mere 8| See also David Craven, “Art History and the Challenge of Post-Colonial Modernism,” Third Text 16, Issue 3 (Summer 2002): 309–16, reprint in Art history as social praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven, ed. Brian Winkenweder (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 448, 488f.; Francis Frascina, “Institutions, Culture, and America's ‘Cold War Years:’ The Making of Greenberg's ‘Modernist Painting,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 71–97, 76ff. 9| Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (New York: Duke University Press, Art History Publication Initiative, 2016), I; emphasis A.S. 10| Cahan, Mounting Frustration, 110ff.

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twelve exhibitions in prominent U.S. museums featuring African American artists; however, the added identitarian specifications or terms looking to indicate race and descent (such as “negro,” “African American,” “black”) in the titles of the exhibitions document the institutionalized cultural segregation and the structural absence of cultural actors and an audience.11 Two of the shows— “Contemporary Negro Art” in the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939 (fig. 3a–b) and “The Negro Artist comes of Age” in Brooklyn Museum in 1945,12 which primarily featured works by the main proponents of the Harlem Renaissance and modern African American art—are particularly notable for our considerations due to the temporal specifications of their titles. The qualifying attributes (“contemporary” and “comes of Age”) place the so-called “Negro art” in new and differentiated temporal relations. They are not only conceptually determined, but also through the spatial and contentual context of the museum. Shifts in the older concepts of time and periodization thus already seem presaged in the institutionalized exhibitions of the 1930s/40s, and these are not 11| Cahan, Mounting Frustration, I. 12| With a different setting of priorities, the exhibitions essentially focus on the painting and graphic arts of the Harlem Renaissance (Jacob Lawrence, Ronald Moody, Archibald Motley, James Lesesne Wells, Hale Woodruff); the brochure accompanying the Baltimore exhibition includes a statement by the theorist of the New Negro Movement, Alain Locke, who already in his programmatic “The New Negro” (Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (March 1925): 3–16) from 1925 had derived the new significance in the present from a socio-political and cultural “earlier” and it opened it towards a vision of the future.

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only relevant for the perception of African American art in toto but also for the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s/70s. In the case of the Baltimore show—which takes place just a few years after the “First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” held in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1932—it is the convergence of the segregated spatial-temporal sphere of the terms “negro,” used to designate the other, with that of “art” (generally secured through embedment in cultural history) that indicates a discernible transgression of seemingly entrenched time thresholds. Hitherto usually separated, the spatial and temporal horizon—for the continent of Africa, without either history or culture, as well as for its diaspora—is now, in the spatial context of an American art museum, brought closer to the understanding of time and (high) art through which America’s own national, Western history and art are determined, as are its institutions and collection and exhibition conceptions. Despite the relativized concessions of contemporariness qua “negro art,” it seems that an understanding of the contemporaneity of contemporary art is only haltingly—and moreover in a perhaps completely unexpected field of art (that of the others)—crystallizing. A shared present of African American art and American art (here evoked through the museum context) is already appearing, even if the groundbreaking shifts in the notions of time and art concerning the African diaspora first become concretely tangible in the 1960s—and contrary to earlier opinions—outside the reaches of Western art history, namely in the transatlantic perspective.13 Another aspect demands brief consideration here: the New York’s exhibition use of “age” in its title, obviously borrowing from Alain Locke’s The New Negro,14 introduces a topos into American art history and criticism of African American art that will reverberate for half century through to the reception of Basquiat in the 1990s.15 In contrast to Locke, as the image of a development from a purported childlike (infantile, folkloristic, simpleton, etc.) “negro art” to—as it were—a “grownup” (museum) art of the present, an anthropological-evolutionary time 13| Exemplary for the hitherto concrete dating of the periods of upheaval in question, which are mostly aligned to global social, economic, and foreign policy turning-points, are the considerations of Suhail Malik, “When is Contemporary Art?” in Former West: Art and the contemporary after 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (Utrecht/ Cambridge, MA: BAK/ The MIT Press, 2016), 127–137, 128f. 14| Locke concludes his text “The New Negro” with the following prospect: “And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.” Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (March 1925): 3–16, 16. 15| For the later framing of Basquiat as a “child artist” or “radiant child,” see Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child,” Artforum 20, no. 4 (1981): 37–43; Jordana Moore Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), ch. 1 “The Black Picasso.”

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dimension is evoked that once again however sets apart the art of the others into a specific temporal nexus. This degrading to an American ‘special case,’ which Cahan traces for the reception of African American art in U.S. cultural institutions and exhibitions, leads however to a further phenomenon of ambivalent contemporariness that now directly touches on the canonical temporalization and periodization categories of the 1960s/70s which are our main concern here: Cahan attests the period from 1969 to 1973, the pinnacle of the Black Arts Movement, an overall inflationary exhibition presence for active African American artists—a presence that now even extends to large survey exhibitions on contemporary art in the first New York museums,16 whereby the separating identitarian characterizations are kept in the exhibition titles and the ongoing isolation from national “high art” and modernity maintained. The prominent art museums are ultimately merely responding to the irreversible changes taking place in the political and cultural climate of the United States, in particular those cultural activities of the Black Power and Black Arts Movement operating within the broader context of the civil rights movement. No longer able to be ignored, the demands for visibility, relevance, and (cultural) self-determination, but also the nationwide protests and founding of their own internationallynetworked cultural institutions, artist groups, exhibition, and cultural centres and galleries in the 1960s/70s, express the “critical understanding of culture’s important role in the production of society’s structures of domination” and how “museums were instruments of power no less than political and economic institutions.”17 16| Cahan, Mounting Frustration, 110ff. 17| Mary Ellen Lennon, “A Question of Relevancy: New York Museums and the Black Arts Movement, 196–1971,” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa G. Collins and Margo N. Crawford (New

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In the large museum exhibitions in this period devoted to proponents of the Black Arts Movement, once again changed—specifically structurally conditioned— relativizations of the status African American and black art emerge in the label of “contemporary art.”18 These relativizations are here obviously directly related to what Cahan has identified as the arbitrary and unrepresentative selection and arrangement of the artists and exhibits by the curators, the unwillingness to involve the respective actors themselves, and above all the fundamental lack of adequate art historical discussion and contextualization of African American art by the national museums.19 Just how lasting these gaps and the related subtle strategies of exclusion and temporalization in fact have an impact is underlined by those museum exhibitions of the 1960s and 1970s in which the interpretative sovereignty (over the art of the others, here the African American artists in their own country) is articulated directly—and provokes forthright responses, the artists, now organized, withdrawing their cooperation, staging fierce protests, and holding their own counter exhibitions (fig. 4a).20 With the temporal designations announced in the exhibitions “Thirty Contemporary Black Artists” in the San Francisco Museum of Art (1969) and “Contemporary Black Artists in America” in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 (fig. 4b), both of which have been the subject of detailed studies in recent years, the segregation strategies for black art appear to have now completely shifted to art historical terrain. The introduction to the exhibition catalogue of 1971 by the heavily criticized curator, Richard M. Doty, who realizes the exhibition—contrary to the proBrunswick/ NJ, London: Rudgers University Press, 2006), 92–116, 93f. Lennon refers here to the influential and momentous study of the “art establishment” of the United States by the poet and painter Edward Spriggs from 1969. 18| Only recently have museums paid closer attention to the excluding strategies, i.e. beyond single exhibitions, since the 1990s. This has resulted in fundamental revisions to display practices, to the discussion and contextualization of relevant pieces of the collections and publications in the U.S. (e.g. Brooklyn Museum, NYC); in part however, the desiderate are still under discussion, see for example Charlotte Barat and Darby English, ed., Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019). 19| Cahan, Mounting Frustration, 111. Even the more recent changes (from personnel/curatorial support to exhibition strategies) that have been implemented in several national art museums in recent years have essentially done little to address systemic problems. 20| Exemplary for the recent detailed studies into the exhibition activities in the large New York museums are “The 1930’s: Painting and Sculpture in America” show (1968) and the subsequent exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art “Contemporary Black Artists in America”: an intervention and a catalogue of demands by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) presented to the museum was the consequence and eventually led in 1971 to the withdrawal of 28 exhibition artists and an organizing of the counter exhibition, “Black Artists in Rebuttal,” held in the Acts of Art Gallery in New York City. See Cahan, Mounting Frustration, 109ff.; Howard Singerman and Sarah Watson, Acts of art and rebuttal in 1971 (New York: The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, 2018), 3ff.

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claimed aim of drawing on “the advice of Negro art experts ‘wherever feasible’”21 — without the curatorial involvement of the respective artists and groups, reveals the problems hindering acceptance and interpretation, articulated here above all in the contextualization and temporalization.22 In his brief outline of “negro” to contemporary “black art,” Doty invokes relevant historical (New Negro Movement) and current positions from the Black Arts Movement; however, he construes the contemporaneity in his ‘evolutionary’ presentation of a “disparate” black art characterized by “diversity” only from the continuity of the artistic activities in terms of their relationship and relevance to history and society. Essentially, in this way, what is being put up for debate is the presence of a movement driven by a realism, itself perceived as oscillating between didacticizing and a combative spirit ready for struggle, and an aesthetic assimilation, a presence beyond American art. Thus, the exhibited works are, as it were, grasped in terms of their “degrees” of contemporaneity and art itself is mostly placed in the contexts of “ancestral art,” whereby the African traditions of representation and techniques are posited as a gauge, as is the orientation on “folklore, religious and political stories and myths, animal and other symbols, illustrations of the people, and the vivid colors and rhythmic forms of tribal artifacts.”23 In contrast, the positions of individual artists are more strongly 21| Alone this formulation in the official announcement of the exhibition (New York Times (October 2, 1969) provoked fierce opposition amongst the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) during the preparatory negotiations with the Whitney Museum. See Howard Singerman, “Rebuttal and Representation,” in Acts of art and rebuttal in 1971, ed. id. and Sarah Watson (New York: The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, 2018), 11. 22| Opinions are divided when assessing the reasons for the rejection of the exhibition and the subsequent protest under the leadership of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC). In contrast to the majority of authors, Darby English underlines the engagement shown by the Whitney curator Doty and “the actually progressive character” of the exhibition, as well as “the intellectual project he made of his assignment.” He obviously fails to see however the cultural-political status of the show, nor the interpretive hegemony exercised over black art by a national museum, which is based on a subtle strategy of temporal localization. Cf. Darby English, A year in the life of color (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), chap. 2, especially 128f. 23| Robert M. Doty, Contemporary Black Artists in America, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, April 6–May 16, 1971 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971), 7. It is of particular interest that in his historical localizing Doty takes up the position of Richard Wright, drawing on the latter’s older publication (Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices (New York, The Viking Press, 1941), 13: “We smelted iron, danced, made music, and recited folk poems; we sculptured, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth; we invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery; we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite; we had our own literature, our own system of law, religion, medicine, science, and education; we painted in color upon rocks; we raised cattle, sheep, and goats; we planted and harvested grain—in short, centuries before the Romans ruled, we lived as men.”

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tied to “contemporary aesthetics,” where, for example, they merely call up processes of “assimilation of the arts of Africa and America” with painterly abstractions (color field, pattern) and material extensions of the image—or where, according to Raymond Saunders‘ understanding of a “human spiritual and intellectual experience” beyond identitary ties, as called for here— they are negotiated as an aesthetic common good, as it were, and thus removed from the context of the Black Arts Movement.24 Imposed definitions and ambivalent temporal ascriptions assigned to black art continue to exert considerable influence in the United States beyond the 1960s/70s—while in West Africa and the transatlantic region a very different concept of contemporary art becomes established. From the basis of decolonization and newly gained independence, at the First World Festival of Negro Art, held in Senegal in 1966, a new understanding takes shape:25 with the Festival empha24| Doty, Contemporary Black Artists in America, 7–13. 25| Younger publications on the First World Festival of Negro Art have partly missed the firm orientation on contemporary art in the Palais de Justice exhibition of the Festival of 1966. See David Murphy, ed., The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (Postcolonialism across the disciplines 20), 2016). But from the very beginning of preparations, the show—which was titled “modern art” only at the building—is in fact administered as “Exposition d’art

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sizing performance, the African and diasporic contemporary art of the 1960s is separated both spatially and thematically from colonial-connoted European modernism and shown in Dakar‘s Palais de Justice, its opening attended by prominent guests, underlining the political relevance of the respective decision (fig. 5).26 “The contemporary art exhibition ‘Trends and Contrasts’ (Tendences et confrontations) is intended to exemplify the unity and great originality of the present-day Negro world through its most representative works of art.”27 In the sense of Senghor’s universalistic art and culture concept of Négritude (repeatedly criticized, including from the diasporic side), contemporary art is thus synchronized with the art of the African diaspora28 —even with the „black art“ from the United States, which is also on display at the Festival, albeit in a reduced scope. Senghor’s understanding is essentially based on the notion of the image already formulated in 1956 in Esthétique négro-africaine, which he then discusses again in relation to the work of Pierre Soulages, describing it as “l’art contemporain.”29 contemporain” (under the title “Tendances et confrontations”) and a respective commission under the direction of the Senegalese contemporary artist Iba N’Diaye was formed. Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres, FESMAN, 025–037: 1964–1966, Archive National Senegal, Dakar (in the following, ANS). The significance of the exhibition as a decidedly presentation of contemporary art has only recently been the subject of research, especially on the festival’s transnational and pan-african art politics and it’s presentation strategies and display, as particularly the contributions to World Art 9, 1 (2019) show: Lindsay J. Twa, “Revealing the ‘Trends and Confrontations’ of Contemporary African-American Art through the First World Festival,” 5–26; Joseph L. Underwood, “Tendances et Confrontations: An Experimental Space for Defining Art from Africa,” 43–65, esp. 44f. 26| A photograph of the opening shows the prominent figures gathered in front of a painting by Iba N'Diaye, a member of the Commission des Arts Contemporains du Festival. Besides Senghor and his wife, the guests include André Malraux, Pierre Lods, and the Secretaire Général de la Présidence de la République du Sénégal, M. Abdou Diouf. M. Souleymane Sidibé, ed., Premier Festival des Arts Nègres (Paris: BoucherLakara, 1967), 68. 27| Le commissariat national du Festival, ed., Premier festival mondial des arts nègres. Dakar 1/24 avril 1966 (Dakar, 1966), 119. 28| The differentiated time connotations of the individual exhibition locations and the contents become particularly clear when compared: Thus, the “Exposition d'art nègre” is presented in the specially built Musée Dynamique in close proximity to European modernism, while historically oriented single works are exhibited in the framework of the “Spectacle féerique” on the island of La Gorée. See Ben Enwonwu, “The African View of Art and some Problems facing the African Artist Today,” in Le commissariat national du Festival, 56ff; cf. Sidibé, Premier Festival, 54ff. My forthcoming book will deal in detail with the relevance of exhibition policy of the 1960s–70s and the simultanious negotiation of African and diasporic artistic positions in West Africa for the temporalization and periodization strategies of African American Art. 29| Lépold Sédar Senghor, “Esthétique négro-africaine,” in Diogène (Revue internationale des sciences humaines) 16 (1956): 43–62; id., Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); id., “Pierre Soulages,”

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American participation in the “Exposition des Arts Contemporains” in Dakar again reveals the cultural-political motivated selection processes which had already determined the showing of contemporary African American art in the aforementioned museum exhibitions. While the American Festival commission tailored the artists and works collated for the contemporary art exhibition to fit a moderate, depoliticized image of black art30 —which once again provoked the withdrawal of the most relevant artists, groups and commission members from amongst the Black Arts Movement (and is seen as a “boycott”31)—in contrast, solely the intention to hold an exhibition of contemporary (black) art in Dakar must be considered a pivotal break in the understanding of contemporariness and contemporary art. In the 1960s, contemporaneity is thus understood as a basic identifying characteristic of an art that, due to well-known historical reasons, is dispersed across the globe and, thanks to the performative emphasis at the festivals of the 1960/70s, transnationally networked; moreover, this art clearly aligns itself against Western art criticism and art history, its institutions and debates, although for political reasons dialogue is always sought and kept open. This also relativizes those current-day considerations, informed by the philosophies of time and art, on contemporariness and contemporary art which define global (exhibition) presence and networking as decisive criteria. For after all, despite occasionally positing a referential space enlarged by the global and transnational, they ultimately regress to Western-centered models of history and thought, and pass over other time concepts and aesthetic conceptions while concomitantly disregarding relevant historical artistic positons and contexts of presentation.32 in id., Liberté I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 232–236, 232. See also Gabriele Genge’s essay in this volume. 30| Current research highlights the cultural and foreign policy decisions of the American Commission, which acted on directives from the U.S. State Department and the CIA. See: David Murphy, “Introduction. The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Arts,” in id., ed., The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966, 1–52, 29–31; Hoyt Fuller, Journey to Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1971), and Hugh Wilford, “The American Society of African Culture: The CIA and Transnational Networks of African Diaspora Intellectuals in the Cold War,” in Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks, ed. Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin, and Giles Scott-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 23–34. 31| FESMAN 037: Participation américaine convenue entre les comités américains et sénégalais du Festival Mondial des Arts Negres; correspondance generale (1964–1966) et demande de participation de certains particuliers adressés au President du Festival. 1964–1966, ANS. 32| Peter Osborne’s book Anywhere or Not at All, which is highly relevant in this respect, is to be mentioned here as an example, despite the fundamental significance that transnational de-bordering processes (in art, media, and the social spaces of art) have for his definition of the contemporaneity of contemporary art (15), for these are ultimately derived from a relativizing but exclusive negotiation of Western concepts of time, history and theory (15ff.). Due to the lack of an extended temporal and geographical focus, he

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In contrast, the concession of contemporariness—understood here in the sense of a “shared time and contemporaneity”33 that is articulated in art as a common and collective experience—is subjected in the United States of the 1960s/70s to clearly exclusivist hierarchizing ideas and models of otherness spanning time, culture, and art. They are also documented in those contexts postulating enlarged spatial and temporal conceptions and open to a multidisciplinary approach, wherein conceptualizations of “centrism” are applied,34 but also in the ongoing employment of compounds (like “African-American,” “Indian-American,” and so on), which signify only a “partial” national belongingness, shared history, and thus merely only a ‘conditional’ contemporariness. This relativization of contemporariness in the United States is directly connected to the general marginalization of African art and culture from a Western viewpoint. Moreover, it seems to be closely tied to the lack of visibility of artists of “African descent,” connoted with otherness and, as it were, “blackened out” textually and pictorially, an absence already signified in the aforementioned early exhibitions of contemporary “Negro art” in the United States. There contemporaneity acts as a marker for cultural and temporal exclusion, for strategies of de-temporalizaton and periodization in canonized art history and criticism. The verdict of the “uncivilized” and “ahistorical” black continent that has fallen out of history and time, as prominently proclaimed with long-term repercussions in Hegelian philosophy in the age of colonialism,35 and the temporal separation of its cultural productions from (Western) historiography and art history,36 which have a recognizable effect here, finally reach the cultural sciences in the observation of both allochronic and anachronic concepts of temporality. Yet they ultimately also lead to theories of multiple/other modernities spanning art and culture and including the African-American diaspora. However, the tableau of temporal allocations sketched only briefly here—in the context, on the one hand, of a Black Arts Movement in the U.S. struggling for civil rights, visibility, cultural recognition and contemporaneity, and on the other, an independent West Africa recently liberated from French colonial rule in which a exemplifies his thesis of a global contemporaneity of contemporary art derived from the observation of a globalized and networked presence of artists and exhibitions since the late 1990s exclusively by using the example at the Atlas Group (i.e. the Lebanese artist Walid Raad). 3 3| Susanne Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2013), 9ff. 3 4| For the debate on allochrony, anachrony, and chronocentrism, see Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie 1870–1960 (Munich: Fink, 2005). 35| See Frantz Fanon, “Racisme et culture,” Présence Africaine 3, VIII-IX-X (1956): 122–31, 122. Exemplary for how entrenched and longstanding such historical exclusions are and the perspective of African and diasporic contemporary art, see: Maguéye Kassé, “De l'Afrique et de la métaphore du miroir,” in Dak'Art 2008: Afrique: Miroir? ed. Ousseynou Wade (Dakar: Dak'Art, 2008), 18–28, 21,27. 36| For more on this see the essay by Gabriele Genge in this volume and my forthcoming book on aesthetic perception and artistic concepts of temporality in the ‘Black Atlantic.’

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markedly African and diasporic notion of contemporariness and contemporary art emerges—can be sharpened once again. When the debates around polychronic concepts within and outside Africa and in the transatlantic space by those actually involved since the 1960s are included, the partly absurd perspectives and attributions of contemporaneity as well as the (nationally) politically conditioned relativity of the per se relativizing concepts of temporality and periodization can be recognized.37 But these connections between and debates about the contemporaneity of African and diasporic contemporary art and the concomitant transnational synchronization and inclusion processes since the 1960s come to a grinding halt at the gates of Europe and North America, not to mention the disciplinary barriers of dominant periodization schemes for the art of the others. In this way, both the experts and the art public generally fail to notice that the artists and groups now mostly subsumed under the term “black art” meanwhile are positioning themselves aesthetically in a changed way, and that all those aspects of presentness and contemporariness that later go on to become key criteria for retrospective definitions and dating of contemporary art are already taking effect.

Presence and Contemporariness in the Black Arts Movement Mostly outside the field occupied by the large museums and art institutions for “contemporary art,” a new contemporary black aesthetic emerges in the United States in the 1960s/70s. It draws its creative energy from the transatlantic positions of the time and the North American traditions of African American art—and in the process it also considers conceptions of “official” American contemporary art. The diversity of the aesthetic and artistic positions in the Black Arts Movement is documented in a number of artists and groups, for instance the Spiral Group,38 the “Where We At” Black Women Artists, Weusi, the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC),39 or the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), and many others, but also in their animated presence in mostly newly founding galleries, exhibition spaces and studios.

37| Only a brief reference should be made here to the debates in conjunction with international congresses and festivals, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent publications, which will be the subject of separate book publications (see Genge and Stercken, both fortcoming). 38| Founded on July 5, 1963, founding members: Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. Cf. Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective, exh. cat. The Studio Museum in Harlem, ed. Abbe Schriber and Lauren Haynes (New York: Cosmos Communications, 2011). 39| Founded in Southside Chicago, May 1967 by a group of intellectuals lead by Hoyt W. Fuller (editor of the Negro Digest), the poet Conrad Kent Rivers, and Gerald McWorter (later Abdul Alkalimat).

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Embedment in the civil rights movement and the political aspirations driving the Black Arts Movement means that, operating in the framework of cultural and art-political activities, the artists directly or indirectly attune to the political demands for the still denied civil rights and negotiate these issues in their works. In particular the subjectivization of black history and culture in Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological approach,40 unfurls a powerful impact for the Black Arts Movement, its demands for presence and visibility of the own culture, history and contemporary art as well as the opening into a future.41 Probably the most crucial consequence of the artistic engagement with the socio-political situation of the 1960s—open racism and segregation, opposition to invisibility, and the struggle for civil rights in the West and East of the United States—leads however straight into the aesthetic debates of the Black Arts Movement. On the one hand, classical visual media are to be named, which draw 4 0| Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil (Collection: La condition humaine), 1952). 41| “Rather than trying to recapture the ‘true’ Fanon, we must try to engage the after-life of Frantz Fanon— that which Jacques Derrida would call, following his recent essay on Marx, his ‘spectral effect’ (…) in ways that do not simply restore the past in a cycle of the eternal return, but which will bring the enigma of Fanon, as Benjamin said of history, flashing up before us at a moment of danger. ‘The colonial man who writes for his people’—that is, of course, colonial man and woman, an elision in Fanon which is as characteristic as it is un-timely—‘ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future,’ Fanon observed; ‘an invitation to an action and a basis of hope.’” Stuart Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: London Institute of Contemporary Arts/ Seattle WA: Bay Press, 1996), 12–37, 14.

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new aesthetic possibilities from their contextualization and accessibility in public space: Often they become visible for the first time in urban space and are networked and distributed far beyond its boundaries in the medium of photography. But, and this already indicates the transgressions of narrow genre and media boundaries associated with their placement and distribution, images also become embedded in comprehensive conceptual performative contexts (emphasizing body presence) and thus enable the addressing of a (changed/expanded) audi-ence. On the other hand, reference should at least be made to those aesthetic positions, especially in image theory and painting, in which media transgressions and a merging of colour theory and abstract pictorial language with performative approaches become also apparent. However, in addition to phenomena of surface and materiality, here painting’s own standards—the picture body [Bildkörper] and colour, which, along with “black” as its form of absence, can also refer to the “colours of Africa” and the spectral colours—are primarily under negotiation. Both of these contexts are underpinned by an aesthetic markedly characterized as “black” that is going far beyond the primarily considered political and art-political dimensions of the BAM. Here visibility and presence themselve become decisive aesthetic factors and bring forth a new visual repertoire: “black is a color,” “black is beautiful...” What becomes manifest in both realms is the presence of artistic work in its diasporic engagement with the idea of “Africa” and its global meanings. Until the end of the 20th century, both contexts remain relevant for African American art as well as the art historical determinations of what constitutes contemporary art. In this contribution, attention will only be paid exemplarily to those artistic negotiations of temporality that are emerging in the above-mentioned first group of space-related traditional visual media and their performative extensions in the Black Arts Movement.42 The starting point will be the Chicago Wa l l o f Resp e c t (fig. 6a), which created in 1967, was modified and extended several times until the central building was destroyed in 1971. Developed on the initiative of the Chicago-founded Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), it not only features wall painting in the narrower sense and tradition of earlier murals. Rather, 42| The above mentioned second group of image and color theoretical considerations in the Black Arts Movement will be subject of my forthcoming book publication on this topic.

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the significance of this far more comprehensive project, as Natalie Crawford has observed, resides in the “transformation of a brick wall of a building into a veritable cultural center without walls”43 —in other words into a cultural articulation that goes way beyond the mere sum of single artistic contributions or wall sections. The characteristic of this ‘without walls’—here obviously alluding to Malraux’s Musée imaginaire (“museum without walls”)—calls up both historical museum spaces as well as exhibition displays and global contexts, that continue to have an effect until the time of Jean-Michel Basquiat discussed in the beginning (see fig. 1a–2c). The concept of the Wall does indeed arise out of the perception of time—an awareness of the present and sense of crisis that defines the bundling of artistic and cultural forces starting from the Chicago black community in a joint artistic contribution of nationwide radiance as an obvious goal.44 “What of our goals? We have to be concerned with an end result which includes the art produced, the artists involved, the people involved, and the context within which 4 3| Margo Natalie Crawford, “Black Light on the Wall of Respect: The Chicago Black Arts Movement,” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa G. Collins and id. (New Brunswick/ NJ, London: Rudgers University Press, 2006), 23–42, 24. 4 4| “The Committee for the Arts believes that this is a time of crisis for the black community, and that, in time of crisis, it is appropriate that families come together. While we can all agree that the arts are an intrinsic part of a people's experience, it is not so clear that we, as a people, are embracing our responsibility to mobilize our art forms and artistic energies in the service of our people. We feel that it is time to unite and to address ourselves with force and resolution to our common culture, our heritage and our needs.” The Committee for the Arts (Gerald A. McWorter, Hoyt W. Fuller, Conrad Rivers), “Invitation letter and Statement of Purposes” [1966], qtd. Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach, ed., The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 113.

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everything happens. (…) Our goal in art is to develop and project new themes, heroes, and attitudes. This test must stand the test of being contemporary, authentically related to Black Peoples’ experiences, and consistent with the ideas and values developed as the overall ideology of OBAC.”45

As a campaign of artistic visibility and marking, the wall first defines the limited urban space (here Chicago’s south side), but going beyond this, also encloses a territory and ownership, as documented 1968 in Bob Crawford’s photograph of one its parts, the Wa l l o f Tr u t h (fig. 6b). Created by prominent painters and photographers of the OBAC and the Chicago Black Arts Movement, the Wa l l o f R e s p e c t is divided into seven thematically structural sections (Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, Theatre, Statesmen, Religion, Literature, Sports). Both firmly installed and temporarily exhibited, the pictures arise out of a context of public performative acts spanning different genres and media, which comprise a collective creative process as well as public-oriented actions, tours, political demonstrations after the completion of the project in 1967 (fig. 7a–d),46 and changes later made, which caused not insignificant tension.47 The collage-like merging of different pictorial genres on the Wa l l —painting, photography, drawing, text-image, poster—responds directly to this with its mixed media and performative orientation. Constellations of cultural activities, much resembling a “bulletin board,” are created with the public “exhibition:” in the case of the L i t e r a t u r e S e c t i o n 4 5| Gerald A. McWorter, “OBAC Position Paper: Some Ideological Considerations,” quoted from Alkalimat, Crawford, Zorach, The Wall of Respect, 121; emphasis A.S. 4 6| Cf. Rebecca Zorach, “Painters, Poets, and Performance: Looking at the Wall of Respect,” in The Wall of Respect, 17–36. 47| Cf. Rebecca Zorach, “Conflict and Change on the Wall,” in The Wall of Respect, 273–283.

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it comprises image-text constellations which, like Edward Christmas’s image and visualization of the Amiri Baraka poem SOS (“Calling Black People”) surrounded by further portrait heads, anticipate the pictorial strategies of later forms of graffiti (fig. 8a/b). In the dense constellation of images, mostly structured to take into account the circumstances of the building, the window and door openings or the existing materials, but also occasionally negating them (in particular where a concealing pictorial ground is positioned), it is possible to also speak of a kind of iconostasis of black culture in public urban space, one that—as it were—partitions off the “interior.” Such sacralizing conceptions continue to unfurl an effect to later graffiti and their site-specific and spatial action radiuses in the 1980s. The personalization and heroization of exposed representatives of black culture on the Wa l l , a pivotal part of the program, may still be understood as the

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identitary derivations of a culture of the present (Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and many others) from a sort of subjectivized history. Thus, these invocations of history and “ancestry” in the struggle to gain “respect,” “liberation” and “dignity,” to name some of the key terms used by the movement, even take place in a consciously chosen, present urban context. However, the Wa l l is not to be understood exclusively as an artistic contribution of identitary, local cultural-political or even purely territorial nature. Represented in the media nation-wide and visited by prominent figures (Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, and many more)—especially in the medium of newspaper and magazine photography, and here embedded in a subtle directorship of the gaze and transcultural reference structure—the images open up broader contexts of meaning and reception in terms of content and geography.48 Just like through the wall paintings, in which historical representatives of art and culture theory, politics and society (Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois) are present, visible for the first time49 and in part even become “speaking” actors, via the photographic dissemination and nationwide media presence, the wall opens up, once more, other temporal and spatial contexts, connections and axes, which lead far beyond the U.S. into the transatlantic realm of the Black Atlantic. The program of the leading Organization of Black American Culture had reflected the “identification with Africa and the proclamation of a new leadership

4 8| Crawford refers to a photograph of Bob Crawford’s showing Earth Kitt in front of the Wall of Respect: it is not the prominent singer but the books she holds in her arm (The Book of American Negro Spirituals; The Lost Cities of Africa) that become visually major players as representatives of “black culture” and signs of “black consciousness.” Crawford, “Black Light,” 35. 4 9| Donaldson later remarks: “It should be remembered that blacks were rarely seen in billboards, in print or other public media before 1967.” Jeff Donaldson, “The rise and fall and legacy of the Wall of Respect movement,” International review of African American Art 15, no. 1 (1998): 22–26, 26; cf. Alkalimat, Crawford, Zorach, The Wall of Respect, 31f.

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in Chicago’s political culture.”50 Expressing encouragement, its Committee for the Arts had addressed its members as early as 1966: “To assure the success of our projects, we need your talent, your glow, your strength, your Negritude,”51 leaving no doubt—in the year of the First World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar and in the run-up to the Chicago Wall project—as to the transnational aesthetic orientation. It is thus no coincidence that in 1967 the painter takes over the leadership of the OBAC Committee for the Arts and subsequently (with Elliot Hunter) the plans for the J a z z S e c t i o n of the Wall whose aesthetic orientation on the pictorial, textile, and sculptural traditions of Africa and African contemporary art of the 1960s could scarcely be clearer: Jeff Donaldson. Prefixed to the all-purpose handout of the OBAC of 1967, the explanation on the name of the organization, the forming of which he was decisively involved—“OBAC is a Yoruba word for royal, leader or chief. We profess an

5 0| Alkalimat, Crawford, Zorach, The Wall of Respect, 115 (introduction to the memorandum “Black People and Their Art” by Gerald A. McWorter to the Committee for the Arts (OBAC), 15.3.67. 51| The Committee for the Arts, “Invitation letter,” 113. Emphasis A.S.

