Mixed Forms of Visual Culture: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity 9781350211377, 9781350211407, 9781350211384

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Mixtures of All Sorts
Mixtures strange and rich
‘Mixed form’ defined
Defining ‘form’ via Hegel
The remit of ‘mixed form’
‘Medium’ and visual media
The join
The writing on ‘mixed form’
The questions, and the frameworks for responses
Some limitations
A post-script on the visual essays
1 The Cabinet of Curiosities as Mixed Form: Depictions and Desire
Words and things
Three kinds of curiosity
The origin of the cabinet in the Age of Discovery
A history of mixed form: the cabinet of curiosities as origin
Diversity of contents – and in curating
Locating evidence
Writing on the methods of display in the Wunderkammer
Defining ‘order’
Locating the images
The method for analysis
The Dimpfels’ cabinet
Ole Worm’s museum
Basilius Besler’s Wunderkammer
Settala in Milan
The cabinets of Calzolari and Cospi
Ferrante Imperato’s ‘Museo’
Athanasius Kircher’s museum
Jacob de Wilde’s ‘collection room’
Overview
Order overlooked: some explanations
2 Mixed Form in Working Life: The Rise of Manufacture
Introduction
The division of labour – key features
The division of labour – as experienced
Un-divided labour in communist society
3 Popular Mixed Forms in a Long Eighteenth Century: From the Broadside Ballad to the Chapbook
The broadside
The broadside ballad – as mixed form
The chapbook
Less diverse and more divided
Less diverse and more divided: eighteenth-century cultural form and working life
4 Visual Essay: The Pastime Scrapbook
5 Mixed Form and Modernism in the Visual Arts: Assemblage and Assembly Lines
Inimical: mixed form and modernism
Mixed form – its key forms in other modernisms
Collage, montage and assemblage
Writing on assemblage7
The beginnings of (heterogeneous) assemblage in modernism
Mixed form assemblage as a form of kinds: a summary
Assemblage as the outcome of assembling
Methods for arranging the components
. . . and glue
Mixed form assemblage and other modernisms
Mixed forms of modernism – and modernity
6 Visual Essay: The Artist’s Scrapbook: A Material Analysis
7 Digital Culture as Wunderkammer
The distribution of the digital
Mixed reality’s materials – a note
The scope of mixed reality’s ‘reality’
The sensory dimension of mixed reality’s reality
The scope of digitality in mixed reality
Mixed reality as digitality: the media
The means of mixing digital and real
The rules of media-combination
The provisionality of mixed reality
The screen and its ‘computer layer’
Digitization: ‘discretization’
Digitization: modularity
The digital as Wunderkammer?
Divided labour in the digital age
Post-Fordism
Post-Fordism as mixed form
Digital culture and labour: relations
Conclusion: A Synthesis of Sorts
The shape – or form – of history
Mixed forms in visual culture – as a field of study
Mixed forms in visual culture – the formalist analysis: some trends
Labour and mixed form
Mixed form in culture and in labour: the relationship
Beyond a synthesis
The remainder
References
Index

Citation preview

Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity Mary Anne Francis

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Mary Anne Francis, 2021 Mary Anne Francis has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover desgin by Tjaša Krivec All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3502-1137-7 978-1-3502-1138-4 978-1-3502-1139-1

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Mixtures of All Sorts

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The Cabinet of Curiosities as Mixed Form: Depictions and Desire Mixed Form in Working Life: The Rise of Manufacture Popular Mixed Forms in a Long Eighteenth Century: From the Broadside Ballad to the Chapbook Visual Essay: The Pastime Scrapbook Mixed Form and Modernism in the Visual Arts: Assemblage and Assembly Lines Visual Essay: The Artist’s Scrapbook: A Material Analysis Digital Culture as Wunderkammer

vi viii 1 23 53 73 101 115 147 169

Conclusion: A Synthesis of Sorts

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References Index

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Illustrations I.1

Plastic pellets, industrial granules, nurdles or mermaids’ tears of colors white, amber, black, red . . . southwest of France (sandbeach), 2011 I.2 Jimmie Durham, Still Life with Spirit and Xitle, 2007 I.3 Gerhard Richter, Overpainted Photograph, 2008 1.1 Anonymous, The Paston Treasure, c. 1670 1.2 Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690s 1.3 Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Sight, 1617 1.4 Overview of images of cabinets to be analysed 1.5 Musei Wormiani Historia, 1655 1.6 Hans Troschel the Younger, showing Basilius Besler’s cabinet on the title page to Fascicvlvs Rariorvm, 1616 1.7 Interior view of the Galleria Settala, 1666 1.8 Francesco Calzolari’s cabinet of curiosities, 1622 1.9 The collection of natural curiosities of Ferdinando Cospi, 1677 1.10 Fold-out engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale, 1599 1.11 Das Kircher-Museum im Collegium Romanum. Abb. in Turris Babel, Amsterdam, 1679 1.12 Peter the Great visiting the Museum Wildianum on 13 December 1697, 1700 2.1 Plate on pin-making, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1762 3.1 Broadside, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1798 3.2 Broadside: depiction of the Exchange Coffee House Boston, burning, c. 1818 3.3 Jacobite broadside: Proclamation of 1678 3.4 Broadside ballad: The bleeding lovers lamentation: or Fair Clorindas sorrowful complaint for the loss of her inconstant Strephon, between 1683 and 1696 3.5 Broadside ballad: The Easter wedding; or, The bridegrooms joy and happiness compleated, in his kind and constant bride, c. 1685 vi

5 6 6 28 34 34 36 40 41 42 43 44 46 47 48 55 77 78 80

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Illustrations

3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 C.1 C.2

Broadside ballad: The passionate damsel; or, The true miss of a man, between 1672 and 1696 Broadside ballad: The noble gallant, or An answer to Long days of absence, &c, c. 1670 Chapbook (front page): K. James 1st. and the tinker, 1790(?) Chapbook (front page): History of John Cheap, the chapman, 1800(?) Chapbook (front page): Fortunate weaver’s uprise, or, The landlady well pleased, 1802 Chapbook (front page): The Lamp-lighter, 1803 Chapbook (pages 3 & 10) Pilgrim’s Progress, from this world to that which is to come, c. 1840 Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic, 1919–20 Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (film still), 1929 Illustration from Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté, 1933 Pablo Picasso, The Bathers, 1956 Pablo Picasso, Nature morte à la chaise cannée, 1912 Pablo Picasso, Guitare, 1912 Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Clarinet, 1913–14 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau in Hanover, 1933 Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 1920 Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936 Jean Miró, Object, 1936 Workers on the first moving assembly line, 1913 Ford autos, Michigan Raoul Hausmann, Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head, 1919 Graham Harwood, Mongrel, My Dad, Hogarth, for Uncomfortable Proximity, Tate, 2000 Screenshot from IKEA Planner, author’s design, 2019 Tamiko Thiel, Reign of Gold, augmented reality installation, 2011 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6, 2001 The Manus VR Glove, 2016 Head-up display in a 1994 Pontiac Bonneville SEE, 2005 Pages from a commonplace book, 1843–4 The possible relationships between culture and ‘reality’ in Marxist theory

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82 82 88 89 90 91 92 118 120 121 125 129 130 131 134 135 137 138 142 144 170 171 175 177 179 180 199 203

Preface I finished writing this book on 31 December 2019, just as reports of a ‘mysterious’ viral pneumonia were coming out of Wuhan. The rest, as they say, is history. In the life lived alongside the emerging and embroiling epidemic, and in waiting for my script to emerge from peer-review, I found myself assailing the text I’d just completed with a range of questions, including ones that were pandemic-specific. Was it, I wondered, still relevant? Should I revise it in the light of recent events? And if so, how? Was there such a thing as a visual culture of the virus? (Possibly – but then, it felt too early to elaborate.) And what about the book’s interest in the socio-economic context of mixed form as an experience of labour: did its concern with that in its most recent manifestation – as an aspect of precarity, which had suddenly intensified – call for further comment? (Probably.) It seems increasingly obvious that Covid-19 has been facilitated by certain kinds of mixings; the compound interaction of animals and people that occurs when humans encroach upon the former’s habitats, driving wildlife closer to cities; the proximity between the two in ‘wet markets’ and in mink farms; the intermingling of people that is global travel and tourism, and the mixing that is a feature of overcrowded living conditions. But when mixture is not inherently bad or good, mixed form has also appeared in strategies for Covid-mitigation: for instance, the recourse to blended learning, which is no less than multimodal pedagogy. So, it may be timely to think about mixed form. Beyond the immediate scenario, mixture is, of course, implicated in matters of mass migration, which for reasons of climate emergency and poverty, in particular, are not going to go away. And as the Introduction mentions, mixed form offers a way of thinking about contemporary environmental concerns over and above global warming. Even when this book is not first and foremost concerned with mixed form in the realm of natural science, it might have a metaphorical value in approaching such, as well as those areas of social science not implicated in its concern with particular aspects of labour. On a more personal level, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture represents the most substantial articulation to date of my ongoing preoccupation with the multifarious; in Louis MacNeice’s memorable phrase: ‘the drunkenness of things viii

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being various’ (MacNeice 1949: 86). Over the years, this has taken an array of forms across the production of visual culture or more strictly speaking art, and writing. Variously, this project has involved the refusal of consistency at the level of an artist’s practice (as a student, I had four pseudonyms identified with different kinds of art – see Betterton: 1996: 163); it has recruited the viewer to extend an aesthetics of diversity, especially via interactive, and ‘Open Source’ art; and, among much else, it has been concerned with word-image artefacts as inherently mixed form, if often minimized and overlooked as such. As context goes, this is in turn informed by many other things, and perhaps, from an intellectual point of view, most significantly, the politics and textual theory of diversity that has been one of the legacies of post-structuralism and thereafter. In mentioning this history, I am prompted to acknowledge the many people who directly and indirectly have had a part in forming my thoughts and actions on things multifarious and mixed form more especially. They include tutors, gallerists, collectors, editors, academic colleagues, students, friends and family. In particular, I thank Jonathan Gilhooly, Matthew Rowe and Claire Scanlon for reading draft chapters of this book; Matthew Cornford, Nadine Feinson, Gavin Fry, Paul Grivell and Claire (again) for advice on visual matters; and all of the above for sustained and sustaining conversation around (and beyond) the book’s concerns. The chance to present a version of Chapter 6 at the 2019 Association for Art History conference was both welcome and helpful. Thanks also go to Lisa Redlinski and other colleagues at St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton, and to staff at many archives, especially the Bodleian’s and Tate’s. I am grateful to Fintan Ryan at Tate Images for painstaking help in tracking down elusive copyright holders and hi-res files. The production of this book has been supported by research funding from the School of Art, University of Brighton, and a University of Brighton sabbatical award. Especial thanks here go to Nicole Ramsamy in the School of Art Admin Office. And last but not least, while celebrating the heterogeneous, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture is doubtless more productively consistent in aspects of its prose and presentation by virtue of Sue Littleford’s meticulous and sympathetic copyediting.

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Introduction: Mixtures of All Sorts

‘Mixed forms’ are mixtures, though not all mixtures are mixed forms. This book uses the first term in a specific sense, which will be laid out below. Meanwhile, the territory the book considers is usefully introduced by looking at the broader category of ‘mixture’, with its more familiar meaning. When mixtures include blends and composites, syntheses, conglomerates, concoctions and amalgams, brews and stews, they themselves have had a mixed reception. It is this which first and foremost sets the scene for this book.

Mixtures strange and rich Mixtures are often treated with suspicion – hence the common phrase ‘strange mixture’. Even appearing in dictionaries’ examples of how the latter word is used,1 this conjunction implicitly proposes that there may be something sinister about all mixtures. Relatedly, the first post-partition prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, described himself as ‘a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere and at home nowhere’ in a phrasing that also links mixture to perceived deficit (Schröttner 2009: 291).2 This aversion to mixed things has long been a trope in Western culture. Indeed, the lexicon of mixture speaks volumes, when the following terms are both descriptive and have negative associations: ‘mishmash’, ‘mash-up’, ‘mixedbag’, ‘motley’, and the adjectival version of ‘miscellany’ – ‘miscellaneous’ – as well

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Lexico supplies the following for ‘mixture’: ‘1.3 A person regarded as a combination of qualities and attributes. “he was a curious mixture, an unpredictable man” ’ (Lexico 2019). Macmillan Dictionary offers the following as the second of three examples: ‘[t]he building was a strange mixture of styles’ (Macmillan 2009–19). Reciprocally, queer theory includes the idea that gender, sexuality and identity are mixtures, in a non-essentialist sense, hence the term ‘genderqueer’. See Richards et al. (2017).

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as ‘hotchpotch’ (or ‘hodgepodge’), ‘rag bag’ and ‘jumble’. So, to describe a person as ‘mixed-up’ is not to note their well-roundedness but to suggest that they are unwell. And if a kind of origin is sought for this, it might be found with Plato, when his metaphysics or theory of being, which identifies ‘reality’ with the realm of ideal forms, proposes, in the main, that the latter are singular essences. (And in so doing, it banishes the sometimes more plural metaphysics of the pre-Socratics.) Mixed entities are therefore – and in much thought and culture afterwards – marginalized; as Jacques Derrida has argued: ‘[a]ll metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded [by] conceiving [. . .] the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex’ (Derrida 1988: 93). Examples of this prejudice are not hard to find, and pervade cultural practice in all sorts of ways. One persistent legacy can be found in the valorization of aesthetic unity, and reciprocally, the condemnation of its absence. This is first notably elaborated in Aristotle’s Poetics, which, informed by his own metaphysics, in turn informed by Plato’s, proposes that ‘a play’ – but equally, other ‘imitative arts’ – ‘must present [an action] as a unified whole’, ‘and its various incidents must be so arranged that if any one of them is differently placed or taken away the effect of wholeness will be seriously disrupted’. From this, it follows that: ‘if the presence or absence of something makes no apparent difference, it is no real part of the whole’ (Aristotle 1965: 43). This is a form of ‘organic unity’ (Lord 1978: 59); there are also other kinds, as the art-historian Heinrich Wölfflin has suggested (Wölfflin 1950). One, which is known in recent times, is the idea of art’s unity as the synthesis of form and content (Summers 1989: 393). Here, the structural difference at the heart of all cultural practice is reconciled in a higher form; the broader forms, or types, of art and culture. And when this unity is (perceived to be) lacking it has typically been called out in no uncertain terms. Included in the list above was ‘motley’, which, if more commonly deployed today as a dismissive adjective, derives from the noun that referred to a jester’s dress. Even when there is debate about what ‘motley’ actually comprised – perhaps, as Zoe Screti offers, it was just ‘a coarse, woollen fabric of multi-coloured, interweaving threads’ (Screti 2018: 1) – there is also a pictorial tradition, along with written evidence, which presents it as a multicoloured, patchwork costume. Indeed, in a letter published from ‘An Old Batchelor’ in Harper’s Bazar in 1871, a ‘motley-wearer’ is described as ‘a man in an extraordinary suit of parti-coloured garments, wearing a cap of the most grotesque form, like an exaggerated clown’s cap’ and the writer adds: ‘[t]here were also ribbons and feathers and streamers of all kinds’ (An Old

Introduction

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Batchelor 1871: 98). Here, ‘motley’ demonstrably enshrines mixture as maligned – the Harper’s correspondent concludes that ‘the wearer is a fool’ (An Old Batchelor 1871: 99). Other examples of the negative reception of mixed forms can be found, for example, in discussions of the fair and the carnival: forms of cultural practice that are commonly associated with the crowd which, in such reviews, often threatens to mutate into a rabble as another kind of mixed form. But if, in the literature on such, Bakhtin’s writing is doubtless the most famous, and links carnival to mixed form – at least as he notes its polyphony, its heteroglossia and its practice of transgression – carnival for Bakhtin is, however, finally a ‘unity’ (Bakhtin 2009: 52). So, it falls to lesser known accounts to capture the disunity of these phenomena. Writing on the 1893 Chicago Fair (an ‘exposition’ of ‘high capitalism and imperialism’), via the ‘spirit’ of Walter Benjamin, Curtis M. Hinsley quotes a contemporary commentator noting how fairgoers ‘ “would pass between the walls of medieval villages, between mosques and pagodas, Turkish and Chinese” ’ and how ‘ “[t]hey would be met on their way by German and Hungarian bands, by the discord of Chinese cymbals and Dahomeyan tomtoms” ’ (Hinsley 1996: 126). And he quotes a more recent writer to suggest that the latter links the ‘ “carnival atmosphere” ’ to a ‘ “confusing hodge-podge” ’, while he himself refers to ‘the scenes of [the fair’s] constructed confusion’ (Hinsley 1996: 123); a sweep of perspectives that proposes a very particular purchase on mixed form. However, some of the best-known excoriations of the multifarious in cultural form are identified with poetry. And if at some remove from matters of the visual, these nevertheless serve as powerful indices of a broader attitude: a distaste for the condition of things being various. So in 1681, John Dryden’s poem ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ satirized: A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long, But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. Dryden 1681

While functioning as a judgement upon character, not art, the poem nevertheless enables a link between the two via its own stylistic consistency and in particular, its use throughout, of rhyming couplets.

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Articulated at the start of what was known as the neoclassical period in Western culture, Dryden’s disdain is rhymed by a famous burst of invective at the end of the era. This appeared in Samuel Johnson’s essay on ‘the metaphysical poets’ – a term that Johnson coined to describe a constellation of writers that included, among others, John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. His target, however, was not mixed(-up) persons, but disunity of thought. Contending that metaphysical poetry favours ‘a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike’,3 Johnson declares that, in this work, ‘[t]he most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ (Johnson [1779] 2009). Much might be said about these comments which are quoted from a longer passage. (For instance, there is the irony of Johnson’s metaphor of ‘yoking’ which itself exemplifies a kind of yoking of dissimilar ideas; precisely: ideas, and the harness for two animals.) But perhaps the most important aspect for this book is, indeed, the shift in tone from Dryden’s ridicule to Johnson’s denunciation of the mixed as non-rational (‘occult’) and barbaric (‘violent’). By and large, this book rejects the values and the vectors attributed to mixtures by Dryden and Johnson. If there is a hesitation, that is to acknowledge that some mixtures involve ‘matter out of place’, in Mary Douglas’s phrase (Douglas 1966) in destructive ways: pollution for example (Figure I.1). But beyond such exceptions, mixture is valued for its following capacities: as it enables difference and diversity to coexist, with the possibility of integration; as it allows exchange and interchange; and as it facilitates ‘becoming’ and change when components in a mixture affect each other, leading to new forms. Put simply: mixture’s transgressions and nonconformities are regarded as productive, the more so as mixture’s inherent richness, in being multiform, remultiplies. At the start of this section, I mentioned Jacques Derrida. Derrida of course proposes that ontology is différance, instanced via the pharmakon as remedy and poison. Différance, it could be said, is being-mixed in motion. This book does not seek to overlook the knowledge of deconstruction, but it does set that to one side, in order to recognize a culture lived on other terms, in which some things are (seen as) mixed, and others not; hence the lexicon of ‘purity’ and ‘mixture’.

3

Here Johnson seems to be alluding to the Renaissance concept of ‘similitude’ discussed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things – in turn discussed in Chapter 1 (Foucault [1966] 1994).

Introduction

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Figure I.1 Plastic pellets, industrial granules, nurdles or mermaids’ tears of colors white, amber, black, red . . . southwest of France (sandbeach), 2011. Maldeseine, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

‘Mixed form’ defined Moving from mixture to the more specific mode of mixture that is ‘mixed form’, this book defines the latter as comprising materially hybrid entities, composed of different substances or structures, and sometimes both. In other words, these mixtures are not about semantic juxtaposition, except as that is realized by material contrast. So, in a Fine Art context for example, a work such as Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967–72), is not the kind of thing addressed, when it only involves one materiality, however effectively plying the seam between heterogeneous magazine imagery. Rather, the sorts of artefacts this book considers are exemplified by say, Jimmie Durham’s Still Life with Spirit and Xitle (2007) (Figure I.2) – an ‘agile blending of dissonant parts and alternative perspectives’ – to borrow curator Ralph Rugoff ’s description of Durham’s oeuvre as a whole (Harris 2019). Or they might be exemplified by Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs (Figure I.3) which, as the series’ title indicates, constitute snapshots covered by the artist’s trademark, often brush-free (dripped

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Figure I.2 Jimmie Durham, Still Life with Spirit and Xitle, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.

Figure I.3 Gerhard Richter, Overpainted Photograph, 2008. © Gerhard Richter, 2021 (0019).

Introduction

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or squeegeed) skeins of paint. And then again, beyond the sphere of art, and world no less, if not the sphere of visual culture, ‘outer space’ supplies another instance: vacuum supplemented by assorted debris: ‘space junk’, which is ‘matter out of place’ in a super-terrestrial dimension. Each of these examples turns upon the presence of material difference, which in turn depends upon the way in which material identity – defined as ‘form’ – is understood.

Defining ‘form’ via Hegel In its approach to understanding ‘form’ (already related to materiality), this book looks to G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. The value of this reference is manifold. First, Hegel, who addresses form in its broadest sense (see the Shorter Logic § 133 (Hegel [1873] 1975) on ‘Content and Form’), also attends to its cultural aspect in Lectures on Aesthetics, first published in 1835. Second, exactly as the Lectures uses such concepts (content and form) it speaks to some of the generic conditions of visual culture, even when the focus is on ‘the Fine Arts’ (Hegel 1886). Third, as ‘form’, for Hegel, is dialectically related to ‘content’, its scrutiny belongs to a comprehensive engagement with art (and by extension visual culture) that nevertheless enables certain things to be excluded from this book’s analysis – such as photomontage. And when ‘formalism’ has been cast as a ‘problem’ in recent decades, in the wake of aspects of post-structuralism (Osborne 2013), Hegel’s aesthetics not only supports a return to formal preoccupations, but equally enables form’s other – the idea or ‘content’ – to be kept in view. But perhaps most importantly, Hegel’s emphasis on dialectics informs Marx’s ‘dialectical materialism’ – the theory that this book deploys in order to understand the way in which culture is affected by political economy, and vice versa, which will be discussed below. When that relationship between the two theories is itself dialectical – because Marx inverts Hegel’s thesis that Mind, or Idea produces the real – Hegel’s philosophy nevertheless usefully enables a concern with an area famously overlooked by Marx: aesthetics. For as Gordon Graham notes in ‘The Marxist Theory of Art’, ‘Marx himself had very little to say’ on the subject (Graham 1999: 109). And while Graham claims that this is ‘not really a major obstacle’ (hence the title of his essay), when ‘an understanding of fundamental Marxist conceptions’ can extend to ‘a proper understanding of art’ (Graham 1999: 109), this arguably does not result in anything as systematic as Hegel’s aesthetics which is both a theory and a history of art.

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In Lectures on Aesthetics, art’s ‘form’ is realized in at least three ways. In the first place, it designates a historical typology that comprises three epochs which, in the course of the evolution of ‘Fine Arts’, refer to the ‘Special Forms’ of Symbolic, Classical and Romantic Art. Here, forms are distinguished on account of ‘three [distinct] relations of the Idea to its outward shaping’ – relations which correspond to the ‘Special Forms’ just mentioned (Hegel 1886). Colloquially expressed, those relations concern the imbrication of ‘content’ as art’s subject matter, and ‘form’ as art’s materiality. Then, overlaying this typology, Hegel proposes another way of thinking about art’s form; the ‘general types of art’ as ‘the conception of the Ideal’ in ‘particular sensuous media’. And this second approach to form, which is in principle, transhistorical, produces (again) three categories: architecture, sculpture and a third, that comprises ‘painting, music and poetry’ as ‘media’ in which ‘the sensuous element of art’ is ‘adapted to subjective inwardness’ (Hegel 1886); media, which, in Hegel’s conception, are better suited to the representation of ideality. And yet, while posited as ‘general types’, these categories of art are nevertheless, and perhaps, inevitably, aligned with the forms in Hegel’s historical typology, given their varied ratios of the ideal and material. Finally, in its third main sense in Lectures on Aesthetics, ‘form’ also has its ordinary meaning of the vehicle of art’s content or the materiality that underlays the ‘Special’ and ‘General’ forms. Typically, Hegel defines this mode of form circumstantially. For instance, he refers several times to ‘sensuous form’ when, in its context, that proposes that form is always so; not just occasionally. (In the introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics the patterns of the prose propose that ‘form’ is antithetical to ‘spirit’ and ‘idea’, identifying it with the ‘external world’.) And directly, in the Introduction, form is defined as ‘sensuous and corporeal reality’ (Hegel 1886). In being ‘sensuous’, form exceeds its narrow meaning as ‘a shape or structure’ – as Hegel proposes when he writes that ‘science [“knowledge”] can start from the sensuous in its individuality and possess an idea of how [an] individual thing comes to be there in its individual colour, shape, size, etc.’ (Hegel 1886). Indeed, ‘colour, shape, size’ and crucially ‘etc.’ (when that refers, among much else, to ‘form’ as forms of ‘form plus content’) designate the remit of this book’s address to this key term. ‘Form’, via Hegel’s schema, appears in many guises, variously typologized and named, if always engaging some aspect of visual culture’s materiality. So, sometimes, ‘form’ refers to ‘medium’, even when the latter is also seen as that which form is brought to bear upon and which form structures. And reciprocally, vice versa: ‘medium’ is used in a way that, at times, brings it

Introduction

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very close to ‘form’. Emblematically, this commutability of reference is captured in ‘painting’s’ double-meaning, when on the one hand the term refers to a set of aesthetic conventions often, though perhaps not necessarily, applied to a substance known as ‘paint’ in turn applied to certain kinds of surface, and on the other hand, the outcome of that second application (which may not involve painting’s ‘aesthetic conventions’). In practice too, it can be difficult to distinguish what is at work in this terrain, even in the light of the distinctions just proposed. Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs offer a case in point. When, evidently, paint and snapshot-style photographs comprise the artworks’ media, the issue of the forms involved is less clear-cut. As paintings, for instance, they are missing stretcher and canvas. To complicate things further, each also seems to be a fragment of a larger painting (different in each instance) in offering the photographic backdrop as the index of a chance encounter with a kind of action painting. And as photography, the Overpainted Photographs often fail to do the denotative work conventionally associated with that form, when the photographic image is erased – if to varying degrees – by different instances of textured surface.4

The remit of ‘mixed form’ In principle, Richter’s work falls within the scope of this book – even if uncertainly an instance of ‘mixed form’ when the latter is construed as a form of forms. It qualifies because Hegel’s understanding of ‘form’ includes ‘medium’, and because the Overpainted Photographs are ‘mixed-media’, which yields a heterogeneous form: ‘mixed form’ as a form of mixed-media. Hence ‘mixed form’ denotes at least two things. On the one hand, it refers to forms that act as ‘meta’ forms – containing others – such as that discussed in Chapter 1: the cabinet of curiosities. (As a curatorial structure, that is both a form in its own right – literally for instance, as a kind of interior architecture – and a repository for other cultural forms.) On the other hand, ‘mixed form’ refers to entities that are composed of different media: the overpainted photographs, and some assemblage art – exemplified by Jimmie

4

Beyond the scope of this argument, it might be observed that what these ‘overpainted photographs’ really put at stake is the over-coming of photography and painting – via dialectical, indeed ‘Hegelian’ interrogation – in order to propose a new, synthetic form. (And indeed, in Part 1 of Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel (1886) uses the term ‘mixed form’ to describe ‘a form of [i.e. ‘in’] transition’.) But if that ‘over-coming’ is at stake, it certainly depends upon the presence of photography and painting as idea, which is indexed as their respective medium is present.