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affinity with our African sisters and brothers”52 —may be understood as a forerunner of the latter founding of the artist group AfriCOBRA by Donaldson and others. Not only with the “heroes” of black music in the Jazz Section (fig. 8c/d), but especially in the neighboring Sports Section, the “black body,” which for a long time appears as a more politicised one,53 becomes the decisive benchmark of an internal and external pictorial reference structure combining image and text, performance and image. This is demonstrated not only by en face portraits but also by cut-out scenes of individual athletes in action, who, as in the case of the centrally placed, large-scale anchor figure Muhammad Ali (fig. 8e), show the boxing champion frontally in a body-hugging gesture of victory. Here, the significance of the body and its physical presence as a point of reference for the numerous accompanying cross-disciplinary performative acts, music events or poetry readings that take place directly in front of and with the images of the Wall, but also include already mediatized image contexts, becomes

52| Gerald A. McWorter, “OBAC: Organization of Black American Culture” [“all-purpose handout”], qtd. The Wall of Respect, ed. Alkalimat, Crawford, Zorach, 127. 5 3| “In the case of a revolution, the physical presence of people in masses includes something that goes beyond the pure presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit] of bodies. (...) It is this more that can adhere to the physical presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit] of masses that makes up the revolutionary event. As a fundamental political act, in revolution the political itself is disputed and challenged. Physical presence thus becomes a fundamental political factum. As the physical presence of a populace, of the deputies, of the military, of the police, of the demonstrators, or of the assassinator, it is accordingly a power that props up or overthrows.” Clemens Kauffmann, “Präsenz, Zeitbewusstsein und Implizites Wissen: Drei Funktionsbedingungen demokratischer Politik,” in Präsenz und implizites Wissen: Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Christoph Ernst (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 277–95, 278.

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apparent: with forceful directness they mediate physical experiences of the present, entwine visual with auditory and performative moments (see fig. 8b).54 The proximity to the concept and performative character of the World Festival from the previous year in Dakar is clearly conveyed through the photographic documentation and staging of the Wall by prominent photographers from the Black Arts Movement, even if the format over all is more modest. The significance of the Wall of Respect for the reorientation of a black aesthetic in the U.S., however, seems to have resided not only in the focus on the conceptual and performative dimension of the Festival, but also in the understandig of the present and contemporary art that was shown in Dakar—aspects that require closer consideration elswhere. The positionings beyond those temporal and specializing segregation strategies for black art dealt with at the beginning, which “have ranged from responding to the visual tropes of racist and stereotypical representation, to confronting the legacy of absence in the work of artists associated with the Black Arts Movement, as well as the neglected legacy of Black Abstraction,”55 cannot be recognized exclusively in the Chicago Black Arts Movement, nor can the spatial transgression mentioned above. Rather, nationwide artistic actions, interventions, and exhibitions— from Chicago and New York to Los Angeles—invoke and draw on the public urban public space throughout the 1960s/70s (among them the Detroit Wa l l o f D i g n i t y (1968) and the Atlanta Wa l l o f R e s p e c t (1974)); paintings, installations, performative, and participatory acts, along with their transmedia interweaving, which could not be discussed here, show that the issue of visibility is directly tied to the disputes about blackness, the awareness of the present and the aesthetic anchoring of contemporary art. |

5 4| Cf. Valerie Cassel Oliver, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2013). 5 5| Salah Hassan, “Remembering the Black Arts Movement,” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 29 (Fall 2011): 4–7, 4.

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Figures Fig. 1a/b

a| Jean- Michel Bas q uiat at t he s hoot ing of D o w n to w n 81, 1980/81; qtd. from Basquiat: Boom for Real, exh. cat. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, ed. Dieter Burchart (Munich/ London/ New York: Prestel, 2018), 57; photo by Edo Bertoglio; b| Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Red Man), 1981, Acrylic, oil paintstick, and silkscreen on canvas, 204.5 x 210.8 cm; qtd. from Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, ed. Richard Marshall (New York: Abrams, 1993), 81; © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Fig. 2a-c

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a| Famous, 1982, Acrylic and photocopies on canvas mounted on wood, each c. 182 x 90 x 53 cm; qtd. from Burchart, Basquiat: Boom for Real, 210/11; b| J‘s Milagro, 1985, Acrylic paint, oil, oil paint stick, and paper collage on wood doors, 3 panels, 203,2 x 228,6 cm overall; photo by George Poncet; qtd. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 208; c| Icar us E sso, 1986, Acrylic, oil paintstick, and collage mounted on wood, 229 x 285 cm; qtd. from Jean Michel Basquiat: The Work of a Lifetime, exh. cat. Fondation Dina Vierny– Musée Maillol, Paris (Paris: Fond. D. Vierny, 2003), 104/05; © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Fig. 3a/b

Contempora r y Negr o A r t is t s , 1939, The Baltimore Art Museum: a| G a l l e r y, exhi bi ti on vie w, with Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture series (1936−38), on the table a sculpture by Henry Bannarn; qtd. https://artbma.org/1939, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Archives and Manuscripts Collections, AN6.44; b| E x h i b i ti o n v i e w with visitors; qtd. Black Artists in the Museum, https://black-artists-in-the-museum. com; courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

Fig. 4a/b

a| Protes t at t he W hit ney M us eum of A mer ic a n A r t, January 31, 1971, with Nigel Jackson (left) and Vivian Browne (center); qtd. from Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (New York: Duke University Press (Art History Publication Initiative), 2016), 147, fig. 3.6; photo: © Jan van Raay; b| Contemp or ar y Blac k A r t is t s in A m er ic a, 1971, exhibition view, Whitney Museums of American Art, April 6– May 17, 1971, exhibition view; qtd. from Cahan, Mounting Frustration, 157, fig. 3.1.6; photo by Tyrone Dukes/ The New York Times/ Redux.

Fig. 5

Expos iti on d'ar t contemporain (First Word Festival of Negro Arts), 1966, Palais de Justice, Dakar; qtd. from M. Abdou Diouf. M. Souleymane Sidibé, ed., Premier Festival des Arts Nègres (Paris: Boucher-Lakara, 1967), 68.

Fig. 6a/b

a| Wall of Respect, 1967, photo, Chicago/ Southside, photo by Robert Sengstacke; qtd. from Soul of a Nation: The Art in the Age of Black Power, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London; Brooklyn Museum, NY a.o. (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 58; © Robert Sengstacke; b| Doorway at the Wall of Tr uth, 1967, photo by Bob Crawford; qtd. from Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach, eds., The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 255; © Bob Crawford.

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Fig. 7a-d

a| Jeff Donald s on p aint ing t he J azz S ec t io n , 1967, photo by Robert Sengstacke; qtd. from Soul of a Nation, 57; © Robert Sengstacke; b| B a rb a ra Jo n e s- H o g u painting t he Wall of R es p ec t , 1967, photo by Robert Sengstacke; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 198; © Robert Sengstacke; c| B i l l Wa l k e r pai nting Nation of Islam section, 1967, photo by Bob Crawford; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 222; courtesy the artist; d| B l a c k L i b e ra ti o n banner in front of the Wall of Respect, 1967, photo by Derryl Cowherd; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 234; © Derryl Cowherd.

Fig. 8a-e

a| Edward Christmas, Literature Section (Amiri Baraka), 1967; photo by Robert A. Sengstacke; qtd. Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 57; © Robert A. Sengstacke; b| D on L . L ee r ead ing at t he L it er at ur e Se c ti o n , 1967, photo by Robert A. Sengstacke; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 36; © Robert A. Sengstacke; c| Jaz z Section (Detail), 1970, photo by Bertrand Phillips; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 65; © Courtesy Bertrand Phillips; d| R o sc o e Mi tc h e l l a n d Les ter Bowie playing at the Wall of Respect, 1967, photo by Bob Crawford; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 244; © Bob Crawford; e| Sp o r ts Se c ti o n (detail), 1967, photo by Robert A. Sengstacke; qtd. from Alkalimat et al., The Wall of Respect, 67; © Robert A. Sengstacke.

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

Christine Ross

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

This paper sets up to examine contemporary art’s engagement with coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently. It is grounded in the observation that coexistence has become pivotal to the development of the 21st century art as an aesthetic response to some of our current crises, including: global warming, the migrant crisis (the predicament I will be addressing here) and the legacies of colonialism. Art shows these crises to be amongst the most urgent conditions of our times, where the eradication of the “other” (nature, the wandering migrant, the nonhuman, the inhuman—bodily lives normatively defined “as less worthy of protection and sustenance”) is taking place.1 Contesting that eradication, art upholds coexistence not so much as a living-together than a human/nonhuman interdependency in need of reinvention and looping—a challenge, a difficulty, a conflict even an anxiety, but also a possibility for life-enhancement. The paper asks: “How is contemporary art performing coexistence(s)?” and “What are the possibilities of this aesthetics, i.e., how does it generate new modes of perceiving, knowing and relating?” Its main claim is that artistic practices are conceiving environments that set into play the coevolution of humans and nonhumans as the fundamental modality of coexistence. These environments are not simply representations: they function as materialities in relation to which performers, spectators and objects spatially coevolve. In these practices, it’s the interdependency of coevolution that matters: the environments orient humans and nonhumans interdependently as a call for mutuality, livability and accountability. This relationality relies on a unique reconsideration of notions of presentness and presence—a reconsideration I seek to investigate here, insofar as it is this very reconsideration that makes coexistence an original, promising, emerging aesthetics.

1| Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 119.

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Focusing on a specific artwork—Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality environment, Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) from 2017 (fig. 1), a work that invites viewers to experience from within a shared space the trauma of Mexican and Central American migrants crossing the US-Mexico border—this paper is an attempt to establish a dialogue between contemporary art and the contemporary philosophical thinking of coexistence. It examines Iñárritu’s environment in relation to the philosophical work of Timothy Morton and Judith Butler to establish “ongoingness” as the key modality by which notions of presentness and presence are fundamentally reconsidered in coexistence so as to enable the viewer’s experience of interdependency. Although Morton and Butler do not address the migrant crisis explicitly, their insight is fundamental to the thinking of coexistence and interdependency active but also denied in the migrant crisis, vitally redefined in Carne y Arena. The paper also investigates the technology of virtual reality to further specify ongoingness in its Carne y Arena deployment. As I hope to show, presentness and presence are ongoing in the aesthetics of coexistence: this ongoingness is weird and paradoxical but it enables interdependency, livability and liability; it allows the then of a migratory event to evolve in the now of an artistic environment and the over there of that event to evolve in the here in relation to beings who are never simply there and according to a logic where terms can easily flip into one another.

The Future of Coexistence In Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), ecological thinker Timothy Morton argues that, although the Anthropocene has scientifically been defined as our geological period—a period where human activities have become the

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

primary cause of global warming—the environmental crisis is more deeply rooted in a mode of thinking and living that precedes the period of the Anthropocene, namely the Holocene or even earlier. He designates that mode as “agrilogistical,” as pertaining to the logistics of agriculture—a mode of thinking and doing based on the construction of rigid boundaries between nature and culture (on a severance between human and nonhuman worlds), and the belief in consistency; it is committed to noncontradiction and the metaphysics of presence. Morton’s work proposes to replace that logic with “ecognosis,” a mode of knowledge-production that pertains to “coexisting” in that it accepts and prospers on contradictions: a “[k]nowing in a loop—a weird knowing” in which “two levels that appear utterly separate flip into one another” (narrators of a film noir, for example, finding out that they are the criminals).2 Ecognosis is a philosophy of coexistence. It becomes especially tangible with the following Anthropocenic gesture and understanding of that gesture: the simple starting of one’s car (the act of ignition): when I turn the key, my personal intention is not to destroy lifeforms or, more generally, to destroy the Earth—it’s a blind action; it’s also the case that my action doesn’t have any statistical meaning, but “scaled up to Earth magnitude so that there are billions of hands that are turning billions of ignitions in billions of starting engines every minute” the Sixth Mass Extinction is specifically what the ignition is both instigating and sustaining.3 Morton’s main assertion is that today’s growing planetary awareness of the environmental crisis is forcing a transformation in human thought by showing that humans cannot transcend their reliance on other humans and, more deeply, nonhuman beings and things. Particularly relevant to the aesthetics of coexistence I am trying to delineate here as a strategy of ongoingness is Morton’s claim that ecognosis—a logic of coexistence that alleviates the Anthropocene’s repression of the relatedness of humans and nonhumans—relies on loosening our commitment to the axioms of agrilogistics, particularly the axiom of non-contradiction and the axiom of presence according to which “existing means being constantly present,” the myth that a thing is real insofar as it is consistently “there” and in full adequacy with itself, a metaphysics which makes it easier for humans to resolve an inconsistency by inventing an action or a tool that will put an end to that inconsistency.4 Seeking alternatives to these axioms, Morton draws on the work of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray to propose a weird essentialism in which all things have an essence (a form, an identity, a substance without which it would not be that thing) while remaining indeterminate. Let us recall this passage from Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One: “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, […] for her genitals are formed of two lips in 2| Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5, 7 and 9. 3| Morton, Dark Ecology, 35. Also see 66. 4| Morton, Dark Ecology, 47 and 10.

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continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other.”5 Weird essentialism is one in which an essence (here, woman) is never resolvable as a separate entity (it is never simply one). Morton also draws on object-oriented ontology (OOO) to temporalize this claim: if things are not constantly present it is because they continue to exist even when they have ceased to be concepts or visible phenomena. In other words, beings do not “coincide with their phenomena.”6 To account for the fundamental relatedness of humans and nonhumans—a relatedness that agrilogistics works to suppress to rid itself of the inherent inconsistency of things, but that ecognosis anxiously welcomes—Morton wants to think time weirdly. Big history, scaled up at the temporal scale of global warming, should be seen, he writes, “as a nested series of catastrophes that are still playing out rather than as a sequence of events based on a conception of time as a succession of atomic instants. We can think these nested sets as ouroboric, self-swallowing snakes.”7 The catastrophes fit in larger ones as reiterated yet failed efforts to resolve inconsistency. These catastrophes never simply vanish, they persist now in the present.8 Morton: “The Anthropocene is a loop within a much larger loop we could call the Bacteriocene. The Bacteriocene and its oxygen are happening now; otherwise I would be writhing on the floor rather than typing this sentence. […] Surrounding the Bacteriocene there is the Cyanidocene … [which] is happening now—otherwise I would be a puddle of chemicals. The loop of the Cyanidocene exists within an even more encompassing one […].”9

Eras do not end as epistemes just because we decide that we have proceeded from the Holocene to the Anthropocene; rather, these periods extend forward—via their effects—to produce our present. Morton, however, does not explain how that temporality and the coexistence it sustains can become tangible to humans or how we can act to make that coexistence effective; he even maintains that “historicity” (understood as the historical actuality of persons and events; the quality of being part of history) is “inoperative” at the temporal scale of global warming. After all, global warming is an “hyperobject,” a term influenced by Björk’s 1991 “hyperballad” song, coined by Morton to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, the human species, global warming and the internet, which are “so massively distributed in time and space that we [humans] can’t directly grasp them empirically,” existing but not constantly pre-

5| Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24. 6| Morton, Dark Ecology, 74. 7| Morton, Dark Ecology, 69. 8| Morton, Dark Ecology, 70. 9| Morton, Dark Ecology, 70.

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

sent.10 But the history of humans does appear in his subsequent book, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017). Coexistence here is not only defined as the interdependent relation between humans and nonhumans, but also as what occurs between humans. He introduces two terms that disclose the human scale of coexistence as inseparable from its global scale: a) humankind as an ecological being—in contrast to the notion of “humanity” to which it is opposed because of its distancing of the nonhuman, humankind is a symbiotic real in which apparently opposite components (the chief example here is the parasite and its host) uncannily rely on one another following affiliations that never simply stabilize; and b) solidarity with humans and nonhumans—what Morton defines as the phenomenology or manifestation of the symbiotic real as such.11 Affirming the requirement to be attentive to the historicity of the historical present—an uphold-ing that can be particularly helpful for the understanding of the migrant crisis as a denial of coexistence in its eradication of the “other”—he shows the historical present to be in continuity with the severance effect of agrilogistical thought and action: “[d]ifficulties of solidarity between humans are … artifacts of repressing and suppressing possibilities of solidarity with nonhumans. […] The Severing consists precisely in the stitchingtogether itself […] in which non-white, non-male humans are dehumanized and made inhuman.”12 Humankind and solidarity are explored as possible answers to that historical present; they significantly rely on the ongoingness of presentness and presence. This sense of the human scale (which affirms itself without necessarily suspending the planet’s larger scale) brings us close to contemporary art practices that seek to involve the viewer in its environments of coexistence. Philosophy and art are complementary practices. Morton’s philosophical claim about the ongoingness of the present (in which the past persists within the present) and the ongoingness of presence (in coexistence, beings continue to exist even when not manifest or perceivable; they do not, in and by themselves, coincide with their phenomena) provides a precious analytical tool to better understand contemporary art engaged with coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently. In matters of coexistence, temporality—the ongoingness of the concentric and fizzy temporalities of hyperobjects—is a “twelve-thousand-year present” (if we want to start with the Mesolithic or Holocene), a three-hundred-year present (if we want to start with Western modernity) or whatever duration. Not subject to a conceptualization of time as linear or universal; “it is as much “now” as it was “then,” as

10| Morton, Dark Ecology, 11 and 18. 11| Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 2–3. 12| Morton, Humankind, 15 and 23.

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much “here” as “over there.”13 And presence—in environments that acknowledge coexistence—is not so much denied than acknowledged as persisting relationally with the other even beyond their phenomena. In contrast to philosophy, however, contemporary art does attempt to make ongoingness tangible to the viewer: it produces environments that function as materialities in relation to which performers, spectators and objects spatially coevolve, asking the viewer to experience coevolution by relating interdependently with human or nonhuman others. Our main question therefore becomes: how is ongoingness aesthetically defined and not simply predefined by philosophy?

Carne y Arena Carne y Arena (trans. Flesh and Sand) is a 2017 virtual reality project directed by Mexican film director, producer and screenwriter Alejandro González Iñárritu, immersing viewers in the environment of Mexican and Central American migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki collaborated with ILMxLAB with the support of Legendary Entertainment, the Fondazione Prada in Italy and Emerson Collective (a social justice organization). The work premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was the first virtual reality project to be featured at the festival. It was later featured at the Prada Foundation in Milan, the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center in Mexico City, LACMA (where I experienced it) and The Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington DC. The synopsis goes as follows: the VR places the viewer among a group of migrants who are led by a coyote across the Mexican border into the U.S. until they are stopped by the border patrol. The story is based on interviews Iñárritu did with Mexican and Central American refugees—men and women who have crossed the desert in precarious conditions some of who were hired as non-actors to reenact their story. “Virtually present, physically invisible,” the work’s subtitle, describes rather well how VR introduces the viewer into an environment he or she co-creates while remaining invisible to the migrants—a double status that is fundamental to the coexistence I argue to be unfolding here. The viewer can move around, look in front or behind, watch the migrants or the police while standing in the middle of the scene or to the side, or touch the virtual body of a migrant—an action that releases the image of a pulsing heart. Let us be more precise about Carne y Arena and the type of experience it sustains. It is important to highlight that the viewer enters the VR environment after undergoing a first room which reproduces the conditions—the cold temperatures and lack of privacy—of holding cells, where detained migrants are usually held after their arrest, in which the viewer is instructed to remove shoes, socks and bags. A 13| Morton, Dark Ecology, 83. On the problem of simultaneity and universality, see Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (New York: Penguin, 2017).

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light goes off and an alarm calls the viewer into the main room: a darkened chamber with a sand-covered floor where assistants strap the viewer to a backpack and VR gear—a head mounted display device, including goggles and headphones (fig. 2). The backpack contains the VR PC, which allows the viewer to circulate in the space without the use of cables; it adds to the realism of the experience by giving a sense of what migrants carry with them as they walk in the desert; it is also used as a security measure: the museum assistant will pull the straps of the bag if and when the viewer is about to hit a wall. The sand, not only its mixed (smooth and rocky) texture but also its unevenness, is one of the physical parts of the desert that the viewer experiences as she or he walks in the space. The 6 ½–minute virtual-reality experience then begins. You are now immersed into the Sonoran Desert at sun-up, feeling the wind’s breeze. A small cluster of migrants walks towards you across the desert plain. The migrants are in transit. There’s a pregnant woman with a child and several working-age men. Someone is complaining of a broken ankle. The guide, or coyote, is on his cell phone. Just as they are about to reach you, loud helicopters with a searing (blinding) spotlight bear down on you and the migrants, while two immigration enforcement trucks thunder in from the distance. What follows is a chaotic encounter where men, women and children are thrown to the earth and ordered onto their knees, threatened with guns and barking dogs. You both feel fear and observe their fear. The officers command the migrants to take off their shoes. In a moment of magical realism, the older woman with a broken ankle hums at a long table upon which a boat floats and then capsizes, spilling its human cargo. And then you are brought back to the live action scene. Men are interrogated, handcuffed, and searched. All of them will eventually be brought away. The halo continues in the sky above and abruptly, it’s over. You are then guided out of the virtual space towards a third room, where you will get your personal belongings back and be invited to circulate in an exhibition space of photojournalist-type photo/video portraits of the people seen in the simulation. The screens on which the sitters

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are projected are overlaid with words that offer testimonies about their lives and journeys. We learn that the border-crossers and the migrants are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico; their stories of migration are written at the first person. These stories give a better sense of what Iñárritu means when he speaks about Carne y Arena as a “semi-fictionalized ethnography.” The migrant crisis belongs to the category of what W.B. Gallie has called “essentially contested concepts.”14 The absence of agreement on the use of the term (should it solely include asylum seekers or economic migrants as well?) is part of the rhetoric by which migrants are accepted or refused. For the purpose of this paper, the migrant crisis refers both to the worldwide increase of displaced people since 2011—migrants displaced by conflict, economic or climate disaster, or out of fear of being persecuted—and the xenophobic implementation of national immigration policies and border systems that “transform exodus into a process of elimination” of a certain segment of humanity: the wandering migrants.15 In 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 14 million people were displaced by war in 2014, the highest number in a single year since WWII; it reported 59.5 million displaced people globally, roughly double the estimation in 2005. In 2015, New York Times journalist Rod Nordland insisted on the globality of the crisis: “There are more displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history—60 million in all—and they are on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. They are coming not just from Syria, but from an array of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Haiti, as well as any of a dozen or so nations in sub-Saharan and North Africa. They are unofficial ambassadors of failed states, unending wars, intractable conflicts. The most striking thing about the current migration crisis, however, is how much bigger it could still get.”16 These figures still hold today and must include Mexico and Central America. Studies also show that the migrant crisis is not simply about migration but about the reinforcement of borders that increasingly endanger the lives of migrants. Globally, according the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 40,000 migrants died between 2005 and 2014 while attempting to cross a border. In his recent publication on the global proliferation, reinforcement and militarization of borders, geographer Reece Jones insists on the need to question the dominant idea that the 21st-century intensification of borders is a response to 14| W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56, 1955– 1956, 167–198. 15| Daniel Trilling, “Five myths about the refugee crisis,” The Guardian (June 5, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/05/five-myths-about-the-refugee-crisis. 2018 (2018/8/8), Étienne Balibar, “Pour un droit international de l’hospitalité,” Le Monde (August 17, 2018): 23. 16|Rod Nordland, “A Mass Migration Crisis, and It May Yet Get Worse,” New York Times, October 31, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/world/europe/a-mass-migration-crisis-and-it-may-yet-get-worse. html (2018/8/8).

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

the lawless violence of people coming from less economically developed countries. He argues instead that the hardening of borders is more about the production of violence than a protection against violence—a reinforcement whose main modus operandi is to reserve privilege to insiders by restricting access to resources and movement for specific (poor, non-white) others.17 This is particularly manifest in the transformations of the US-Mexico border over the last 30 years, especially since the September 11, 2001 attacks—namely its alteration into an intensified militarized security space, made possible by additional funding, the deployment of thousands of Border Patrol agents that prevent easy crossings in urban areas (El Paso and San Diego, for example) and redirect migrants to perilous deserts (namely, the western portion of the border passing through the Sonoran Desert, the desert simulated in Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena, the construction of walls, the expanded use of security surveillance infrastructure, the use of force, the criminalization of migration and a surge in deportations.18 The US-Mexico border is further intensified by violence on the Mexican side where cartels work to reinforce control over lucrative smuggling routes: between 2007 and 2013, about 47,000 migrants died in Mexico before reaching the border—murdered by cartel-related gangs, succumbing to train or car accidents or to the elements.19 In his main statement about Carne y Arena, Iñarritu is especially attentive to the precariousness of migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexico border: “During the past four years in which this project has been growing in my mind, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many Mexican and Central American refugees. Their life stories haunted me, so I invited some of them to collaborate with me in the project. […] My intention was to experiment with VR technology to explore the human condition in an attempt to break the dictatorship of the frame, within which things are just observed, and claim the space to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.”20

In a more recent interview, he stipulates that the non-virtual components of the work (the sand; the wind, to which should be added the backpack) provide a sense of embodiment by which the viewer becomes the migrant. The belief here is that VR can facilitate a form of empathy—the vicarious experience of another’s suffering, to the point of triggering the desire to alleviate that suffer-ing—with the migrant. The desire for and presumption of empathy (or even compassion as the filmmaker has emphasized in a subsequent interview at the Philips Collection), however, are not completely convincing. VR is often supported by a rhetoric or promise 17| Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London/ New York: Verso, 2017), 5 and 46. 18| Jones, Violent Borders, 31–32. 19| Jones, Violent Borders, 44–45. 20| http://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/carne-y-arena/?lang=en (2018/8/8).

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of empathy. Media scholar Jeremy Bailenson’s recent publication on virtual reality dedicates a whole chapter on how VR environments enhance empathy, because of the realism of virtual worlds and the first-person perspective from which users experience them.21 And yet, Iñarritu’s desired empathy can never be simply guaranteed and is not necessarily what occurs when one experiences Carne y Arena. That experience necessarily varies from one viewer to the next, depending on their political sympathies. What I believe to be more important in this work is the coexistence the VR work temporally, affectively and materially enables. This is an affective environment because of the state of crisis, fear and violence it discloses and reenacts as it includes the viewer. The viewer is exposed to and partakes of the intensities of the present—not only the now of the environment but, and here I borrow Lauren Berlant’s definition of the affect, a now embedded “in an historical field,” in the thick historical present.22 The viewer adapts and responds to the unfolding historical crisis; and this affective response (the unlikelihood of remaining indifferent) is already a step toward coexistence. The materiality of VR technology is also explored to favor human-nonhuman relatedness. To understand that materiality, it is useful to go with Iñárritu’s definition of VR as a proto-narrative (Iñárritu says, “I think this medium deserves to find its own language. It should not carry that narrative tradition. […] Nothing actually exists. It’s an invention of your wired brain and it’s a kind of phenomenon between your consciousness, your memories, and your own understanding of yourself and how you project yourself in others. The ability that you have, or don’t have, to do that.”23). It is also helpful to point out that although VR technology loosens what Iñárritu names the “dictatorship of the frame, within which things are just observed,” it sustains the observational stance of the VR user. These modalities contribute to ongoingness as a present and a sense of presence that enable the experience of interdependency. Let us take a moment to explain why. As computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier observes, a virtual reality environment, in its most basic formulation, consists in an interface between a user and a simulated environment, but the interface—in contrast to film, for example—loses in rigidity what it gains in its responsiveness to the user’s bodily motion as he or she looks around while immersed in the environment. That responsiveness is what makes a VR narrative a proto-narrative. The enabling of the user’s sensorimotor loop that connects the user with the VR world is crucial to

21| Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality is, How it Works, and What it Can Do (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 83–84. 22| Lauren Berlant, “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event,” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 4, (December 2008), 846. 2 3|http://remezcla.com/features/film/alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-vir tual-reality-carne-arena-lacmaconversation/ (2018/8/8).

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achieve the simulation.24 In other words, the VR computer “must constantly and as instantly as possible calculate whatever graphic images [our eyes] should see were the virtual world real.”25 Lanier’s insistence on the sensorimotor loop is particularly useful to the understanding of the stabilizing and destabilizing presentness and presence sustained by Carne y Arena. Insofar as a VR system will never achieve complete coverage of all the human senses or measurements of everything there is to be measured from a person (VR trains the user’s perception as he or she perceives; perception is in constant evolution as it coevolves with the technology), simulated reality can only be achieved as “real” if the VR technology gives the user’s nervous system sufficient cues to treat the virtual world as the world on which to base expectations—i.e., to make the brain believe in the virtual world.26 The consideration of the relationship between VR’s technology and its necessary connection with the user’s bodily motion and perceptual activity leads Lanier to complexify the definition of VR as a system that explores “the deep time of nervous system adaptations and preadaptations,” so that the brain may be persuaded to temporarily expect virtuality as though it was real and not simply simulated—a mixed process of persuasion and adaptation that makes the user attentive to experience itself.27 In short, to be immersed in a VR environment is to be part of an environment from a first-person perspective, but always under the influence of a technology that trains one’s perception to perceive realistically. But although the user’s perception is conditioned by the technology, that technology needs to make room for the user’s sensorimotor system; and the user always ends up influencing the unfolding of the environment as he or she moves in that environment. The visuality of the virtual reality environment both precedes and is reshaped by the user’s unfolding perception of it. It’s an ongoing reality. With this affectivity and materiality in mind, let us be more precise about Carne y Arena’s ongoing presentness. Experiencing that environment, the viewer is in the present understood as a now: he or she shares the same space as the migrants and participates in the making of that space through his or her bodily movements and affects. But the viewer is also in a past that persists now: the event of migration has already taken place, the migrants’ story is a story about a past event (the attempt to cross the border), the migrants preexist their becoming-digital, and yet that story is actualized now in a space that the viewer is co-shaping. Moreover, the viewer is as much in the near past as he or she is in the near future as part of the now, for within and beyond the VR experience, mass migration is unfolding in the historical present throughout the world, close by and far away. The viewer 24| Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 47, 52 and 235. 25| Lanier, Dawn, 48. 26| Lanier, Dawn, 51 and 54. 27| Lanier, Dawn, 54, 55 and 141.

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probably already knows about that global crisis before experiencing the work; the two adjacent rooms provide contextualization and remind the viewer of that fact. The scene of magical realism (the mirage-like scene of the long table appearing in the desert, upon which floats the specter of a sinking boat—a reference to the Mediterranean migrant crisis) spatially enlarges (globalizes as it were) the historical present as pertaining not only to the US-Mexico border but also to other regions in the world. It is also the case that although VR environments always enforce the observational perspective of the user as is the case with reading a book (the user is alone sensing the environment through his or her own perspective28), they can likewise facilitate—as in Carne y Arena—a necessary coevolution of the user and the digital characters, one that evolves in a present where the now and the then, the here and the there, the user and the virtualized refugee are not separated by rigid boundaries; they blend and then de-blend; looped, they may well weirdly flip into one another. This is the weirdness—to use Morton’s terminology—of Carne y Arena’s environment of coexistence. Iñarritu himself speaks of the viewer’s experience as weird: “a living ghost dream.”29 It is a productive weirdness insofar as the migration crisis is experienced as ongoing, persisting in and constitutive of a thick and long now, which never simply stabilizes as a now. That kind of present is supported by the environmentalism of the viewer’s experience, but also by its affective charge—which is not one of pure empathy. I might share (feel) the fear of the migrants, I do so alone and probably from the relative safe space of the non-migrant. I am more of a witness—and this is the work’s strongest contribution to the thinking of coexistence as a necessary reconsideration of presentness and presence for the sake of interdependency—a weird witness who sometimes feels as an intruder or a voyeur even a potential migrant, yet who is never completely detached from the fear experienced by “others.” I am a witness of a special kind evolving in a present made of the ongoing past within the now, for which I might not be directly responsible but certainly responsible at the scale of the earth magnitude (here and over there; then and now). If a witness is indeed a person who perceives an event (a crime, an accident, a catastrophe) as it occurs and if the witness’s role is to attest that an event has occurred, Carne y Arena’s ongoing environment can be said to partly blur the separation between the occurred and the have occurred, between the witness and the victim (the witness can become a victim, and the victims here are after witnesses of their own story—digitized, they haunt the present), or even flip them into one another. It shows that coexistence requires another type of witness—a human or a nonhuman (perhaps a digital being) who does not see an 28| Rose Eveleth, “The Limits of Empathy,” Topic, no. 7 (January 2018), https://www.topic.com/thelimits-of-empathy (2018/8/8). 29| The Philipps Collection, “Carne y Arena: Art and Technology” (June 4, 2018), https://vimeo. com/277983418 (2018/8/25).

The Aesthetics of Coexistence as Ongoing

event as simply involving other humans. It is this ongoingness, as well as the affective charge of the proto-narrative, that makes me experience coexistence as a fundamental interdependency, as a means of acknowledgement of my own responsibility and as a means of livability for any bodily life. In that large-scale present, I am part of that never-one-never-whole species called humans—humankind humans who are not so easily separable from one another and from nonhumans (the desert, the border, the dogs), but who cannot be said to fit in the shoes of any other. Ethically, this is sound. As Sara Ahmed has maintained in her study of the cultural politics of emotions and despite the rhetoric of empathy accompanying Carne y Arena, one can never feel what a victim or a witness feels; it is also the case that the installation’s third room of testimonies doesn’t reductively make the fear stand for the identity of the migrants as though that fear wasn’t historical (i.e., made and changeable).30 In her own examination of interdependency—a notion she defines as pertaining to our existence as social beings whose lives necessarily “depend on the life of the other”—Judith Butler raises her own concern about the human capacity to respond to the suffering of others who might well be geographically far but also geographically close.31 She asks: “what makes the ethical encounter possible?” and “how can one bear responsibility for what is happening out there or nearby?”32 Claiming that responsibility is neither a consent or a communitarianism, she suggests that it depends on an always partial and incomplete “reversibility of proximity and distance,” a reversibility that is never simply resolved by making suffering at a distance closer or by making close-by suffering distant.33 She argues for an ethical call that brings bodily life (more specifically, the precariousness of all bodily lives) to the fore—a bodily life whose locatedness limits but never simply abolishes the full reversibility of the “here” and the “there.” Butler: “For if I am here and there, I am also not fully there, and even if I am here. I am always more than fully here. Is there a way to understand this reversibility as limited by bodily time and space in such a way that the other is not radically other, and I am not radically over here as an I, but the link, the joint, is chiasmic and only and always partly reversible and partly not? […] it is only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that ‘here’ is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in ways that let us know the transport and constraint of what we might call ethics.”34

30| Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32. 31| Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 108. 32| Butler, Notes, 99 et 101. 3 3| Butler, Notes, 103–104. 3 4| Butler, Notes, 120–122.

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That ongoingness and reversibility-enabled redefinition of the witness is crucial if we are to follow Paul Ricoeur’s acute understanding of the role of the witness’s declaration as the starting point of historical knowledge: “We must not forget,” writes Ricoeur, “that everything starts, not from the archives, but from testimony, and that, whatever may be our lack of confidence in principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person, and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies.”35 Renewing Ricoeur’s relatively stable and utterly human witness of past events as past, Carne y Arena proposes a weird witness in the age of mass migration: the virtual reality environment does so by enlarging and thickening the present of the crisis, by globalizing the here, by making the viewer’s and the digital characters’ presence relational and not necessarily always perceivable, by enabling the partial reversibility of temporal and spatial categories, by producing a world in which the host might well become the parasite and the viewer another migrant. It asks that the viewer engage with what official accounts of mass migration repress: the impossibility of transcending humans’ reliance on other humans and nonhumans in any crisis and in any accountability of that crisis. Supported by this aesthetics of coexistence, the viewer or the virtualized migrant or even border officer qua witness can initiate historical knowledge anew—as ongoing. |

Figures F ig . 1 Alejandro González Iñárritu, C ar ne y A r ena ( V i r tu a l l y P re se n t, P h y si c a l l y Invis ibl e), 2017, Poster; photo by RR, © Alejandro González Iñárritu; qtd. from Brian Bishop, “Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena proves that great virtual reality means going beyond the headset,” The Verge (July 8, 2017): n.p., https://www.theverge. com/2017/7/8/15941596/carne-y-arena-alejandro-inarritu-virtual-reality-installationborder. F ig . 2 Experience A lejand r o González Iñár r it u' s , C a r n e y A re n a ( V i r tu a l l y P re se n t, Phys ical ly Invisible), 2017, Virtual Reality Content, 6.5'; photo by Emmanuel Lubezki; © Alejandro González Iñárritu; qtd. from Ben Davis, “Can VR Really Make Us Feel Empathy? Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ‘Carne y Arena’ Proves That’s the Wrong Question,” arnet news, reviews (March 30, 2018): n.p., https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/alejandro-g-inarritus-carne-y-arena-comes-to-dc-1255907.

35| Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147.

The Spectral Present of Control

Francesca Raimondi

“There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself.” The Spectral Present 1

of Control and the Strategies of Performance

Enter the Ghosts A few years after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida takes part in an international colloquium entitled “Whither Marxism?” at the University of California, Riverside. For Derrida, the question of Marxism becomes an examination of "specters of Marx," in the double meaning of the genitive: the specter or the spirit of Marx himself, whose legacy is the issue up for discussion, but also—and indeed above all—the specters which appear at significant places in Marx’s own work and are pivotal for a new Marxism or a “New International” (announced by the subtitle of Derrida’s book). These textual specters multiply rapidly, added to by those preceding and informing Marx’s specters, like the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, apparitions of a “time out of joint,” and those following them, like Valéry’s “thousands of specters” (amongst them also that of Marx), which stand for a past that has become opaque.2 Accompanied by this peculiar troop, Derrida embarks on a determination of the present, not solely with respect to Marx’s legacy, but also with reference to what constitutes the present as such. “The time is out of joint”—the famous Hamlet

1| Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York / London: Routledge, 2012), 48. 2| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4.

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quote—thus marks a twofold undertaking for Derrida: it describes the impact of the specters and the structure of the present of modernity haunted by these specters. As Derrida describes them, specters are anachronic figures or more precisely anachronic forces which disrupt the ordered and datable sequence of future, present, and past. As forces specters are essentially operating in the present, and yet they do not belong to this time. For the elaboration of his lecture and with the title Specters of Marx Derrida initially had in mind the haunting of the present by ghosts of the past. The rereading of Marx, however, and in particular The Communist Manifesto, made Derrida aware of the existence of ghosts from the future. The “specter of communism” is precisely the advent of something new that is already active in the present without gaining full presence in it.3 Ghosts can disjoin a “presence effectively identical to itself” in diverse ways.4 They disrupt because they are not merely a manifestation of the possible, but of the “impossible:” they stand for what could not be experienced (a trauma, the repressed), or for something future that could overthrow the dominating parameters (revolt, revolution).5 The present of modernity, its dawn marked by Shakespeare’s theatre, is this contested field for Derrida. Inherent to it is a tendency to the now, to merging into the given and the prevailing.6 In this tendency it is however haunted by the repressed past or a revolutionary, suspending future. To accept these hauntings is a question of justice for Derrida; justice for the past generations and the unsettled debt towards them, as well as for a future that admits change. “To learn to live with ghosts”7 is therefore the watchword of the book and Derrida’s deconstruction in general. This maxim becomes especially urgent—and the tone of Specters of Marx is repeatedly an agitated and troubled one—when capitalism starts to install itself as the new global hegemony: “At a time when a new world order is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neoliberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.”8

Twenty years after Derrida’s conjuring of specters to haunt the upcoming neo-liberalism, Esther Peeren acknowledges their very fragility in her book The 3| Cf. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 126f. 4| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 123. 5| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 111. By marking a third vis-à-vis reality and possibility, the spectral is related to the phenomenon of latency. 6| The construction of a present identical to itself and of a seamless chronology is first of all a mark of kingly or absolutist power. Shakespeare’s theatre discloses the brittleness of this construction. However, with its apodictic validity claims, modern reason, which Derrida deconstructs in its various facets, has inherited precisely this tendency towards the now and linear time. 7| Derrida, Specters of Marx, xvii–xviii. 8| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45–46.

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Spectral Metaphor. Starting with Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, Peeren shows how a spectral incorporation, incapable of taking action due to its incomplete presence, is therefore reliant on—drawing on a modification of Robert Musil—the ‘sense of impossibility’ of its counterpart.9 A broken capacity to act is characteristic of all those ghosts Peeren focuses on in her study and that in Derrida’s work were not yet so visible-invisible, the ghosts of the present: people who are still very much alive and at the same time hover between life and death because they are almost invisible, like migrants, either unregistered or without documents, domestic workers, and cleaning personnel, mediums or missing persons. Unlike Derrida’s ghosts of the past and Marx’s of the future, these ghosts do not break into the present, but are in fact brought forth by the present itself, by—to speak with Rancière—the “distribution of the sensible” at work in the present—and especially the neoliberal one. The neoliberal present, as Peeren points out, is at the same time also inhabited by a completely different type of ghosts, by sovereign specters, or specters of sovereignty. Already Derrida had mentioned these, albeit in passing: the financial market, paramilitary groups, panoptical surveillance, and mafia cartels. If both Derrida and Peeren focus primarily on the resistive and subversive force of ghosts vis-à-vis the established order and its ideology, both are inevitably forced (in the wake of Marx) to also mention the spectral dimension of capitalism itself and, in particular, its present.10 This aspect demands closer attention, for there is meanwhile much evidence indicating that the spectral figures, groups, and institutions are able to multiply at such a rate because the experience of the present itself has become spectral to an unprecedented degree in contemporary capitalism. I would like to pursue and elaborate this diagnosis in the following section before using it as a key to understanding some current strategies of the artistic practice that operates most intensively with the present—performance art.

A Ghostly Present It has been frequently pointed out that our current society is characterized by acceleration and threatens to vanish the present.11 Although phenomena of acceleration are undeniable, the vanishing of the present concerns only partially its current modification. Mark Fisher has offered a more accurate description of the present 9| Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor. Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–5. Published in 1887, in the story the ghost of Canterville, confronted with the pragmatism of an American family, loses its spectral eeriness and ultimately has to save itself from them. 10| Cf. also Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 11| Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: Sage, 2000); Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

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in the dawning 21st century—as a peculiar stasis that is buried behind the frenzy of the new and the perpetual movement.12 This stasis is the effect of an all-pervading anachrony, arising out of the persistent encroaching into the past and future: “the ‘jumbling up of time,’ the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed.”13 Derrida had characterized ghosts as resistive anachronic forces disrupting the ordered chronology of past, present, and future. For Fisher, anachrony has become the ordinary feature of a society and culture that negates the difference between past, present, and future, and, by eliminating this difference, also renders any far-reaching rupture or friction impossible. Drawing or borrowing from the past is no longer an engagement with another historical juncture from a current situation, and accordingly no longer an attempt to comprehend the present in its uniqueness. The new anachrony leads to a regime of simultaneity that, in an eerie way, erases temporal difference and hence also change: “In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.”14 Deleuze has also described the temporality of the “control society” as one of a peculiar simultaneity and its presence in a spectral terminology.15 Derrida had initially designated the law as one figure of the ghostly. Just as ghosts always see one before one can glimpse them, the law introduces a “dissymmetry”16 into the present that addresses and calls, whereby the direction of the addressing defies reversal. Surveillance, too, is ghostly for Derrida, for it also makes use of an asymmetrical gaze and the power that ensues from it: “…ghost or revenant, sensuous-non-sensuous, visible-invisible, the specter first of all sees us. From the other side of the eye, visor effect, it looks at us even before we see it or even before we see period. We feel ourselves observed, sometimes under surveillance by it even before any apparition. … [the visitation] does not always mark the moment of a generous apparition or a friendly vision; it can signify strict inspection or violent search, consequent persecution, implacable concatenation.”17

The asymmetry of law and surveillance in control society spreads by simultaneously altering its modality. It is no longer limited to specific milieus of enclosure like the school, factory, or prison, but extends across the whole of life through “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control.”18 The forms of control seem to offer something 12| Cf. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (WinchesterWashington: Zero Books, 2014), 6. 13| Fisher, Ghosts, 6. 14| Fisher, Ghosts, 9. 15| Cf. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), 3–7. 16| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 222. 17| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 126. 18| Deleuze, “Postscript,” 4.

The Spectral Present of Control

liberal and free, because they cling to the needs and interests of individuals while also transferring far-reaching responsibility and creativity to them. Control is much softer than discipline, but for that, it is principally everywhere, not least because it has migrated into the ‘smart’ media that accompany and monitor everyday life everywhere. The ubiquity of control is also connected to the collapse of the chronological and discrete order of disciplines (family, military, factory, hospital, prison): the control society is a society of simultaneity, because in it, as Deleuze identifies, nothing really ends. Work becomes precarious, constantly changing, project work, while school turns into permanent training, so that both coexist and diffuse into free time. The cipher for this new form of ubiquitous control is for Deleuze the corporation, which takes the place of the factory (but also of the school, the hospital, the university, etc.). What was once the normative “form” has become a fluid “modulation” that is constantly changing and adapts its form to fit the respective circumstances. The corporation is not a body, “but a spirit, a gas.” In short: something ghostly that can be everywhere, invades both working and free time, and never enunciates a clearly defined demand. The present of the control society is thus not one that tries to close itself off from the past and future, as Derrida was describing modernity. On the contrary: it is constantly integrating future and past into itself, so that the present does not vanish but, due to the anachronic obliterating of differences, it becomes irreal, or a “non-present present,”19 which is precisely how Derrida characterizes the ghostly. The recursive procedures informing the knowledge and media of the control society suggest a relentless apprehension and far-reaching recycling of the past, and indeed even of resistive knowledge; all events and places are subjugated to a global synchrony and complete visibility which hardly knows of heterogeneous units or discrete milieus; preventive procedures are constantly counting on future possibilities they can utilize or attempt to manipulate as they emerge. Even the incalculable events and the unpredictable are exploited sooner or later, thus losing their incisive character. Anachrony and simultaneity, perpetual control, and media omnipresence generate a present that, as such, takes on spectral qualities: elusive, not fully locatable spatially and temporally, an eeriness that is not a full presence, and an undecidable between-dead-and-alive. In such a present that has become spectral, the influence and admission of resistive anachronic forces or peripheral groups is considerably more complex. The control society has no need to exorcize ghosts because it irrealizes itself: resistive action even no longer appears to be impossible but rather futile, without any real, sustainable effects. If, as Deleuze claims, the gentle controls are “equal to the harshest of confinements,” this does not imply however that there cannot be any possible counter-strategies or alternatives. In the spirit of 19| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5.

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Deleuze’s “new weapons,”20 I would therefore like to examine two artistic strategies in performance art that can be read as distinct responses to our spectral present.

Art and Specters As anachronic forces, specters stand not only for a peculiar temporality, they also take on a peculiar materiality. Like themselves, their apparition, their figure, is a thing of the impossible: specters are “neither soul nor body, and both one and the other,” “one does not know it if is living or if it is dead;” a “paradoxical incorporation” and a “non-object” in a “non-present present,”21 “neither substance, nor essence, nor existence.”22 Specters can be individualized, but they never have the full figure of a body that is the possession of someone specific and assumes a specific place in time. This paradoxical incorporation is therefore troubling or astonishing, never indifferent. In its peculiar materiality and temporality, art—not just figurative—has something in common with specters. Precisely contemporary art is never fully in its own time, always interwoven with the past and directed towards the future in order to constitute a discontinuity in its own present. Its materiality is also of a peculiar kind, somewhere between the spirit and the letter, “both one and the other.” If the capitalist present is spectral, then this must also affect the aisthesis of art. This pertains to performance art in particular, an art characterized by “bodily co-presence”23 and which is directly or indirectly dealing with issues of the present (in space and time), acting out different forms of presentness. I would like to consider two distinct strategies that corroborate the diagnosis of a spectral present, precisely because they move within this present and manifest 20| Deleuze, “Postscript,” 4. 21| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5. 22| Derrida, Specters of Marx, vii. 23| Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38.

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different aspects of it. At the same time however, they not only absorb the spectral present and co-presence but also produce in them new resistive operations. The first strategy makes use of an augmented corporeality, whereby the striking conspicuousness interrupts the anonymous stream of commodities and people, rendering it visible in the first place. Johannes Paul Raether’s “augmented embodiments” are sheer impossible, grossly exaggerated figures, phenomena unmissable due to the color, material, textiles, and used objects. The variety of f i g u r e s —“ridiculous trickster”24 —Raether embodies (fig. 1a–d) are not beings of a past or future, but operators of interruptions within time. They are thus not psychological individuals but whole-body masks, entering different thresholds within the purported temporal continuum and disturbing synchronically structured time. Contrasting with their own excessive materiality, these figures make visible spectral-like components in the very heart of the neoliberal economy and way of life: the Apple Store, Ikea, gigantic tourist centers like Florence or Athens. Commodities and bodies can be tangibly experienced in their spectral qualities through these interventions, for instance the massive skulking, ever-recurring desire for technology in an Apple Store. Raether’s action disrupts this using gallium to invert the order of the dead and the living. The metal, which at first glance looks like quicksilver, melts when contacting with body heat, and reveals to be only harmful for the technology, but not for bodies. If today’s commodity fetish makes bodies often appear to be nothing other than prosthe-

24| Johannes Paul Raether, A full manual to understand Identitecture, http://johannespaulraether.net.

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sis for the smart technology, Raether’s action, interrupting the (police-protected) power of the commodity and the technology addiction supporting it, opens the horizon for another possible constellation of human and machine. The intervention Dismembered City Particles in the tourist center of Florence (fig. 2a–e) moves between the diffused and fragmented individuals and the different streams of tourists and migrants, crisscrossing one another without really seeing each other. Only the massive amount of copied mass-produced goods is momentary into the focus of attention of tourists, not the figures selling them in the street. The striking presence of the “swarm,” as Raether names his own figure, interrupts and inverts the order of these economies in different ways. Made itself out of gimmicks, souvenirs, and refunctioned low- and high-tech materials, the surface of the swarm with its colors and forms deflects attention from the touristic course, interrupting for a moment the remote controlled and indifferent gaze inherent to it; at the same time the idiosyncratic mask of the swarm challenges the false pretense of singularity of the supposedly functional and ‘normal’ outdoor style of tourists. By interrupting the spectral co-presence of the indifferent crowd with its striking appearance, the swarm creature brings the dismembered city particles’ on the street into view and activates—if for a moment—the latent possibility of them becoming a resistive or ‘deviant’ swarm. In contrast to Raether’s “augmented embodiments,” Anne Imhof’s performances are themselves somehow ghostly. Whereas in the second act of her opera A n g s t I I , performed in the Hamburger Bahnhof 2016 (fig. 3a–f), Imhof uses a thick fog to generate the impression of other-worldliness, in Fa u s t at the Venice

The Spectral Present of Control

Biennale 2017 it is a a diaphane architecture of glass that provides a not-quite-presence of performers and audience (fig. 4a). The cold colors of the German Pavilion make everyone appear pale and the glass walls, behind, on or beneath which the performers are seen, blur their contours (albeit minimally) (fig. 4b); the bodies (including those of the audience) appear translucent in the specular reflection. The performers are both present and absent at once: they perform in direct proximity to the audience touching it, repetedly in paving their way through the crowded space, but the situation never becomes participatory. The whole performance seems to take place behind glasses, the ones of the architectural installation in the space, but also the glasses of the smartphone displays, through which the audience perceives (or will perceive) what happens before its eyes (fig. 4c). The movements of the performers are abstracted, sometimes slowed down, then accelerated again, the bodies grapple around each other, embrace and submit each other. Like many of the immobilized positions of the figures in space, the movements all remain in a kind of limbo, gestures leading to nothing and at the same time evoking manifold associations: club culture, fashion world, Christian iconography, zombies, memories of street battles, and squatting—turning into one another and passing again.25 What holds these fields together is a strange corporeality, intense and exhausted, not quite alive and yet simultaneously distinctly present. Besides glass, the second important material in Fa u s t is metal, which not only supports the glass panels but also surrounds the pavilion and regulates access to it. The hardness of the metal accentuates the hardness of the armored glass, evoking an atmosphere of power, control, and even violence, reinforced by the Dobermans standing guard behind the glass walls and metal grilles. The visible traces of power extend into the bodies, which, in their “exposed singularity,” are put on display through the architecture, tipping them into the “general,” as Juliane 25| Like ghosts, zombies are also revenant figures of the undead related to trauma or suppression, but characterized by a more invasive physicality. Whereas ghosts, one could say, are bodies without flesh, zombies are like bodies without souls, driven by desire and therefore often (e.g. in movies) remaining impersonal.

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Rebentisch notes in her incisive catalogue essay.26 Their absent presence thus appears to be the product of a power that (like Christianity beforehand) has a highly ambivalent relationship to the body: moving it into the center of visibility, it simultaneously divests it of any intrinsic value. The body is everywhere, but as a spectacle, as a commodity, much the same as the fashionable clothes it shows off. Fa u s t brings the spectrality of the neoliberal spectacle right into the middle of the crowd, whose curiosity is simultaneously demonstrated to be an active part of this economy. The work thus does not disrupt the flows of capital but bolsters them until they become eerie and at times insufferable. Fa u s t is not positioned outside the neoliberal synchrony; instead, it repeats it. In Imhof’s performative arrangement everything, including the audience that views, photographs, mirrors, and exhibits itself, is ultimately so gripped by the spectacular self-presentation that “even the most ordinary and minor detail” is turned into “its theatric double, […] dissimilar or sinister to itself.”27 In the space of the German Pavilion, cramped due to the large audience numbers, the spectacular visibility is carried to its extreme and an uneasiness arises, a resistive impulse. Instead of trying to please or take a stance of a critical superiority and sovereign distance, Imhof’s work coopts its audience driving it to a moment of uneasiness, a strategy to be found also in queer-feminist dance (of e.g. Mette Ingvardsen or Ligia Lewis). The spectacle thus comes to an internal turnover, where an impulse of aversion raises that reaches further than the spaces of art in which it is generated. To reproach Imhof with renouncing radical art and affirmatively mingling art and stylish spectacle misses this point.28 Despite the explicit recognition of the spectral present of neoliberalism and its voiding synchronicity, the two strategies briefly outlined here seek to move beyond. They make it brittle in very different ways. Both refuse to operate from a 26| Juliane Rebentisch, “Dark Play. Anne Imhof's Abstractions,” in German Pavilion, 57. Biennale di Venezia, exh.cat. ed. Susanne Pfeffer (Cologne: Koenig, 2017), 25–33, 27. Rebentisch also points out the ‘undead’ appearance of the performers, whom she associates with vampire connotatios rather than ghostly or zombie-like qualities. 27| Rebentisch, “Dark Play,” 31. 28| Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Rock Paper Scissors,” Artforum International 56, no. 1 (2017), https://www. ar tforum.com/print/201707/benjamin-h-d-buchloh-on-some-means-and-ends-of-sculpture-at-venicemuenster-and-documenta-70461 (2019/3/27).

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position purportedly outside the dominant parameters, but look to act from within to disrupt the configuration of visibility and invisibility or turn against itself what informs the neoliberal economy and its culture of the spectacular: Raether through grotesque assemblages, Imhof through cool abstraction. In this way, both sabotage the present that so indifferently exploits everything without countering it with a form of heroic, thus individual resistance, which inevitably will be either quelled or assimilated. Rather, both draw nearer and nearer to the spectral co-presence of crowds so as to force a confrontation of the eerie synchrony with itself until a first displacement gestates: a “disjointed or disadjusted now.”29 |

29| Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1.

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Figures F ig . 1 a–d

Johannes Paul Raether, a| “TRANSFORMELLA,” 2012; b|“TRANSFORMALOR,” 2015; c|“SCHWARMWESEN,” 2015, d| “PROTECTORAMA,” 2012; qtd. from A full manual to understand Identitecture, n.d., n.p., http://johannespaulraether.net, n.p.; © Johannes Paul Raether.

F ig . 2 a–e

Johannes Paul Raether, Dismembered C ity Par tic le s, September 5, 2015, intervention, N 43°46’11.1’’ E 11°15’22.1’’, screenshots; qtd from http://johannespaulraether.net (geolocation); © Johannes Paul Raether.

F ig . 3 a–f

Anne Imhof, Angst II, 2016, performance, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; film on the exhibition, 6 screenshots; video by Nathan Corbin; qtd. from Freunde der Nationalgalerie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjVGOLmWmRw; © the artists.

F ig . 4 a–c

Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, performance, German Pavilion, 57. Biennale di Venezia; photos by Francesca Raimondi; courtesy German Pavilion 2017; © the artist.

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_The Presentation of Presentness and Presence

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Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

Ludger Schwarte

Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

Articulations of time are bound to performing cultural acts and are hence pervaded by cultural boundaries. Considered from this vantage point, the idea of a global time appears to be as much a modern fiction as that of a global history, namely as a thoroughly colonialist product. At the same time, media and technologies alter something in this constellation. The technological, cultural, and political milieus, latencies, and sources of friction, particularly perceivable and criticizable in artistic events, must be thought of in more global dimensions in the age of digital reproduction than was the case in the age of mechanical modernity. It thus seems obvious to take leave from the singular concept of time and proceed instead from a branching out of time conceptions which are conditioned through language, cultural history, society, and media technology. A vague idea of their similarity would be based on a cartography of differentiations of this sort; however, these too would demand explication when one wished to look at articulations of time which, within relatively homogenous cultural and social formations, are directed precisely against these, or at the very least seek to suspend, extend, or transform them. For there is not only complex layering of temporal fabrics everywhere, but also an agonal relationship between them. Historical turning-points are often articulations of conflicts between how time is counted, how its meaning or significance is interpreted, or how it is evaluated. When we want to say that the understanding of time in the quantum theory of the atomic age is simply incomparable to that of the sundial or that of Messianic conceptions, or that Hinduist and capitalist ideas of time preclude one another, then we are implying that time depends either on theories, on systems of signification or belief, or on clocks, instruments, and technological systems. With Cornelius Castoriadis we can distinguish between two institutions of time: the logical and the imaginary. Time is counted and interpreted: the logicaltechnological reality of time and its social and technological significance are mutu-

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ally dependent. The logical institution of time is metrical time, the subjugation of time to a measurement. The time instituted as imaginary is the time of meaning, the time of festivities, of stages in life. Both times maintain a relation of reciprocal implication. Sundials, calendars, or church clocks measure the time and at the same time assign it a meaning.1 Every measured point in time, every date, is therefore not merely a repeated event but the expression of a world order, specifically how it is imagined by the respective society.2 The question this poses is, in my view, against what do aesthetic intrinsic times actually define themselves and distinguish themselves from: from cultural intrinsic times, i.e. from the African, the Far Eastern, or the Kreuzberg notion of time? From chronological time or time regimes—for instance like that of the control society? Do aesthetic intrinsic times have their own temporal logic, their own mode and technique for counting time, or do they aim toward disarticulating the coupling of logical and imaginary time? Perhaps aesthetic temporalities seek to dissociate from “time per se;” mostly however, they engage with a specific temporal technique of domination, with a regime of time. The domination of time is not natural or a given, but is bound to forms of articulation, techniques, and subjectivation. This raises a second question: whether aesthetic intrinsic times merge into “other times” or even “counter-times” and if so, wherein would they differ from psychiatric intrinsic times for instance— which could be discussed in consideration of Michael Theunissen, who compares the aesthetic standing still of time with the psychotic fixation to the endless recurrence of the same and the schizophrenic arresting of time: “Fundamentally we are all subjected to the domination of time. In psychoses we are fully exposed to it […]. For depressive persons, time disintegrates into the units marked by clocks and calendars […]. Accordingly, the domination of time unfolds precisely in its elapsing: as being helplessly exposed to the endless recurrence of the same […]. Projective, schizophrenics also halt time; they attempt to disrupt the cycle of time units, this tedious, vast time without end.”3

1| See for example Thomas Macho, “Zeitrechnung und Kalenderreform. Arithmetische oder geometrische Paradigmen der Visualisierung von Zeit,” in Die mathematischen Wurzeln der Kultur. Mathematische Innovationen und ihre kulturellen Folgen, ed. Jochen Brüning and Eberhard Knobloch (Munich: Fink, 2005), 17–41. Peter Galison, Einsteins Uhren—Poincarés Karten. Arbeit an der Ordnung der Zeit (Frankfurt o.M.: Fischer, 2006). 2| “The essential manifestation of the world-order […] of the forces that dominate it, of the privileged moments of social activity—whether this concerns work, ritual, feasts, politics.” Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 210. 3| Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 49.

Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

Both—psychotic and schizophrenic modes of behavior—demonstrate, in Theunissen’s view, with great clarity the domination of time. But precisely which time is being considered here? Time is mostly thought of in terms of a distinction to pure presence [Präsenz], to being, or the eternity of God. Time is subject to becoming and passing, to change, to different levels of intensity. In philosophical considerations and theories of physics, time is mostly located on two sides simultaneously: outside of events, processes, and developments, as a form or measurement; or as that which constitutes the change, as the content and object of temporal experience. As form or measurement, time itself is not temporal, it is that in which the “authentically temporal”—in the sense of the transient—is played out, it is apriori and eternal. Plato stated that time is an image or likeness of eternity. Time, as formation and epitome of becoming, is depicted by Plato in Timaeus (37 C 6ff) as dependent on the objective motion of the planets. Time is the imitation of the becoming that moves in orbits, which itself is a sensualizing of eternity. Plato’s becoming thus knows no present, only the presentation of the eternal [Gegenwärtigen des Ewigen]. Still dominant today, the abstract concept of time is firmly established in Aristotle at the latest: for Aristotle, time is not an image or likeness, but a number. Aristotle defines time as the “the calculable measure or dimension of motion with respect to before-and-afterness.”4 Time has the character of a line, which is defined by a point where its parts come together: “Time is a whole and continuous; the present, past, future are linked.”5 As a measure, time articulated the length of the temporal and simultaneously generates the presentness with a measuring of the temporal, in relationship to something else, the earlier and later. As that needing to be measured, the temporal emerges out of movement. This movement can be considered under a temporal aspect and set in relationship to other movements, as earlier, later, or simultaneous. Are they respectively other presents, depending on how the past and future touch or shift the point of the present homogeneously and discretely along the line of measured time? Is time the preset or given measure, or, more generally, the course of continuous and discrete change, or is it the aggregate of the same? From Augustine to Kant, the objectivistic idea of a cosmic or physical time is opposed to a subjectivistic one. Kant understands time as “the form of an inner sense, i.e. of the intuition of our self and our inner state.”6 This form is then explicated variously, as the determination of the relationships of ideas, then as “a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series that is of only one 4| Aristotle, The Physics, IV. XI, 219b 1-2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 387. 5| Aristotle, The Categories, VI, 5a (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 39. 6| Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163.

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dimension,” 7 then as a mere succession of inner states, 8 and then again (not merely as the form of sensory intuition, but) as intuition itself. 9 In this latter respect, Kant speaks of—analogous to places—“lengths of time” and “positions of time for all inner perceptions from that which presents external things as alterable.”10 Whereas in the first case this tends towards a kind of program for plotting the succession of changes to inner states, for which only affects need to be presupposed, in the latter the presentation of the changeability of external things would be the provision for producing positions of time. But this production, like the concept of succession generally, is based, according to Kant, on the movement and self-reflection of the subject,11 on an action that, first and foremost, resides in an “act of attention” and an “act of determining.”12 In other words: the self-representation [Selbstvergegenwärtigung], as the elementary act, that underlies both perception and the “I think,” may be conditioned by inner and external stimuli, but it is always the expression of spontaneity. But here too it is not clear: does the present change? What is the duration of the present? A day, a second, an eternity? Is time that which specifies the measure of the present and dictates the rhythm of its change, or does it first result out of the changes which could or indeed could not occur? And what does occur, happen, or take place even mean when some pure becoming (nothing/something) or change of place is not meant, but the modification of a temporally conceived present, and as the case may be, an action? Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of time13 moves beyond the Augustinian tradition in the analysis of the present as a moment or instant [Augenblick] in so far as it substitutes the discrete moment with the concept of the time-field—at the time a first in philosophical theories of time.14 This time-field presents itself as a horizontal trinity: 1. the primal impression; 2. the retention; and 3. the protention. Husserl also speaks of a halo or a horizon. The constitution of the time-field is for Husserl an act of time-consciousness. 7| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163. 8| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 180. 9| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 178. 10| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 259. 11| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 259f. 12| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 260. 13| “Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins” (written 1905, 1909/11, published by Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein, 1928). 14| The concept of the time-field draws on Stern and James. William James (Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890) and Ludwig “William” Stern (“Psychologische Präsenzzeit,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 13 (1897), 325-349) had already spoken of the present as a “saddle,” for the present is not experienced as a point without extension, as a cut through the times, but as a saddle with the direction extendable in two different directions.

Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

The dimensions, the texture and the thickness of the time-field remain unclear in Husserl’s elaboration as well however: does it cover the fraction of a second, a day, a stage in a life? The sounding of a note, the melody, or the whole piece of music? 15 It is important to keep Husserl’s starting point in mind, namely “time objects.” These are objects which have a duration and change, like sounds or music in general.16 According to Husserl, time objects cannot be understood purely objectively, but need a time-consciousness: “we really hear; the temporal Object itself is perceived; the melody itself is the object of perception. And, likewise, temporal periods, temporal determinations and relations are themselves given, perceived.”17 Obviously this time-consciousness depends at least on these time objects’ design: “temporal objects […] spread their content over an interval of time.”18 It is in relation to these temporal objects that we complete acts of consciousness which differentiate between grasping the now, the past, and a primary expecting. However, in contrast to what Husserl claims here, the temporal differentiation in an act of consciousness does not “constitute” or “found” the temporal structure of the object. This is real. It is prior to the possibility of forming a timeconsciousness. Husserl fails to analyze this reality of time. For him, it is not the tone that counts, but the “now” of the primal impression, the apprehension that some tone is being struck. But without tones, or suitable sounds, then there is no timeconsciousness. For Husserl, consciousness is a constant flow, one in which the now is given a special distinction—that it is the source point in which the “primal impressions” are given. At this juncture, with the concept of presentification [Vergegenwärtigung] Husserl differentiates the reflexive act of consciousness from perception and its presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit]; he contrasts presentifying [Vergegenwärtigen] to perception as presenting [Gegenwärtigen]: “Here, perception is an act which brings something other than itself before us, an act which primordially constitutes the Object. Presentification, re-presentation [Vergegenwärtigung, Re-Präsentation], as the act which does not place an object itself before us, but just presentifies - places before us in images, as it were (if not precisely in the manner of true figurative consciousness)—is just the opposite of this.”19

15| “The temporal field always has the same extension. It is displaced, as it were, with regard to perceived and freshly remembered motion and its objective time in a manner similar to the way in which the visual field is displaced with regard to objective space.” Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 52. 16| Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 43-44. 17| Husserl, The Phenomenology, 58. 18| Husserl, The Phenomenology, 61. 19| Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology § 17, 63-64; cf. § 16, 60 [“perception as originary presentation”].