10

Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

Durham’s Still Life with Spirit and Xitle, which includes as its main ingredients a ‘Spirit’ car, a rock from the Xitle volcano, and paint.5

‘Medium’ and visual media Offering a robustly schematic approach to questions of aesthetic form, Hegel’s aesthetics has less to say on ‘medium’ specifically, except as that is, at times, a synonym for ‘form’. And so, when contemporary visual culture – as a practice and a theory – may be more concerned with medium than form, in the wake of the former’s proliferation, and way beyond the scope of Hegel’s view, ‘medium’ needs to be pursued. In the same vein, Lectures on Aesthetics is strangely laconic on the question of ‘visibility as such’ (Hegel 1886), much as it has to say on those Fine Arts which do take visual form (Architecture, Sculpture and Painting); forms which, today, are just three points within the much expanded field of visual culture. And so, an understanding of mixed form that serves the scope of this book needs to look beyond Hegel’s aesthetics, while recognizing its value as a conceptual substrate. As one contemporary visual culture theorist argues, their work often involves ‘a necessary and dangerous supplement to [art-history’s] work’. This is W.J.T. Mitchell, obliquely referring to Derrida, and proposing that his own work draws, among other things, on ‘iconology’ and ‘media studies, specifically, the emergent field known as “media aesthetics” ’ (Mitchell 2015: 6). And indeed, his essay ‘There Are No Visual Media’ (2013) offers just such a supplement to more traditional art-history-theory (or philosophical aesthetics). It usefully expands upon Hegel’s discussion of medium and visuality, and moreover, visual media per se, despite the literal meaning of its title. Further still, for reasons of the overlap proposed between the scope of ‘form’ and ‘media’, Mitchell’s essay valuably informs an understanding of the first. And it advances the discussion of mixed form in other ways as well. In claiming that ‘there are no visual media’ Mitchell is, of course, being mischievous; he later admits this is ‘a gambit’ (Mitchell 2013: 10). Needless to say, it is never ‘medium’ that is at stake; Mitchell endorses Raymond Williams’s description of a medium as ‘a “material social practice,” not a specifiable essence dictated by some elemental materiality (paint, stone, metal) or by a technique or

5

Perhaps the car and volcanic rock might be construed as different forms in the world, not the least as one is manufactured, and the other ‘natural’.

Introduction

11

technology’. And he continues to say that when ‘[m]aterials and technologies go into a medium, [. . .] so do skills, habits, social spaces, institutions and markets’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). Several things follow from this statement. First, for the purposes of this discussion, it should be noted that there is nothing in the definition that does not equally apply to (cultural or aesthetic) form, underlining the proximity of form and medium if not excluding the idea that form exceeds the latter in some way. Second, Mitchell seems to use the statement to explain why ‘there are no visual media’ (with the emphasis on ‘visual’), when he proceeds to argue ‘all media are mixed-media’ i.e. there are no ‘purely’ visual media (Mitchell 2013: 9). But in actual fact, the point about mixed-media does not quite follow from Williams’s argument, except by a kind of fractal logic, which permits the point that media are mixed (with each other) as an extension of the point that a medium is not a ‘material essence’ in also being a social practice. Not that this matters for the conclusion, which in the context of this book’s concern with mixed form in visual culture proposes that the latter is necessarily mixed, when ‘[o]n closer inspection, all the so-called visual media turn out to involve the other senses (especially touch and hearing)’ and other media, which Mitchell demonstrates via copious examples (Mitchell 2013: 7). But as the claim of Mitchell’s title is explained, it also raises a problem for working with mixed-media (and by extension, mixed form); a problem that Mitchell notes and progresses, which is useful in as much as the issue also potentially undermines the premise of this book. For the thesis that ‘all media are mixed-media’ seems to point to an absurdity, or the question: ‘[h]ow [. . .] can there be any mixed-media or multimedia productions unless there are elemental, pure, distinct media out there to go into the mix?’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). And versioned for this book, the question is: do ‘mixed forms’ not depend upon the opposite? Mitchell responds by arguing that ‘this conclusion [that “all media are mixed”] does not lead to the impossibility of distinguishing one medium from another’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). He offers the analogy of food-recipes: ‘many ingredients, combined in a specific order in specific proportions, mixed in particular ways and cooked at specific temperatures for a specific amount of time’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). In other words, media differ in their blends – and Mitchell refers to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘sensory ratios’ – ‘the specific mixtures of specific media’ (Mitchell 2013: 10). And although as Mitchell notes, ‘McLuhan never really developed this question’ of sensory ratio, ‘he seems to have meant several things by it’ (Mitchell 2013: 10). One of these, that is relevant for this discussion, is the ‘notion that there is a relation of dominance/ subordination’ between media (Mitchell 2013: 10). And although, in turn,

12

Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

Mitchell does not elaborate, the concept – in the context of the essay – would seem to recognize the fact that media are often weighted towards one sense more than another. So, while there are no purely visual media, there are also media that are less impurely visual, which gives ‘visual media’ a currency even as a shorthand for this nuance. At the same time, the notion that media differ in their sensory ratios enables a response to Mitchell’s version of the question for this book – the question of mixed-media’s viability when ‘pure’ media do not exist. Extrapolating from the points that Mitchell makes, it is possible to argue that the differences between media enable any given medium to serve as a component in a mixture. This does not have to be about their relative purity in any fixed sense, but rather about how they signify as entities with the potential for combination with another in a given context. So, when I have described Richter’s Overpainted Photographs as mixed-media and possibly mixed form as well, it might be proposed that their paint (or painting) and their photographs (or photography) are ‘pure’ ingredients, i.e. ingredients for mixture just as they can be also seen as mixed, themselves. That this can be claimed for a mode of painting which is ‘modernist’ (abstract, and concerned with paint as paint), when ‘modernist painting’ has been deemed to be ‘purely visual’, is possible because, as Mitchell notes, there is ‘abundant evidence that [that “concept”] was a myth’ – indeed, a ‘fetish’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). And certainly, considered even simply, paint, for instance, is a material synthesis, comprising a pigment and a substance termed a ‘binder’, or a ‘medium’, no less. The value of ‘There are No Visual Media’, short though it is, to the underlying concepts of this book, can be summarized as follows. First, it enables an idea of medium as something close to form, such that Hegel’s ‘form’ is close to Mitchell’s ‘medium’;6 second, it defines ‘medium’, and so perhaps too, ‘form’, as a postmaterial, expanded field – looking to the pastures of post-medium;7 third, it rejects the idea of media ‘purity’ in respect of ‘visual culture’ (when ‘purity’ designates a singular essence); and fourth, it offers a way of thinking about mixed-media as configurations of already non-pure media, which valuably, facilitates an understanding of ‘mixed form’ as historically and culturally dynamic, not the least as a mixture in one era or place becomes the component of a mixture elsewhere or at a later point in time. In the very rare literature on

6

7

This book does not use the term ‘mixed-media’ to describe its subject for two reasons: first, it is predominantly associated with Fine Art. And then, the first point notwithstanding, in all the different meanings of the two terms, ‘form’ preserves a larger compass. As defined by Rosalind Krauss, ‘post-medium’ does not reject its latter half but rather includes it to critique and reconfigure it (Krauss 2000).

Introduction

13

mixed form in the cultural field at large (beyond just the visual realm), and writing on Moby-Dick, Sheila Post-Lauria notes how ‘[Herman] Melville’s reputed “defiant anomalies of genre” actually represent the conventions of mixed form’ (Post-Lauria 1990: 311). This articulation exactly captures the dialectical relationship of form to mixture; as today’s mixture is tomorrow’s form, which in turn becomes a form in another, future mixture. Recognizing that, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture refuses the notion that its subject has an essence – not of content, nor of form, other than the empty outline of a hybrid structure, or the matrix for a mixture that is subject to historical contingencies.

The join Beyond the knotty analysis of visual media’s composition, Mitchell’s essay invokes another topic that is vital to this book’s concerns. This is elaborated as it looks at ‘ “ratio” itself ’, and Mitchell notes that ‘McLuhan [. . .] seems to have meant several things by it’ – two of which bear upon the question of how copresent media can be brought together, structurally (Mitchell 2013: 10). This is, of course, a crucial issue for mixed form, when ontological concerns must include more than just a focus on component parts. When Mitchell identifies ‘nesting’ and ‘braiding’ as ways of linking different media, there are clearly many more, if necessarily ‘beyond the scope’ of his article (Mitchell 2013: 10). In its discussion of mixed form and attention to at least seven different instances of that, this book will invoke the matter of conjunction; the methods for assembling varied media and forms. For now, it is time to turn to review the ways in which the subject of ‘mixed form’ has been addressed by others – or not.

The writing on ‘mixed form’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, there seems to be no literature on ‘mixed forms of visual culture’. The quest for writing on ‘mixed form’ (including in its hyphenated form) in ‘culture’ on its own fares better. However, most of the results returned by an onlinelibrary’s database are focused on natural science publications – especially in biology and related areas, including veterinary science, microbiology, biochemistry and toxicology, where ‘culture’ refers to ‘cultivated’ bacteria or cells, which exist in ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ forms. Indeed, in the first one hundred entries for ‘mixed form culture’, only six relate to ‘culture’ in its other sense. Of these, three comprise reviews of the same book:

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

Peter Dronke’s Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and the Scope of the Mixed Form, published in 1994. As its title proposes, that is concerned with what one reviewer identifies as prosimetra (texts that alternate prose and verse), which the same writer, Paolo Cherchi, further describes as ‘Menippean’ (Cherchi 1997: 85) when that refers to different styles of writing: a well-known example, which also includes visual ‘texts’, is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Cherchi also notes a ‘growing interest in the Menippean genre, due in great part to the influence of Bakhtin’s studies’ (Cherchi 1997: 84) – and indeed, Bakhtin’s writing on heteroglossia (‘different tongues’) offers a point of reference for Mixed Forms of Visual Culture. Another cultural mention of ‘mixed form’ is also literary: Sheila Post-Lauria’s already-cited essay, ‘ “Philosophy in Whales. . . Poetry in Blubber”: Mixed Form in Moby-Dick’. Significantly, this identifies ‘mixed form’ as a mode of narrative or ‘genre once popular but now largely forgotten’ (Post-Lauria 1990: 303). And the author locates examples of the practice in novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others – as well as in Melville’s novel. More particularly, in this version of mixed form, ‘[d]ifferent literary genres come to represent alternating perspectives of reality’ (Post-Lauria 1990: 309), and especially, the view that truth consists of both ‘metaphysical’ and ‘material’ reality; ‘the veridical and the visionary’ (Post-Lauria 1990: 306). As such, this is not so far from some (post-)modern literary practices, and magic realism, contesting the author’s claim that literary mixed form is ‘forgotten’. (After all, it would describe no less than James Joyce’s Ulysses never mind such recent novels as Ali Smith’s How to Be Both.) And writing is also the focus of the penultimate entry in the search results – if now occurring in a pedagogic context. This is ‘Mixed Forms of Academic Discourse: A Continuum of Language Possibility’ by Judith Hebb (Hebb 2002). While this, too, draws on Bakhtin to offer a way of rethinking students’ ‘academic’ writing around heteroglossia, its most immediate contribution to this discussion is as it underlines the word-based focus that the search for ‘mixed form’ (in cultural practice) returned. Perhaps, when that dominates, albeit in a small sample, it might be because formal cacophony can be contained between the covers of a book better than in other cultural forms. And so to the last reference in this list: a newspaper obituary for ‘maverick architect’, Hans Hollein (Wainwright 2014), which represents a turn to visual culture. Billed as ‘[o]ne of the earliest proponents of postmodernism’, with a ‘unique brand of witty historicist collage’, Hollein is said to have ‘developed a trademark style of combining classical motifs with futuristic industrial materials’. Moreover, ‘[d]esigning with a magpie sensibility, Hollein would sample forms

Introduction

15

and materials from different periods and cultures, with promiscuous abandon’; or as the article’s subtitle puts it, he ‘mixed forms’; the subject has a passing mention – as an action. The absence of much literature on ‘mixed form’ per se in visual culture (and relatively speaking too, an absence of the same for mixed-cultural-form), should not, however, be mistaken for a dearth of writing on the topic, when beyond a kind of terminological fundamentalism, the topic might be addressed in other words. Indeed, the reference to postmodernism proposes that the subject has been covered copiously, when one understanding of postmodernism gives it as a kind of collage. Famously, this is part of Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the term – which also significantly exceeds that. Describing no less than ‘the postmodernist experience of form’, he notes how he has been ‘concerned to stress the heterogeneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or organic, but now virtual grab-bag or lumber room of disjoined subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds’ (Jameson 1984: 75). While not quite specifying formal-material diversity, if allowing for its possibility, this articulation appears in ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ under the heading ‘Collage and Radical Difference’. ‘Collage’, then, became a term in an expanded search along with a range of other synonyms and related phrases. But none of these readily defined the field I had in mind, that is still best described by a circumlocution – ‘mixed form’ aside – when the wordy version would be something like ‘forms in visual culture that combine different cultural forms’. So most obviously, perhaps, ‘hybridity’ captured the structure at stake. But to return meaningful results that functioned as a substitute for mixed form culture that was not located in the Petri dish, if falling short of visual culture more specifically, ‘hybridity’ had to be augmented to give ‘cultural hybridity’, when ‘hybrid culture’ risked too much overlap with the scientific literature. In one of the results – which is otherwise concerned with globalization – hybridization ‘[w]ith respect to cultural forms’ is proposed as ‘ “the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices” ’ (Pieterse 1994: 165). And indeed, this definition is realized by the entry that headed up my search results for ‘cultural hybridity’: Peter Burke’s book (2009) of the same name. However, this looks at ‘cultural hybridity’ in a very particular way that cuts across my focus, concerned as it is with hybridization between cultures often identified with particular peoples, when Mixed Forms of Visual Culture is concerned with hybridity that occurs within one culture, differently defined as mode-specific i.e. visual, if drawing in a range of cultures in Burke’s sense.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