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Presentification is, according to Husserl, a “reproductive modified consciousness of the present,” i.e. an act in which not only something else is perceived, but also something absent can be imagined.20 In addition, Husserl distinguishes between a presentifying that, positioning itself in the now, directs its attention to something perceivable (as when remembering or expecting), and a presentifying that is non-positing and not in the present, like phantasy, which, neutral with respect to the existence of what is imagined, remains an act of the as-if.21 Thus, drawing on Husserl, it is possible to distinguish between actualizing, presenting, and presentifying. Taking up Husserl, albeit then embarking in a contrary direction, in his dissertation Vergegenwärtigung und Bildbewußtsein, Eugen Fink distinguishes between presentification [Vergegenwärtigung] as a mode of perception bound to temporality, and presentation [Gegenwärtigung] as an image consciousness that results from intuiting the pure present of the image reality.22 In contrast to presentification, which for Fink encompasses the flow of the imagination and perception, it is solely the standing image that is “presented.” What we encounter here is nothing other than a diametrically opposed use of the concepts of presentation [Gegenwärtigen] and presentification [Vergegenwärtigen]. Both Husserl and Fink however characterize presenting [Gegenwärtigung] as an act of consciousness. It seems to me, precisely with respect to “time objects,” that a contrary understanding is more convincing than the subject-centered one of phenomenology. According to Husserl, the original impression, the “primal impression,” first becomes prevalent a posterori, in the reflecting objectivation; the now is presentified, retentionally modified. The metronome of the now is thus always too late and distorted. The present, which we encounter in an articulated and counted now, takes place, its phases delayed, from the constitution of the object to the consciousness of the constituted object. This inability to grasp the present moment, 20| Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordecht: Springer, 2005), § 42, 94. 21| Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1982), § 103–114. 22| “Die Bildwelt ist absolut eindeutig bestimmt, soweit ihre Anschaulichkeit reicht; sie hat ferner auch keine temporalen Fernecharaktere in sich, die sie als vergangen, zukünftig oder möglich charakterisieren, sondern sie ist gegenwärtig, an ihr selbst zugänglich. Aber ist nicht die Bildwelt ein ‘Unwirkliches’? ‘Unwirklichkeit’ besagt hier offenbar etwas von Grund auf anderes als bei den Vergegenwärtigungen. Handelte es sich dort immer um die Unwirklichkeit einer Imagination, also eine Unwirklichkeit, die im Wesen der Zeitlichkeit und nicht der thematischen Gegenstände liegt, so geht es hier einzig um eine ‚Wirklichkeit,‘ die im präsentativ-urgestifteten Gehalt einer bestimmten Erlebnisart liegt.” Eugen Fink, “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit,” in id., Studien zur Phänomenologie, 1930–1939, Phaenomenologica 21 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966), 74f.

Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

the presence of the present, leads Jacques Derrida to criticize the metaphysics of presence and to deny the autonomy of the present. For Derrida, the immediate now is founded, on the contrary, in the retentional modification, the origin of the present lies in the trace: “The living present arises on the basis of its non-self-identity, and on the basis of the retentional trace. It is always already a trace. […] It is necessary to think originary-being from the trace and not the trace from originary-being.”23 Here the retentional “presentification” or re-presentation forms the structure in which the present takes shape at all. As the origin of the present, the trace precedes perception and shapes its protential schemata. Derrida has always emphasized that things are not simply given to perception. They are rather “presentified.” This does not mean however an act of representation. “Presentification” is rather a resistive act, whereby not only a present is produced by a subject in the perceiving designation, but is also made possible by a trace, one that is prior to the distinction between presence and absence.24 I would propose to sort these terms slightly differently: Actualization is orientated on the now-time, it consists in assigning of events to a timeline. It thus depends on a technique of counting time and a mediatization of temporal relations. Presenting is not exclusively traceable back to subject acts; instead, as Husserl’s example of the melody and Fink’s of the image have shown, it depends just as much on the temporal affordance of a thing or the meeting with a specific material configuration. There are time objects—objects which are constituted through duration and change. The structure of a “time object” establishes the duration of its present. Presenting, so it seems to me, therefore needs to be understood as the opening of a time field between a perceiving time-conscious and a time object. This does not occur by attention being directed to something or through the conscious reflection of the perceived; rather through a presence field [Präsenzfeld] in which materialization and perception mutually attract and hold. The present resulting from presenting needs always to be thought of as dynamic and oppositional. With presenting and actualizing we understand already two dominant ways to articulate time. Timepieces articulate actuality. Actuality is a

23| Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston/ IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 73. For an extension of the trace to the technical dispositif, see: Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Impossibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 441-461. 24| Cf. Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: The presence, the closeness, the given has determined, according to Derrida, the meaning of being in metaphysics. But in the presence of the present there lies even more: metaphysics has ignored the non-showing, the un-showable, the trace, the supplement. Unlike what the false alternative presence/ absence assumes, the trace is very much in play as the deferred, but does not show itself, dis-locating instead. See also Jacques Derrida, Ousia et grammé. Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 76f.

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calculated now-point.25 The actualized world-time of the internet binds the dating to a relative computer-location, but has to be “rendered present” each time anew. The counting of discrete time units does not yield time. The presenting also entails the publication of the time and, at the same time, the establishing of time’s validity at all. Presenting is an act that casts what will be or what passes onto the horizon of temporality, onto presence [Präsenz].26 As a rule, this happens when I conceive actual time, the now, as a form (of intuition, of experience, of life). The present produced by presenting concatenates different now-points and establishes a field of perception and action, mostly bound to techniques, media, and rituals. That which is regarded as present therein, identifiable and handable, is delimited from what is not yet and what is no longer.

Running contrary to this, presentifying [Vergegenwärtigen] eludes the conditions under which a time order becomes valid and is thus a modification of the presence field, or—to put it somewhat more straightforward—it is a process that leads out of the fabricated presence.27 Aesthetic intrinsic times are basically presentifying.

The verb present presents the present as the product of an act; as if the radius of the time, in which acts are realized, in which things happen, in which we can act and perceive that we act, would have a certain coherence, volume and plasticity, as if it was transparent and manipulable, dependent on acts of positioning, 25| Despite its origins in the experience of singular moments, we mostly experience time only in this derived form, namely as a published time, selected from a spatialization and converted into an available date. This dating constitutes actuality, which means that one count on and with time. “This dating of things in terms of the heavenly body which sheds forth light and warmth, and in terms of its distinctive ‘places’ in the sky, is a way of assigning time which can be done in our Being with one another ‘under the same sky,’ and which can be done for ‘Everyman’ at any time in the same way, so that within certain limits everyone is proximally agreed upon it. That by which things are thus dated is available environmentally and yet not restricted to the world of equipment with which one currently concerns oneself. It is rather the case that in the world the environing Nature and the public environment are always discovered along with it. This public dating, in which everyone assigns himself his time, is one which everyone can ‘reckon’ on simultaneously; it uses a publicly available measure. This dating reckons with time in the sense of a measuring of time; and such measuring requires something by which time is to be measured—namely, a clock.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 2008), § 80, 46. 26| “This comporting toward something present, this having-there of something present, a having which expresses itself in the now, we call the enprésenting [Gegenwärtigen] of something.” Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 260; here Heidegger calls relating to a then, to a future, ‘gewärtigen.’ 27| Contrary to Heidegger, who calls the present the pure now: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 47.

Presentations as Aesthetic Temporalities

perceiving, and consciousness. When we remember something or put ourselves in another position or place, and when one makes something experiential and evaluable, so proving his/her presence of mind, then one produces a present. Depending on subjectivation, we get used to a certain thickness, contour and stability of the present. Presentifying lends presence [Präsenz] to that which absent or imperceptible, to that which is only remnant and trace or portent and intimation. But then the present within which this presentification acts is not self-obvious: it has several expanses, layers and curves, we can lose ourselves in these present times or enter into close contact with another present, we can intensify it or negotiate it intersubjectively and color it. We can lose ourselves on the past or lose grip with time at all. But we can also sense that presence is not something we create by our bodily or mental acts (alone), but (also) something we enter or encounter. When do we know that we are present? How can we get out of the present? In my view, dis-presenting is to be understood as an assault on the hegemony of this time order, as an unfolding and configuring of intensities by the dissolution of time objects and/or the puctiation of the temporal horizon. As the counterpart of acts of presentification, dis-presentation would be an objective process in which the real of time becomes perceivable, and there is no subjective referring to a presupposed presence [Präsenz]. One can thus differentiate between aesthetic and artistic intrinsic times. Dis-presentation is the subversion of presentations, and is therefore also distinct from the representational acts of consciousness which, in the fabricated present-field, render demonstrable the sensory manifoldness of temporal impressions as an actual experience. In contrast to this renewed presenting, “to dis-present something” means foremost: to carve it out, to suspend it from the presence field. This implies that one can intentionally surrender oneself to an experiment that defies being immediately accountable as a momentary experience. Accordingly, to dis-present something means to expose it to a real time, beyond the countable times and at the border of our horizon of sense. The present can be (through and in media) enhanced, intensified, and multiplied, one can border and configure it. One can simulate it, but, unlike actuality, it cannot be produced. “Gegen-wart”—pre-sent, to be in front of/con-fronted by something—means that something is opposite me, has awaited me, has expected me. The present is a configuration. I enter into a present that has already expected or anticipated me, it is before me, it surrounds me. If presentation means placing something before my senses, and representation to bring this once again into the horizon of the senses, then dis-presentation would be the act that suspends precisely the constitutive claims of this horizon and the configuration of this time order. Accordingly, dis-presenting also means to move out of actuality and out of the coherence of the present, to the border of perception, there where something can happen without being expected or focused. The present of the perceived stands opposite, within the borders of the present, of the respective possibility of percep-

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tion, of attention, of the schema, and of the time measurement. The present, out of which dis-presenting pulls us, may be stable or dynamic, it may be conceptualized and experienced variously: dis-presenting is always an act in which my perception is pulled out of the time in which I exist and can numerate the surrounding objects. Through the interplay between presentifying and dis-presenting, one can get in touch with pure change. Dis-presenting in this sense is, in my view, that which distinctively characterizes artistic intrinsic times—including in relation to psychotic and schizophrenic disorders of the present. Dis-presenting is the intersubjective severing or destructing of the presenting, which is underpinned by media and culture, of actuality, assisted in this by incommensurable change. Referencing pure change, futurity, is what I miss in contemporary art.28 |

28| For detailed considerations on this see my book Notate für eine künftige Kunst (Berlin: Merve, 2016).

Extreme Situations of the Political

Iris Därmann

Extreme Situations of the Political. Hannah Arendt’s Article “The Concentration Camps” (1948)

1

In 1948 an article by Hannah Arendt entitled “Konzentrationsläger” was published in Die Wandlung, a monthly edited by Dolf Sternberger. For years it was probably the only theoretical attempt to confront this “region of brutal facticity.”2 At the time, Arendt was already taking a perspective focusing on aspects relevant to a theory of totalitarianism, and it was for this reason that she considered the Soviet concentration camps side by side with the concentration and extermination camps of the National Socialist regime. In both cases one faces the “most consequential institution of totalitarian rule” ever.3 In the article she resorted to a metaphor that swiftly began to circulate amongst perpetrators,4 victims, observers, and survivors alike, a

1| This article is a shortened version of the chapter „Extremsituationen des Politischen. Hannah Arendt, „Konzentrationsläger“ (1948)“, in Iris Därmann, Undienlichkeit: Gewaltgeschichte und politische Philosophie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2020). 2| Hannah Arendt and Kurt Blumenfeld, “… in keinem Besitz verwurzelt,” in Die Korrespondenz, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), letter by Hannah Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld dated July 19, 1947, 43. 3| Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review 15, no. 7 (1948) in collaboration with Karl Jaspers, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and Alfred Weber, ed. Dolf Sternberger, 743–763, 746. 4| As noted by Raul Hilberg, the Polish-German SS doctor Friedrich Entress, stationed at the main Auschwitz camp and active in Auschwitz Monowitz, appears to have been the first to speak of the production of corpses as if on “a conveyor belt:” The Destruction of the European Jews [1961], vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University press, 2005), 1033ff. Using the term “death factory” implies the parrying question if it is indeed possible that the “monstrosity of the killing” could be the “work of humans.” See Alf Lüdtke, “Der Bann der Wörter: ‘Todesfabriken,’” Werkstatt Geschichte 13 (1996): 5–18, 10.

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metaphor used by Josef Sacker, member of the “Sonderkommando” in Auschwitz,5 and Raul Hilberg,6 as well as Martin Heidegger,7 albeit with contrary intentions of bearing witness and providing historical understanding on the one hand, and serving self-exoneration and relativizing the Holocaust on the other: Arendt spoke of “factories of annihilation,”8 of “extermination factories,”9 of “the corpse factories invented by the Nazis.”10 The focus of her attention was not the technological procedures employed by the SS in the “Final Solution,” namely the mass gassing with Zyklon B and the dual muffle ovens used for burning and cremating corpses produced by the Erfurt-based firm Topf & Söhne for the Auschwitz concentration camp since the summer of 1940;11 nor was she interested in the theatrical deception system installed by the SS to minimize tumults and resistance amongst those selected for gassing. Rather, her attention was directed towards the “tactical organizational measures” employed in the manufacturing of the “living dead.”12 “The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses.”13 The so-called “Muselmänner”14 formed, as Primo Levi put it, the “backbone of the camp” at Auschwitz: “an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”15 In camp slang also known as “cripples,” the “rotting,” and the “gems,” these “men in decay”16 were so enfeebled and exhausted that they 5| Josef Sacker, “To Survive, so the Truth Would Come Out,” in “We wept without Tears. Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, ed. Gideon Greif (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press 2005), 87–121, 101 (“industrialized death machine”). 6| Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), X, 27, 65, 79 (“the machinery of destruction”). 7| It is no surprise that in 1949 Martin Heidegger adopted the idiom of the perpetrators and spoke of the “Fabrikation von Leichen” which blocked the victims from access to the “Wesen des Todes.” Martin Heidegger, “Die Gefahr,” in id., Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, GA, vol. 79, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt o.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 46–67, 56. 8| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 763. 9| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 762. 10| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 762. 11| Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, 946. 12| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 746. 13| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 751. 14| Danuta Wesołowska, Wörter aus der Hölle. Die “lagerszpracha” der Häftlinge von Auschwitz (Kraków: Impuls, 1998), 115–121. 15| Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2004), 96. 16| Levi, If This Is a Man, 95.

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could barely stand, think, or speak. Their expression was vacant and apathetic, their skin covered with ulcers and scabs. The other prisoners steered clear of them, full of fear that they may contract a harmless illness from them, which then however, due to their own exhaustion, could be their undoing; and they averted their gaze from them, because in them they glimpsed the tangible forerunners of their own fate.17 Through which measures, Arendt asked, did the SS succeed in fixating millions of people for an unspecific period of time in a zone between life and death and transforming them into a mere “bundle of reactions?”18 Here she discerned three violent methods: the killing of the juridical, the moral, and the individual person. With respect to the killing of the “juridical person,” already upon their deportation to the extermination camps those affected were deprived of the possibility of appealing to a third and neutral instance and asserting their elementary human rights. Particularly perfidious in this process of an absolute disenfranchisement of rights was that the largest prisoner group by far, the European Jews, was completely innocent. The destruction of the identity of the juridical person was “most fully realized in the gas chambers,” in as far as the mass extermination was no longer intended for individual cases but “only for people in general.”19 Moreover, in the camps conditions were created in which “to do good becomes utterly impossible.”20 The killing of the moral person in man was ultimately founded on how “the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims.”21 Finally, the destruction of the “differentiation of the individual, his unique identity,” was based on inflicting tortures which were calculated “to manipulate the human body—with its infinite possibilities of suffering—in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental diseases of organic origin.”22 Those turned into “‘uncomplaining animals’”23 could hardly be expected to have actively resisted: “Millions of human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas chambers […].” And moreover, persons “individually condemned to death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them,” while “there were scarcely any serious revolts,” and “even in the moment of liberation there were very few spontaneous massacres of SS men.” This was all possible because “to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s 17| So the references and assessment of Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 209f. 18| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 760. See also id.. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1985), 437f. 19| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 754. 20| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 757. 21| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 757. 22| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 758. 23| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 743 and 759: “Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human beast […].”

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power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events.”24 Informed by the perspective of natality, with her assessment of the annihilation measures and practices targeting the person Arendt expounded however the “most consequential institutions of totalitarian rule” 25 into “total” organizations. Arendt most certainly knew of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19 to May 16, 1943. On April 23, four days after the launching of the uprising, one of its commanders, Mordechai Anielewicz, who on May 8, 1943, together with his fellow resistance fighter and girlfriend Mira Fuchrer and the majority of the members of the Jewish Fighting Organization gathered in the central command bunker, the Miła 18, took his life26 to avoid capture after General Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, ordered the deployment of poison gas, wrote to his co-commander Yitzhak Zuckerman: “I can’t describe to you the conditions in which the Jews are living. Only a few individuals will hold out. All the rest will be killed sooner or later. The die is cast. In all the bunkers where our comrades are hiding, you can’t light a candle at night for lack of oxygen. […] Be well, my friend. Perhaps we shall meet again. The main thing is the dream of my life has come true. I’ve lived to see a Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.”27

But in 1946 did Hannah Arendt know about the uprising of the “Sonderkommando” in Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944, or even of the prisoner revolts in June 1943 in the ghettos of Lemberg, in Tschenstochau (June 1943), in Będzin (August 3, 1943) and in Białystok (August 1943), or in the extermination camps Treblinka (August 1943) and Sobibór (October 1943)? She was not the only one however to think that the possibilities of Jewish resistance against the Nazi regime 24| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 759. 25| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 746. 26| Yehuda Bauer, Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust (Tel-Aviv: MOD Books, 1989), 127. 27| April 23, 1943, Warsaw, letter by Mordechai Anielewicz to his fellow commander on the ‘Aryan side’ of the ghetto wall, Yitzhak Zuckerman. Icchak Cukierman, in Faschismus—Getto—Massenmord. Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges, ed. Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (Berlin: Röderberg, 1961), Dok. 427, 518f. For the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [1961], vol. 2, 520ff. Markus Roth, Andrea Löw, Das Warschauer Getto. Alltag und Widerstand im Angesicht der Vernichtung (Munich: Beck, 2013). In the Warsaw Ghetto the group Oyneg Shabes, headed by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, commenced collecting material for an underground archive during the summer of 1940; buried in tin boxes and milk churns, the archive was to document Jewish life under the Nazi occupation for posterity. In 1946, not least thanks to the unstinting effort of Rachel Aucherbach, one of Ringelblum’s earliest assistants, most of the material was recovered in the ruins of the former ghetto, under the rubble of the building at 68 Nowolipki Street. See Samuel D. Kassow, Ringelblums Vermächtnis. Das geheime Archiv des Warschauer Ghettos (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2010), 15.

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were almost negligible. Raul Hilberg also shared this view.28 Under the conditions of “systematic starvation” and “systematic torture” and in an “atmosphere of permanent dying,”29 the very possibility of the political and the formation of political communities in the Nazi extermination camps seemed themselves to have been annihilated. But here everything depends upon what resistance actually signifies in these spaces of power and violence that were the camps. And also upon if the political in its complete wealth of activity and passivity, in its smallest and most unremarkable events, is thought of as ensuing from natal and mortal suffering. What is unquestionable is that it—with the belatedness of history—needs to be finally brought to light. Bruno Bettelheim was imprisoned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps between 1938 and 1939. Based on his own experiences and his psychoanalytical work with Holocaust survivors, he outlined means for “surviving” and a “psychology of extreme situations.” Bettelheim addressed the double problem of “surviving.” Firstly, there is the disintegrative experience of “being imprisoned in a German concentration camp,” which in effect has “completely destroyed one’s social existence;” secondly, there are the “life-long aftereffects of such a trauma, which seem to require very special forms of mastery if one is not to succumb to them.”30 To survive, the capacity to summon the strength of self-assertion, preserving selfrespect, staying true to oneself, and dignity are all necessary, and not least the possibilities afforded by social bonding as “supporting,” stabilizing moments, and indeed these need to be already present in the “extreme situation” of imprisonment.31 The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has analyzed both armed and unarmed forms of Jewish resistance. In Hebraic, he has characterized the latter as “amida”— “to stand upright,” to “stand firm,” “to rise up against another.”32 He has explored the social, religious, cultural, and political practices of resistance Jews resorted to in their response to German persecution and extermination in the ghettos: these included defying the prohibition on setting up schools, kindergartens, orphanages and hospitals, as well as the staging of theatre performances and the holding of

28| Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [1961], vol. 2, 515ff.; for a contrary view, see the chapter “Jewish Fighting” in Bauer, Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust, 129–137, 124. “Jewish Fighting was not only of considerable size, but represented an armed protest of the greatest significance. We have already seen the considerable dimensions of Jewish Fighting. One should, however, remember that this only started when the Jewish realized that there was no alternative; that the Nazis were planning to kill all Jews.” 29| Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” 748. 30| Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: New York Vintage Books, 1980), 25–28. 31| Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays, 105. 32| Bauer, Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust, 86–95; id., Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 2001), 120f., 127, 143-166.

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concert and commemorative evenings for those murdered by the SS.33 “Amida” aimed to “sanctify life,”34 to preserve Jewish culture and dignity, to maintain an elementary morality “in a completely immoral world.”35 In 1941 Hannah Arendt had demanded the formation of an international Jewish voluntary army to take part in the war against the Nazi regime, expressing the view that the Jewish people could not “profit” in a political sense “from Hitler’s defeat if we don’t also contribute to it.” In this context she emphasized that the “famous” and, as she instantly added, “infamous” “Jewish will to live” over the last 200 years of European history “has threatened to degenerate into something totally negative: the will to survive at any price.”36 As Arendt wrote these lines in November 1941, she could not know that since the fall of 1941, Odilo Globočnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, was carrying out the order to set up the three extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.37 Until their disbandment at the end of 1943,38 some 1 366 000 people, most of them Jewish, were murdered in the three 3 3| In the Vilnius Ghetto, the first concert was held on May 4, 1942, accompanied by heated debate on whether a theatre could be founded on, as it was described, the grounds of a cemetery; see Gudrun Schroeter, “Jüdischer Widerstand in Ghettos 1939–1944,” in Lernen aus der Geschichte, January 20 (2010), 6-7. “In memoirs and recollections it is documented that many people exposed to the dehumanizing and hopeless conditions found the hour of rest provided by the concert to be akin to a sacral experience. Avrom Sutzkewer describes the atmosphere of the first evening, that each tone was a warning reminder honoring the murdered, ‘... MENTSHN SAYNEN GESHTANEN, WI ME SHTEY T LEBN AN OFENEM KEY WER.’ During the first months of the theatre’s existence, themes taken from Jewish literature, works by Aleiychem, Perez, and Bialik were performed, then a few productions from the Ghetto were added.” Gudrun Schroeter, “Konzert- und Theaterplakate aus dem Wilnaer Ghetto 1941–1943,” http://www.juden-in-europa.de/baltikum/ wilnaer-ghetto.htm. See also Gudrun Schroeter, Worte aus einer zerstörten Welt. Das Ghetto in Wilna (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2008). 3 4| Bauer, Jewish Reactions to the Holocaust, 86f. In the Middle Ages the goal of the enemies and suppressors of the Jews was to dissuade them from their faith, who had responded with the “sanctifying of God’s name” and the saying: “You can take away my body, but not my soul.” In the 20 th century, the Nazi regime and the Germans were not concerned with questions of faith, but were aiming at the physical annihilation of European Jews. Now the Jews responded with the idea of “the Sanctifying of Life:” “This meant that one should do everything to preserve Jewish life.” 35| Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 120, 155f. 36| Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish Army—the Beginning of Jewish Politics,” in id., The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 136–139, 137f. 37| Sarah Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), 21. With thanks to Michael Wildt for this reference. 38| The extermination camps were closed in the fall of 1943 in the wake of prisoner uprisings in Sobibór and Treblinka. To prevent further uprisings, Himmler ordered the murder of all Jewish prisoners pressed into forced labor in the district of Lublin. Under the codename “Erntefest” (“Harvest Festival”), the ensuing mass murder involved 2000 men from the Waffen-SS who murdered 42 000 Jews in Majdanek, Trawniki,

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extermination centers of the “Generalgouvernement.”39 Beginning with the first mass killings in the spring of 1942, Rudolf Höß then developed Auschwitz-Birkenau over the course of 1943, i.e. “as Belzec was already abandoned, and the murdering in Sobibór and Treblinka, following the attempted revolts of August 14 and October 1, 1943 […], as well as the deportations to Majdanek” had been stopped, into the “center” of the extermination of European Jews.40 In her 1946 article “The Jewish State,” Hannah Arendt once again considered the “chief concern of the Jewish people for centuries: survival at any price.” For the survivors of the Holocaust, this chief concern is probably “gone forever.” Now “something essentially new” concerns Jews: “the desire for dignity at any price.”41 The survivors however were telling of their desperate struggle to survive with dignity, their efforts to resist being manufactured into “living dead” and to inform the world about the crimes of annihilation by smuggling documents. On March 6, 1964, the 24th day of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, Hermann Langbein presented to the court the possibilities of resistance in the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp and told a subversive story on the origins of the tattooing of numbers there: “The main resistance in Auschwitz was naturally to save lives. Because the chief activity of the SS was to exterminate life. It began on a very small scale. It began with trying to ‘organize’ food. It began with trying to swap prisoners with corpses. That is the reason why prisoner numbers were then tattooed: in isolated cases—this was only possible in very few individual cases—one could swap someone from outside who it was thought and Pontiatowa, bringing “Operation Reinhardt” to an “official conclusion” in the “Generalgouvernement.” Patricia Heberer, “Von der ‘Aktion T4’ zum Massenmord an den europäischen Juden. Der Transfer des Tötungspersonals,” Germ. trans. Angela Martin, in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, ed. Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), 165-175. 39| Dieter Pohl, “Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt,’” in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, 185–195, 193. 4 0| Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz. Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2004), 77. Rudolf Höß claimed that in the summer of 1942 he was commissioned by Himmler to “carry out” the “Führer’s order” and proceed with the “final solution of the Jewish question” in the Auschwitz concentration camp, erected the year before, and make the camp’s infrastructure and technology serviceable for the mass annihilation of European Jews. See Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen des Rudolf Höß, ed. Martin Broszat, 16. ed. (Munich: DTV, 1994), 237f., 239, 240, 244. Meanwhile the consensus is that Höß is mistaken about when he received this order to murder European Jews from Himmler. See Robert Jan van Pelt, “Auschwitz,” trans. Christine Brocks, in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, 196–218, 199f.; Karin Orth, “Rudolf Höß und die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage,’ Drei Argumente gegen die Datierung auf den Sommer 1941,” Werkstatt Geschichte 18 (1997): 45–57, 57. 41| Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State: Fifty Years After, Where Have Herzel’s Politics Led?,” in id., The Jewish Writings, 375-387, 386.

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that they were in grave danger with someone dead, one could give him the number of the dead and write him off as dead, so that for the Political Department he was dead and could no longer be hunted down.”42

Witold Pilecki, who as a member of the Polish underground organization ZOW (Związek Organizacji Wojkowych) volunteered to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to—assisted by the Polish Home Army— provide reports on SS perpetrators and conditions in the camp, to draft maps and compile statistics, and not least to give accounts of the mass gassings43 for the Polish exile government in London as well as to organize the camp-internal resistance, tells of saving lives in similar ways: “During the high death rate from typhus, when great numbers of corpses were thrown out daily from a number of blocks, two of our people were admitted to hospital as serious cases; we saved them by writing their numbers on corpses with similar numbers, taking care too that the dead men did not have any serious unfinished business with the political department. Thus, also equipped with changed personal details (provided by colleagues in the Schreibstube), we managed to get them into Birkenau straight from

42| 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess. “Strafsache gegen Mulka u.a.,” 4 Ks 2/63, Landgericht Frankfurt am Main, 24. Verhandlungstag, 6.3.1964. Vernehmung des Zeugen Hermann Langbein (49). For resistance and the possibilities to resist in Auschwitz, see Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, trans. Harry Zohn, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 321ff., 323: “Besides the saving of human lives, another task in the extermination camp forced itself on those who could think beyond themselves and the barbed wire: not to let the truth about the extermination methods of Nazism perish together with the victims.” (393) The fundamental skepticism and incredulousness with which the outside world received the written reports smuggled out of the camp on the mass annihilation of European Jews were to be dispelled with the help of photographs. The camera smuggled into the camp by the resistance organization “was brought to the Sonderkommando in a food pail with a false bottom, and pictures were taken from the roof of a crematorium” (340). For the four blurry photographs on “film snatched from hell” and photography as an act of resistance, see above all Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3–47, 3. 4 3| See the report by Jerzy Tabeau, that by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler as well as from Czeslaw Mordsowicz and Arnošt Rosin (all of whom were deported to Auschwitz after 1942) in Henryk Ś wiebocki, London wurde informiert. Berichte von Auschwitz-Flüchtlingen, Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (O ś wi ę cim: Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1997). For more on the “collecting of documents and evidence of the crime” and the resistance movement in Auschwitz, see Adam Bujak, Teresa Ś wiebocki, and Henryk Ś wiebocki, Auschwitz. Residenz des Todes, Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (O ś wi ę cim: Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2003), 15. In 1944 the camp resistance movement “compiled a so-called ‘hangman’s list’ for Auschwitz. It contained the names of the SS men who were mainly responsible for crimes committed there. The Polish underground movement sent this list secretly to London and the BBC made it public to the whole world.”

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the hospital. There they were completely unknown, new numbers, zugangs, their trail ran cold and the plan worked.”44

To be already dead, i.e. to be marked with the prisoner number of a dead person, could possess a subversive meaning under the conditions of the camp, indeed it could introduce a sense of meaning in the absurd senselessness of the camp. For Hannah Arendt, the concern with surviving and just saving mere life could never develop into a sense of political direction, at no time and at no place.45 Neither in the protected private and intimate sphere of the home, nor in the extreme situations of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Revolutionary struggles, pursuing the goal of liberation from the suffering and misery of poverty, provided at best pre-political conditions for the actual practice and manifesting of the political, a sphere in which the concern is rather, through mutual action and dialogue, beyond power and violence, i.e. “in the space where freedom can appear,”46 and under the creative sign of natality, “to embark on something new.” 47 A life well lived is separated by a divide from mere life, from, one could say, the vita passiva. That birth and being-born are eminently pathic experiences fails to play a role for Arendt’s political initium.48 Her understanding of what she claims as the politicalpublic domain is also characterized by underdetermining the pathic. Arendt marks out the political realm as a kind of perpetual stage, one that “rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deed.’” Given this genuinely theatrical dimension of the political space of “appearing before an audience,”49 in which each participant is at once actor and speaker, seen and heard, it could be expected that Arendt would position the constitutive entwinement of pathos and practice, of suffering and action, at the center of the political. Instead, she outlines the political exclusively as the vita activa, without taking seriously the critical, irritating, and questioning potential of the experience of being seen and heard, and indeed not sole4 4| Witold Pilecki, The Auschwitz Volunteer Beyond Bravery, trans. Jarek Garlinski (Los Angeles: Aquila Polonia, 2012), 182. 4 5| See Judith Butler’s pertinent criticism of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy in relation to a performative and bodily understanding of the political: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 203ff. 4 6| This was the thrust of her criticism of Karl Marx, who she saw as reducing the political to economic questions. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1963]), 54. “And since he, unlike his predecessors in the modern age but very much like his teachers in antiquity, equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very center of human endeavor.” 47| Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Cheshire: Stellar Classics, 2014), 82. 4 8| Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2 nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177. 4 9| Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.

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ly in the realm of political action and communication, sharply demarked from the activities of labor and work, but also at the place of domestic coexistence. Her distributing of the activities of labor, work, and action to the domestic and political sphere brings with it the loss of the pathic dimension of the political as well as the question of human resistance to servitude. The trenchant distinction drawn between oikos and polis, which Arendt emphatically invokes, only makes sense from the slave-owner perspective of Aristotle and blocks an appreciation for how the despotic spaces of power and violence wherein labor and forced labor are played out, were turned into an arena of political gestures, which could then transform them into a political space of dangerous rallies and demonstrations of equality. While the French Revolution might have been an eminent political event, the Haitian Revolution, beginning in August 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue and culminating in the founding of the sovereign state of Haiti on January 1, 1804, is not for Arendt. How else is it possible to understand her obviously erroneous statement that there is a “striking absence of serious slave rebellions in ancient and modern times?”50 Arendt not only passes over in silence the passive and active resistance of Americans of African origin, but moreover, like Hegel, Marx, and Engels before her, the Haitian Revolution. As Jews exiled in the United States, it was no coincidence that in the 1940s the Austrian sociologists Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer were the first to focus their attention on the active and passive practices of resistance to slavery. On the basis of narratives of ex-slaves, their thick description of the day-to-day resistance to slavery lends the subversive practices of Americans of African origin a political weight for the first time, prior to them triggering revolts and swelling into revolutionary movements. Amongst these varied practices they counted escape, skipping work, playing sick, slowing the pace of work, dancing through the night until utter exhaustion, destroying of working tools and animals, theft, ridiculing the planters, pretending, masking their true feelings, arson, poisoning of slaveholders, and witchcraft.51 The great art of inconspicuous action and least resistance, irritating the power holding authority and ready to exercise violence, and indeed causing it to founder, when even for just a moment, can be articulated in scarcely noticeable deviations and omissions. Then there are the offensive and provocative refusals to obey orders, the tricky tactics and strategies,52 the small confrontations,53 potential 5 0| Arendt, The Human Condition, 215. 51| Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” The Journal of Negro History 27, no. 4 (1942): 388–419. 52| Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29ff. 5 3| Michel Foucault, “Macht und Wissen” [interview with S. Hasumi, recorded in Paris on October 13, 1977], Germ. trans. Michael Bischoff, in id., Dits et Écrits, vol. III (Frankfurt o.M: Suhrkamp, 2003), 515–534, 524.

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triggers for larger power struggles. To occasionally and selectively wrest oneself free of the despotic authority and exercise this freedom, which in the first instance means inaction, to do nothing, means to articulate the ‘no’ of disobedience, i.e. resist servitude through the myriad possibilities of “dis-servicing.”54 In slavery’s spaces of power and violence, freedom could also consist in making oneself weak and incapable of executing the despotic will. In the extreme situations of transatlantic slavery, where people were reduced through the infliction of extreme violence to their bodies, practices of evasion and enfeeblement marked out the political in statu nascendi: resistance destructive of self and other, expressed in abortion, self-mutilation, and suicide, were—under the prevailing conditions of slave breeding and sexual and exploitative violence—disruptive practices of a de-appropriating body politics and of “dis-servicing.” These practices inflicted a severe blow against the holders of power, namely the loss of workforce and possessions, and confronted them with an unpassable boundary revealing that their powers of control and disposal were limited. As practices of unified weakness and potentia passiva,55 they simultaneously represented paradoxical movements of physical-corporeal self-reclamation and probably one of the most challenging acts of despair, a balancing act of self-liberation, imaginable. The political in extreme situations must not only be thought of from the natality of resistive survival, but also from the mortality and transitivity of death. This pertains to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps in particular. Hermann Langbein has reported that suicide was a question much discussed amongst the prisoners. In the context of the racist Nazi Thanatos-politics, saving life was not the only resistive practice but so too was suicide, evidenced by how failed attempts were severely punished: once the mass killings got underway, suicides were viewed by the SS as acts of self-assertion and self-determination, running contrary to the claim of absolute power over the life and body of the inmates.56 Jean Améry, who having survived Auschwitz took his own life in 1978, described this as follows: “It was characteristic for the situation of the prisoner in regard to death that only a few decided to ‘run to the wire,’ as one said, that is, to commit suicide through contact with the highly electrified barbed wire. The wire was after all a good and rather certain thing, but it was possible that in the attempt to approach it one would be caught first and thrown into the bunker, and that led to a more difficult and more painful dying.”57

5 4| See Iris Därmann, Undienlichkeit. Gewaltgeschichte und politische Philosophie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2020). 5 5| Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., trans. and with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 199, 201. 56| Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 115. 57| Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 17.

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All resistance practices of activation and passivation, and in particular the literal body politics of “dis-serviceability,” which aim to make the “most consequential institutions of totalitarian rule” not total and complete, must be taken seriously as extreme situations of the political and made distinct, and all the more so when this occurs with irreducible belatedness and as historically deferred action. Spaces of political appearance and spectatorship in the sense articulated by Hannah Arendt are at best spheres of action and communication amongst those present, i.e. they are presentist and symmetrically constituted; in extreme situations however, the political takes place in pathic suffering, in the invisible and the inaudible, in the historical asymmetry of showing and watching, of witnessing and bearing witness, in the surviving of people, in the surviving of traces, things, narratives, memories, and images in spite of all, in resistive insistance.58 The first secret notes on life in the “Sonderkommandos” at the Auschwitz extermination camp were written by the prisoners themselves, risking death in their living quarters, to document “how and by what means they have destroyed millions of the people known for their humility.”59 The other members of the unit were exempted from duty to this end. Jaacov Freimark, a former prisoner of the “Kanada” Kommando, provided Salmen Gradowski, one of the six authors, with rough writing paper made out of cement bags. He wrote the wealth of material for the future historian because he could not know whether “at tomorrow’s sunrise, the witnesses to the night of cruel darkness will be able to arise.”60 Chaim Herman, Salmen Gradowski, Salmen Lewenthal, Lejb Langfus, and Marcel Nadjari, the name of the sixth author is still not known, placed the so-called “The Scrolls of Auschwitz” (Megolith Auschwitz) in glass jars and hid them for posterity. Some of them were discovered; a part of them still lie buried in the soil of Birkenau.61 |

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5 8| Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All. 59| Salmen Gradowski, “Writings“ (September 6, 1944), in Ber Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishing House, 1985), 173–205, 173, Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears, 173–205, 48. See Pavel Polian, ed., Briefe aus der Hölle. Die Aufzeichnungen des jüdischen Sonderkommandos Auschwitz, trans. from Russian by Roman Richter, revised by Andreas Kilian (Darmstadt: WBG, 2019). 6 0| Gradowski, “Writings,“ 174. 61| Greif, We Wept Without Tears, 46.

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Maximilian Bergengruen

“Fortrollende Gegenwart:” Psychopathology and Epical Present Tense in Georg Heym’s Der Irre and Der Dieb In Georg Heym’s volume of short stories Der Dieb (The Thief) there are two stories dealing with the themes of psychopathology and theological time (and its sublation): Der Dieb (The Thief) and Der Irre (The Madman).1 Both stories, like the other texts, were written in 1911. The collection was published posthumously in 1913. Via the discursive links of the ‘Neue Club’ (‘New Club’)2 but also through his own independent study, Heym had come into contact with theories from psychology3 and Lebensphilosophie4 in the years 1910 and 1911. At the same time, while 1| For the role of the author Heym in the posthumous publication of his work, see Alexander Nebrig, “Expressionistische Nachlassgeburten. Georg Heyms postume Autorschaft,” in Nachlassbewusstsein. Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, ed. Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2017), 346–363. 2| On the short time and instability of the association, see Gunter Martens, “Georg Heym und der ‘Neue Club,’” in Georg Heym. Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1968), 390–400; Peter Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” in Literarisches Leben in Berlin 1871–1933. Studien, vol. 2, ed. Peter Wruck (Berlin: Akademie, 1987), 7–44; Achim Aurnhammer, “Verehrung, Parodie, Ablehnung. Das Verhältnis der Berliner Frühexpressionisten zu Hofmannsthal und der Wiener Moderne,” Cahiers d’Études Germaniques 24 (1993): 30–31. This discursive connection is documented in Martens, “Georg Heym und der ‘Neue Club,’” 402–438; Richard Sheppard, ed., Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980). 3| For the reception of psychology in the New Club and Heym himself: Akane Nishioka, Die Suche nach dem wirklichen Menschen. Zur Dekonstruktion des neuzeitlichen Subjekts in der Dichtung Georg Heyms (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 177–180. 4| On Heym’s study and exploration of philosophical theories, cf. Nishioka, Suche nach dem wirklichen Menschen, 203–208.

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writing he took his orientation from a literary text that, also discursively informed, dealt with the same psychiatric themes (in particular “Verfolgungsideen” [‘ideas of being followed or persecuted’])5 and related them, albeit not in the same way, to (para-)theological notions: Alfred Döblin’s Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup). Shaped by literary practice, this connection between these two discursive strands may be described in Heym’s work as follows: an external being-in-time—in the terminology of this volume: presentness—is sublated in favor of an inner time in the cases of the eponymous and unnamed protagonists. This psychological intrinsic time is not structured so that an inner succession of felt senses of time is produced through memory; but rather so that, via psychopathology (I), a path is forged to a different, metaphysical sense of time, or more precisely: a sublation of time (II). This path can be traced into the finest details of the narrative style, in particular the choice of tense (III).

I. Psychopathology Based on the contemporary understanding of paranoia or “Dementia paranoides,”6 Heym’s Der Irre describes the hallucinations (“Sinnestäuschungen” and “Erinnerungsfälschungen” [‘memory falsifications’],7 i.e. “Paramnesien” [‘forms of paramnesia’]8 and “Confabulationen” [‘confabulations’]),9 of the protagonist, for example when he believes to remember that the patients in the “Fleischerei” (“butchers”) of the psychiatric clinic he has just been released from, were “in heiße Bäder gesteckt” (“stuck in hot baths”) and “verbrüht” (“boiled alive”) so that they could be made into “Wurst” (“sausages”).10 Connected to this are “Verfolgungsideen,” for example when the madman identifies those who try to reason him out of his hallucinatory perceptions/memo5| Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studirende und Aerzte, 5. ed. (Leipzig: Barth, 1896), 465. 6| Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 463. Cf. Wolfgang Schäffner, Die Ordnung des Wahns. Zur Poetologie psychiatrischen Wissens bei Alfred Döblin (Munich: Fink, 1995), 59; Yvonne Wübben, “Tatsachenphantasien. Alfred Döblins Die Ermordung einer Butterblume im Kontext von Experimentalpsychologie und psychiatrischer Krankheitslehre,” in ‘Tatsachenphantasie.’ Alfred Döblins Poetik des Wissens im Kontext der Moderne, ed. Sabina Becker and Robert Krause (Bern: Lang, 2008), 92–93. 7| Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 466; 467. 8| Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 123. Cf. Wübben, “Tatsachenphantasien,” 87. 9| Alfred Döblin, “Gedächtnisstörungen bei der Korsakoffschen Psychose” (PhD., Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, 1905), 31. 10| Georg Heym, “Der Irre,” in Georg Heym. Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1962), 19–20; id., “The Madman,” in id., The Thief and Other Stories, trans. Susan Bennett (London: Libris, 1994), 47.

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ries, in this case: the psychiatrist, as being allied with the butchers: “So, der hatte also mit unter der Decke gesteckt” (“So the doctor must have been in league with them too”). The fear of conspiracy and ambush changes into an agoraphobia as the story unfolds: “Er kam durch ein paar volle Straßen, über einen Platz, wieder durch Straßen. Ihm wurde unbehaglich in den Menschenmassen. Er fühlte sich beengt” (“He passed through a few crowded streets, across a square, through streets again. He began to feel uneasy among the masses of people. He felt crowded”).11 The sense of being persecuted is matched by its opposite, a “Größenwahn” (‘Megalomania’):12 “Das berauschte ihn, machte ihn zu einem Gott” (“He was intoxicated; he was a god”).13 Driven by the idea of revenge, the madman‘s fantasies of violence turn active, prefigured by his musings on “[d]en dicken Direktor, den hätte er an seinem roten Spitzbart gekriegt und ihn unter die Wurstmaschine gezogen” (“[t]he fat governor: he’d have got him by his pointed red beard and fed him into the sausage-making machine”). Recalling his time in the asylum, the fantasies are by no means limited however to images of slaughter: “Und der Assistenzarzt, dieses bucklige Schwein, dem hätte er noch mal das Gehirn zertreten” (“And the assistant doctor, that hunch-backed pig; he’d have stamped on his brains”). The further the madman moves away from the institution, the more his fantasies adjust to the new surrounds: He left the “Straße” (“road”) and turned off “in die Felder” (“into the fields”), reveling in the joy of treading “in die dicken Halme“ (“into the thick stems”). Feeling as if he was walking across a large square, he abandons himself to the idea that he was stamping on people: “Da lagen viele, viele Menschen, alle mit dem Kopfe auf der Erde […], und jedesmal trat er dann rechts und links um sich, auf die vielen weißen Köpfe. Und dann knackten die Schädel” (“Many, many people were lying there, all with their heads to the ground […] and each time he trod to right and left, on the crowd of white heads. And then the skulls cracked”).14 It is plainly obvious that here Heym is influenced by another Expressionist text published just a year before, namely Alfred Döblin’s Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (published on September 8 and 15, 1910 in Der Sturm).15 This 11| Heym, “Der Irre,” 20; 31; id., “The Madman,” 47; 59–60. 12| Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 465. 13| Heym, “Der Irre,” 23; id., “The Madman,” 50–51. 14| Heym, “Der Irre,” 19; 20–21 id., “The Madman,” 46; 48. 15| A mutual dependence (or at least a comparability) between the two texts has also been considered by Jörg Schönert, “Der Irre von Georg Heym. Verbrechen und Wahnsinn in der Literatur des Expressionismus,” Der Deutschunterricht 42, no. 2 (1990): 94. Heym most certainly knew Döblin’s text through the New Club and its connections to Der Sturm is also demonstrable through the discursive context; on the relationship between the New Club and the publishing editor of Der Sturm, Walden, Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” 19–20. On the relationship Walden/Döblin cf. Sabina Becker, “Zwischen Frühexpressionismus, Berliner Futurismus, ‘Döblinismus’ und ‘neuem Naturalismus.’ Alfred

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story describes how the protagonist Michael Fischer watches himself as he “auf die Blumen stürzte und einer Butterblume den Kopf glatt abschlug” (was “hurling […] at the flowers and cleanly striking the head off a buttercup”).16 Here too we find, albeit formulated with more restraint, the association that when destroying a plant it is a person—underlined by the parallel of the head—who is being brutally killed. Heym adopts a second psychological element from Döblin, namely memory gaps, which Döblin himself takes from his own work on the Korsakoff psychosis. In his doctoral thesis from 1905 Döblin had argued that the amnesias caused by Korsakoff is a “Störung in der Verbindung der Vorstellungen” (‘disruption in connecting perceptions’), i.e. an “Associationsstörung” (‘association disorder’), with the consequence that the patient finds it impossible to assign a perception “aus dem Inhalt des Erlebten” (‘from what was experienced’) a “Platz zwischen vorher und nachher” (‘place between before and after’).17 And this is precisely what happens to Michael Fischer, the protagonist of Butterblume, after his ‘Gewalttat’ (‘violent act’):18 “‘Was ist geschehen?’ fragte er nach einer Weile. […]. Ich erinnere mich dieser Blume nicht, ich bin mir absolut nichts bewußt” (“what had occurred, he asked after a while […]. I don’t remember that flower, I know absolutely nothing about it at all”). Expressing the amnesia in both instances, underlining the parallels, is the loss of clothing: Fischer “vergaß […] den Hut im Gras” (“forgot his hat in the grass”),19 while the madman lost his “Kleiderbündel […] unterwegs“ (“lost his bundle of clothes on the way”).20 Related to this is a coexistence of varying, if not actually mutually exclusive, extreme states of consciousness to be found in both texts. After Döblin’s Herr Fischer no longer knows “was […] geschehen [ist]” (“what had occurred”), he— having just succumbed to a violent fantasy—is described as a “feinfühlige[r] Herr” (“sensitive gentleman”) who “fuhr zusammen” (“started back”)21 upon catching a glimpse of what he has done. The same occurs with Heym’s madman. After the latest act of violence, which is though now no longer fantasy—he has brutally killed two children—he “mußte weinen, große Tränen liefen langsam über seine Backen Döblin und die expressionistische Bewegung,” in Expressionistische Prosa, ed. Walter Fähnders (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2001), 22–23; 26ff.; 30–31; 34–35. 16| Alfred Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,” in Alfred Döblin. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. Christina Althen (Frankfurt o.M.: Fischer, 2013), 60; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” in Early Twentieth Century German Fiction, ed. Alexander Stephan, trans. Patrick O‘Neill (New York: Continuum, 2003), 58. 17| Döblin, “Gedächtnisstörungen,” 37; 32. 18| A cautious but not unproblematic argumentation for Korsakoff, understood as a memory disorder, is given in Wübben, “Tatsachenphantasien,” 87–90. For a greater emphasis on paranoia, see Sandra Janßen, “Die Psychopathologie der Komplexitätsreduktion: Paranoia,” in Komplexität und Einfachheit. DFG-Symposion 2015, ed. Albrecht Koschorke (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017), 124–144. 19| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,” 61; 64; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 59; 61. 20| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 22; id., “The Madman,” 49. 21| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,” 62; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 60.

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

hinunter” (“could not help crying; big tears ran slowly down his cheeks”). And after the second murder as well, the amnesia allows a distancing from the subject of the deed: “‘Aber pfui, bin ich schmutzig.’ Er besah sich. ‘Wo kommt denn das viele Blut her?’” (“‘Ugh, aren’t I dirty?’ He looked himself over. ‘Where’s all this blood come from?’”).22 The second story by Heym, Der Dieb, describes a religious form of the persecutory delusion: the protagonist “hatte seine Zeit mit allerlei Studien verbracht, um die Qualen seiner Melancholie zu heilen” (“had passed his time in all kinds of studies, trying to heal his tormenting melancholia”).23 The seemingly somewhat ahistorical formulation of ‘Melancholie’ (‘melancholia’) could be referring to Döblin’s teacher Alfred Hoche, who shortly before, turning explicitly against “Kraepelin,” had defended “Melancholie” because as he saw it, the concept of “manisch-depressive [..] Irresein” (‘manic-depressive insanity’) had yet to prove its worth and replace the ancient term designating a “selbstständig[e]” ‘Krankheit’ (an ‘independent’ illness).24 Like Fischer, like the madman, the thief tormented by melancholia has a propensity to become engulfed in paranoia, haunted for example by the vision that “[a]lle Leute auf der Straße lachten ihm ins Gesicht” (“[a]ll the people in the street laughed in his face”). In the case of the thief, the paranoia is especially fixated on women, and includes an erotic dimension, on the one hand, while on the other it turns to the religious. The thief believes that all women have given him the “bösen Blick” (“evil eye”), forcing him to resort to “mannigfache [..] Schutzmittel” (“many precautions”) against it.25 At the center of his battle against the feminine is Mona Lisa. His paranoia concentrates on her, whom he senses as if she—or her picture26 —were a “Meuchelmörder hinter seinem Rücken” (“an assassin […] standing 22| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 24; 27; id., “The Madman,” 51; 55. 23| Georg Heym, “Der Dieb,” in Georg Heym. Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1962), 72; id., “The Thief,” in id., The Thief and Other Stories, trans. Susan Bennett (London: Libris, 1994), 2. 24| Alfred Hoche, “Die Melancholiefrage,” Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie 33 (1910): 193–194. 25| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 91; 77; id., “The Thief,” 23; 7. 26| For the connection between viewing pictures and the thief’s madness, see Alexander Košenina, “Gefährliche Bilder? Wie Kunstbetrachtung literarische Figuren ver-rückt (Goethe, Kleist, Th. Mann, Heym, Schnitzler),” ZfG 27 (2017): 501–503; and on the associated iconoclasm, Torsten Hoffmann, “‘Nehmt Spitzhacken und Hammer!’ Funktionen und intermediale Implikationen von Bildzerstörungen bei Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Wilhelm Busch, Georg Heym und Botho Strauß,” JDSG 52 (2008): 289–328; Burkhardt Wolf, “‘Auf diesem furchtbaren blutlosen Schlachtfelde’. Das ‘Pathos des Realen’ bei Georg Heym,” in Ultima ratio? Räume und Zeiten der Gewalt, ed. Gerhard Scholz and Veronika Schuchter (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 18–20; Peter Sprengel, “Brennende Masken. Georg Heyms Der Dieb und die Novellistik der Brüder Mann,” GRM 65 (2015): 227–231. For the role of the Mona Lisa in the art of around 1900, see Ursula Renner, “Mona Lisa—Das ‘Rätsel Weib’ als ‘Frauenphantom des Mannes’ im Fin

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behind his back”). The thief believes to be exposed to her attacks because “das Weib“ is “das ursprüngliche Böse” (“woman was the original evil”). At the same time, he convinces himself that Christ’s work remains incomplete and indeed had been “umsonst” (“in vain”),27 and it is now up to him—here the persecutory delusion turns into megalomania28 —to take up this work of salvation in the battle against the feminine evil (in the form of Mona Lisa): “Denn Gott hatte ja keinen anderen als ihn” (“For God had no one else but him”). This megalomania can revert back into persecutory delusion however, for example when the thief remarks that Mona Lisa (and thus all evil in the form of the feminine) is “sehr schön in ihrer Verworfenheit” (“so beautiful in her depravity”). Permanently suspended in this danger, the thief senses that God too is “hinter ihm her” (“after him”) and “Gott“ (“the heavenly Father”) “schickt seine Polizisten ihm überall nach” (is “sending his policemen out after him everywhere).”29 It is thus clear that the thief (like the madman and even before both of them Döblin’s Michael Fischer) disintegrates into halves which the memory cannot unify, one in which he hates all that is feminine, in particular fixated on the Mona Lisa, and, at the behest of God, he aims to track down and obliterate—and another in which the Mona Lisa (and with her all that is feminine) is his “Geliebte” (“beloved”).30 In the latter he rebels against God, noting, like a good Nietzschean, that God is “gestorben” (had “gone”) and was now “perhaps dead” (probably an allusion to the Fröhliche Wissenschaft [Gay Science], aphorism 125: “Gott ist todt” [“God is dead”])31 and “streckt [..] seine Zunge heraus” (“stuck out his tongue”).32 de Siècle,” in Lulu, Lilith, Mona Lisa … Frauenbilder der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Irmgard Roebling (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1989), 139–156 (for “The Thief:” 142–146). 27| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 78; 74; 75; id., “The Thief,” 9; 4. 28| For the function assigned paranoia in this text, see: Burkhardt Wolf, “Georg Heym: Der Dieb und die Paranoia als ‘kritische Aktivität,’” in Paranoia. Lektüren und Ausschreitungen des Verdachts, ed. Timm Ebner et al. (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2016), 71–87. 29| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 87; 86; 81; id., “The Thief,” 18; 17; 12. 30| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 92; id., “The Thief,” 24. 31| Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 3 (Munich: dtv, 1980ff.), 481; id., The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 120. See Heym’s diary entry of June 6, 1907, in Georg Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg: Ellermann, 1960), 89: “Die Götter sind zu lange schon tot. Ich allein bin nicht im stande, sie wieder zu erwecken” (‘The gods have been already dead too long. I’m not able to reawaken them on my own’). See also Kurt Mautz and Georg Heym, Mythologie und Gesellschaft im Expressionismus, third ed. (Frankfurt o.M.: Athenäum, 1987), 247. For the Nietzsche reception in the New Club, see Martens, “Georg Heym und der ‘Neue Club,’” 395; 397; Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” 28; on Heym’s Nietzsche reception, Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” 43 (note 86). 32| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 92; id., “The Thief,” 24.

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II. Apocalypse and the Mystic Heym is the first of the two authors to take seriously the religious element in the religious monomania or the religious paranoia of his protagonists, moving away from considering it solely as a delusion. Similar as in Viennese Modernism (at once deeply venerated and criticized by the Berlin faction),33 the contemporary criticism of “medical materialism,”34 delineated for example in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), is followed to the effect that the metaphysical dimension of the text is not played off against the psychological. Shortly before his death, Heym’s madman—to begin with this story—jumps from the gallery balustrade of a department store to the floor below. There he “reißt ein Ladenmädchen zu sich herauf, legt ihr die Hände um die Kehle und drückt zu” (“pulls a shop-girl up to him, places his hands around her throat and presses”). This leap is accompanied by an imagined experience of nature wherein he perceives himself to be “ein großer weißer Vogel über einem großen einsamen Meer” (“like a big white bird over a great lonely sea”). Poising to take off, his wish is “[in dieses] Meer zu sinken” (to “sink onto the sea”). Atop of the shop-girl it feels as if he “reitet auf einem schwarzen Fisch” (“is riding on a black fish”) and he “umarmt seinen Kopf mit den Armen” (“embraces its head with his arms”); shortly after he “drückt ihm den Hals ab“ (“breaks its neck”). After he is shot in the back of the head, the scene changes to a sinking into the “Ozean“ (“ocean”): “Und während das Blut aus der Wunde schoß, war es ihm, als sänke er nun in die Tiefe, immer tiefer, leise wie eine Flaumfeder. Eine ewige Musik stieg von unten herauf und sein sterbendes Herz tat sich auf, zitternd in einer unermeßlichen Seligkeit” (“And while the blood shot out of the wound, it seemed to him now as though he was sinking into the depths, ever deeper, light as a piece of down. An eternal music rose from below, and his dying heart opened, trembling with immeasurable happiness”).35 What is striking about this description is the obvious connotation of the sublime in the fantasy; after all a murder is depicted and after all by a narrator who has already classified his protagonist as a madman in the title. In the sense of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the narrator remains almost completely in the seemingly exalted personal interior view however and counters it merely with the neutral exterior view of the death of the shop-girl—but not a nullifying value judgement. The concentration on the animal (bird, fish) linked with the exalted state has its roots in the middle of the story, there however not yet with the connotation of the sublime. At the point concerned it serves rather—borrowing from Zola’s La 3 3| See Aurnhammer, “Verehrung, Parodie, Ablehnung,” 36–39. 3 4| William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, 14 th ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 13. Cf. Maximilian Bergengruen, Mystik der Nerven. Hugo von Hofmannsthals literarische Epistemologie des ‘Nicht-mehr-Ich’ (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2010), 7–34. 35| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 32–34; id., “The Madman,” 61–64.

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Bête Humaine (1890)36 —the description of uncontrolled violence. Commencing with: “Er fühlte, daß in ihm wieder die Wut aufkommen wollte. Er fürchtete sich vor dieser dunklen Tollheit” (“He felt the rage coming on again. He feared that dark, furious state”), just three lines later the rage and fury merge into an animal: “Plötzlich sah er das Tier wieder, das in ihm saß” (“[s]uddenly, he saw the animal again, the one that crouched inside him”). Soon after, the animal becomes a specific species through a comparison. Taken aback at how quickly the victim can run—“[w]ie die laufen kann” (“She can run fast!”)—the madman adds: “aber so eine Hyäne ist noch schneller” (“but a hyena’s faster”).37 As the story unfolds, building on this perception, the animal inside him is externalized (“hier konnten gleich wieder die Hyänen aus dem Korn kommen” [“The hyenas could come back out of the corn at any moment”]), and then incarnated: “Später fand er einen Rübenacker, er riß ein paar Rüben heraus und aß sie” (“Later, he found a turnip field, and pulled up a couple of turnips and ate them”).38 The first positive and for that also metaphysical description as an animal or animallike creature is while bathing in the pond, where he “tanzte nackt in der weißen Sonne, groß, stark und schön wie ein Satyr” (“danced naked in the white sunlight, big, strong and handsome like a satyr”),39 albeit still capable and willing, later discarded, to question this position, feeling it to be shameful: “Plötzlich kam ihm der Gedanke, daß er etwas Unanständiges täte” (“Suddenly it occurred to him that he was doing something indecent”).40 The identification with the animal intensifies when the madman, leaping from the balustrade in the department store, believes he is a bird diving down into the “Ozean“ below. This clearly alludes to the ‘ozeanische Gefühl’ (‘oceanic feeling’),41 around 1900 a common topos for describing the union between humans 36| Schönert, “Der Irre von Georg Heym,” 91, has also drawn attention to this connection; for Heym’s reception of Zola in general, see Nishioka, Suche nach dem wirklichen Menschen, 53–144, with reference to Der Irre: 235–237. 37| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 25; id., “The Madman,” 53. 38| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 26; 27; id., “The Madman,” 55. 39| The satyr relates back to the Dionysian dance: “Er begann wie in einer Verzückung um die beiden Leichen herumzutanzen” (“He began dancing ecstatically around the two corpses”). Heym, “Der Irre,“ 23; id., “The Madman,” 56 and earlier. For this in general, see Edith Ihekweazu, “Wandlung und Wahnsinn. Zu expressionistischen Erzählungen von Döblin, Sternheim, Benn und Heym,” Orbis Litterarum 37 (1992): 337. Cf. on Heym’s conception of the Dionysian in general, Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” 31–32. 4 0| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 27; id., “The Madman,” 56. 41| Ironically, the ‘ozeanische Gefühl’ (‘oceanic feeling’) first gained its name only subsequently to its description and moreover as a negation of its existence. In Das Unbehangen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents) Freud claims—while critically discussing Romain Rolland’s Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion)—that the “‘ozeanische’ Gefühl” (“oceanic feeling”) [Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe,

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

and a divine creation. And this union with life, nature, the cosmos or the universe not only comes about in the medium of water but also—as a bird of prey—in the animal. This union with nature through the animal is another topos popular in the early 20th century, for example when Lord Chandos senses inside himself the “Todeskampf dieses Volks von Ratten“ (“death throes of the pack of rats”).42 Or in the words of the popularizer of science and the mystic of life, Wilhelm Bölsche,43 “ich bin auch im Tier” (‘I too am in the animal’).44 The feeling of union also entails the loss of the last form of presentness, namely the perception of time in terms of succession. Completely in line with Eckhart’s “nû”45 (circulating as a topos around 1900),46 the madman’s perception of nature is accompanied by an experience within which, as contemporary life mystics contend, “Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft [...] nur ein einzig-einiger ewiger Strom sind, der vom Unendlichen zum Unendlichen strömt” (“past, present and future […] are only a unique/unified eternal stream that flows from the infinite to the infinite”).47 Or in the perceptual modus of the madman: “Ein unendlicher ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey (Frankfurt o.M.: S. Fischer, 1969ff.), vol. 9, 198; id., Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 2] represents a form of narcissism that “nachträglich in Beziehung zur Religion geraten ist” (“subsequently became connected with religion”) [Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. 9, 204; id., Civilization and its Discontents, 11]. For the positively connoted “ozeanische [..] Gefühl” (“oceanic feeling”) as a topos prevalent amongst adherents of ‘Lebensmystik’ around 1900, see Wolfgang Riedel, Homo natura. Literarische Anthropologie um 1900 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1996), 85–150. 42| Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Rudolf Hirsch et al, vol. 31 (Frankfurt o.M.: S. Fischer, 1975 ff.), 50–51; id., The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 123. 4 3| For the connection Heym/ Bölsche cf. Gust, “Georg Heym in der Zirkelbildung des Berliner Frühexpressionismus,” 7–8; on Bölsche as ‘Lebensmystiker’ see Riedel, Homo natura, 105–107. 4 4| Wilhelm Bölsche, “Über den Wert der Mystik für unsere Zeit,” in Angelus Silesius. Cherubinischer Wandersmann, ed. Wilhelm Bölsche (Jena/ Leipzig: Diederichs, 1905), XII. Similarly Bölsche, “Über den Wert der Mystik für unsere Zeit,” X XVI. Cf. Bergengruen, Mystik der Nerven, 25–26. 4 5| Meister Eckhart, Sämtliche deutsche Predigten und Traktate sowie eine Auswahl aus den lateinischen Werken. Kommentierte zweisprachige Ausgabe, ed. Niklaus Largier, trans. Joseph Quint et al. (Frankfurt o.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), Pr. 9, vol. 1, 104. 4 6| Bölsche, “Über den Wert der Mystik für unsere Zeit,” XLIV: “Die echte mystische Vorstellung von einer Aufhebung des Zeitlichen und Räumlichen [...] tritt hervor als eine Empfindung, eine Schau, ein Erlebnis” (‘The genuinely mystical idea of sublating the temporal and spatial […] emerges as a sensation, an intuition, an experience’). 47| Gustav Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in Das Reich der Erfüllung. Flugschriften zur Begründung einer neuen Weltanschauung, H. 2, ed. Heinrich Hart and Julius Hart (Leipzig: Diederichs, 1901), 48–54; id., “Through Separation to Community,” in Revolution and Other Writings. A Political Reader, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 99.

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Friede, eine ewige Ruhe zitterte unter diesem ewigen Himmel” (“An endless peace, an eternal rest, trembled under this eternal sky”). At the end of the fantasy, or in other words: while passing into death, an “ewige Musik” (“eternal music”) rises up and the entire experience defies quantification, “sein sterbendes Herz tat sich auf, zitternd in einer unermeßlichen Seligkeit“ (“his dying heart opened, trembling with immeasurable happiness”).48 Animals also possess an important function in Der Dieb: as Heym’s protagonist moves towards the end, his own and that of the story, he crouches “wie ein schwarzes Tier in dem Viereck des blauen Mondlichtes” (“like a black animal in the square of blue moonlight”). Before this, “seine gekrümmten Hände standen wie ein paar Schnäbel über seinem Kopfe, und seine langen und verwüsteten Haare tanzten auf seinen dünnen Schultern […] wie ein riesiges Känguruh” (“his crooked hands” are “like two beaks above his head, and his long, neglected hair” danced “on his thin shoulders […], on and on like a giant kangaroo”). In the end he seems to the narrator to be like “eine Maus“ (“a mouse”) chased by “ein paar große Teufel” (“two great devils”)—the firemen trying to save him from the burning house.49 All these descriptions of animals converge, as I wish to argue, on the beast of the apocalypse (Revelation 13.1): “vnd sahe ein Thier aus dem Meer steigen / das hatte sieben Heubter vnd zehen Hörner / vnd auff seinen Hörnern sieben Kronen / vnd auff seinen Heubten namen der Lesterung” [“and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy”]).50 The apocalypse is namely the theological scenario of Der Dieb, which, aside from a few exterior views and some non-focalized insertions (to be elaborated on below), is depicted without narrative distance in its entirety. Through an idiosyncratic but by no means inconsistent reading of specific eschatological passages in the New Testament, in particular Mark 15.34 (“Mein Gott / mein Gott / warumb hastu mich verlassen?” [“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”]) and the 17th chapter of the Revelation, which, as is well known, features the whore of Babylon, the thief becomes convinced that “Gott hatte ihn [Jesus Christus] verlassen, und sein Werk war umsonst gewesen” (“God had forsaken him [Jesus Christ], and his work had been in vain”). Because the thief sees himself embattled by tribulations, very much “wie Christus, der zwei Jahre in den Schrecken der Wüste ausharren mußte” (“like Christ who dwelt two years amid the horrors of the wilderness”),51 but which he though now believes to

4 8| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 33–34; id., “The Madman,” 62–64, emphasis M. B. 4 9| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 95; 93; 96; id., “The Thief,” 28; 25; 29, emphasis M. B. 5 0| Luther 1545; The Bible. Authorized King James Version. For the apocalyptic as a figure of thought in Der Dieb, Hoffmann, “‘Nehmt Spitzhacken und Hammer!,’” 312–313; Wolf, “‘Auf diesem furchtbaren blutlosen Schlachtfelde,’” 15–17; in Heym’s work generally, Mautz, Georg Heym, 224–247. 51| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 75; 74; “The Thief,” 4; 3.