Pursuing the approach of working with near synonyms, I also looked for writing via ‘diverse cultural form’ – which predictably appeared only in a plural version, with the extra s significantly shifting the focus away from immanent diversity and rather onto difference within a group which is less the focus of this book. And in the opposite direction, I used the technical vocabulary of hybrid cultural practices to try to find a literature. So along with ‘collage’ (but not ‘montage’ which, as Chapter 5 will argue, is typically reserved for singlemedium practices), terms such as ‘patchwork’, and ‘medley’ were deployed – to see if they provided entry points for an otherwise subterranean body of writing about mixed (cultural) forms. There was nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond a literature specifically about those practices, although from work in other directions I have come across concepts such as ‘patchwork writing’, which demonstrates a figurative use of one hybrid cultural practice to describe another, if not a larger body of work i.e. the broader territory of mixed form. And yet, the absence of a literature as realized by a formal search does not – again – quite mean the absence of a literature as such. After all, Jameson’s discussion of ‘Collage and Radical Difference’ (which was not returned by my searches) seems to constitute just that, though by the end of the section, which refers to Nam June Paik’s ‘stacked or scattered television screens’ to instance the subject of the section’s heading, it is not clear that ‘radical difference’ is not identified with content more than form. (Noting that Paik’s work calls upon the ‘postmodernist viewer’ ‘to do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once’, Jameson conceives this as an act of viewing imagery in its ‘discontinuous variety’ (Jameson 1984: 76). Certainly, to view this work more formalistically would offer greater graspability, when the medium is singular.)8 And yet: issues of the emphasis upon the formal notwithstanding, ‘radical difference’ – ‘for which collage is still only a very feeble name’ (Jameson 1984: 76) – is in turn a name for mixed form in its negative condition. The immediate frustration with locating a literature on mixed form in cultural practice at large, never mind its visual version, points to the way in which this book inscribes a new perspective on existing phenomena, when finding examples of mixed form is not difficult. Mixed form has long existed, but the writing on it less so. That said, as this book curates a corner of the cultural field in the name of a new emphasis on mixture, its writing is also arguably constitutive, in the sense

8

Though as Jameson also notes, the screens are also ‘positioned at intervals within lush vegetation’ (Jameson 1984: 76) which returns the work as mixed form, though not as it presents a problem for the viewer.

Introduction

17

that it affects its objects, and will change the practices regarded, and how they are regarded in future.

The questions, and the frameworks for responses In seeking to understand this newly distinguished topic, this book responds to several questions. Two of these are fundamental. One is the question of what are key instances of mixed form in visual culture in the last five hundred years, and how these realize that category. (So, the first question has two related parts.) The other is a question that frames the findings of the first in a very particular way and for specific ends: the question of how mixed form in visual culture relates to contemporaneous experiences of labour as a more or less mixed form. Both require elaboration, not the least for the way in which they open onto other questions. To begin with: the premise of the first question needs to be defended: namely that the last half-millennium represents a meaningful period of time for the book’s topic. Certainly, in very broad terms, it coincides with what may be referred to as the ‘modern era’ or the post-medieval period, defined as such on account of seismic shifts in social, political and economic life, many of which had consequences for the realm of visual culture: for instance, the invention of movable type; the expansion in overseas trade and plunder. At the same time, the ‘modern era’ marks a period that saw significant changes to the way in which labour was organized and experienced; and when the issue of work is the focus of the second question, the rationale for looking at the last half-millennium is further underpinned. Meanwhile, two other aspects of the first question need to be considered. One concerns the issue of how ‘key instances’ of mixed form in visual culture were selected. And of course, this in turn cues the question of how ‘visual culture’ is defined in the context of this book. Much has been written – perhaps ironically – on that term, with influential texts including October’s ‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’ (Alpers et al. 1996), Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999) and The Visual Culture Reader (2013), along with related works such as Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, edited by Norman Bryson et al., and journals such as Visual Culture. This book is informed by that work in many ways, but especially, for the purpose of thinking about the selection of examples, as its ‘visual culture’ includes the objects of art-history and popular culture; and as those also represent the extent of different visualities in the last half-millennium, so both material and

18

Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

digital, and more and less visual instances. ‘Culture’ is understood to refer to material representations, but not ‘a whole way of life’ – in Raymond Williams’s well-known phrase (Williams 2001: 63).9 Further deliberations informing the selection of examples involved the following criteria. First: that examples should include a good mix of visual culture in its compass as defined above. And second: that instances of mixed form should also be evenly distributed across the book’s concern with the last half-millennium, in order best to track the vectors that might emerge. The resulting collection – ragbag or otherwise – comprises: the cabinet of curiosities, also known as the Wunderkammer (Chapter 1); popular print, in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forms as the broadside ballad and the chapbook (Chapter 3); the scrapbook in its pastime mode (Chapter 4); and as later used by artists (Chapter 6); Fine Art assemblage (Chapter 5) and visual, digital culture (Chapter 7). And forms that are forsaken include, for instance, the funfair, the carnival, opera, theatre and cabaret, film, and the music video; multimodal forms which are often captured by the term Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’, when that refers as much to the array of media involved, as to notions of the aesthetic unity the latter might produce. But as much as exclusion shapes the list of forms this book considers, so too does a simpler absence: the absence (whether absolute or archival) of phenomena. In today’s glut of imagery, the lack of such – no less than a few centuries ago, and especially in ordinary people’s lives – is easily overlooked; as discussed in Chapter 3. In the summary of chapters just supplied there is, of course, a missing entry, that for Chapter 2. This chapter is anomalous in looking at the subject of mixed form in working life. The reason for this focus was triggered by a hunch that the history of mixed form in culture might be related to changes in the organization of labour especially as that realizes the individual’s labour as more or less diverse. In particular, I was concerned to find out how political economy understands ‘the division of labour’ in the period that the book reviews, when that typically refers to a process that breaks (commodity) production up into discrete parts, and allocates those to different workers. Clearly, this division of labour disables an individual’s experience of mixed form at work.10 So the question for this

9

10

The focus on visuality in its reified form does not exclude Mirzoeff ’s broader definition of the latter as ‘that which renders the processes of History visible to power’ (Mirzoeff 2013: 5), if perhaps it does define visual culture (for this book) as that which renders the processes of power visible to History. Both with ‘productive’ and so-called ‘unproductive’ labour i.e. labour in the ‘work’ place and at home. For a discussion of some of the debates around this distinction and the difficulty in conceptualizing it via a Marxist framework, see Dave Beech (2015).

Introduction

19

chapter – as an aspect of the second question noted in the introduction to this section – was as follows: how does the division of labour describe the organization of work in the last half-millennium? When a number of political economists have explored this topic (both during and outside the period in question), I turned to Marx and Engels’s extensive discussion of the subject. Among other reasons, this was on account of the Marxist idea that humans realize themselves in their ‘species being’ via diversity of action. This definition of the human underpins the raison d’être for this book. Hence Chapter 2 presents Marx’s and Engels’s writing on the division of labour – albeit as a series of extensive, if annotated quotations, when their prose is seldom improved by paraphrase. As this address comprises the theory of political economy that the book adopts, if focused on one aspect of that theory, it also enables a response to the latter part of the second question: the issue of the relationship between mixed form in work, and culture. This is pursued as each selected instance of the latter is first of all, close-read for its instantiation of mixed form, and then referred to its historically related mode of production and in detail the allocation of labour among the workforce. (For reasons of its subject’s connection to a different aspect of political economy this is less of a concern in Chapter 1.) In every case, the discussion entertains the idea that the way in which culture relates to ‘life’ (here, working life), can, in Marxist cultural theory, take a number of forms. These variously involve: reflection or rejection of the status quo; and the presentation of an alternative reality, which can also function as critique. The detail of this territory is elaborated both in individual chapters, and in the Conclusion, which discusses the cumulative outcome of each chapter’s observations, as they concern all the book’s main strands. In responding to the questions that head up this section, this book, as already noted, presents a subject that is newly identified as such. As this makes a contribution to the literature on hybrid cultural practices, via its emphasis on form, and then the evolution of mixed forms across the last five hundred years, it also inevitably covers new ground in referring that to the division of labour. But then again, prospected from the other side of this enquiry, it is difficult to find any literature that took the idea of the division of labour as a focus for understanding culture (except in its sense as yeast). This seems remarkable when cultural production is not exempt from that division, even if, as art, it is deemed to be ‘exceptional’ (see Beech 2015). Mixed Forms of Visual Culture claims that beyond the contributions that it makes to its immediate academic fields, its significance resides in scrutinizing a

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

topic that concerns no less than a vital aspect of being-human, as realized in particular experiences of the multifarious. As it looks at that, it also looks to ways in which culture and work can be more or less supportive in realizing that humanness.

Some limitations With a focus on Western European and Anglo-American culture, this book is limited in the scope of its reference. That does not mean that other cultures are excluded: as Chapter 1 demonstrates, far from it, as the history of ‘Western culture’ has long been bound up with the history of other countries and cultures, if often for reasons of Western imperialism. Indeed, this mixing of cultures is enmeshed in this book’s concern with mixed form, if the first is regarded through the second as the focus of the book. Properly: the formal is only separated from the figural by an act of violence. Of course, as this history of mixed form progresses, and globalization takes hold, ‘Western culture’ is even more involved with other cultural practices, even as it is hegemonic. Some of the complexities that ensue – specifically for mixed form – have been compellingly elaborated in an essay that is quoted in Chapter 1, on Gabriel García Márquez’s magic-realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo’s Wonder Rooms: The Collection of Marvels in Cien Años de soledad’ by Jerónimo Arellano. Slightly pre-empting the discussion of that chapter in the name of a larger point, I quote from Arellano – noting that ‘Macondo’ refers to a fictitious country, first encountered in the novel in the nineteenth century. Arellano writes: [i]f the early modern Wunderkammer attempts to make distant territories tangible and present for European audiences, the collection of marvels in Macondo traces a reverse process of decollection, in which a peripheral space gathers the oddities of a distant, fugitive mainland. Instead of botanical specimens, archaeological artifacts, feathers, or snakeskins, what Melquíades brings to Macondo as maravillas are technological artifacts: magnets, telescopes, and daguerreotype cameras. Arellano 2010: 373

This describes a process whereby the historical trajectory of Western imperialism’s heft of goods from the ‘margins’ to the ‘centre’ (in Stuart Hall’s terms) is inverted, as the commodities and indeed, cultural forms, of the West are exported, or in

Introduction

21

Arellano’s term ‘decollected’ to its periphery (albeit fictional). Here indeed is a Wunderkammer of the margins, based on plunder from the centre. Of course, the ‘reversal’ is not simple, when the terms of the relationship between margins and centre are, by definition, asymmetrical – as the lists of imports/exports propose, when one comprises ‘natural’ things, and the other ‘artefactual’, and we might note that one of Western culture’s major exports to its margins is, in fact, its waste. And if this passage does not make the point that many of its artefacts were produced on the back of imperialism, when among other things, that supplied their raw materials and, perhaps, labour (as well as markets), it does flag the notion that the globalized dimension of mixed forms in the last half-millennium concerns flows and counterflows. This book seeks to acknowledge both, in an era that has seen one of human beings’ largest mixings-up.

A post-script on the visual essays Earlier, I suggested that the volume of writing on visual culture could be construed as ironic. That was intended as an observation on the form that it takes, as word-based. Here, I have in mind the idea that has surfaced in some visual culture studies, most famously, in John Berger’s visual essays in Ways of Seeing (Berger 1972: 66–81, 114–27), which in turn refer to Aby Warburg’s monumental Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9); both propose that as much as visual culture can be reviewed in writing, it can also be rewardingly regarded through more (if not ‘purely’) visual means. I have examined the value of this visual, and potentially, aesthetic turn elsewhere (Francis 2010). Chapters 4 and 6 in Mixed Forms of Visual Culture materialize the offer of the latter as a medium in which analysis takes place, when both are visual essays; one on the ‘pastime’ scrapbook and the other on the artist’s version of that form. As such, they ask the reader to ‘look’ as much as read, or to ‘read’ visual images (though the images in Chapter 6 are prefaced by a short written introduction, and are captioned). In placing this emphasis upon the visual in a manner that exceeds the relative number and the function of the images in other chapters, these ocularcentric interjections most demonstrably propose this book as an instance of the very thing it is exploring: mixed form in visual culture.

22

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The Cabinet of Curiosities as Mixed Form: Depictions and Desire

Words and things At the start of this address to the history of mixed forms stands – strikingly – the cabinet of curiosities. And if that needs a definition, notwithstanding recently revived interest in the form (Lasser 2014; Moore 2013), it may be described as a Renaissance, curatorial structure that comprises a display of dizzyingly diverse objects. But then again, this history is headed by competing terminology and related phenomena. The cabinet of curiosities was also known by its German name, (the) Wunderkammer, as too, if far less frequently, the Dutch term, rariteitenkabinet. And while these terms function as synonyms, if in different languages, they also point to different aspects of their object, which is thereby variously the site of curiosity, of wonder and of rarities. (When the latter is a qualitative description of the form’s components, it is perhaps one cause of ‘curiosity’ and ‘wonder’, as the form’s declared affects.) So, appropriately enough, at the origin of mixed form as represented by the Wunderkammer, is a mixture. This is not just lexical. The cabinet of curiosities – especially in its German form – was also identified with seemingly more specialized forms such as the Schatzkammer (treasure chamber), and the Kunstkammer/Kunstschrank. And if, in the latter case, the ‘art chamber’ would seem to point to a specialist collection, then that is both confirmed and disputed by the phenomena so-named. Many a Kunstkammer is a cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammer in all but name, as the Habsburg’s collection in Vienna demonstrates today. So this story of mixed form is, at source, associated with a mixture, or a mix-up in relationships between words and things.

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Three kinds of curiosity This mixture of meanings is at work, too, when it comes to defining what constitutes a curiosity for the cabinet. First, the cabinet’s artefacts are ‘curious’ (and also ‘rare’) for their audience when they derive from exotic, unknown lands; those of the ‘New World’ beyond Western Europe, that were being prospected from the mid-fifteenth century onwards by explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus, and which furnished cabinet staples such as the crocodile, the flying fish and the tortoise-shell. Second, the cabinet’s components are otherwise ‘exotic’ and hence curious, in presenting the edges of the everyday; extremities of kind or type. Here, examples include ‘giant’s’ bones, and in the cabinet of Ferdinando Cospi (Figure 1.9) a living dwarf who acted as a guardian (Bertucci 2016: 150); deformities (‘a man with only two fingers on each hand’ (Carrier 1987: 83)); and oddities such as the mandible of a horse embedded in a tree-root (Nicholls 2013). And third: there are improbabilities as curiosities – such as mechanical ‘devils’ that heckle the viewer,1 and of course, the unicorn, for which a narwhal’s tusk often did metonymic if mendacious service.2 I am proposing that the first kind of rarity comprises the cabinet’s conceptual core; that the second follows as its domestic extension, and the third is a legacy from earlier, religious culture in which the marvellous, and indeed, relics, also had a role.

The origin of the cabinet in the Age of Discovery ‘The story of the Wunderkammer, as narrated by cultural historians, takes the shape of a bell curve – a period of emergence and effervescence from the midsixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, followed by a gradual decline at the dawn of the “Age of Enlightenment” ’ – so writes the Latin American scholar Jerónimo Arellano (Arellano 2010: 377). One such historian would be Eliza West, who specifies the narrower period 1560 to 1660 when ‘collecting was in vogue amongst respected European men’ (West 2014: 76). And here is Marx referring, in Capital, to ‘the great revolutions, which took place in commerce with the geographical discoveries’ of ‘world-markets’, which ‘speeded up the

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‘Milanese collector Manfredo Settala (1600–80), for example, owned the automaton of a devil. He placed it at the entrance of his cabinet, where the mechanism would stick out its tongue and make loud sounds when someone entered’ (Allen 2019). See Ferdinand I’s collection: http://www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/horn-unicorn-and-holy-grailhabsburg-treasure (accessed 18 November 2019).

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development of merchant’s capital’. Marx notes in particular ‘the competitive zeal of the European nations to possess themselves of the products of Asia and the treasures of America’ and proposes that the ‘great revolutions’ constituted ‘one of the principal elements in furthering the transition from feudal to capitalist mode of production’ in ‘the 16th and 17th centuries’ (Marx [1894] 1999d). As Arellano also remarks ‘[t]he collection and display of particular objects as wonders or marvels, then, remains intrinsically linked to forms of colonial expropriation and appropriation’ (Arellano 2010: 372). But the quote from Marx proposes that the ‘link’ that Arellano mentions can be understood in starker terms, producing the Wunderkammer as a symptom of mercantile capital. Certainly, the latter shapes the Wunderkammer in a range of ways. Most basically, it furnishes the Wunderkammer’s contents: ‘beads, tusks, coins, feathers, archaeological artifacts . . . gathered from across the Americas, as well as objects arriving from the East’ – this is Arellano quoting Silvia Spitta (Arellano 2010: 372). At the time, this was a wealth of things. More diffusely, and profoundly, a ‘capitalist mode of production’ valorizes the Wunderkammer’s interest in worldly goods, and vice versa. The Wunderkammer speaks of a relation to the world in which stuff matters, and does so variously. First: objects confer status on their owners, who accrue social and cultural capital; second: things enable knowledge (of the physical world) when knowledge is another kind of power. For as much as the Wunderkammer’s items were collected for effect – to impress, and to be marvelled at – they also formed the basis of enquiry, often in the service of new knowledge that would enable further exploitation of the object-world; the capitalist project. (One such instance of a scholar’s Wunderkammer is Ole Worm’s – discussed below.) So much for the Wunderkammer’s origins – or some of them – as issues of political economy. Next, I consider the way in which the cabinet serves as a starting point for this account of mixed form culture.

A history of mixed form: the cabinet of curiosities as origin Arguably the first demonstrative example of ‘mixed form’ in Western secular culture, the cabinet nevertheless has a sacred precursor of sorts in the ‘reliquary chest’ which displayed collections of religious relics (MacGregor 2007: 3). Beyond the sacred, it also had a kind of precedent in the early Renaissance scrittorio which refers to a room, rather than a piece of furniture, which in one example, comprised ‘astrolabes, and musical instruments, books and writing materials, as well as arms and armour’ (MacGregor 2007: 13). But in the breadth

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of its contents, the cabinet of curiosities was unparalleled. Further, the cabinet of curiosities is also visibly significant because it was recorded in pictorial – print – form. Developed in the fifteenth century, the copper engraving process enabled images of cabinets to circulate beyond the latter’s immediate audiences, permitting records to survive when the referents had long since disappeared.

Diversity of contents – and in curating But so far, I have emphasized the cabinet as a set of contents, and in doing so, am cued by many commentators both present-day and contemporaneous. Take for instance, the following description from 1638 of the first cabinet open to the public in the UK, which was known as the ‘Ark’, by a German visitor, Georg Christoph Stirn: In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape’s head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk’s hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies – when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the

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East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor’s MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones. Stirn 1638

This account is almost pure inventory; save for a brief allusion to the Ark’s three spaces (courtyard, garden and museum), there is no sense of how the items were arranged. And while this stress upon the quiddity of the Ark’s contents certainly captures one of the necessary conditions of mixed form (diversity of parts) it avoids the question of how the containing form – the curatorial aspect – underscores or minimizes that mixture. A useful way of understanding what is at stake in thinking about the Wunderkammer as mixed form (and indeed all instances of such) is offered by linguistics, and specifically Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between the ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ axes of language: respectively ‘vocabulary’ and ‘syntax’, when both offer degrees of choice (Silverman 1983: 80–1). In discussions of the Wunderkammer, it is often the paradigmatic axis that prevails. And this is underlined in collections’ catalogues, with their focus on the list of contents (see John Tradescant’s Musaeum Tradescantianum, or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth Neer London, which Stirn mentions); in such publications, the idea of the combinatory aspect of collections all but disappears. So, there is a question for the cabinet of curiosities, regarded as mixed form, which concerns the matter of display or arrangement; the collections’ syntax. This can be seen as a version of the issue of the ‘join’, mentioned in the Introduction, when the placing of the Wunderkammer’s contents functions in the manner of the glue in collage. Given the sheer number of components in most cabinets, the scope for the syntagmatic expression or repression of mixed form considerable. To put this practically: the extent to which a large group of varied artefacts will register as mixed, depends in part upon the way in which they are displayed.

Locating evidence In their detail, these issues of curation need to be referred to actual cabinets. But cabinets of curiosities present a problem for empirical analysis. For if, in their heyday, they were numerous – as Arthur MacGregor notes, Hubertus Goltz

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counted ‘some 970 collections which he had visited throughout mainland Europe between 1556 and 1560’ – that number is much reduced today (MacGregor 2007: 12). Simply: many cabinets have been dispersed. The Paston’s is a case in point, known today principally through a painting, The Paston Treasure, c. 1655 (Figure 1.1) which depicted part of an extensive collection that, by the 1730s, had been sold following the family’s bankruptcy. (When the table in the picture is laden with worldly goods, the picture itself is freighted with highly charged colonialist symbolism; Timothy Wilks notes the difficult ‘realization’ that the figure on the left ‘(surely, a portrait of a real person) was, quite possibly, tradeable’ (Wilks 2019: 432–4), while saying nothing about the way in which the painter tropes that figure with the monkey.) Then again, many Wunderkammern were subsumed by other, often early national, collections: Tradescant’s Ark formed the basis of the Ashmolean in Oxford, and some of the artefacts in Ole Worm’s famous Museum Wormianum are now in the Natural History Museum of Denmark. So another method must be sought. As already noted, there are visual records of Wunderkammern, usually in the form of engravings. And while some of those depictions concentrate on details (see Wondertooneel der Nature which illustrates Levinus Vincent’s collection), most seek to overview

Figure 1.1 Anonymous, The Paston Treasure, c. 1670. Browne27, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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their subject, presenting the viewer with a three-sided room, which amply indicates the systems of display in use. When the principal obstacle for researching the cabinet of curiosities today is the paucity of extant examples, the value of these images is that they allow access to long-vanished collections: Ole Worm’s, for instance (Figure 1.5), and Ferrante Imperato’s Naples cabinet (Figure 1.10). And in often dating from the period of a given cabinet’s inception, there is a possibility that they show their subject as it was conceived or intended to be seen, or at least, before any substantial rearrangement took place. But there are also limitations with this resource: the images still comprise a partial record; for instance there is no image of Tradescant’s Ark. And they only offer second-order evidence which mediates its subject in all sorts of ways, starting with the idea of the print as a medium, never mind questions of late-Renaissance visual rhetoric – and the absence of the fourth wall. Certainly, the startling superficial similarity between a number of the extant images implies that the representation of the cabinet of curiosities almost constituted a genre in its own right. In view of this – the issue of the viewable and otherwise – and when I am concerned, in this chapter, with the way in which the Wunderkammer is regarded as a mixed form today – I am proceeding with this analysis by way of discourse analysis. This allows the cabinet of curiosities to appear precisely in its representation across visual and verbal media, past and present, in a range of settings, when, as Gillian Rose notes, a discourse comprises ‘knowledges, institutions, subjects and practices’ which ‘work to define’ its object(s) (Rose 2007: 142). And when images are important to this analysis, so too is literature.

Writing on the methods of display in the Wunderkammer Looking for the writing on this subject – by its obvious terminology – is a fraught affair when both of the key terms are often used as metaphors in articles and books on very different subjects. Nevertheless, a systematic search revealed a small literature connected to the recent emergence of Museum Studies in the 1990s (Starn 2005), and also postcolonial studies. As already noted, when the writing on the Wunderkammer as a multifarious entity tends to see that as a matter for its contents and less as an issue for display, it only sporadically attends to the latter. It is tempting to speculate upon the reasons for this oversight. Possibly, as David Carrier proposes ‘[i]t is not easy to reconstruct the principles underlying these collections’ (Carrier 1987: 83). Which also might

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explain why much in this address sees a lack of system in the presentation of the cabinet’s components. Indeed, in his key contribution to the field, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, MacGregor proposes, at the outset, that ‘[a]s a modern-day figure of speech, the cabinet of curiosities conjures up pictures of an irredeemable quaintness, of random conjunctions of unrelated specimens brought together by chance and in an essentially haphazard manner’ (MacGregor 2007: 11). This description (of an idea of the Wunderkammer) resonates with other commentators’ observations on the cabinet-as-structure. So, writing in a blog post that is at pains to distance the London-based Grant Museum of Zoology from the cabinet of curiosities, curator Jack Ashby refers to the latter’s ‘randomness’ – which he seems to set against the ‘organising’ aspect of his museum (Ashby 2016). Likewise, in a preface to the recently reissued ‘First Treatise on Museums’, the Inscriptiones of 1565 by Samuel Quiccheberg, Bruce Robertson identifies the Wunderkammer with ‘the bizarre, the accidental’ and crucially, for the issue of its ordering, the ‘unsystematic’, and thus, as he goes on to note, ‘as antithetical or an antidote to the hyperrational claims of taxonomic systems and systematic organization in general’ (Robertson 2013: viii). And then again, writing in his doctoral thesis about the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s collection, MacGregor observes that it ‘has frequently been likened to [Rudolf ’s] personality in its immense richness and lack of purposeful direction’, suggesting that ‘[i]n it he sought emotional and aesthetic gratification, rather than an expression of scientific order’ (MacGregor 1983: 74). And so this association of the Wunderkammer with the unorganized continues, such that, writing on Hans Sloane’s collection, Kathryn Hughes refers to ‘an old-fashioned Wunderkammer effect in which heterogeneous objects were tumbled together’ – squeezing in a reference to Samuel Johnson’s criticism of the Metaphysical poets that was mentioned in the Introduction (Hughes 2017). This conception of the Wunderkammer reaches its apotheosis in Jerónimo Arellano’s discussion of the form as part of his analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s literary fiction. Theorizing the Wunderkammer via Silvia Spitta, he notes that she ‘has suggested that the early modern Wunderkammer appears to contemporary eyes as a form of epistemological disorder akin to the one that Michel Foucault identifies in the “Chinese Encyclopedia” of a story by Jorge Luis Borges’ (Arellano 2010: 371). And he continues: ‘[a]ccording to Foucault, Borges’ chimerical encyclopedia transgresses the boundaries of thought by imagining a site wherein “fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite” ’ (Arellano 2010: 371).