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have mastered,52 the idea ripens in him that he is Christ, or indeed a better Christ, and must therefore complete the work of salvation—naturally hopeful that God will not forsake him. Accordingly, his subsequent actions—the theft of the Mona Lisa and his journey to Florence—take place under apocalyptic portents: “Und nun war die Stunde gekommen” (“And now the hour had come”), the “Schlacht [sollte] beginnen” (“battle was to begin”), and he hears the “Trompete“ (“trumpet”), which he takes to be “deutlich eine Anspielung auf das Jüngste Gericht” (“clearly an allusion to the Last Judgement”).53 The antichrist or Satan, i.e. the figure instigating the apocalypse,54 who is the opponent to the figure of Christ, i.e. the thief, in this scenario is women as such,55 concentrated in the picture of Mona Lisa and reflecting the Bible description of the apocalypse,56 which he reads again directly in the story: “Und ich sahe das Weib sitzen auf einem rosinfarbenen Tiere, das war voll Namen der Lästerung, und hatte sieben Häupter und zehn Hörner” (“I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns”).57 During this work of salvation, i.e. his battle with the female “Hölle“ (“Hell”) who takes up the “Herausforderung“ (“challenge”), the scenario remains the same as the one the thief perceived at the very beginning, namely that he finds himself in a situation of permanent temptation. Incessantly he is aware of this danger: “Ja, wenn er abfiel, wenn er, der den Himmel offen gesehen hatte, Gott den Gehorsam aufsagte, so machte er sich selbst zum Spott und kreuzigte sich selbst, sich, den wahren Messias und Boten Gottes” (“Yes, if he were to defect, if he, who had seen the heavens standing open, were to revoke his obedience to God, then he would be putting himself to open shame, crucifying himself, the true Messiah and messenger of God”).58 Shortly before the climax of the story it looks as if God has lost his most important Messiah and messenger in the apocalyptic final battle, because he—should she stop laughing—“wollte sich […] auf der Stelle dem Teufel verschreiben” (“would sell himself to the devil on the spot”): “Ach er verachtete sie, aber er liebte sie. Und er verachtete sich selber, daß er sie liebte, diese Hure, die es verstanden hatte, ihn, den Heiligen Gottes, in den Schlamm herunterzuziehen” (“Oh, he despised her, but he loved her. And he despised himself for loving this whore who had known how 52| Allusions to Mark 1.12 as well as Matthew and Luke, both chapter 4. 5 3| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 81–83; id., “The Thief,” 12–14. 5 4| 1 John 2.18; Revelation 20.1. 5 5| Cf. the contemporary antifeminism Heym draws on, Hoffmann, “‘Nehmt Spitzhacken und Hammer!,’” 311; Johannes F. Lehmann, “Biblischer Gotteszorn und menschliche Wut. Georg Heyms Novelle Der Dieb,” Essener Unikate 26 (2005): 45. 56| Revelation 17.3. 57| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 87; id., “The Thief,” 19. 5 8| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 88; id., “The Thief,” 19–20.

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to drag him, the holy one of God, down into the mud with her”). But at the very last second he hears Mona Lisa laugh, and “das verträgt kein Mann. Seine ganze Liebe war weg” (“no man can stand for that. His whole love was gone”).59 If the “brennende Feuersäulen” (“blazing pillars of fire”), the fire destroying the building the thief is in, fulfill the apocalyptic scenario, then Heym’s protagonist takes on an ambivalent role. On the one hand, the laugh had led him to take “Rache“ (“revenge”) on the female antichrist. Or at least he cuts the picture, striking “da wo das Lachen am bösesten saß, an dem rechten Mundwinkel” (“in the righthand corner of the mouth where the smile was at its most wicked”).60 On the other hand however, the battle does not end with the destruction of his enemy but in fact with a double assimilation: firstly laughter takes hold of the thief61 and he “mußte lachen, zum erstenmal seit einer Ewigkeit” (‘has to laugh, for the first time in an eternity’), while at the very end “sein lautes Gelächter” (“his loud laughter”) rings out;62 and secondly, he does not simply destroy the picture but makes a mask out of it that he then pulls over his face. He takes revenge on evil, but also enters into an union with her—and not with God, to whom he wags his long tongue out of the picture’s empty mouth. Not described in the Bible, this independent position in the apocalyptic final battle enables the thief to astonishingly enter into a state similar to that of the madman, i.e. one of unity and timelessness. Laughter has lead him to the brink of death and hence the cusp of a new dimension of time. The mouth had “sich zu dem furchtbaren Lachen des Todes auseinandergezerrt” (“drawn apart into the frightful grimace of death“), a “Lachen unhörbar und doch laut, unsichtbar und doch da, alt und dunkel wie die Jahrtausende” (“an inaudible laugh which could yet be heard, which could not be seen and yet was there, ancient and dark as the centuries”). Sliding out of his present into a much more expansive time dimension, the thief now—despite or even because of the Nietzschean realization of the death of God—experiences the impression of a mystical sublation of time: “Und plötzlich konnte er, als er seine Tat übersah, das Wesen der Dinge erkennen, und er wußte, daß nichts war, kein Leben, kein Sein, keine Welt, nichts, nur ein großer schwarzer Schatten um ihn herum. Und er war ganz allein oben auf einem Felsen. Und wenn er nur einen Schritt tat, sank er herunter in den ewigen Abgrund” (“And suddenly, as he surveyed his work, he could see the essence of things, and he knew that there was nothing, no life, no being, no world, nothing, only a great black shadow around

59| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 92–93; id., “The Thief,” 24–26. 6 0| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 97; 94; id., “The Thief,” 30; 26; 27. 61| Very likely an allusion to Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, 49; id., Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29: “Nicht durch Zorn, durch Lachen tödtet man” (“Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing”). 6 2| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 94; 97; id., “The Thief,” 27; 30.

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

him. And he was quite alone, up above on a rock. And he had only to take a single step and he would sink down into the eternal abyss”).63 Although only in the modus of the conditional, it is no coincidence that here Nietzsche’s “unendliches Nichts” (“infinite nothing”)64 is connected with the mystical idea of the bottomless “abgrund” (‘abyss’) in the soul65 articulated by Johannes Tauler—hence invoking the vision of a mystical timelessness. This vision can be related to psychopathological conception underpinning the story. In his dissertation Döblin had argued, in a manner very similar to Bergson, that, without any placement in time performed by acts of memory, psychic perception arises “aus dem Nichts” (‘out of nothing’). And it is to this “Nichts“ (‘nothing’) that a person returns—or indeed actually remains in—who is suffering from paranoid Korsakoff psychosis, for which disrupted memory functions are characteristic.66 The experience of a non-successive and thus non-temporal perception is metaphysically charged in Heym’s story, and to the effect that the thief’s perception of time is not simply, as in Döblin’s dissertation, a deviation from that of a person sound in mind, but at the same time escalates, in the sense of a ‘Mystik der Nerven’ (‘mysticism of the nerves’),67 into a mystic “nû”—albeit not a divine one. The Nietzschean nihilism prevents namely that the abyss here can be a divine nothingness; instead, this is an abyss that arises from the insight that nothing is, no present, no past, no world, but also no God or anti-God—and it is only into this decidedly non-theological “nû” or nothingness that the thief can enter. The emphasis is on ‘can,’ since the “wenn“ which introduces the sentence mentioned above has only a temporal but also a conditional function [Änderung MB]. This also then pertains to the mystical experience of timelessness or the nondivine “nû:” the thief senses the abyss of timelessness but shrinks back from entering and so—for the moment at least—remains in the present. The final step is first taken in the closing scene.

6 3| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 95; id., “The Thief,” 27, emphasis M. B. 6 4| Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, 481; id., The Gay Science, 120. 6 5| Johannes Tauler, Die Predigten. Aus der Engelberger und Freiburger Handschrift sowie aus Schmidts Abschriften der ehemaligen Straßburger Handschrift, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin: Weidmann, 1910), Pr. 28, 117; Johannes Tauler, Predigten, ed. and trans. Georg Hofmann, 2 vols., third ed. (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1987), Pr. 28, vol. 1, 197. 66| Döblin, “Gedächtnisstörungen,” 17; 32. 67| For this term, see Bergengruen, Mystik der Nerven, 7–34.

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III. Narrative Style and Tense Alfred Döblin’s Butterblume is narrated with an internal focalization on its protagonist in many episodes, and hence follows Fischer’s external and internal perceptions. There are however a small series of neutral external focalizations, for example at the beginning when Fischer’s external appearance is described (“[d]er schwarzgekleidete Herr” [“the gentleman in black”]; “der Dicke“ [“the fat man”] etc.). Occasionally these descriptions move quietly into (pejorative) evaluations (transporting an authorial viewpoint): “Er hatte eine aufgestellte Nase und ein plattes bartloses Gesicht, ein ältliches Kindergesicht mit süßem Mündchen” (“He had a tilted nose and a flat beardless face, an elderly child’s face with a sweet little mouth”); “der schlaffe Herr in Schwarz” (“the flabby gentleman in black”). Similarly the following formulation: “In den Ernst seines Äffchengesichts war ein leidender Zug gekommen” (“A trace of suffering had appeared in the gravity of his monkey’s face”).68 The narrator never articulates the madness of the protagonist however. This switch in the narrative mode is radicalized by Heym’s narrator,69 who in Der Irre mostly follows the viewpoint of the protagonist with an internal focalization, but at one place is prepared to forfeit this in favor of a different internal focalization—namely an old man who notices the murder of the woman (“‘Das ist sicher der Mörder’, dachte der alte Mann.” [“‘That is certainly the murderer,’ thought the old man”]). In this connection there are authorial evaluations and ascriptions, e.g. “der Verrückte” (“the madman”), which are also evident of course in the title, alternated with externally focalizing descriptions, which also contain a certain evaluating: “Und der Irre lachte über das ganze Gesicht, das Blut zog sich in den Falten zusammen. Er sah aus wie ein furchtbarer Teufel” (“And the madman laughed all over his face so that the blood ran into the creases. He looked like a fiend”).70 At the end however, the subtle polyperspectivization of double viewpoints is reduced to the oceanic feeling of the madman, namely at once both an external and internal perspective, but now without any authorial evaluation. Der Dieb follows a similar approach, also mainly shaped by an internal focalization. But here, too, we have a title that conveys an authorial perspective and evaluation. Even more subtly than in Der Irre, this maintains the same vocabulary, for example when the thief is also called “Irre” (“[t]he madman”). It is precisely at this point, however, that there is also an external focalization when this “Irre“ moved to the guard at the Louvre, gave him a “Fünffrankenstück” (“five-franc 6 8| Döblin, “Die Ermordung der Butterblume,“ 59; 62; 68; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 57; 58; 59; 65. 6 9| Up until now, only Werner Sulzgruber, Georg Heym, Der Irre. Einblicke in die Methoden und Kunstgriffe expressionistischer Prosa. Erzählen aus der Perspektive des Wahnsinns (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 1997), 46–48, has explored the psychological time structure of the texts, albeit without consideration of the connection to psychopathology. 70| Heym, “Der Irre,“ 26; id., “The Madman,” 54; 55; cf. Schönert, “Der Irre von Georg Heym,” 89.

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

piece”) and told him “er sollte ihn in zwei Stunden holen und ihn hinauslassen” (to “come and fetch him into two hours and let him out”). A zero focalization had already occurred (“[s]eine Freunde wußten nichts mehr von seinem Leben” [“His friends now knew nothing of his life”]) and several times external, e.g.: “sein struppiger Vollbart wurde von einem lauten Lachen geschüttelt” (“his big bristling beard was shaken by a loud laugh”). At the end, a second internal focalization, distinct from that of the protagonist, on the firemen (who are killed as a result of his actions) is suggested: “und als sie wieder an ihm vorüberflogen, hörten sie noch in ihre Verzweiflung hinein sein lautes Gelächter hinter sich her” (“and as they flew past him, even in their despair they heard his loud laughter ringing behind them”).71 Although only suggested, the evaluating and judging position of the narrator is replaced in any case towards the end by a focalization on other figures: the “Betrunkene[n]” (“drunks”), the “alte [..] Mann [..]” (“old man”), and the firemen, “[d]ie durch die glühenden Dachsparren springen” (“leaping through the glowing rafters”).72 It seems as if the trajectory of Heym’s narrative modus is to contrast the metaphysical interior view with its sublation of time to a subtly inserted external viewpoint in which objective time continues. This stylistic approach is reflected in the use of tense, the final aspect of our considerations. The stylistic device of switching tense is already discernible in Döblin’s Butterblume. Mostly written in the preterit, the text changes into the present in a few passages—and precisely whenever, as I would like to show, the protagonist’s presentist experience of time not only ‘contaminates’ the narrator in free indirect speech,73 but when, as explicated in the Korsakoff study, the former slips into a “fortrollende Gegenwart” [‘onward rolling present’]74 that has neither a before nor an after, and with this psychopathologically radicalized experience of the present overwhelms the latter and forces him into altering the tense. The general present tense of Fischer’s experience of time, as becomes clear in direct speech (“‘Ich bin nicht berauscht. Der Kopf darf nicht fallen […]’” [“‘I’m not drunk. The head can’t fall […]’”]75 etc.), impacts on the indirect speech to the point that it now also determines the tense used by the narrator. If previously it was possible to mainly use the epical preterit76 (“Diese Blume dort glich den anderen 71| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 84; 72; 79; 97; id., “The Thief,” 15; 1; 9; 30. 72| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 95–96; id., “The Thief,” 28–29. 73| For the idea that the narrator is ‘contaminated’ by the figure in free indirect speech, see Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens, sixth ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 247–250; id., A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 192f. 74| Döblin, “Gedächtnisstörungen,” 16. 75| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,“ 61; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 59, emphasis M. B. 76| For this, see Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (Munich: DTV/Klett-Cotta, 1987), 64–85; however, I adopt the criticism leveled by Matias Martinez and Michael Scheffel, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, eighth ed. (Munich: Beck, 2009), 71–72, assuming that a complete “Verschwinden der präteritiven

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auf ein Haar” [“This flower here was exactly the same as the others”]77 etc.) to mark, at least formally, a certain distance to the presentist time experience of the protagonist, the narrator is now forced—radicalizing the epical preterit78 —to switch to an epical present that renders Fischer’s “fortrollende Gegenwart” without distance: “Und daneben im Rasen fault der Kopf. Er wird zerquetscht, aufgelöst vom Regen, verwest. […] Das hebt sich lebendig, rinnt auf ihn zu, gerade auf Herrn Michael zu […]. Er springt, hüpft nur noch auf den Zehen” (“And beside it the head is rotting in the grass. It is squashed, broken up by the rain, decomposing. […] It rises, alive, runs toward him, straight toward Herr Michael […]. He leaps, hops only on his toes now”).79 Psychopathologically shaped, this epical present erupts a second time, still in connection with the ‘murder’ of a flower, namely as Fischer flees: “Um nicht auf dem glatten Boden auszugleiten, tastet er sich von Baum zu Baum. […] Entsetzen packt ihn […]. Da bricht er sich mit Gewalt Bahn” (“To avoid slipping on the treacherous ground, he feels his way from tree to tree. […] Horror grips him […]. He breaks his way through violently”). In both instances the narrator switches precisely into the (also epical) preterit when the protagonist has found his way out of the “fortrollende Gegenwart” and back into a succession of events: “Der feinfühlige Herr fuhr zusammen” / “Regungslos stand der dicke Herr an der Gaslaterne vor der kleinen Dorfkirche” (“The sensitive gentleman startled back” / “The fat gentleman stood motionless by the gaslight in front of the little village church”).80 Heym’s narrator also uses this stylistic device in both stories: the present suddenly breaking into the text dominated by the (mostly epical) preterit, but radicalizes it to the point where he deploys this present sweeping in on the narrator and his narrative style not at various places interspersed through the text but only once, at the very end—and precisely when his protagonist begins to undergo his metaphysical experiences. This most certainly has something to do with how Heym’s narrator takes these more seriously than his predecessor in Döblin’s story. After seventeen pages in—mainly epical—preterit, in Der Irre the final murder of the shop-girl is described in the present: from “er holt aus und springt” (“[h]e poises himself then springs”) until “er reißt ein Ladenmädchen zu sich herauf, legt ihr die Hände um die Kehle und drückt zu” (“he pulls a shop-girl up to him, Bedeutung des Präteritums” [‘disappearance of the past meaning of the preterit’; c.f. Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, 80] does not take place in the epical preterit, but both the presentist experience of the character discourse as well as the post-temporality of the narrating find expression. 77| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,“ 60; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 58, emphasis M. B. 78| Not to be confused with the “historische [..] Präsens” (‘historical present tense’) in Hamburger, which does not possess any temporal function; Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, 96). 79| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,“ 62; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 60, emphasis M. B. 8 0| Döblin, “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,“ 66; 62; 67; id., “The Murder of a Buttercup,” 63; 60; 63, emphasis M. B.

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

places his hands around her throat and presses”) solely the present tense is used. Also in the present is the first part of the metaphysical scenario that opens up to the madman in the water after he, feeling himself to be a bird of prey, has dived into the sea: from “Um ihn herum ist das große goldene Meer, das seine Wogen zu beiden Seiten wie gewaltige schimmernde Dächer türmt” (“[a]ll around him is the great golden sea, with towering waves on either side like brilliantly shimmering roofs”) through to “Die Schlösser rücken immer tiefer, die Gärten scheinen immer tiefer zu sinken” (“[t]he castles go further down, the gardens appear to sink ever deeper”)— also solely in the present tense. Up until now we have encountered the psychopathological shaped epical present tense from Döblin, as a kind of narrative parallel to the “fortrollende Gegenwart” of the protagonist, which the narrator follows, or indeed has to follow. This onward rolling, unending present is described however as the prerequisite for—and not the entering into and immersing in—an oceanic feeling. There is something that hinders the protagonist from sinking infinitely: “Aber da war etwas Schwarzes, etwas Feindliches, das störte ihn, das wollte ihn nicht hinunterlassen” (“But there was something black there, something hostile; it disturbed him, it didn’t want to let him go down”). It is ultimately this ‘Wahrnehmung’ (‘perception’) of a disturbance that, mediated through indirect speech oriented on the present tense (“Aber er wird das schon kriegen; er ist ja so stark” [“But I’ll make it, of course”, “I’m strong enough”]), compels the narrator to switch to the “fortrollende Gegenwart” of his protagonist: “Und er holt aus” (“He poises himself”). And in this present tense the disturbance is marked as the main hindrance to entering the oceanic feeling: “[E]r wird ja niemals dahinkommen” (“he’s never going to get there”). Interestingly this occurs in the form of an obstructed future tense. The present tense thus stands for an inner present that is clearly demarked from the outer time sequence, thanks to which it is predestined for a mystical experience. At the same time however, the subjective, presentist experience of time is not completely free: the bloodlust experienced in the state of a pathological present tense and its associated future tense (“er wird das schon kriegen” [“But I’ll make it, of course”]) hinders actually feeling the oceanic. Sinking completely into the mystical ocean takes place in the preterit again, in the—as one could put it—depths of the past tense. Meanwhile (admittedly the whole scenario spans just a few seconds!) the madman, having ‘landed’ on the floor below, is fatally wounded by a shot fired by presumably a policeman or security guard, and experiences in the moment of dying the consummation of the oceanic feeling—in the past tense: “Und während das Blut aus der Wunde schoß, war es ihm, als sänke er nun in die Tiefe, immer tiefer, leise wie eine Flaumfeder. Eine ewige Musik stieg von unten herauf und sein sterbendes Herz tat sich auf, zitternd in einer unermeßlichen Seligkeit” (“And while the blood shot out of the wound, it seemed to him now as though he was sinking into the depths, ever deeper, light as a piece of down. An eternal music rose from below, and his dying heart opened, trembling with immeasurable happiness”).

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Interestingly, it is the real breaking into the scene that ushers in the resumed use of the epical preterit, or more precisely: an external focalized description of the shooter, also in preterit: “Hinter der Tür erschien ein Mann, legte ein Gewehr an die Backe, zielte. Der Schuß traf den Wahnsinnigen in den Hinterkopf. Er schwankte ein paarmal hin und her” (“Behind the door a man appeared, laid a gun to his cheek, aimed. The shot hit the lunatic in the back of the head. He swayed back and forth once or twice”).81 The narrator now takes up this objectivity when he no longer allows himself to be overwhelmed by the subjective temporal perception of the non-successive present tense of his protagonist, but instead, despite the resumed internal focalizing, hauls him back into his own time form. This is now no longer the same epical preterit however that the narrator has used (mostly) in the preceding seventeen pages, but a preterit that has integrated the present tense of his protagonist or (in the sense of the Hegelian tripartite structure) sublated it—for he follows the presentist experience of the oceanic feeling, but now without the subjective, purely psychopathological aspect. In Döblin’s Butterblume the pathological present tense of Michael Fischer ends when he—and following him, the narrator as well—has freed himself from the state of utmost agitation, extreme subjectivization, and the absolute presentism of his perception. In a certain sense this is also the case for the madman: all psychopathological subjectivity ends—and this is the goal of the mystical henosis that finds expression in the oceanic—with the experience of death. This extreme subjectivization of the perspective was necessary to gain liberation from the successiveness of an external, objective time and enter a “fortrollende Gegenwart;” but a second step then followed, namely to overcome this pathological present tense and enter a state beyond the subjective. And this goal of the supra-subjective was shown through the—also needing to be overcome—objectivity of external focalized description of the shooter and the accompanying past tense. Here, in this presentist-charged preterit, which moreover opens the previously barred future tense—“er wird ja niemals dahinkommen” (“he’s never going to get there”) was the description before, while he has now gotten there –, a union takes place between narrator and figure, one that enables the Eckhartian “nû,” in which there is neither a before nor an after, to be narratively depictable. A change in tense also takes place at the end of Der Dieb. However, the idea that a pathological delimitation of time is expressed and a supra-temporal, metaphysical experience at least shimmers through, is no longer taken up. Rather, the decisive discovery that leads to the “ewige [..] Abgrund” (“eternal abyss”) is described immediately in the preterit: “Und plötzlich konnte er, als er seine Tat übersah, das Wesen der Dinge erkennen, und er wußte, daß nichts war” (“And suddenly, as

81| All quotes: Heym, “Der Irre,“ 33–34; id., “The Madman,”63–64, emphasis M. B.

“Fortrollende Gegenwart”

he surveyed his work, he could see the essence of things, and he knew that there was nothing”).82 The end, where the harrowing death of the firemen is described, is also in the past tense (“das Feuer fraß ihr Gesicht, das Fleisch flog in Stücken von ihren Händen” [“the fire ate their faces, the flesh flew in pieces from their hands”] etc.). In contrast, the present tense is used to describe—from an external focalizing (with the viewpoint from the street, surveying the street first and then to the floor where the thief is)—the dramatic attempt launched by the firemen to save the thief: from “Die Straße wird voll Menschen” (“[t]he street fills up with people”) and “wo der Kopf des alten Mannes aus der Bodenluke heraushängt” (“where the head of the old man is leaning out of the attic window”) through to “Nun kann man sehen” (“[t]he watchers see them”) and “Auf einmal verschwindet die wilde Jagd nach hinten in einer rauchenden Wolke” (“[t]hen the wild chase disappears abruptly rearwards in a cloud of smoke”)—all present tense.83 This shows that the present tense here is neither psychopathological nor metaphysical (not even in the sense of a transition or passage). If it is still possible to speak of a “fortrollende Gegenwart”, then in the sense that the events come thick and fast, that in a brief span of time a host of impressions have to be received; here we are close to the “Vergegenwärtigung ...” (‘re-presentation’) of the historical present tense.84 But to reiterate: this presentic perspective is not that of the thief, but that of onlookers, who are neither mentally ill nor involved in metaphysical transcendence. In contrast, whenever the narrator adopts the metaphysical perspective of his protagonist, he switches into the past tense. This is related to—when compared to Der Irre—the altered insight of the respective protagonist, or more precisely: to his Nietzschean nihilism. The metaphysical fantasy of the madman was no longer theological in the sense that there had been a union with a divine entity, but there was however a positively described something of (albeit imagined) nature, with which union was sought. In the case of the thief this positive entity no longer exists. When he decides to leap into the “ewige [..] Abgrund”—and at the end a lot speaks for this assumption—then this is because he had come to know “daß nichts war” (“that there was nothing”).85 There is simply no space for a present tense evoking the metaphysical (nor one that coincides with it); and accordingly, there is nothing to be narrated. Above all though, within the scope of this universal nihilism, the self no longer exists, the ‘I’ from whose perspective a metaphysical experience could be described. The death of the firemen is namely no longer described from the thief’s 8 2| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 95; id., “The Thief,” 27, emphasis M. B. 8 3| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 96–97; id., “The Thief,” 28–30, emphasis M. B. 8 4| Which Hamburger rules out for literary texts however; Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, 91-93. 8 5| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 95; id., “The Thief,” 27.

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perspective, but that of those dying themselves: “und als sie wieder an ihm vorüberflogen, hörten sie noch in ihre Verzweiflung hinein sein lautes Gelächter hinter sich her” (“and as they flew past him, even in their despair they heard his loud laughter ringing behind them”).86 The pathological-subjectivist epical present tense from Der Irre, used to represent a transitional position on the way to a metaphysical experience, is still invoked but deprived of its substrate: it is no longer pathological (rather only excessive or overwhelming), it no longer enables a metaphysical experience—and above all else it is no longer subjective in the sense that it describes the (external or internal) perception of the protagonist. Instead, this self with its experience of time is now nothing other than a perceived object, no longer the perceiving subject of the narration. This is—so to speak—the consequence of Der Irre, in which a metaphysical preterit is developed as the outcome of the complete de-subjectivization of the protagonist. Moreover, in Der Dieb, and in this point it goes beyond Der Irre, a transcending experience without any content, only in form, is broached and dealt with. At the end, the knowledge “daß nichts war” becomes real and tangible to the effect that the subject of this knowledge cannot enter a union with a higher positive metaphysical power but sinks into nothingness and hence itself becomes a nothing. Wishing to render this experience—which is actually no longer an experience—comprehensible, the narrator can only describe, in a gesture resolutely holding back empathy, how destruction unfolds in the physical world—and this requires the proven mode of the past tense. It is only in this way that the narrative objectivity of the outside world is not taken as a sign of metaphysical objectivity; it signifies instead all that remains. The protagonist has entered the “nichts“ so fully and completely that he eludes any possible perspective. And this is why his death is not even mentioned. |

86| Heym, “Der Dieb,“ 97; id., “The Thief,” 30.

Now-time Explosion

Samuel Strehle

Now-time Explosion. The Experience of Time in Social Revolution

The following remarks are based on initial work in the subproject “Linguistic Appresentations of Material Experiences of Time: The Relationship of Object–Aesthetic and Social Sense in Temporal Metaphors,” a cooperation between the Institute of Sociology and the Seminar for Indo–European Studies at the University of Jena. We are examining metaphors of time, i.e. pictorial turns of speech, in which experiences of time and temporality are expressed. The focus on metaphors is only logical: there is no other way to speak about time other than in metaphors, for time per se is unimaginable and needs metaphors to become imaginable and presentable. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck succinctly put it: “Whoever speaks about time is dependent upon metaphors.”1 What interests us about the time metaphors themselves are the sources and donors of the imagery, i.e. the imaginable things that ‘lend’ the unimaginable time its imaginable substance. The things play a double role in our project: on the one hand, as a source in the sense above, i.e. as a symbolic form in which experiences of time find expression and representation by and through language; on the other hand, as the objects through which the experience of time itself takes place. Precisely because time is so un-imaginable and un-sensory, it requires material things to be experienced at all.2 Elementary examples of this are the rotation of the earth in the day-night rhythm or its circulation around the sun in the rhythm

1| Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in id., Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 9–16, 9. 2| Cf. Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn, Was sind Ästhetische Eigenzeiten? (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014), 11f.

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of the seasons, the continuous advancing hand of a clock or the rhythmic work of a factory assembly line. Our project assumes that a (more than merely arbitrary) connection exists between the two levels, materiality and language. The choice of the source providing the imagery in a metaphor typically refers as well to qualities of the thing itself, i.e. it expresses not only experiences of time, but also of things. We speak of the flow of time because this relates to the characteristic qualities of rivers, to the structural analogies between the passing of time and the constant flowing of water. We are thus taking up the idea of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of metaphor,3 according to which many of our “basic ontological metaphors,”4 including temporal metaphors,5 build on physical and bodily experiences, i.e. they have “experiental bases”6 in the objective structure of the world.7 In the following I will speak about only one of the themes we are addressing in this context: the experience of time in social revolution, i.e. those historical states of turmoil, unrest and upheaval which since 1688 and, above all, 1789 we subsume under the concept of revolution. We have selected revolution because it is a prototypical epitome of presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit]. Revolutions are events of radical presentness, and indeed of collective, socially shared, socially generated presentness. How are such events experienced with respect to their temporal structure? Which social experiences are embedded in speaking about revolutions—which, just like speaking about time, relies highly on metaphors—and can be reconstructed from them? At the present point in time, we would like to put up for discussion a few fundamental theoretical considerations on the experience of revolutionary time and linguistic appresentation, or in other words, the linguistic visualization of this time experience, as it occurs in German literature.

3| Cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14–21, 56–60. 4| Cf. Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 58. 5| Cf. Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 58f. 6| Cf. Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 19. 7| This experiential grounding of metaphors is not to be understood as determinative in the sense of an immediate, virtually automatic transposing of the structures of the world onto those of thought however (cf. Lakoff, Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 18, 22–24, 57), but rather also entail cultural experiences so that corresponding differences “can vary from culture to culture” (14).

Now-time Explosion

From Cycle to New Beginning: Revolution as a Metaphor of Time The origin of the modern concept of revolution is well known—it comes from astronomy. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is the original Latin title of Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543).8 The revolutio (from Latin re-volvere, to ‘roll back, to roll over, to turn back’) was thus first the orbit of the planets. A thing that orbits around another thing—this is what seems to have been remembered when one reflected on political unrest and upheavals, mainly since the 18th century, but occasionally even earlier.9 What connected these two far-apart fields was the ancient doctrine of the cycles of constitutions, informed by Aristotle and Polybius: the purported ironclad succession of the various forms of statehood in the cycle from monarchy to tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, polity, and ochlocracy.10 In both fields, there are described cycles and cyclical repetitions, in any event an orderly course of events. It is in this sense of an orderly course that the astronomical revolution became a metaphor for the political. At the beginning, this was still a vibrant, innovative and striking metaphor, over which one stumbled and first needed to reflect upon. Over the course of time, the word then percolated into general usage and from a lively image seen with the inner eye turned into a mere concept, its pictorial origins no longer present in everyday language usage. In turn however, this ‘de-visualized’ concept is now associated with new images. The 19th century, the century of revolutions, was also one of proliferating revolution metaphors. Used as terminology, synonyms like ‘upheaval’ or ‘overthrow,’ building on the literal meaning of revolutio, were joined by a series of secondary poetic visualizations. The most common of these are the thunderstorm (‘Gewitter’), the storm, the earthquake, the flood, the volcanic eruption, the fire and the explosion; for friends of the revolution there is also birth as a symbol of the new

8| Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres [1543], trans. A.M. Duncan (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976). 9| For this history of the concept of revolution in the modern age, see Karl Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff: Entstehung und Entwicklung [1969] (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973); Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution” [1969], in id., Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 43–57; Reinhart Koselleck et al., “Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch–sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1984), 653–788, and Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor [1976] (New Brunswick/ London: Transaction Publishers, 2004). 10| Cf. Karl-Ernst Petzold, “Kyklos und Telos im Geschichtsdenken des Polybios,” Saeculum. Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte, no. 28 (1977): 253–290.

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beginning, for its opponents the out of control (guillotining) machine.11 For Marx, there is the “gigantic broom” that “swept away all these relics of bygone times,”12 or the famous locomotive on the journey along progress when he writes, two years after 1848, that revolutions are the “locomotives of history.”13 All these metaphors hit upon something that is unique to revolutions as historical events: havoc and destruction as in natural disasters, but also the rise of the new as in a birth; energetic discharges as in a thunderstorm or an explosion; acceleration like a locomotive; the buildup of enormous masses of force as in floods breaking through dams and dykes, or in a volcanic eruption; and finally, processes taking on a life of their own, slipping out of the control of their instigators, much like a machine or a fire that spreads wildly and consumes all in its path. In contrast, over the course of modernity the planets seem a less plausible means to visualize the phenomenon of revolution. New things take their place instead: phenomena of nature and catastrophic materiality, but also human-made forces and artefacts. Often connected with this visual shift is—as has been frequently noted—a shift in the meaning of revolution itself.14 It is now reversed into its very opposite—from the cyclical continuity to a radical break that creates something fundamentally new; from a rule to the exception, from repetition to event, from circle to point.