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Specifically, he writes, quoting Foucault, that things are ‘ “laid,”“placed,”“arranged” in sites so very different from one another’, ‘that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all’ (Arellano 2010: 371). (This is the exoticism of one object to another.) And Arellano is not the only one in recent times to implicate the heteroclite in the ‘order’ of the Wunderkammer. As Marion Endt observes in an article on Mark Dion’s Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy, this is referenced in the artist’s version of the Wunderkammer that constitutes the ‘Centre’ – via a ‘filing cabinet labelled with the categories of the Chinese Encyclopaedia’ which, as she goes on to write, ‘Michel Foucault mentions in The Order of Things’ (Endt 2007: 6). The repeated association is significant in speaking of a reading of the Wunderkammer as the site of radical diversity which submits to no known mode of organization. Taking a somewhat different line, Eliza West notes that ‘[m]odern scholars are decidedly mixed on the matter of whether these collections, cabinets or Kunstkammern are ordered by some rational principle or not’ (West 2014: 79) though, the names of those scholars are not supplied. For her own part, she contends that ‘despite these collections’ appearance as disordered assemblages of the bizarre, order did exist and they did make a contribution to the history of science’ (West 2014: 75). (Here ‘order’, troped with ‘science’, must refer to something like a modern, taxonomic order, which Foucault identifies with the emphasis on observation as knowledge, referred to ‘four variables in things’: form, quantity, distribution and relative magnitude (Foucault [1966] 1994: 134).) And while obliquely recognizing that a number of potential systems may be at stake in the organization of the Wunderkammer (‘personal’, ‘haphazard’ and ‘aesthetic’/‘visual’), West offers a suggestion for advancing the discussion: looking at the Wunderkammer’s presence in ‘engraved images’ (West 2014: 79). But West only looks at three – to come, again, to the conclusion that such ‘collections were organized, if clumsily’ (West 2014: 81). When visual imagery can be a crucial element in discourse analysis, I am advancing this question of the role of order (of whatever kind) in the cabinet of curiosities by recourse to a greater clutch of images – nine – and a more formalized analysis.

Defining ‘order’ In the preceding discussion, ‘order’ in the Wunderkammer has emerged as modern, ‘scientific’, taxonomic order, and dis-order as its absence. However, as The Order of Things makes clear, ‘things’ are ordered differently by different

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epochs or epistemes, making order and dis-order culturally relative. When the preceding discussion has proposed that there is disagreement about the Wunderkammer’s status as an ‘ordered’ entity, it is useful to recognize that what might be at stake is not just the question of how rigorously accepted order is materialized, but also the question of what kind of order might be at work. It is possible for instance, that the Wunderkammer is arranged according to an episteme that no longer registers – not the least when Foucault proposes that the Renaissance (episteme) was in play ‘[u]p to the end of the sixteenth century’ (Foucault [1966] 1994: 17). And if the Wunderkammer is organized by a premodern order, then it is important to understand the principles that govern that arrangement. (This is even more urgent when, with the turn to visual images, the signifier is often less clearly anchored to its signified relative to verbal representations, which may be seen therefore to facilitate ‘securer’ interpretations.) Framed as a question: how, across the chasm of five hundred years can we read the grammar of a display which shows a tortoise carapace hanging next to a conch shell, and a stuffed armadillo? In the Renaissance episteme, knowledge was organized around ideas of ‘similitude’ and ‘resemblance’, rather than the (now familiar) ‘identity and difference’ binarism that emerged with the Classical episteme (Foucault [1966] 1994: 52). And in the Renaissance world, things could be related to each other through similitude/resemblance in four ways. This quartet comprises: convenientia (likeness by virtue of adjacency); aemulatio, which is convenientia ‘from a distance’, as instanced in ‘the reflection and the mirror’; analogy, proposing a resemblance across space; and sympathy, which makes ‘mourning roses that have been used at obsequies’, ‘render all persons who smell them “sad and moribund” ’ (Foucault [1966] 1994: 23). So, the cabinet’s arrangement of its objects might emerge as a kind of order via similitude in one, or several, of four ways. First, it would seem that, by definition, convenientia must organize the Wunderkammer as the space of similarity, when its contents are adjacent to each other. And likewise, ‘sympathy’ extends the association of one item with another, though as Foucault notes, for reasons of its threat of ‘render[ing] things identical’, it is countered ‘by its twin, antipathy’ (Foucault [1966] 1994: 24), proposing that a reading, according to this principle, is (re)ordered into something more dichotomous if arguably no less ordered. Then again, aemulatio might be in play if one item has its ‘reflection’ or indexical relation in another; and so, too, items might be ordered according to a principle of analogy. (The operation of the last two modes of similarity would have to be established by research that unearthed the terms on which an index and analogy occurred.) Indeed, this is pursued

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in Marlene A. Bürgi’s unpublished master’s thesis, which applies ‘Michel Foucault’s account on [sic] the Renaissance episteme’ to an exhibition likened to a Wunderkammer (Bürgi 2016: 6). Such is the demanding place from which I begin to inspect the prints – after two brief caveats. First off: my analysis proceeds on the basis that the organization of a depicted cabinet does not substantially depart from either the Renaissance or Classical episteme. (This is conjecture on my part – based on the assumption that at the time of the cabinet’s appearance a specialist museological language had yet to emerge.) Second: when this analysis accepts that a Renaissance mode of order may not readily appear as such to today’s viewers, it is less sure of the reverse: that what appears to us as ordered signified as otherwise to a Renaissance audience. Simply: for reasons of the difficulty in deciding that, this is relegated to the margins of my concern.

Locating the images In identifying images to progress my enquiry, I searched online for ‘cabinet of curiosities’ (singular and plural); likewise, for Wunderkammer, Schatzkammer, Kunstkammer and rariteitenkabinet and, in all cases, considered the first hundred entries. I then focused on depictions of rooms, not details, or small, free-standing cabinets such as Domenico Remps’s ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ (Figure 1.2), and I insisted that images should show actual, historical cabinets, not imaginary representations, of which Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s treatment of the subject in The Sense of Sight (Figure 1.3) is an example. Figure 1.4 presents an overview of the results (save one); results which prompt some remarks. First: they produce a slightly later period for the Wunderkammer than the one given by historians (West, for example) in largely congregating in the period post-1650 though there is nothing after 1700. (Perhaps this is a kind of documentary lag.) Second: all of the nine images are engravings, save one, which is a painting. However, The Cabinet of the Dimpfel Family in Regensburg, by Joseph Arnold, c. 1668, which is the painting, and the first to be discussed, is not reproduced here for copyright-related reasons. While a verbal description will function as a kind of substitute, the image can also be seen online.3 Which

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At: https://bawue.museum-digital.de/index.php?t=objekt&oges=2784.

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Figure 1.2 Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities, 1690s. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 1.3 Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Sense of Sight, 1617. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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cues a third comment: the following analyses owe much to the facility that online versions of the images offer for zooming in. When the latter are readily accessible, the reader might also find it useful to consult these, especially in respect of the discussion of the pictures’ detail. And then another remark: the images cover a relatively limited geographical spread of examples, with five Italian, two German, one Danish and one Dutch cabinet(s). And finally: the images’ relation to their referents must be complicated for all sorts of reasons, beyond the comments offered above. For instance: there is little information on how these records were produced: in situ / from sketches / from memory / from other images, or some combination of all four. And indeed, MacGregor notes that ‘some small doubt remains’ over the status of the image of Ole Worm’s cabinet (Figure 1.5) ‘as a direct record’ (MacGregor 2007: 19). Happily, however, for discourse analysis, this is less an obstacle and rather, something that can be regarded as constitutive of the discursive object. There is no doubt that, at first glance, this set of images presents the idea of the Wunderkammer as an involuted space, densely packed with diverse artefacts, which might connote disarray, not the least when the volume of contents seems to threaten any kind of order. Perhaps – as impressions go – this is of a piece with the popular perception of the Wunderkammer cited by MacGregor. But equally, and equally immediately, if at another level of the imagery, something very other to this sense of a sprawling object-world emerges. So the question to be addressed by analysis is how these images depict the Wunderkammer as mixed form as that is realized through a kind of order (or dis-order) in its modes of display.

The method for analysis The method that I have used to scrutinize the set is a form of content analysis (Rose 2007) that aims to code the images in two ways. First it seeks to identify the nature of the artefacts included in each cabinet, and second, on the back of that, the principles for their arrangement – keeping in view the idea that very different systems might be at stake, signifying order/disorder in very different ways. In pursuing the question of arrangement, the work that architecture does to organize the contents of the cabinet will be considered, not the least because when joinery appears, so too do certain methods of display. Readings of the Wunderkammern are presented in an order that represents a conceptual trajectory from disorder to order – across various epistemes.

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Figure 1.4 Overview of images of cabinets to be analysed, with the exception of Josef Arnold’s painting of the cabinet of the Dimpfel family, in Regensburg, 1668. See individual captions for source and copyright information.

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First a note about the role of dates – expanding on a previous comment. While the following discussion accesses its subject through visual representations, it needs to be remembered that the cabinets are seen at the point of the images’ creation, not necessarily their inception. Even for discourse analysis, this might present an obstacle for interpretation if the latter date is unknown or uncertain. However, as suggested earlier, it is very probable that these images present a given cabinet at the point of being valorized – in its pristine novelty – not the least when they were doubtless commissioned, some indeed for guides to collections.

The Dimpfels’ cabinet Of all nine images, the picture of the Dimpfel family’s cabinet shows, it seems, the least organized collection: when that refers to objects grouped by kind, in a Classical taxonomy. Looking down the centre of a room which comprises tables along the left- and right-hand walls, and one in the centre, the collection is presented somewhat obliquely, though enough can be deciphered for the purposes of analysis. Certainly, the heterogeneous natural and manufactured objects are arrayed in an ad hoc fashion. Hence, on the outer tables, which are draped in green cloth, are globes, shells, a clock or two, the odd stuffed animal, at least one statue, and a skull, in an arrangement which is best captured by an image from more recent times: a stand at an antiques fair, or its car-boot cousin. (The central display seems to relate to an older kind of cabinet – the reliquary, perhaps – in being laden with devotional artefacts, among them a crucifix and bible.) Where order does explicitly emerge that is, perhaps, by virtue of the architecture of the room; paintings are grouped together on the walls, and books reside – a little messily – on a small set of shelves. But then, one row of paintings is punctuated by an urn and what may well be a mirror, and another ends with a clock. Only a series of miniature cannon is truly regimented – in a line on the floor. But even this feels tenuous, almost as if the person doing the arrangement ran out of space for them elsewhere. Perhaps the picture shows a collection that is waiting to be ordered, even in another venue, and so temporarily laid out in the Dimpfels’ spare room. Outlier as it is in this set of nine images, it seems unlikely that any other kind of order is at work in this cabinet, for 1668 substantially postdates the end of the sixteenth century, which Foucault identified as the later limit of the Renaissance episteme. That said, it is possible that similitude might be present in odd snatches – as subsequent analysis proposes.

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Ole Worm’s museum The image which depicts this long-lost cabinet is now iconic, and perhaps for that reason, was the Wunderkammer chosen for artist Rosamund Purcell’s 2011 three-dimensional, life-size rendering.4 The analysis that follows is indebted to photographs of the latter, when those enabled readings of the smaller objects. Like the Dimpfels’ cabinet, Worm’s Copenhagen ‘museum’ was located in a domestic space, and also appears at least in some respects, to be ad hoc. And yet, the shelving-system (even if a little rudimentary) suggests a different level of ambition for the organization. Sometimes, indeed, there are outcrops of taxonomic order as the same kinds of things are brought together. Hence the top half of the back wall is occupied with weaponry; the left-hand wall between the windows, with antlers, tusks and horns; the top-half of the right-hand wall with miscellaneous stuffed animals (in part, or whole); and the bottom three shelves, by and large, with boxes that proclaim collections of the following: Metallica, Mineralia, Cochlea, Turbinata, Conchilia, Marina, Animalium Partes, and Conchiliata: precisely order as identicality (of kind). Here, assisted by a set of verbal anchors, is the strongest indication of a modern Natural History. But elsewhere in the room, that sensibility is vanquished. On the ceiling, for example, which the Wunderkammer typically reserves for creatures (usually, marine), there is, besides a polar bear, a kayak. And the shelves not otherwise inventoried are teeming with all manner of odd objects, with the hexagonal box emblematically proposing the vertiginous complexity of system(s) now at stake, when the box is actually a mini-cabinet. And then again, there is a hominoid automaton, which by definition threatens any curatorial ordering, in being (putatively) under self-propulsion – on the move. However, it is difficult to say what these less well-regulated nooks in Ole Worm’s Wunderkammer represent: disarray in any system, or an earlier episteme. The congestion and the use of hooks to hang things proposes that perhaps practical concerns won out. And indeed, the idea of order being contingent upon practicalities is something that MacGregor is at pains to note (MacGregor 2007). But either way: this image shows a Wunderkammer as a mixed-expression of mixed form, with one vista looking to a field of disarray – uncertainly, a bygone order – and the other to a new world in which the disarray of mixture is minimized by the organization of things into groups of the

4

Photographs of this can be seen at: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ole-worm-cabinet (Meier 2013).

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Figure 1.5 Musei Wormiani Historia, the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities, 1655.

same – even, as the box on the floor to the right proclaims: ‘Varia’; difference subsumed into identicality.