Experiences of Revolutionary Time The history of revolutions, but so too the concept of revolution, is comparatively well researched; the same applies, albeit to a lesser degree, for its metaphorical dimensions.15 Within the framework of our research project, we are interested in the specific experiences of time stored in the revolution metaphors.16 As Karl Heinz 11| An overview of revolution metaphors and the role of metaphors for history in general is to be found in Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte. Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch–politischen Denken (München: C. H. Beck, 1978); for the revolutionary metaphoric specifically, see also Hans–Wolf Jäger, Politische Metaphorik im Jakobinismus und im Vormärz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), and Helmut Peitsch, “Jakobinische Metaphorik? Deutsche Reisende als ‘Zuschauer’ der Französischen Revolution,” Literatur für Leser 12, no. 4 (1990): 185–201. 12| Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France. Address of the General Council of the International Working–Men’s Association” [1871], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 307–359, 328. 13| Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850 [1850], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 45–145, 122. 14| Cf. Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff, and Koselleck et al., “Revolution, Rebellion.” 15| Cf. Lasky, Utopia und Revolution, 261–315. 16| Unlike the concept of revolution, experiences of time in revolutions are somewhat less well researched; besides Koselleck’s works on the experience of history, see the study by Ernst Wolfgang

Now-time Explosion

Bohrer once put it with reference to the experience of the French Revolution, the “time of revolution” is always connected to a “revolution of time.”17 We would add, revolutionary situations are accompanied by a specific aggregation of time as such, a very specific ‘intrinsic revolutionary time.’ The sociologist Georges Gurvitch has described the phenomenon of revolution as the prototype of an “explosive time,”18 one in which the present and past dissolve, replaced by an immediately experienced future, hauled in as it were into the here and now. The course of time accelerates to such a degree in revolutions that Walter Benjamin was even enticed to describe the experience of time in revolutions as a standing still of time, the now-time (“Jetztzeit”) as expounded in the Theses on the Philosophy of History.19 We wish to bring these two fundamental determinations of revolutionary time together in the concept of ‘now-time explosion,’ i.e. the explosion of the now in the present. In revolutions—so the thesis behind this concept—the directly lived singular moment of time intensifies into the experience of an immediate presence and presentness, which is so filled with rapidly synthesizing connections, erupting wishes and desires, but also fears, traumatic shock, and disorientation, that the usual order of time unravels. The experience of time in such situations is paradoxical. Revolutions are perceived as an extreme acceleration of how time is felt, as a “temporal abbreviation”20 and a shrinking of the present to a “temporal minimum.”21 On the other hand, this time—felt to be virtually traveling at the speed of light—leads to a slowing down and lengthening of how time is felt, culminating in the standing still of time or even the loss of time as an experiential category altogether, typical for euphoric states of intoxication.22 This timelessness or “achrony”23 is the opposite of an eventless emptiness and needs to be understood rather as an excessive fullness—a rich mo-

Becker (Zeit der Revolution!—Revolution der Zeit? Zeiterfahrungen in Deutschland in der Ära der Revolutionen 1789–1848/49 (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), and Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Zeit der Revolution—Revolution der Zeit. Die Hermeneutik revolutionärer Gegenwart bei Friedrich Schlegel (1795–1800) und Heinrich Heine (1831–1855),” in id., Die Ideen von 1789 in der deutschen Rezeption, ed. Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 128–155. 17| Cf. Bohrer “Zeit der Revolution;” similarly Becker “Zeit der Revolution.” 18|Georges Gurvitch, “Social Structure and the Multiplicity of Times,” in Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 171–184, 178. 19| Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” [1940] in id., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken 2008), 253–267, 261. 20| Koselleck, Modern Concept of Revolution, 50. 21| Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” [2000], in id., Sediments of Time, 3–9, 7. 22| For the influence of drug intoxication on time perception see Arnold Hinz, Psychologie der Zeit: Umgang mit Zeit, Zeiterleben und Wohlbefinden (Munster/New York/Munich/Berlin: Waxmann, 2000), 88–92. 23| Gamper, Hühn, Was sind Ästhetische Eigenzeiten?, 49.

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ment extended into perpetuity, wherein revolutionary practice takes place as temporarily ongoing presentness. In this temporarily ongoing presentness the revolutionary changes of a protagonist’s lifeworld follow one another at breathtaking speed. People begin to act radically different, to fundamentally reorganize their lives; they severe old ties and enter new ones, engender new ways of thinking and new desires, infected by the new thoughts and new desires of others, and together there is a reciprocal ecstatic intensification of resonance.24 The ‘now-time explosion’ is thus also a wish explosion, an explosive breaking out of collectively repressed yearnings and desires buried deep within the conventions of everyday life. An eyewitness account by a participant of the Russian February Revolution of 1917 vividly captures the outbreak of desire, looking back in grief from three years later: “When I think of the October days and the mighty enthusiasm which swept the country, I realize to what depths we have sunk. Then was liberty, indeed, and brotherhood. Why, the joy of the people was such, strangers kissed each other on the highways.”25 This is more than a coincidental anecdote, but an exemplary expression of the heart of the revolutionary experience: an example of the sudden and ‘wild’ breaking open and away from everyday norms and behavior, the practice of revolution on the micro–level of social action. If social revolutions always imply a change in the “relational modus”26 between people, then they go hand in hand with a very peculiar type of social acceleration. They are ‘explosive’ in how the relationships between people multiply exponentially, and with these felt to be infinitely on the increase they are to take to the streets and form a mass, ready to fight together, to passionately discuss, or just smooch. No one looks at a watch or clock, the passing of time is completely forgotten: this is another way in which revolutions are felt to be timeless while still having their own length of time, one in which, to remain with our example, the duration of a kiss is held as intrinsic time. When considered against this background, the ‘intrinsic time of revolution’ would be the epitome of everything that is acted out, unfolding according to its own respective rhythms, within the duration of this event and merges poly–rhythmically into the total event that is a revolution. 24| For more on ‘resonance’ see the work by Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), who is primarily concerned with the ‘responses of the world’ to the subject, i.e. ‘effective relations to the world;’ for a concept of resonance that emphasizes rather the infectious, the setting alight, and reciprocal amplification, and hence the “effect–explosions,” see Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication [1986], trans. John Bednarz Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 15–21, quote 21, and 115–120. A third concept of resonance would be the psychoanalytical one, which also explores phenomena of intersubjective igniting, infecting and vibrating, but focuses on the field of wishes and desires; see Samuel Strehle, Kollektivierung der Träume. Eine Kulturtheorie der Bilder (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2019), 165–173. 25| Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922) (London: Hutchinson, 1925), 186; see also Bini Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution: 1917, 1968 und kommende (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 41f. 26| Cf. Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution, 239–257.

Now-time Explosion

The Refunctioning of Things: The Materiality of the Revolution Like all social actions, revolutionary practices and experiences are also embedded in tangible surrounds. Revolutions take place through and in people, but also through and on things as the media and framework conditions of human action. If, following Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network–Theory, we can think of the social as an ‘assembly,’27 and if this concept, instead of simply meaning a gathering of people, encompasses the ceaseless practice of linking people and things, then revolutions are assemblies in this Latourian sense. Not only people meet each other in these assemblies, but people and things, people with things in their hand, people using things for protection, people hiding behind things, hurling them around, overturning them, or setting them alight; people fighting over things and for the power to control things, since their individual and collective existence is organized, in every conceivable way, in the medium of things and the structures of things. This begins on the street itself, the tangible arena of revolutionary clashes, their material stage and their ‘carrier medium’ (in the truest sense of the word as a supporting surface, bearing the weight of the fighting body), and continues through to the factories, offices, and stores, where the politico–economic order of society is directly manifest as an ‘order of things.’ On this material level, the revolution appears, first and foremost, to be a more or less creative refunctioning of things and a changing of their usage.28 The revolutionaries occupy squares and buildings and alter their function, turning them into assembly places; they turn vehicles or furniture into barricades, iron bars into weapons, and walls into surfaces for communicating. Like the social explosions of human gatherings, these examples of refunctioning the world of things go hand in hand with respective experiences of an intrinsic time. They are connected to a new configuration of the time intrinsic to a material thing, to new, previously never experienced durations of presentness. The barricade burns for a specific length of time; the doors of the government building withstand the onslaught for so long; the messages on the walls are urgent for a certain period of time before they are written over or become meaningless; the guillotine can carry out only so many executions an hour. Another level of time is mediated by the symbolic things of revolution, associated with specific images and notions of present, past, and future. In revolution27| Cf. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63–86, 247–262. 28| An interesting description of the role of things in situations of revolt is to be found in Klaus Neukrantz’s novel Barrikaden am Wedding. Der Roman einer Straße aus den Berliner Maitagen 1929 (Vienna/ Berlin/ Zurich: Internationaler Arbeiterverlag, 1931); cf. Samuel Strehle, “Barrikaden am Wedding: Revolutionäre Zeiterfahrung und die Eigenzeit der Dinge,” in Parallaxen moderner Zeitlichkeit, ed. Patrick Eisenlohr, Stefan Kramer, Andreas Langenohl (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2020).

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ary France for instance, a new zeitgeist and a changed regimen of sensuality is expressed in the medium of a more lascivious fashion; to mark the federation celebrations on the first anniversary of the revolution, highly symbolic clothing, flags, and insignia recall the triumph of the revolution the year before, while the black attire of the aristocrats articulates their grief for the loss of ‘their’ old order.29 Onetime profane things like bread become symbols of a better future about to dawn, and it is with these symbols that social change is exemplarily manifested.30

From Things to Metaphors: On the Relationship Between Language and Reality One of the guiding ideas of our project is that there is a connection between the world of things described above and sensual experiences on the one hand, and the world of metaphors, the expression though language on the other; that the experiences with things find expression in the store of available language, i.e. as society’s trove of experience. The simplest form of such an expression is when specific things ‘become proverbial,’ albeit this is certainly more the exception than the rule. Most of the time, the real experience of revolution translates only very indirectly into metaphoric speech. Earthquakes, thunderstorms, floods, and brooms usually play only a subordinate role in revolutions for instance. It thus seems to us all the more interesting to ask how such phenomena can nonetheless become emblems of revolution. What is it about the locomotive for example that moves Marx to equate it to a revolution? In essence, we are asking where the phenomenal affinity between the experience of a revolution and a train journey lies; or put differently: what constitutes the translation point between the two spheres? In the case of the locomotive, one part of the answer undoubtedly lies in the culturally charged associations with the recent invention of the railway, perceived as a symbol of technological and social progress.31 With respect to Marx specifically, 29| Cf. Jean–Paul Bertaud, Alltagsleben während der Französischen Revolution, trans. Christine Diefenbacher (Freiburg/ Wuerzburg: Ploetz, 1983), 2–14. 30| Cf. Bertaud, Alltagsleben, 7f. 31| For the railways as part of the “collective symbolic” of the 19 th century, see Jürgen Link, “Zum Anteil der Kollektivsymbolik an der Sprachentwicklung im 19. Jahrhundert: Das Beispiel der Verkehrsmittel Kutsche und Eisenbahn,” in Sprache und bürgerliche Nation. Beiträge zur deutschen und europäischen Sprachgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Dieter Cherubim et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 384–397; in addition, there is also the railway as a “subject of the revolution,” i.e. as “carrying the hopes of March” for social and technological progress, but above all as the transportation means, fiercely fought over, for moving revolutionaries and soldiers during the uprisings of 1848/49: Ralf Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn. Die Herrschaft über Raum und Zeit 1800–1914 (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2005), 89–107. For a typical example of the coeval reception of the railway, see the enthusiastic report of the first German rail line

Now-time Explosion

a further aspect is its suitability as an optimistic symbol of a determined course of history—a locomotive moves forward, traveling from the past into the future, and on tracks, which have set the direction of the journey and always lead to the destination. But perhaps a somewhat subtler key to understanding the metaphor is to be found in the material, sensory experience of a journey in a train for a person of the 19th century; the sheer physical experience of how a manmade power develops a hitherto inconceivable force, a seemingly paradoxical interaction between monumental heaviness and rapid forward movement; and finally, directly related to this, the experience of the journey itself, at once thrilling and frightening, exalting and elevating. On a train journey a person can marvel at the technological triumph of their species; and when looking admiringly at the locomotive they find the direct physical confirmation of modern man’s self-perception as the rational molder of and sovereign over history. In this way, the train is not only a pictorial (iconic) analogy of progress but epitomizes the (indexical) proof that history is moving forward.32 It is not referential in the sense of pointing; rather, it is what it signifies, and in a way that is fully comprehensible through the senses for anyone who sees or travels on a train. The explosion is also a sign of the new age; dynamite—while not the first explosive agent but the first one used on a large scale—was patented in 1867. Unlike the positively connoted railway, here the new is the source of imagery for catastrophic and cataclysmic experiences. In the explosion, acceleration is heightened into its fatal extremity and manifests as a destructive bang, occurring with unexpected suddenness, and mangling and shredding everything in its vicinity. In contrast to the many nature metaphors of revolution like thunderstorms, floods, or earthquakes, wherein the visual logic remains without a subject and the participating actors are ‘cut out’ of the scene,33 the actors remain indirectly present in the image of the explosion, for explosions, in so far as they are not accidental, are triggered. Thus, the explosion metaphor resonates with more than the mere reference to a disastrous occurrence, creating an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, like a thunderstorm, flood, or earthquake; unlike with the natural disasters, there are always intentions at work in explosions. The explosion metaphor thus seems predestined for the field of revolution psychology as it is explained by revolutionaries and theorists of revolution. There the explosion is turned into a source image for needs, desires, affects, between Nuremberg and Fürth: N. N., “Eröffnung der Eisenbahn zwischen Nürnberg und Fürth,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 101, 17.12.1835, 1201f., https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/ display/bsb10531711_00601.html. 32| The conceptual pairing of ‘iconic’ and ‘indexical’ stems from the classification of signs elaborated by Charles S. Peirce, “Speculative Grammar,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2: Elements of Logic, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 2.219–2.444. 3 3| Cf. Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte, 139

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and wishes; it serves as a cipher for the proletarian experiences of oppression, deprivation, and humiliation, but also as the explanation—seemingly as full proof as a law of nature—for the sudden uprising of the oppressed as soon as some spark sets alight and conflagrates the highly volatile ‘powder’ of emotions. Perhaps more emphatically than every other revolution metaphor, the metaphor of explosion has extended its reach into political thinking itself due to these implications. In the image of explosion, the political becomes political psychology, indeed a ‘political physics.’ Once we dwell on the logic of the imagery, then more emerges than just some illustration of something; a thinking model crystallizes. In this thinking model revolutions manifest as reactions, seemingly obeying the laws of physics, to irresolvable contradictions and constellations of mounting political pressure; they result from the contrariety of two forces, between one emanating from the inside outward and the other forcefully impacting from the outside inward, until finally the inside bursts the shackling bonds with a loud bang. A succinct example of this is to be found in a letter by the revolutionary and RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin: “the contradiction between wanting to live and not being able to live is explosive.”34 This thinking model of revolution psychology suggests that the revolutionary explosion is the moment of a sudden change of state in which the oppressed ‘wanting’ asserts itself over the otherwise so overpowering ‘not-being-able-to’ and frees itself from hindrances; the moment in which the life that is possible rebels against real life; the fulfilled instant in which the not-yet-being of utopia passes into the actuality of the present, while what once was is devalued into a no–longer–existent. Revolution, in the logic of this imagery, is thus a movement of inversion: that previously kept under now turns onto the upside. In this thinking model, a part of the original sense of the revolution metaphor has been retained, as upheaval, as the inversion of above and below, as a swapping of positions between manifest order and latent disorder, or—in the image of the explosion—as a rotating of inside and outside. |

3 4| Gudrun Ensslin, „reden wir von uns“ [1973], in das info. briefe von gefangenen aus der raf. aus der diskussion 1973–1978, ed. Pieter H. Bakker Schut (Kiel: Malik, 1987), 14–18, 17, qtd. after Gunnar Hindrichs, Philosophie der Revolution (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 58.

Histories of the Present

Maria Muhle

Histories of the Present— a Media Philosophical Approach

The Present as Reactualized History One paradigmatic aspect emerging in the performative practice of the artist Alexandra Pirici, in particular in her somewhat earlier interventions in monumental commemorative culture, is how practices of remembrance can virtually arise out of the monolithic stone and become performative, powerfully evident in her performance P e r s i s t e n t Fe e b l e n e s s from 2013 (fig. 1a/b) at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig. Built based on designs by the Berlin architect Bruno Schmitz and inaugurated in 1913, the monument commemorates the Battle of the Nations fought at the gates of Leipzig in 1813. Resulting in Napoleon suffering a devastating defeat at the hands of the Coalition armies of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Sweden, until the First World War the Battle of the Nations was considered the largest ever fought in history. In 2013, on the second centenary, a large-scale reenactment was staged; involving 600 participants in front of 30 000 spectators, this was the collective remembrance of a historical event that with (or despite?) its almost 100 000 dead served for a long time as the founding myth of German unity. A politics of history that stages such a mass spectacle aims to foster the belief that a historical past can be summoned into the present intact (albeit condensed in time: while the Battle of the Nations in 1813 was fought over three days, the reenactment took a mere four hours) in order to render it a vivid and tangible experience. This “modern way of conveying history,” as the website of the reenactment association “Leipzig 1813” puts it, is considered an “archaeological experiment that enables deeper insights into the world of past cultures.”1 Pirici’s “sculptural com1| “In this way the re-enactment events, like the one held on the anniversary of the Battle of the Nations each year in Leipzig, are genuine ‘expert forums’ in which new sources and information can be exchanged

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1a/b

plement to the Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig,” wherein the artist and choreographer employs dancers to occupy and extend the interior space of the monument, pursues a contrary aim to authentic representation or a causal culture of remembrance—to question and challenge the present this politics of history is looking to evoke, the gestures it uses to assert power and identity: the supplement counters the affirmation of the founding history through reenactment with a feebleness, one distinctively marked by the draped exhausted bodies of the dancers on the monumental sculpture.2 Both strategies, the traditional reenactment and Pirici’s sculptural extension, address a connection between historiography and performative practices that questions a traditionally transmitted, text-based politics of history, which is primarily concerned with preserving history. Both are about creating a form reactivating and discussed, from archeological finds and little known accounts by eyewitnesses through to the suppliers of authentic clothing fabrics and other props and equipment.” See http://www.leipzig1813.com/de/veranstaltungen/re-enactment/re.html. 2| Alexandra Pirici, P e r s i s t e n t F e e b l e n e s s , Performance, Oct. 19, 2013, Ruhmeshalle, Battle of the Nations Monument, Leipzig. See https://gfzk.de/2013/alexandra-pirici-entschiedene-entkraeftungpersistent-feebleness/.

Histories of the Present

a historical past in the present. At the same time however, this performative connection of past and present takes on diametrically opposed forms symptomatic for the diverse approach to strategies of reenactment, which qua repetition and recreation actualize, re-contextualize, but also re-format concrete historical events. From a perspective informed by media philosophy, it is possible to initially draw a global distinction that is re-encodable in terms of media aesthetics: roughly speaking and reflecting the aforementioned examples, this distinction runs along the opposition between the popular scientific forms of reenactment, geared to producing authenticity and the possibility of emotional identification, and artistically creative repetitions and reenactments, which are precisely not interested in producing a copy of the past in the present, but rather discern and point out the fragmentation of historical narratives and bring this fragmentation into play as a central element of thinking about and in the present. For just as little as the past—completed and finalized—can be shifted into the present as such through a reenactment, so is the present as an “epoch” not closed off from the past; instead, this past continues to unceasingly unfurl an effect.3

“Monumental History” The immersive-spectacular historiography of classical reenactment draws, necessarily so it seems, on a history of events, i.e. history understood as a succession of grand deeds and actions by great (white) men—very much in the sense of Nietzsche’s “monumental history,” which neglects causes in favor of effects and addresses the living contemporary as someone who “acts and strives.”4 The battle is thus a popular subject of reenactments not only because of its suitability as a mass spectacle; rather even more tellingly, a historiographical tradition is drawn on that had already underlain the genre of history painting in the 19th century, and illustrates precisely such an understanding of history as a succession of great events. The epistemological claim of the reenactment is based on the conviction that experience broadens historical understanding, so that here the personal experience of spectators and reenactors is to take the place otherwise afforded interpretation, a radically subjective inlet that of studying the sources and historical documentation. As Vanessa Agnew has explained, elaborating on the approach first formulated by the British historian R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History, published posthumously in 1946 and wherein he introduced reenactment as a method 3| For a critical discussion of the historiographical and historico-political relevance of the concept of the epoch, see Jacques Rancière,“ The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth (English translation),” InPrint 3, no. 1 (2015), Article 3. 4| Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. David Breazeale, Cambridge, 1997), 57-123, 67.

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of historical study,5 this affective study of history rests upon a sympathetic identification with the past that brings this past closer to the contemporary viewer and, when reenacted, makes it more graphic and thus understandable. And in a certain way these practices incline at the same time towards “antiquarian history,” which furnishes the “preserving and revering soul” with the means to create for contemporaries a continuity with their past and produce a “simple feeling of pleasure and contentment,” as Nietzsche put it.6 The reenactment aims to solve the problematic of the present’s increasing distance to a historical past, and does so by seeking to overcome the gap between the historical event and the present-day historian (or reenactor): in Anglo-American forms of spectacular battle reenactments the intention is to produce an emotional identification that in turn makes it possible to bridge the gap to the past in a simpler and more direct way, addressing the affects, than an arduous study of sources could ever achieve; for that, the issue of the sources is solved by making it possible to tangibly experience the sources in the reenactment, or in other words: a simultaneity of source and spectator/historian/reenactor is staged. Thus, history seems increasingly accessible to popular-historiographic reenactment and not distorted in the slightest—the reenactment moves within the horizon of a continuistic understanding of history in which critical scrutiny of what happened and how a historian can even come into contact with the events is less important than staging the grand traditions of what took place, eschewing the posing of any critical questions, so as to make the past an experience in the present.

5| At the same time, reenactment is for Collingwood a purely mental act resting on the identification of two cognitive acts and thus does not participate neither in the performative history of the reenactment nor in its affective claim: “The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind.” Robin G. Collingwood, “Human Nature and Human History,” in The Idea of History: With Lectures 1926–1928 (1946), ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 215. See also Vanessa Agnew, “History’s affective turn: Historical reenactment and its work in the present,” Rethinking History 11, no. 3 (2007). 6| Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” 67, 73.

Histories of the Present

Fragmentary Present In contrast to these immersive-narrative conceived practices of reenactment and their relationship to the past, specific “documentary” forms of reenactment pursue a different historico-political aim—to recover the “lost” sources by producing images of events of which there are no images (or sources). The paradigmatic example of this migration of fictional images into historical judgment most certainly remains the shots of Nicolai Evrainov’s theatrical reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which have entered the annals of history as a historical document and have been “reworked” by Chris Marker in his film Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1992).7 A further example, also referred to by Marker, are the images of the Soviet armies joining up in their two-pronged attack on the outskirts of Stalingrad and encircling the German Sixth Army under General Paulus in November 1942, which were taken by the Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen: without any “authentic” images, Karmen had the scenes restaged a week after the battle in Kalach on the Don to produce these “documents,” which celebrate the first major defeat of the Wehrmacht and the first great victory of the Red Army, thus contributing a further chapter to the history of the “Great Patriotic War.” Whereas Karmen seeks to illustrate events, counteracting the uncertain or indeed nonexistent sources with a logical-authoritative act of the imagination by the historian or filmmaker,8 Marker in turn is not concerned with providing a historical “correction” of Karmen’s pseudo-documentary practices, but rather aims to demonstrate the endless recodability of historical documents. Thus Karmen’s images have themselves been adopted without comment as historical documents in various documentaries on the Second World War, for example in Frédéric Rossif’s De Nuremberg à Nuremberg from 1989; and remarkably it is the French TV series Apocalypse: La deuxième Guerre Mondiale, strongly criticized for its colorization of the filmic material, that has drawn attention to the fictive origin of these images.9 Marker’s film reenactments neither create fictive documents nor do they reflect the “historical truth” to show it in its true light. Instead, they aim at the manifold medialization loops which historical writing or any reference to something like “historical events” already always imply. This occurs also in the early reenactments of Milo Rau, which emphasize the aspect of the reproduction of already over-medialized images, for example in the detailed reenactment of the Ceausescu Trial: no documents are created here, no information conveyed or disclosed, but documents well enough known are medialized, both anew and again. In the case of the trial they 7| Recently, this “fictive document” was the starting point for the exhibition, curated by Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, “Sturm auf den Winterpalast: Geschichte als Theater” in Gessnerallee, Zurich, 2018. 8| Karmen acts here as a historian in the sense described by Collingwood. 9| For a more detailed discussion, see Maria Muhle, “Krieg in Farbe. Darstellung und Nachstellung,” Mittelweg 36, no. 3 (2015).

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are, furthermore, brought back closer to their original medium, with the TV images brought to the stage and thus in their original context of the staged, theatralized trial, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion from the outset. In this way these reenactments do not provide “new” documents, but rather trigger an insight into the construction of history, which is always medialized and re-medialized, and which in its purported correction first and foremost re-produces new history(-ies). But precisely this aspect appears to play merely a subordinate role in Rau’s more recent works, in the sense at least that he has become increasingly concerned with actually changing current political conditions—an activism that, while it cannot be denied, at the same time entails relinquishing the position that is so important for a discerning and challenging reenactment, namely the insight into how repeating an event cannot simply correct what happened and generate a better, ‘correct’ present contrasting to a false past.10

“Proof of Nothing” The works of the artist Marcel Odenbach also pursue the question of the interconnection between historical past and the present, challenging both the naïve belief in the possibility of a seamless representation of history as well as the historiographical gesture that concedes images of the present absolute authority over the past. This is particularly evident in two more recent video works, i.e. in non-performative works, which however need to be considered against the backdrop of a logic of reenactment for their historico-political relevance to first emerge. In 2017 Odenbach gave a large solo exhibition and one of these video works the documentary-provocative title Be w e i s z u n i c h ts / P r o o f o f N o t h i n g . Here the artist is quoting the title of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann from 1952, published in the volume of poetry Die gestundete Zeit in 1953.11 With this title, the video work, the exhibition, and the poem address, each in their own way, each in their own medium, a problem field that spans the examination of the crimes committed in German National Socialism on the one hand, which was only just beginning (if at all) in 1952, and the “proofs” 10| For a more detailed discussion on the various forms of reenactment and their different logics (aesthetics of immersion, identification vs. documentary aesthetics of critical distance) and for the insight that this opposition itself is generally too simplistic, see Maria Muhle, “‘History will repeat itself.’ Für eine (Medien-)Philosophie des Reenactments,” in Körper des Denkens. Neue Positionen der Medienphilosophie, ed. Lorenz Engell, Frank Hartmann and Christiane Voss (Munich: Fink, 2013), and id., “Reenactment als Mindere Mimesis,” in Ortsbestimmungen. Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst, ed. Eva Hohenberger and Katrin Mundt (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016). 11| Ingeborg Bachmann, “Proof of Nothing,” in id., Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2006), 300-301. The poem was revised by Bertolt Brecht who slightly changed a line; it was however left out of the second edition published in Piper Verlag in 1957.

Histories of the Present

of these crimes, the evidence, the witnesses, and the images of this history, which was only a few years past. If 1952 marks something like the launching of a machinery processing and compiling material, and which for several decades had more to do with repressing this past than working through it, the year of Odenbach’s work, 2016, and the year of the exhibition, 2017, are located in a present where there are hardly any more personal memories, the contemporary witnesses now either very old or already deceased. The brutal personal and personnel looming of recently transpired history into the present, as traced in Bachmann’s poem, has given way to a critical examination of this process of coming to terms with the past (non-existent or at least only partially accomplished). For both moments however the same applies: that their historical work is “proof of nothing”—or, as Bachmann put it in her poem: “[…] Having left the straight // and narrow path, and not for heaven, we bring to light // things in which there lives destruction and the power // to scatter us to the wind. All this is proof // of nothing and which no one wants. […]”12 What is at issue here and there, now and then, are not only the historical facts (although these are also contended and disputed) but rather how the horror of the years 1933 to 1945 is “dealt with,” how it is to be represented or narratively retold, and hence the diverse forms of medialization of historical reality, which also entails the forms employed for representing and staging memory which allow history to be written in the first place. The problem facing the historian—and which becomes extreme in the wake of the industrial extermination of whole sections of the population—is that historical reality is not directly accessible in its facticity, but rather is—in its descriptive representation, i.e. in writing, exhibiting, presenting, reenacting—being continuously reformatted and recomposed. The question as to how history is conveyed is inextricably tied to the question which history is being conveyed—and at the same time this means that the operations of history do not conclude when the respective events come to an end, but that they extend and reach endlessly into the present, into that of 1952 and that of today. Bachmann seems to indicate precisely this in a preceding line: “Yet the mist [Rauch] above the hearth [Herd] // prevents us seeing the fire.” While the “smoke” [Rauch] here unequivocally evokes the chimneys of the concentration camps, the “stove” [Herd] hones in on the question of Heimat and the relationship between a mother, who had remained at home, and her children “waving from the dark corner of the world” as indices of the postwar. Subliminally however a further discussion unfolds, one that operates with the potencies of indexical representation theory and reaches into the very heart of the question as to how history can be approached and dealt with (documentarily-artistically). In his semiotic works the logician Charles S. Peirce draws a distinctive connection between rising smoke and photographic images, along with other objects like signposts, maps, or human actions, for example knocking on a door. For Peirce, they are all striking examples of a particular group of signs which are bound or coupled to reality in a specific way: Peirce calls 12| Bachmann, “Proof of Nothing,” 301.

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this sign type “indicators,” and while in a direct physical relationship to the objects they signify, they do not need to resemble them (as in the case of similes or iconic signs)—exactly like the smoke that rises from the fire or the weathervane that turns with the wind. These indicators “hold us stiffly up to the realities.”13 Continuing his analysis, Peirce concludes that photographic images are created under circumstances that “they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature.”14 This theory of the indexical sign, for which photography is merely one example among others, is then drawn on in the 1970s in theoretical discussions on photography, most prominently by Rosalind Krauss in her considerations on photography as the paradigm of 1970s art—including art (“earthworks,” “body art,” and “story art”) that does not operate photographically in the technical sense. Krauss explicitly takes up Peirce’s line of thinking when she traces the photographic from the process of its (technical) production and exempts the photographic image from any need to reproduce likeness. This becomes particularly clear in the juxtaposition with the representations of painting: „Whereas paintings can be made from memory or from the vastness of the imagination, a photograph, as a photochemically produced trace, can only come about through an initial physical connection with the referent. It is along this axis that the process of reference takes place, to which Charles Sanders Peirce refers when he turns to photography as a further element in that category of signs that he calls indexical.“15

The Bachmannian turn of this topos, alluded to by Odenbach, by no means leads to a consideration of the for-and-against of such a (much-criticized) understanding of photographic realism as a layered object (Barthes); rather, it sets up a paradoxical indexicality, according to which the smoke is a certain sign of the existence of fire, but at the same time conceals this fire, renders it invisible, obscures it, and thus extinguishes it from view. This indexicality is thus not only paradoxical because it refuses to enter into a relationship of likeness—this applies (or can apply) for every form of indexicality—but because, having entered a referential relationship with something, it now disguises this something in the very relationship. The smoke signifies fire, but does not show it. This indexicality exaggerates precisely the traditional one that Peirce also brings into play for the photographic image, one that points to the existence of its object but is not necessarily similar to it. Such a paradoxical indexicality, which in a certain way takes Peirce’s understanding further, must therefore arise in the tension between the realistic or documentary interest of the photographic (or filmic) image and its simultaneous disguising or destabi13| Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, Nathan Houser et al., ed., vol. 2 [1893–1913] (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 10. 14| Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotics,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Bulcher (New York: Dover Publishing, 1955), 98–119, 106. 15| Rosalind Krauss, “Marcel Duchamp oder das Feld des Imaginären,” in id., Das Fotografische. Eine Theorie der Abstände (Munich: Fink, 1998), 73–89, 79 (trans. from German by the editors).

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lization. And thus, one could say, such a paradoxical indexicality, referring to the existence of something while simultaneously obscuring, disguising, and enveloping it in ambiguity, pertains to documentary images in general that have to deal permanently with a fundamental uncertainty as to their ontological constitution: they are “proof,” but “of nothing.”

Documents and Monuments In one way or another this problematic runs through Odenbach’s work, in particular the video works assembled in the Vienna exhibition which utilize different media sources and combine documentary elements with fictive or narrative sequences. This is strikingly evident in the exploration of those spatialized representations of history mediated by the monuments on the grounds of the former concentration camp complexes of Buchenwald and Majdanek, which bring a contrast into play that is pivotal for the question of the production of documentary images or images of history, namely that between monument and document. In the introduction to Archaeology of Knowledge from 1969, Michel Foucault took this distinction as the starting point for his examination of the methodology of historical analysis, plotting its own historical change. While, as Foucault saw it, the attention of historians has shifted to the longue durée—here he was targeting the historians of the École des Annales—which entailed consideration of statistics like the fluctuations of population curves, models of economic growth, and climate cycles, etc., that of the disciplines of what may be broadly cast as the humanities has moved from large units (“periods” or “centuries”) to phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity.16 The pivotal question pursued by these analyses is how to specify concepts like “threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation,” i.e. those which “enable us to conceive of discontinuity.”17 Two tendencies have crossed over: while historical studies appear to be “abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures,” the “history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities.”18 In turn though, this contrast is only superficial, for when considered from an archaeological perspective the same problems are being posed in both cases, which Foucault then goes on to specify as “the questioning of the document.”19 16| Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 3-4; for these diverse phenomena of break and rupture, Foucault draws on Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological acts and thresholds, Georges Canguilhem’s displacements and transformations of concepts, and Luis Althusser’s radical distinction between science and ideology. 17| Foucault, Archaeology, 6. 18| Foucault, Archaeology, 6. 19| Foucault, Archaeology, 6.

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Thus, for the traditional understanding of the historian, the document is “the language of a voice reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace.”20 The document is interpreted, the substantiality of its truth and the value of its expressive power weighed up, it is the “inert material” historical studies use to try and reconstruct what people have said or done. According to Foucault, distinct from this understanding of history as (millennial and collective) memory, resting upon the interpretation of the document, is a history that approaches the document in its positivity and tries “to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations.”21 Foucault explicates this shift as follows: “To be brief then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the conditions of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.”22

In Figures of History Jacques Rancière takes up these considerations when he contrasts a history that documents the grand deeds of memorable men with a history “made from traces no one chose as such, the silent testimonies of ordinary life.”23 A new, different history counters the document serving event-driven history—“the text on paper intentionally written to make a memory official”— with the monument, or more precisely the monument in its primary sense, which Foucault also draws on, as “that which preserves memory through its very being,

20| Foucault, Archaeology, 6. 21| Foucault, Archaeology, 7. 22| Foucault, Archaeology, 7f. As the consequences of such a shift, Foucault first mentions the dispersal of a linear schema, of a continuous chronology of reason, replaced by distinctive nuances defying a unifying law of causality, and thus possessing their own peculiar type of history; the second consequence is the central position assumed by the concept of discontinuity in the historical disciplines, which no longer plays the role of some outward fate, but acts as an operational term; the third consequence is the blurring of the possibility of a global history that attempts “to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle—material or spiritual—of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion—what is called metaphorically the ‘face’ of a period.” Foucault, Archaeology, 10. 23| Jacques Rancière, Figures of History, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 22.

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that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak.”24 Whereas in Foucault the monument emerges in its immanence, i.e. in the archaeological description of its (silent) materiality and concatenation, Rancière focuses on its paradoxical capacity to speak. The dualism between thing (monument) and sign (language) that Rancière is seemingly reintroducing here—and countering the Foucauldian archaeology with—is nonetheless refracted by how the monument, while speaking, does so precisely not in a way that was to be expected: a speaking despite everything and thus a non-documentary speaking. The monument thus participates in the paradoxical indexicality mentioned above, for it produces traces “despite everything,” traces which do not prove anything concrete, although they are proof, which are decipherable as a specific historical truth locked in a document, but point to the permanent production of historical truths through figurations of history: “The monument is the thing that talks without words, that instructs us without intending to instruct us, that bears a memory through the very fact of having cared only for the present.”25 And in this way it differs from “monument” in the sense of a memorial, or ultimately in the sense of a document as a controlled speech act that must not necessarily be linguistic in nature but is linguistically decipherable, translatable, and as a (closed) sign (a model or an example) of the past reaches into the present—and hence at the same time forges a certain continuity, but also captures, fixates, and brings to closure a historical situation: carves it in stone. Marcel Odenbach shows how the history stored in a monument or memorial can spin around in circles in his work I m K r e i s e d r e h e n / Tu r n i n g i n 24| Rancière, Figures of History, 22. 25| Rancière, Figures of History, 22.

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c i r c l e s from 2009, a work that deals with the monument erected at the site of the former Majdanek concentration camp: here it is not only the two young men visiting the memorial site who are rolling around in the long summerly grass, but the camera itself also turns in circles, on and on, close up to a gray stone relief (fig. 2). Through a fade-in the viewer is informed that it is a sculptural work: “Bildhauer: Wiktor Tolkin, geb. 1922, lebt in Gdansk” (Sculptor: Wiktor Tolkin, born 1922, lives in Gdansk). As the camera rolls on, now and then changing direction, the viewer finds out that the relief is 220 meters long and made of ferro concrete, that it has a diameter of 35 meters and a height of 14.5 meters. Following these technical details, which however are more obscured than illustrated by the images produced by the camera, the shots are overlaid with documentary film images showing people who walk towards the camera and then onwards out of view. The next fade-in—“Inschrift: Unser Schicksal sollte Euch eine Warnung sein” (Inscription: Let our fate be a warning to you)—immediately suggests that these are shots of deportations; and in fact they are shots taken in the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, the images running over the abstract stone relief as if it were a screen. Further fade-ins provide the following information: the monument was built between March 1968 and September 1969, it was inaugurated on September 21, 1969, the grounds of the memorial site covers 90 hectares, the total cost amounted to 23 million zloty, responsible for the planning was Janusz Dembek. A strip of sky is to be seen, but, as in a camera obscura, it is the wrong way around, the buildings and trees leading the eye from above to below, to the sky beneath, a crematorium chimney also points downward, like “Having left the straight // and narrow path, and not for heaven.”26 The final text fade-in reads: “Konzentrationslager von 1941 bis 1944, ca. 78 000 Menschen wurden getötet.“ (Concentration camp from 1941 to 1944, ca. 78 000 people were killed.) Only now does the camera leave the interior of the memorial, at first filming through another strip of light, this time the right way round, then in a long shot it shows the immediate surrounds of the former Majdanek concentration camp, located in the suburb of

26| Bachmann, “Proof of Nothing,” 301.

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the same name in the small Polish city of Lublin: houses, buildings, and urban structures are to be seen in the direct vicinity to the onetime camp—so close that one wonders if it was the same in 1941. The camera then feels its way along wooden planks, which only give the slightest hint of the prisoner barracks, and lastly cuts back to the two young men who are circling around the memorial and commenting on the fragility of remembrance, which seems paradoxical given the massiveness of the stone shown, the ashes of the dead which could be blown out of the mausoleum bowl, that it was “by a hair there was no one left to grieve for them!” The camera shows the ashes first at the very end and the long shot of the whole structure first in the roll of the credits. With the abstract stone relief and the black-and-white figures of the film material (retrievable in the collective memory) Odenbach stages two traditional types of remembering, which he then however interconnects by turning the monumental stone into a projection screen for the memorized film documents, avoiding in this way a positing of the monument/document as a history sign and making it instead tangibly thinkable as a figure of history; at the same time, the unambiguous commemorative culture of the socialist-brutalist memorial architecture of Majdanek is brought into view, a strategy that draws attention to the historiographical dynamic that exploits commemorative culture as an origins myth for a “new” historical narrative, a new “identity,” which, although claiming to honor the rupture, are in fact far more embedded in continuity to an identitarian thinking, or in other words forever “turning in circles”… In this way, with the film and stone Odenbach’s work Im K r e i s e d r e h e n / Tu r n i n g i n c i r c l e s combines two types of monuments memorized into documents in a cross-fading of the media, turning them into documentized monuments: the work understood as a monument is not concerned with continuing and preserving memory by deciphering the memorials and the past reality transported through them; instead, the trajectory is another: to understand the working of the past in the present, but not to overcome it, nor to leave it open to (ab-)use as a rhetorical ploy of the late-born, or as a springboard for “looking forward,” and hence as the result of a standing still, but rather as ongoing work, and so incomplete and defying closure, a turning-in-circles.

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A historiographical causality that turns the remembrance of the crime only recently endured into an origin myth for a new political or national identity appears to be explicitly constructed at another memorial site, one Odenbach has explored in his most recent work B e w e i s z u n i c h t s / P r o o f o f N o t h i n g from 2017: The Buchenwald Memorial Site, which provided an identity-forging element for the birth of the GDR in the Communist struggle against National Socialism, symbolized by the political organization and discipline exemplified by the Communist prisoners in their uprising at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Odenbach’s examination of this narrative is presented as a dual-channel video installation and begins by showing on both screens shots of the view from Ettersberg into the populated valley below. Once again the spatial proximity between the location of a concentration camp and a settled population in a town is underlined, making a mockery of the myth that Weimar’s residents knew nothing about the camp. As in I m K r e i s e d r e h e n / Tu r n i n g i n c i r c l e s , technical information is provided through text fade-ins on a blackened screen: beside the images of a kite dancing against the sky, the place is named: “Ettersberg, Höhe 481.60 m, Weimar, Thüringer Becken.” („Ettersberg, height 481.6 m, Weimar, Thuringian Basin“). The camera then shows the bricked curvature of the Memorial Site. The following information is then faded in: “Gesamtgröße der Anlage ca. 280 Hektar (approx. size of the site 280 hectares), Entwurf (draft): Ludwig Deiters, Hans Grotewohl, Horst Kutzat, Hugo Namslauer, Hubert Matthes und Kurt Tauschendschön.” Here, too, the camera feels its way along the curvature, a movement that however first then begins once the images are faded over by documentary shots which show prisoners surging out of the camp and people marching, both moving in the opposite direction to the camera. And once again, the stone of the Memorial Site is turned into a projection screen for documentary images, and this in a double sense: explicitly in how the stone becomes the screen on which the images become perceivable; but also implicitly, the abstract, stone-like remembrance is supplemented by figurations, documentary images, which tell the story of these very stones, pictorializing them, explicating them. The film images are shots of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp: those marching are Red Army soldiers, welcomed by the Weimar population

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with signs like (fig. 3a/b): “Wir grüßen die Rote Armee” (We salute the Red Army). Or: “Die Antifaschisten grüßen Marschall Stalin und Zhukov!” (The antifascists hail Marshal Stalin and Zhukov!). A small boy smiles shyly into the (documentary) camera, a triangle is stitched onto the lapel of his jacket, he is holding a wooden scooter, alongside him the information appears: “Konzentrationslager von Juli 1937 bis April 1945 Speziallager von April 1945 bis Januar 1950” (Concentration camp from July 1937 to April 1945 special camp from April 1945 to January 1950). Next to the image of the young boy, who continues to look into the camera, a shot of the large main stairs of the site is now to be seen, in the bottom right corner a shiny can of cola, the monument is only partially in view, a blue ball bounces down the stairs; the boy disappears from the left screen and the following information is now presented on a black background: “circa 63113 Opfer” / circa 63113 victims (fig. 4a). The presentation switches into a shot-reverse construct: from below one looks up the stairs to the Buchenwald tower with the monument in the foreground, designed by Fritz Cremer in 1958 and oriented on Auguste Rodin's T h e Burg h e r s o f Ca l a i s ; from above one sees the stairs, which lead to the bricked circular (fig. 4b). A total shot, albeit fractured, ensues—“Einweihung der Gedenkstätte 14. November 1958” (Memorial Site inaugurated November 14, 1958). The cam-era then focuses on the B u c h e n w a l d M o n u m e n t by Fritz Cremer. Shown on both screens, the camera circles around the monument, wanders along its edges, shows individual parts of the bodies of the rebelling prisoners, the emaciated faces, the gun, the swung flag, and the raised fists. The images are accompanied musically by Heiner Goebbel’s Eisler Material. In the penultimate shot this intimate scanning is pictorially underlain on the right-hand side with material from the 1966 DEFA film Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones) by Frank Beyer, featuring Manfred Krug in the main role—specifically with a threatening c l a p p i n g r i t u a l performed by the construction workers led by Krug (fig. 4c/d). Finally, during the credit roll, one sees the monument as a whole from behind, with the Thuringia Basin in the background. With Fritz Cremer, Heiner Goebbels, Hans Eisler’s scores to songs by Bertolt Brecht, the DEFA, and Manfred Krug, Odenbach strings together a whole panoply

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of GDR cult(-ure)-figures in these images, demonstrating the ambiguity of political constructions of identity which combine affirmation and criticism, propaganda and resistance. The images follow the operations of history, the concatenation of historical narrative and historiographical construction of unidimensional causalities. And they show the attempt to bring these ambiguities to a standstill in a monumentalization of the documents, serving a politics of history for which the monument is as indispensable as a sign of a new beginning as it is imperative for remembering the past, producing a clear, unambiguous vision of history. In stark contrast, Marcel Odenbach’s work on and with history is one that, fully in the sense of Foucault, arranges these different elements into a series, interconnecting them, cross-fading and superimposing them—not in order to plot causalities or construct necessary ordered sequences or indeed chronologies, but rather to place these elements— images, texts, sounds, stones, movements—into a non-determined relationship to one another. Odenbach’s works thus point to the paradoxical indexicality that conceals what it shows—with other images, other ideal types, other media, cultivating an awareness for the difficulties the “writing” or the present of history repeatedly poses. In this sense, Odenbach sets in motion, literally-pictorially, the history codified or carved in the stone memorials, thus contradicting the assumption that one could distill a necessary unfolding of a present from the past. Instead, the works turn the memorials back into monuments, and so they (paradoxically) fluidize the petrified, identity-forging architecture, make it move with the camera, deconstruct it in its component parts, which then must be always reassembled again, each time differently.

Histories of the Present

For this is where the actual work of history resides—dealing with its own ambiguity, which means precisely not erasing it, but exploiting the double meaning of its own name and working on this ambiguity, spanning history between historiographical exposition and fictive narrating, between a history and the stories, between the archive and the imagination.27 That this means that an ideologically flawless political stance cannot be assumed, that the purported penetration to and grasping of “the” truth of history is not some safety net for an emancipatory politics, is just as true as its converse—that calling facticity into question is in no way at all good politics per se. Rather, precisely these controversial disputes on the use and abuse of history in its representation are in essence historical work itself, which thus also—or precisely therefore—takes place in the discussion on the reenacting reconstruction of the past in the present. |

27| See Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis/ London: Minnesota University Press, 1994).

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List of Figures Fig. 1a/b

Alexandra Pirici, Per sistent Feebleness, 2013, sculptural additions to the Monu m ent of t he Bat t les of t he Nat ion s / V ö l k e r sc h l a c h t D e n k m a l in Leipzig, curated by Joanna Warsza, commissioned by Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, photo by Alexandra Pirici; © the artist.

Fig. 2

Marcel Odenbach, Im Kreise drehen / Tur ning in C irc le s, 2009, video, still; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Fig. 3a/b

Marcel Odenbach, Be weis zu nichts / Proof of N othing , 2017, 2-channel video installation, stills: a| “We salute the Red Army,” b| “The antifascists hail Marshal Stalin and Zhukov!”; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Fig. 4a–d

Marcel Odenbach, Be weis zu nichts / Proof of N othing , 2017, 2-channel video installation, stills: a| “circa 63113 victims;” b| Fritz Cremer, B u c h e n w a l d Mo n u ment, 1952–1958, bronze, ca. 4 x 12 x 6 m; c/d| Clapping ritual from Frank Beyer's film Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones), 1966; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

Biographical Notes

_Biographical Notes

Mieke Bal Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist, curator, and a Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. She focuses on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis, and the critique of capitalism, and a critical engagement with cultural heritage. As a co-founder of ASCA, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, her primary commitment is to develop meaningful interdisciplinary approaches to cultural artifacts and their potential effect for the public. Her video projects and collaborative works of documentaries on migratory culture have been exhibited internationally. In “theoretical fictions” like A Long History of Madness, she argues for a more humane treatment of psychosis. Widely exhibited recent video productions include Madame B (e.a. Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Munch Museum, Oslo, 2017–18). The Films and installations as Reasonable Doubt (2016) were premiered in Kraków in the festival “Film and Philosophy.” Current exhibitions show her sixteen-channel video work Don Quixote: tristes figuras (premiered Småland Museum, Växjö/ Sweden; also shown in Murcia, Spain). Her numerous book publications include a trilogy on political art: Endless Andness (on abstraction), Thinking in Film (on video installation), both 2013, Of What One Cannot Speak (on sculpture, 2010), and A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), in which her early work comes together. Publications such as In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2016) and Emma & Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic (Oslo: Munch Museum Brussels: Mercatorfonds; Yale University Press, 2017) stand for her integrated approach to academic, artistic and curatorial work.

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Maximilian Bergengruen Maximilian Bergengruen is professor of modern German Literature, from 2009 to 2014 at the Département d‘Allemand of the University of Geneva, and since 2014 at the Institute of German Studies at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His main areas of research lie in the literary and cultural history of knowledge from the early modern period to modernity, form criticism and literary theory. Recent book publications include Die Formen des Teufels. Dämonologie und literarische Gattung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Goettingen 2020, forthcoming), Verfolgungswahn und Vererbung. Metaphysische Medizin bei Goethe, Tieck und Hoffmann (Goettingen 2018), Mystik der Nerven. Hugo von Hofmannsthals literarische Epistemologie des Nicht-mehr-Ich (Freiburg i. Br. 2010), Nachfolge Christi / Nachahmung der Natur. Himmlische und natürliche Magie bei Paracelsus, im Paracelsismus und in der Barockliteratur: Scheffler, Zesen, Grimmelshausen (Hamburg 2007).

Stefan Binder Stefan Binder is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at University of Göttingen. He received his PhD in 2017 from Utrecht University for an anthropological study on organized atheism, lived secularity, and the politics of difference in India (Total Atheism: Making Mental Revolution in South India). In 2011, he graduated with a M.A. degree (Magister Artium) in Religious Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Indology from University of Munich (LMU). In the framework of the DFG Priority Programe “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten,” he is currently working on religious ritual, audio-visual media practices, and the aesthetics of time among Twelver-Shi’i Muslims in Hyderabad, and is developing a project on masculinities and queer communities in urban India. A monograph on the relationship between science and religion with a special focus on modernist Buddhism, discourses of subjectivity, and practices of the “non-self” in meditation techniques was published 2012 (Die Erzeugung von Welt in Praktiken des Selbst, Munster: LIT).

Iris Därmann Iris Därmann is professor for Cultural Theory and Aesthetics at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-University Berlin. Fellowships have seen her work at the IFK, Vienna, the excellence cluster “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz, the IKKM at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “re:work. Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History.” She was president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Phänomenologische

Biographical Notes

Forschung (2009–2011) and a member of the research group “Pictograms” at the excellence cluster “Bild Wissen Gestaltung” (2012–2014), spokesperson for the research group “Oikonomia/Economy” in the excellence cluster “Topoi” (2012–2019) and subproject head in the special research area “Transformationen der Antike” [Transformations of Antiquity] (2012–2016). In 2016 she was appointed to the advisory board of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung and in 2017 awarded the Caroline von Humboldt professorship. Since 2018 she is a member of the advisory board of the Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene Museum. Her monographs include: Undienlichkeit. Gewaltgeschichte und politische Philosophie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, forthcoming 2020); Widerstände. Geschichte und Theorie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, forthcoming 2020); Kulturtheorien (Hamburg: Junius 2011, third edition 2017); Theorien der Gabe (Hamburg: Junius, 2010 (second edition 2016); Figuren des Politischen (Frankfurt o.M: Suhrkamp 2009); Fremde Monde der Vernunft. Die ethnologische Provokation der Philosophie (habilitation, Munich: Fink 2005); Tod und Bild. Eine phänomenologische Mediengeschichte (dissertation, Munich: Fink 1995).

Gabriele Genge Gabriele Genge is chairholder for Modern and Contemporary Art History and Art Theory at the University Duisburg-Essen. Her actual research interests cover particularly transcultural and postcolonial areas of the discipline with a specific focus on French Colonialism and African and African-American image theory, knowledge systems and epistemology. From these contexts emerged the book Art History and Fetishism Abroad: Global Shiftings in Media and Methods (Bielefeld: Transcript, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), co-edited with Angela Stercken. From 2017 to 2020 she supervised the DFG-research project “The Anachronic and the Present: Aesthetic Perception and Artistic Concepts of Temporality in the Black Atlantic,” since 2018 she is member of a DFG-Research Group dealing with Contemporary Art in Istanbul (“Ambiguity in spatial and pictorial politics between religion and the state”). Recently she drives her attention to migratory issues in Art History, investigating the Méditerranée as a geopolitical concept. Since 2018 she is member of the DFG-Network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents,” and of the scientific advisory board of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. Among her publications are: Black Atlantic. Andere Geographien der Moderne (Dusseldorf: dup, 2012), Artefakt Fetisch Skulptur. Aristide Maillol und die Beschreibung des Fremden in der Moderne (habil., Munich: Dt. Kunstverlag, 2009), Geschichte im Négligé. Geschichtsästhetische Aspekte der Pompiermalerei (PhD, Weimar: VDG, 2000), Méditerranée. Gegenwärtige Perspektiven auf den Mittelmeerraum, kritische berichte 4, co-edited with Alma-Elisa Kittner (Marburg: Jonas, 2017).

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Aesthetic Temporalities Today

Boris Roman Gibhardt Roman Boris Gibhardt is curator at Goethe-Nationalmuseum (Klassik Stiftung Weimar), Adjunct Professor (“Privatdozent”) of German and of General and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin since 2015, and co-editor of the German and French scientific review journal Regards Croisés. Revue d’historie de l’Art et d‘Esthétique. He has received several fellowships and grants for his research, for example from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Harvard University, from German Academic Exchange Service at Stanford University and from Intercontinental Academia at the Institutes for Advanced Studies in Sao Paulo and Nagoya. His research interests include German (and partly French) Literature and Aesthetics from 18th to 21st century. Selected Publications include Vorgriffe auf das schöne Leben. Weimarer Klassik und Pariser Mode um 1800 (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2019), Nachtseite des Sinnbilds. Die Romantische Allegorie (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2018), Das Auge der Sprache. Ornament und Lineatur bei Marcel Proust (Berlin/ Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011). An extended monograph on the topic of his recent contribution on Temporality and Rhythm will be published in 2020.

Boris Groys Boris Groys is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the New York University and Professor of Philosophy and Art History at the European Graduate Center, Saas Fee / Switzerland. Among his numerous book publications are Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), An Introduction to Antiphilosophy (London/ New York: Verso, 2012), Under Suspicion. A Phenomenology of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); On the New (London/ New York: Verso, 2014), In the Flow (London/ New York: Verso, 2016), and the volume (ed.) Russian Cosmism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

Johannes F. Lehmann Johannes F. Lehmann, PhD, is Professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. He studied German Studies and History in Duesseldorf and Freiburg, and completed his doctorate in Freiburg with the thesis Der Blick durch die Wand. Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2000), and his habilitation at the University of Duisburg-Essen with the publication Im Abgrund der Wut. Zur Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte des Zorns (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach (Litterae 107), 2012). His main research fields lie in the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, in narrative, literary and theatrical theory,

Biographical Notes

cultural studies, theories of violence, emotions, anthropology, and the history of the present. Recent books include Einführung in das Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Darmstadt: wbg, 2013), Rettung und Erlösung. Politisches Heil in der Moderne, co-ed. Hubert Thüring (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), and Aktualität. Zur Geschichte literarischer Gegenwartsbezüge vom 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, co-ed. Stefan Geyer (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2018).

Maria Muhle Maria Muhle is professor for Philosophy / Aesthetic Theory at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich and founder of the August Verlag Berlin. She is a member of the DFG research group “Media and Mimesis” at the Mimesis Doctoral Program of the LMU Munich and was a fellow at the research group “BildEvidenz” of the FU Berlin. The focal points of her research are political aesthetics, media philosophy, mimesis, strategies of reenactment, and biopolitics. Some of her most recent publications are: Black Box Leben (co-ed. Christiane Voss, Berlin: August, 2017); “Die große Familie der Menschen: Humanistische Mythen und tautologische Fotografie,” in Das Sichtbare und das Sagbare. Barthes’ Mythologie zwischen Text und Bild, ed. Peter Geimer and Katja Müller-Helle (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2020); “Mimesis und Aisthesis. Realismus und Geschichte bei Auerbach und Rancière,” in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, ed. Joseph Vogl, Veronika Thanner and Dorothea Walzer (Paderborn: W. Fink, 2018) and the issue “Praktiken des Inkarnierens. Nachstellen, Verkörpern, Einverleiben,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 8, vol. 1 (2017).

Nkiru Nzegwu Nkiru Nzegwu is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at State University of New York at Binghamton. She is founder of Africa Knowledge Project (https://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/) and Africa Resource Center, Inc. (africaresource.com). She is author of Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (2006, SUNY Press), co-editor of The New African Diaspora (2009, Indiana University Press); editor of Onitsha at the Millennium: Legacy, History and Transformation and His Majesty Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe: A Ten-Year Milestone (2013, Africa Resource Press); Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art (1999, International Society for the Study of Africa, ISSA); and Issues in Contemporary African Art (1998, ISSA). She has published over 60 articles and book chapters on African aesthetics, art, feminism, and philosophy.

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Francesca Raimondi Francesca Raimondi (PhD, Goethe-University), Junior professor for Philosophy at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf and visiting Professor for Practical Philosophy at Goethe-University Frankfurt, is the author of Die Zeit der Demokratie. Politische Freiheit nach Carl Schmitt und Hannah Arendt (Konstanz: University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Negativität. Kunst–Recht–Politik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018) and Serialität und Wiederholung—revisited (Berlin: August, forthcoming). She is member of the Frankfurter Arbeitskreis für Politische Theorie und Philosophie and serves on the editorial board of the publisher August. Her research is situated at the intersection of aesthetics, political theory and philosophy with a special interest among others on contemporary modes of subjectification and embodiment.

Christine Ross Christine Ross is Professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her areas of research include contemporary media arts, vision and visuality, transformations of spectatorship in contemporary art, participatory media and art, artistic redefinitions of the public sphere, and reconfigurations of time and temporality in recent media art practices. She is currently working on a book project, entitled Coexistence(s) in 21st-Century Art. Her books include: The Past is the Present; It’s the Future too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (Continuum, 2012); The Aesthetics of Disengagement (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Images de surface: l’art vidéo reconsidéré (Artextes, 1996). She has coedited The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Conflict[ed] Reporting: War and Photojournalism in the Digital Age (Photography & Culture, 2015), and Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Since 2005, she has been the principal investigator of the FQRSC-funded MediaTopia team research projects. She was the Director of Media@McGill—a hub of interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and public outreach on issues in media, technology and culture, from 2012 to 2017.

Ludger Schwar te Ludger Schwarte is Professor of Philosophy at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, after having taught as an assistant professor of image theory at the University of Basel (2006–2009) and as a Professor of Aesthetics at the Zurich University of Arts (2009). He was a visiting scholar at the University Paris 8, at the GACVS (Washington), at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris), at the University

Biographical Notes

of Abidjan, at Columbia University (New York), at the EHESS (Paris) and at the IKKM (Weimar). Areas of specialisation lie in aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of culture, ontology and the history of science. His books include Die Regeln der Intuition. Kunstphilosophie nach Adorno, Heidegger und Wittgenstein (Berlin: Merve, 2016), Philosophie der Architektur (Munich: W. Fink, 2009), Vom Urteilen (Berlin: Merve, 2012), Piktrale Evidenz (Paderborn: W. Fink, 2015), Notate für eine künftige Kunst. Berlin: Merve 2016), Denken in Farbe–Zur Epistemologie des Malens (Berlin: August, 2020).

Angela Stercken Angela Stercken is senior researcher in the DFG-project “The Anachronic and the Present: Aesthetic Perception and Artistic Concepts of Temporality in the Black Atlantic” at University of Duisburg-Essen and member of the DFG-Network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents.” Subsequent to her PhD at the University of Basel (Berlin: Reimer, 1998), granted research projects led her to Heinrich-Heine-University in Duesseldorf, where she was senior researcher and lecturer, conceptualizing and realizing projects on the exhibition history of the Weimar period as well as of the international exhibition history in the context of digital humanities (Kunst, Sport und Körper, vol. I, co-ed. Hans Körner, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002; vol. III, Weimar: VDG, 2004; Art Research: International Artists and Exhibitions Database, 2005–2011). Following curatorial and research projects took her to art institutions and museums, and finally to University Duisburg-Essen, where she last was a deputy professor for Contemporary Art History. Her research fields lie in the image theory of modern and contemporary art, in space, technology and timekeeping since the 18th century, and particularly in phenomena of temporality in transcultural art and maritime spaces of migration such as the transatlantic. Recent contributions focus on transmedial concepts, space and surface, and especially on performative and conceptual WestAfrican art and photography, and African-American positions from the 1960 until today. Current book publications include Art History and Fetishism Abroad. Global Shiftings in Media and Methods, co-ed. Gabriele Genge (Bielefeld: Transcript/ New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) and the forthcoming publication on aesthetic perception and artistic concepts of temporality in the transatlantic between West-Africa and the US (2020).

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Patrick Stof fel Patrick Stoffel is postdoctoral researcher at Leuphana University Lueneburg in the Department of History and Literary Cultures, currently working on staging earth history in the 19th and early 20th century. He previously did research at the University of Bonn, at Sorbonne University and at the University of Florence. His research fields include the cultural history of nature, the history of geology and palaeontology and the political imaginary. He is the author of the co-edited volume Europa: Eine Fallgeschichte! (Berlin: Bachmann, 2016) and Die Alpen. Wo die Natur zur Vernunft kam (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2018). In 2019 he was the winner of the Gleim Prize for Literature.

Samuel Strehle Samuel Strehle is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He studied sociology and philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and received his doctorate from University of Hamburg with a study on the “Collectivization of Dreams.” He was a scholarship holder at the Graduate School “Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne” at the University of Constance and a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Basel. He is currently conducting research as part of the DFG programme “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten,” where he is exploring the experience of time in social revolutions with special regard to the connection between time, material things and language. Additional research interests cover sociological theory, cultural sociology, visual sociology, media and film sociology, psychoanalysis, political theory, and theories of gift exchange. His publications include two monographs, Kollektivierung der Träume: Eine Kulturtheorie der Bilder (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2019) and Zur Aktualität von Jean Baudrillard: Einleitung in sein Werk (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), as well as various articles.

Tim Trausch Tim Trausch, PhD, studied Sinology in Wuerzburg / Germany and Bejing / China. After his participation in the DFG project “Indexing of the Sinica Collection and the Alfred Hoffmann Chinese Library at Leipzig University Library,” he completed his doctorate at the University of Cologne in 2017 with a thesis on aesthetic change in Chinese martial arts film. Currently he is a research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cologne, and part of the research project “China’s Third Modernity” (DFG Priority Program “Aesthetic Temporalities”). His research interests lie in the field of Chinese media culture and aesthetics, with

Biographical Notes

a special focus on photography and (post-)cinema. Recent publications include Affekt und Zitat: Zur Ästhetik des Martial-Arts-Films (Wiesbaden: J.B. Metzler, 2017), and the anthology Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture: Global Perspectives (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).

Christina Wessely Christina Wessely is Professor for the Cultural History of Knowledge at Leuphana University Lueneburg in the Department of History and Literary Cultures. She previously worked at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Vienna and had received postdoctoral fellowships from the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and from Harvard University. Her research fields include historical epistemology, the history of the life sciences in the 19th and early 20th century and the history of ecology and (transdisciplinary) ecological thinking. Among her book publications are the co-edited volume Pseudowissenschaft: Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Frankfurt o.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), Künstliche Tiere. Zoologische Gärten und urbane Moderne (Berlin: Kadmos, 2008). Recently, she co-edited a volume on the theory and history of ‘milieu’—a concept that she continues to explore not only in scientific but also in popular contexts around 1900 (Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne, Munich: Fink, 2017).

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Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft Elisa Ganivet

Border Wall Aesthetics Artworks in Border Spaces 2019, 250 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4777-8 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4777-2

Artur R. Boelderl, Monika Leisch-Kiesl (Hg.)

»Die Zukunft gehört den Phantomen« Kunst und Politik nach Derrida 2018, 430 S., kart., 21 SW-Abbildungen, 24 Farbabbildungen 39,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4222-3 E-Book: 39,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4222-7

Chris Goldie, Darcy White (eds.)

Northern Light Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North 2018, 174 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3975-9 E-Book: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3975-3

Leseproben, weitere Informationen und Bestellmöglichkeiten finden Sie unter www.transcript-verlag.de

Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft Julia Allerstorfer, Monika Leisch-Kiesl (Hg.)

»Global Art History« Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft 2017, 304 S., kart., 45 SW-Abbildungen 34,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4061-8 E-Book: 34,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4061-2

Claus Gunti

Digital Image Systems Photography and New Technologies at the Düsseldorf School March 2020, 352 p., pb. 44,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3902-5 E-Book: kostenlos erhältlich als Open-Access-Publikation, ISBN 978-3-8394-3902-9

Monika Leisch-Kiesl (Hg.)

ZEICH(N)EN. SETZEN. Bedeutungsgenerierung im Mäandern zwischen Bildern und Begriffen März 2020, 420 S., kart., eingelegte Faksimiles 50,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-5128-7 E-Book: 49,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-5128-1

Leseproben, weitere Informationen und Bestellmöglichkeiten finden Sie unter www.transcript-verlag.de