Basilius Besler’s Wunderkammer Depicted in an engraving by Hans Troschel, Besler’s cabinet emerges as the background to a title page, the book being no less than a guide to his collection (Figure 1.6). As backgrounds go (it is, in fact, a kind of frame) it does intense descriptive work. Again, the image shows a cabinet of curiosities that is mixed in its address to mixed form. Here, at a metalevel of its being is the Wunderkammer looking to the heteroclite as it invokes two very different systems of display for heterogeneous objects. Indeed, the similarities between this image and that depicting Ole Worm’s collection are acute, though Troschel’s purchase on the subject is different in being delightfully mischievous. Besler’s image shares with Worm’s a play of modern taxonomic elements (the labelled drawers, and items organized by kind; the books upon the left-hand shelf, the roots above the door, to name a few examples), and

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Figure 1.6 Hans Troschel the Younger, showing Basilius Besler’s cabinet on the title page to Fascicvlvs Rariorvm, 1616. Photograph courtesy of W.P. Watson Antiquarian Books.5

another mode of presentation. In the latter, multifarious artefacts sit side-by-side (see Besler’s right-hand wall which mingles naturalia – across flora and fauna – with artificialia – both decorative and utilitarian). But whereas Worm’s nonmodern order has a (partial) presence on at least four planes, in Besler’s case it is confined to one; the right-hand wall, and more specifically, the patch above the shelf – almost as a kind of catch-all space for objects that, for reasons of the limitations on domestic space, could not be accommodated elsewhere.

Settala in Milan Also poised between two systems of display is Manfredo Settala’s museum in Milan as depicted by Cesare Fiori in 1666 (Figure 1.7). Again, the cusp relates apparent disarray to something more conspicuously methodical. And although shelving features in this image too, it plays no role in this analysis. For despite its insistent presence, Fiori’s choice of angle, and the vastness of his scene, work to obfuscate the units’ contents. So it is the rest of the depiction that proposes the (dis-)ordered status of this Wunderkammer. And in an image that is focused on 5

MacGregor gives the date as 1622 (MacGregor 2007: 28).

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Figure 1.7 Interior view of the Galleria Settala, Museo, ò Galeria, adunata dal sapere e dallo studio del sig. canonico Manfredo Settala (Manfredo Settala’s cabinet of curiosities), 1666. Artokoloro/Alamy Stock Photo.

architectural structure, the clues are scant. On the one hand, paintings occupy the top third of the central aisles; the arches under the shelving units to the far left are used, it seems, to display urns, while the same nearer to the centre contain portrait busts, and the ceiling is reserved for water-based creatures. On the other hand, this insistent ordering by kind is broken in odd places; in the left-hand aisle, the cabinets are topped by an assortment of objects; on the right-hand aisle a piece of clothing hangs above a pediment that upsets the larger regularity and symmetry. And then there is the giant tusk, placed awkwardly next to a Neoclassical column. If anything features in this image, it is the floor.

The cabinets of Calzolari and Cospi The floor in Francesco Calzolari’s cabinet is also an impressive spread of chequered flagstones, as shown in Figure 1.8. But the shelves are more striking still. And for reasons of the way in which these overlap with those in Cospi’s cabinet (Figure 1.9), the two collections are considered together. Almost half a century separates the images (from 1622 and 1667 respectively), but only fifty miles the cabinets – in Bologna and Verona – which might go some way to explaining their similarities. Both rooms, or what we see of them, consist of bespoke cabinetry, which, in the upper sections, offer open shelves above a wide, protruding ledge at hand-rest level under which is further storage. And both – like many Wunderkammern – utilize the ceiling area to display stuffed, hanging creatures. That much has been seen in

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Figure 1.8 Francesco Calzolari’s cabinet of curiosities, 1622. Неизвестный художник [unknown artist]. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

the analysis of other cabinets. What is new here is the way in which the highly regimented upper shelves (like Settala’s) are used. While the grid might presuppose a distribution of phenomena by type (think of the cages in a zoo), that does not happen here. Rather, taking Calzolari’s cabinet first, varied contents are arranged according to a pattern that repeats (or thereabouts) in each box, and which seems to take shape according to an A-B-C-B design. Hence in the top right-hand niche, we might just discern a root, an urn, a snake, an urn and, in the box below, a shell, an urn, a leaf, an urn (I am using ‘urn’ loosely to refer to small pots and other lidded vessels). If ‘root’ and ‘snake’ are categorized as ‘naturalia’ this could also yield A-B-A-B. This is ‘order’ as a kind of visual pattern, or a pattern of kinds of thing – and has been named ‘micro-symmetry’ as MacGregor notes, citing Laura Laurencich Minelli’s work (MacGregor 2007: 22). And writing on the latter in relation to specific cabinets of curiosities, Eilean HooperGreenhill observes that ‘with alternate microsymmetry’, ‘[s]imilar items were never

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Figure 1.9 Fra’ gli Accademici Gelati il Fedele, e principe al presente de’ medesimi, Museo Cospiano: annesso a quello del reinventato (the collection of natural curiosities of Ferdinando Cospi), 1677. Gibon Art/Alamy Stock Photo.

displayed together, but were always interspersed with other dissimilar objects [. . .] The alternating components in the microsymmetrical arrangements frequently form two series each with internal homogeneity. One of these series is inevitably of natural material’. Further, she observes that the rules which ‘seem to be in operation’ articulate ‘the relations of resemblance and sympathy that are characteristic of the Renaissance episteme’. And she later mentions Calzolari’s (‘Calceolari’s’) ‘ “museum” ’ in this context (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 124). While I might dispute the detail (‘resemblance’ is not, after all, on a level with ‘sympathy’ when the former describes the epistemological framework materialized by ‘sympathy’ as well as other relations, and the resemblance at work is probably better described as ‘analogy’), the point of this account, enabled by close reading – that the Wunderkammer was, at times, organized by a Renaissance episteme – is invaluable. For my analysis, it enables the significant observation that different kinds of order were at work in the arrangement of the cabinets’ components. And this requires the assertion of disorder to be made with care. In the shelves of Ferdinando Cospi’s cabinet a similar approach to display seems to be at work. But while the overall effect resonates with Calzolari’s, with

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a texture that implies pattern via the alternation of different kinds of artefact, this pattern emerges across the component units, and less obviously within them. Which is to say: if micro-symmetry is in operation, it appears to be less rigorous – though a reading of the contents is somewhat frustrated by the size of the image relative to the scale of the space depicted. On the other hand, the insistent grid of shelving, underlined by the full-frontal presentation proposes another (less historical and more deconstructive) reading: that each unit is a micro-Wunderkammer. This would require an analysis of the order within each box, and then of each to one another, which is beyond the scope of this discussion and possibly, too, the technical affordance of the image in question. What can be said, however, in the light of this scrutiny, is that ‘microsymmetry’ seems to be at work in other images within this set: perhaps, for instance, in the Dimpfels’ arrangement of their globes. Equally, it must be noted that in Calzolari’s and Cospi’s cabinets the Classical episteme also seems to be in evidence – in the order of the drawers in the former, and the arrangement of the weaponry above the shelves in the latter; which is to say that things, in both, are also grouped by kind, and hence these cabinets return another instance of mixed systems of display for mixed components.

Ferrante Imperato’s ‘Museo’ The image of Imperato’s ‘museum’ has been described as ‘the first published pictorial representation of a Renaissance cabinet of curiosity’ (Byrnes 2017); a caption that also indicates the mode of knowledge that might organize the collection’s contents (Figure 1.10). But if the image is the oldest in this set, the conceptual organization it depicts seems to belong to a regime that would not be out of place in the modern museum. In detail: Imperato zones his cabinet, with books in shelves on the right (from which protrudes, no doubt, a narwhal’s tusk); aquatic creatures on the ceiling and the end wall at the top; and on the room’s lefthand side, a bank of elaborate cabinets, which in turn are arranged into cupboards for storage vessels at floor level, and above those, intricate, mini-cabinets that look as if they house tiny amphorae and statues, along the top of which are perched stuffed birds. Only occasionally does this scrupulous grouping slip, and most especially on the right-hand back wall, which resembles Besler’s right-hand wall. But by and large in this image, from left to right, are the spaces of three specialist collections (library, natural history museum and, perhaps, ethnological collection); in other words; the spaces of Classical museological taxonomy.

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Figure 1.10 Fold-out engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale, 1599. Anonymous, for Ferrante Imperato, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Athanasius Kircher’s museum As depicted by Giorgio de Sepi in 1678 (Figure 1.11), Kircher’s museum, at the Jesuit College in Rome, also groups its artefacts by type. However, this shares with Fiori’s representation of Settala’s museum an emphasis on architecture or structure over contents, and also shows a bifurcated space, which compounded by an all-pervading Baroque gloom, makes content analysis difficult. As much as the collection’s items are discernible, they largely consist of categories of things arranged in lines (vases on the left, then portrait busts on pedestals under paintings in the main wing, where obelisks are also regimented). Exceptions to this order include the left-hand obelisk, the primate’s skeleton near the protruding corner, and the hanging crocodile, which of all things in the image does most to define the museum as a Wunderkammer. As with Settala’s use of linear arrangement, Kircher’s very similar deployment proposes the emergence of the modern, specialist museum visible as strata in the space: working from the floor upwards, and in a rough schema: ethnographic, art and natural history collections respectively. So here mixed form prospects its own sublation. And it may have

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Figure 1.11 Das Kircher-Museum im Collegium Romanum. Abb. in Turris Babel, Amsterdam, 1679. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

achieved that in the last image in this set (Figure 1.12), which shows Jacob de Wilde’s collection, in 1697, as recorded by his daughter, Maria de Wilde.

Jacob de Wilde’s ‘collection room’ For what seems to be presented (in Figure 1.12), is in fact a library, or a museum of books. Here, of all the images regarded, is the highest singularity in type of contents: rows of books, interrupted only – and decorously – by two globes, with the shelves’ facing panels showing geometric instruments, and above the bookshelves, neat rows of figurines. Perhaps, at the back of the room, in the recessed shelving, is the vestige of a Wunderkammer.

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Figure 1.12 Peter the Great visiting the Museum Wildianum on 13 December 1697. Museum: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1700. Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

Overview So in this analysis of the nine images, the Wunderkammer emerges as a form that is far more ordered than many commentators seem to recognize. Only three writers that this chapter cites admit a role for order. First there is West, who says that ‘order did exist’ and links this to modern science. Then there is HooperGreenhill (who writes on the Wunderkammer’s sometime micro-symmetry). And third, there is MacGregor who, some way into Curiosity and Enlightenment, alludes to ‘the cosmological principles on which the Renaissance Kunstkammer [‘Wunderkammer’] had been organized’ (while noting their succession to an emphasis on ‘the importance of classified series of specimens’), having given little indication of these principles up until that point (MacGregor 2007: 30). In short: in much of the contemporary writing on the Wunderkammer, there is scant sense of what the pictures of the form propose – namely: that order, whether Renaissance or Classical, is embedded in the cabinet of curiosities, not only as an aspect of its later being, but at its very origin and in its evolution. A preoccupation with the structures and stratagems of regularity is almost always – somewhere – evident. The spaces of the cabinet – perceived as strange by many – are often strangely ordered. This makes the Wunderkammer as mixed form more mixed by virtue of

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its contents than its structure, when the latter often works to offset multifariousness by linking and grouping similar or identical things together.

Order overlooked: some explanations In all of this, there is the pressing question concerning the hold of contemporary perceptions of the Wunderkammer (as dis-ordered) in the face of evidence to the contrary. And here, various responses may be offered. In the first place – and staying with the visual representation of the Wunderkammern – ‘disorder’ may be connoted by an aspect of the images’ rendering. The engraving method encourages a texturing of represented surfaces (technically, this holds the ink) which makes for a busy, visual field in which figures fuse with their grounds, and with each other. This hinders a ready identification of forms, disguising the visual presence of the same; by definition, much scrutiny is required if there is to be ‘discovery of patterns that are too subtle to be visible on casual inspection’ (Rose 2007: 60) – one of the goals of content analysis. So, to look at Settala’s ceiling, for example, does not immediately reveal its focus on marine life. Rather, an undulating set of forms appears – roiling the surface with an impression of multifariousness – that could resolve as many different things. And while it is difficult to be definite, the prints’ monochrome aspect might also not help. (Imagine, say, the way in which the weaponry in Cospi’s cabinet could coalesce in metallic hues, assisting its emergence as a category of thing.) Certainly, aspects of the textuality of print media would seem to facilitate connotations of ‘quaintness’ (in current times, intensified by its status as a recondite technology), when ‘quaintness’ is often, if erroneously, associated with disorder. But then again, this reading is counteracted by another aspect of the images’ rhetoric. This is the work of Renaissance perspective broadly defined, which is at large in the images in different ways. In all but one – de Sepi’s view of Kircher’s museum – the organization of the picture plane overlaps with the depicted space.6 Specifically, the lines of the representational regime or the x–y axes of

6

De Sepi’s perspective may be more Baroque in proposing a fold (as a fork), in space which works to fragment its depicted object, suggesting an ungraspability. Something not dissimilar could be at work in the picture of Settala’s museum too, as a variation on Renaissance perspective, when the outer corridors suggest space which eludes the all-seeing, Cartesian eye, in possession of unified space.

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perspective, which in John Berger’s phrase is as ‘a safe let into a wall’ (Jay 1988: 8), coincide with the pictures’ depicted architectural grids. And the visual assonance does much symbolic work – subtly infusing the Wunderkammer’s organizational regime, again, with the values of ‘taxonomia’ (Foucault [1966] 1994: 72), when its central motif is, of course, the grid writ large. And yet, this perspective does not seem to register for many of today’s commentaries, failing, too, to signify for those more metaphorically as a purchase on the field. So other explanations for contemporary readings of the Wunderkammer as a thing of motley must be sought – and perhaps in the broader cultural context within which they circulate. Here, I am proposing that the tendency to overlook the ‘scientific’ aspect of the Wunderkammer is the work of desire. We see what we want: a space in which the heterogeneous rules. And when desire speaks of a lack, that lack is often, in a historical materialist framework, the product (in its negative condition) of the material conditions of existence. Hence, I suggest that the contemporary desire for the Wunderkammer speaks of a possibility (that was repressed when the form emerged) that the latter might represent the radical heterogeneity of its origins, perhaps as a kind of postcolonial practice. And so the way in which the Wunderkammer circulates today may work to critique, and compensate for, the absence of heterogeneous affect in contemporary culture, an absence addressed in Chapter 7, and one which may be seen to drive this book. Something of this operation is described as Hal Foster writes on the effect(s) of ‘old objects’ – which might include their phantastical inflections. As Foster writes: ‘outmoded images may challenge the capitalist object with images either repressed in its past or outside its purview, as when an old or exotic object, redolent of a different productive mode, social formation, and structure of feeling, is recalled, as it were, in protest’ (Foster 1993: 127). The idea of cultural work as protest against a status quo describes one possibility for the political work of mixed form. However, the relationship between cultural form and political economy as it concerns the Wunderkammer in its heyday is far more conciliatory (at least in respect of the society for which the Wunderkammer was produced). There are two aspects to this. First, the desire for order (of whatever kind) that is demonstrably at work in the structure of the Wunderkammer might be said to mirror the submission of the other to the same that, in part, defines the practice of colonization. Then, as that occurs, the other reality of the form’s emergence – its origin in diverse cultures – is suppressed, or not reflected. When Marx identifies ‘the middle of the 16th’ century (Marx [1867] 1999b) as the start of the rise of manufacture, the Wunderkammer’s submission of difference to order might be seen to prefigure and then parallel, the increasing

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subjection of independent and diverse ‘handicraft’ workers (the term is Marx’s) to the regulation of more streamlined ‘manufacturing’ and ultimately, the factory’s production line. Indeed, in Capital, Marx writes that: ‘[t]he Colonial system and the opening out of the markets of the world, both of which are included in the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period, furnish rich material for developing the division of labour in society’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). The different possibilities for cultural work are pursued in the following chapters. In particular, in looking at other examples of mixed form, this book asks how they are related to the emergence of the division of labour, as that occurs at Western empire’s epicentre, and which can be seen as part of the same structure that fomented overseas exploration in the name of emerging capital. Mixed Forms of Visual Culture asks how the subjects of its title variously protest or acquiesce in that division. This cues the turn to Chapter 2.

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Mixed Form in Working Life: The Rise of Manufacture

Introduction In the preceding discussion of the Wunderkammer, mixed form has emerged as an issue for the internal structure of a cultural artefact, related to the kind, or quality, of its constituent parts. Or to put this another way: to focus on mixed form is to be concerned with the components of a thing, and their collective composition; that thing’s material distinctions and their distribution. And when the latter term invokes the phrase ‘the distribution of the sensible’ as discussed by Jacques Rancière, it has two useful consequences. First: it proposes that my concern with multifariousness and – dialectically – singularity, is really a preoccupation with how the sensible as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception’ (Rancière 2006: 12) is ‘partitioned’ as more or less diverse. (‘Distribution’ in the French original is ‘partage’ which means both a sharing and a separation.) And second: it readily enables a link between materially mixed form in cultural life, and at large – in the world, when the latter, in one of its historical forms, is the focus of this chapter. In his articulation of the concept in ‘The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics’ (2000), Rancière presents this link between art and the political in reverse, first considering the ‘apportionment of parts and positions’ as a politics of life, before discussing the appearance of apportionment in ‘aesthetic’ and ‘artistic’ practices, which rest on the ‘primary aesthetics’ of the sensible as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception’ variously accessible by different subjects (Rancière 2006: 12–13). (For Rancière, ‘artistic’ better defines those forms that ‘intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making’ than ‘aesthetic’ when the latter more properly defines ‘a system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’ – hence ‘primary aesthetics’ (Rancière 2006: 13).) 53

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However, while offering a way of thinking about the texture of phenomena and hence experience across art and life, Rancière’s discussion in this brief text and the others in The Politics of Aesthetics does not review the ‘factory of the sensible’ (Rancière 2006: 9, 42) as manifest in the specifics of particular, historical political economies. For that, and for reasons discussed in the Introduction to this book, I turn to Marx and Engels. In particular, I look to their writing on the division of labour, when this refers to an organization of the workforce around specialization, and hence various modes of estrangement from what, for them, would be more fulfilling ways of working. That is to say: crucial to this concept is the logically implied idea of labour as a practice that properly comprises different parts; that is on some level, undivided. It is in this way that Marx and Engels’s address to the ‘division of labour’ invokes the theory and practice of mixed form in social life.1 (Here it might be noted that as Rancière is extended by Marx and Engels in this discussion, so the metaphoric ‘factory of the sensible’ is supplemented by the all-too-literal workshops of manufacture and the factories of industry.) Of course, to focus on the division of labour as a manifestation of mixed form in social life overlooks other distributions of the sensible. For instance, it would be possible to think about the way in which different communities of interest are dispersed in a given society, or how a natural resource was differentially exploited across the globe. But as Marx and Engels argue in The German Ideology, the division of labour, at least in one of its forms, has been ‘one of the chief factors in historical development up till now’ (Marx and Engels 1932) and Marx suggests that it is ‘in a certain respect the category of categories of political economy’ (Marx 1861–3), forming ‘the foundation of all production of commodities’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). And it is clear, that for Marx, the division of labour ‘is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing period properly so called’, which ‘roughly speaking, extends from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). This is the era in the history of mixed form that starts with the Wunderkammer and continues through to the period covered by the next chapter, which looks at popular print in the eighteenth century. A focus on the division of labour is, it seems, inevitable. It also supplies the basis for thinking about the conditions of work thereafter. Marx and Engels were not the first to write about the concept and practice of divided labour. Indeed, as Rancière notes, Plato is concerned with the subject in 1

And indeed, on somewhat different terms, Jason Read notes the connection between Marx and Rancière when he writes: ‘Rancière makes it possible to understand how there is already perhaps a thought of such a distribution [of the ‘sensible’] at work in Marx’ – though he does not specify the division of labour (Read 2015).

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Figure 2.1 Plate on pin-making, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1762. Designed by Goussier, engraved by Defehrt (1762). File author unknown, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

the third book of the Republic (Rancière 2006: 12). And thereafter, it has been variously approached by philosophers such as Hume and Kant, and as Marx’s attention to needle-making in some respects acknowledges, by Adam Smith, whose famous discussion of pin-making and the division of labour is the example that Marx cannot quite bring himself to use in the final version of Capital; it appears in a draft. My recourse to Marx and Engels here is less for reasons of the greater sophistication of their account of the topic and more for the intellectual substrate that comes with their analysis: that is to say – historical materialism, when that is defined as: ‘that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against each other’ (Engels [1859] 1971: 15). And as noted in the Introduction to this book, historical materialism offers a very particular idea of what it is to be human, as this chapter will both demonstrate and discuss, and which propels this book.

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When Marx and Engels pay particular attention to the division of labour at various points in their writings, and often in self-explanatory terms, I present their reflections as a set of choreographed quotations that aims to represent the essence of their thinking on the subject, even when that is contradictory. In part a pragmatic decision, this also takes its cue from Marx himself, when, in a text later published in a collection known as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he makes liberal use of long excerpts from a range of thinkers, especially Adam Smith. Typically, Marx comments on these passages in ways that range from extended annotation to terse summary, or sharp aside. Cued by Marx again, I also comment on the passages I quote – in footnotes – with the commentary aimed at a range of functions. These include: the underlining of a cumulative discourse, even through tension and contradiction; reference to relevant points in this book so far; reference to commentators’ observations where useful; elaboration on the literary devices that Marx in particular uses; and expansion and possible clarification where occasionally required. The excerpts below come, in the main, from three core Marx and Engels texts/ anthologies: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; The German Ideology, and Capital, Volume 1 Chapter 14, supplemented occasionally by Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, which in comprising a draft of Capital, has an extended discussion of the division of labour. The quotations are organized, in the first place, according to a basic distinction; passages that address the broad ontological condition of the division of labour, and those that look to its affective aspects as its impact on the worker. (And I generally use versions of Marx’s and Engels’s texts provided by marxists.org, with the latter’s endnotes omitted.) Subheadings delineate further distinctions within these categories. A final introductory note: Marx and Engels (or their translators) use the term ‘man’ to refer to the worker – while making it clear that ‘man’ as a concept and political possibility exceeds his being as that is defined by work. Hence the two terms are not synonyms, even if it is a necessary condition of a worker that he is a man – with the qualification I am about to elaborate. For the terms ‘man’ and ‘worker’ are also not synonyms in another way – when ‘man’ refers to the gendered being and therefore cannot be a synecdoche for ‘the worker’. The concept of female (and child) labour is raised sporadically in Marx’s writing, which logically if not explicitly acknowledges that ‘man’ as a literal reference to the labourer is a misrepresentation, albeit a use of the term that is explained as a historical trope. In the wake of Marx, I use the term similarly while noting the space that it inscribes for attention to female and other identities in relation to the division of labour.

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The division of labour – key features Descriptions The division of labour is [. . .] a powerful means of heightening the productive power of labour, performing the same work in less labour time, hence reducing the labour time necessary for the reproduction of labour capacity and extending surplus labour time. Marx 1861–32 For a proper understanding of the division of labour in manufacture,3 it is essential that the following points be firmly grasped. First, the decomposition of a process of production into its various successive steps coincides, here, strictly with the resolution of a handicraft into its successive manual operations.4 Whether complex or simple, each operation has to be done by hand, retains the character of a handicraft, and is therefore dependent on the strength, skill, quickness, and sureness, of the individual workman in handling his tools. The handicraft continues to be the basis. This narrow technical basis excludes a really scientific analysis of any definite process of industrial production,5 since it is still a condition that each detail process gone through by the product must be capable of being done by hand and of forming, in its way, a separate handicraft. It is just because handicraft skill continues, in this way, to be the foundation of the process of production, that each workman becomes exclusively assigned to a partial function, and that for the rest of his life, his labour-power is turned into the organ6 of this detail function7. Marx [1867] 1999b

2

3 4

5 6

7

This definition of the division of labour comes from the draft of Capital (in Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63). It offers a different kind of definition to the one below, in teleologically addressing effect rather than the evolution of the phenomenon (in the transition from handicraft to manufacture). The period that succeeds the era of ‘handicraft’ production and precedes modern industry. The division of labour is an event rather than a condition. It is a process that reorganizes man’s relation to work; a redistribution of the sensible that for Marx is felt as a deprivation. As an event – which takes place in different ways – the division of labour superannuates less alienated forms of work. i.e. the implementation of machinery. In discussing the division of labour, Marx and Engels deploy a number of recurring metaphors, of which this is one; the idea of the detail worker as a body part. Here, when the ‘body’ is, in fact, the ‘detail function’, the metaphor is convoluted, while nevertheless serving to propose that in this mode of production, the labourer is unnaturally reduced. I am flagging these figures because they efficiently – and often savagely – offer an indictment of the division of labour. While making its points graspable, the logic of the argument leaves a question hanging: namely: does industrial (mechanized) production ‘liberate’ the worker from his ‘detail function’ even while estranging him from the satisfaction of handicraft?

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture Secondly, this division of labour is a particular sort of co-operation, and many of its advantages8 spring from the general character of co-operation, and not from this particular form of it.9 Marx [1867] 1999b [G]uild organisation, however much it may have contributed by separating, isolating, and perfecting the handicrafts, to create the material conditions for the existence of manufacture, excluded division of labour in the workshop. On the whole, the labourer and his means of production remained closely united, like the snail with its shell,10 and thus there was wanting the principal basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means of production, and the conversion of these means into capital.11 Marx [1867] 1999b

In summary, as Marx quotes the German radical and publisher, Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz: ‘ “The transition from compound manual labour12 rests on a break-down of the latter into its simple operations” ’ (Marx [1844] 1932c).

Emergence For Marx, the division of labour in its most pernicious form (see the entry ‘Different kinds’, below) is entwined with the rise of manufacture. And as he writes in Capital: Manufacture takes its rise in two ways: (1.) By the assemblage, in one workshop under the control of a single capitalist, of labourers belonging to various independent handicrafts, but through whose

8

9

10

11 12

An endnote on this paragraph at marxists.org says: ‘MECW and Progress Publishers’ editions have “disadvantages,” but the Ben Fowkes translation in the Penguin edition has “advantages.” ’ I agree with Fowkes. In making this assessment of the division of labour around the concept of cooperation, Marx offers a typically dialectical analysis that sees some advantage in manufacture as it entails cooperation (i.e. a form of social interaction). (Elsewhere he explains that this occurs when the factory replaces the individual artificer’s workshop.) However, as Marx clearly indicates, this advantage is not dependent on the division of labour. Marx calls into question the integrity and value of cooperation in manufacture when he notes that in one kind of the division of labour exemplified by the ‘watch manufacturies’ of Geneva, ‘detail labourers directly co-operate under the control of a single capitalist’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). Another striking image which, like others, endorses a particular social order by borrowing a motif from the natural world. So, the division of labour is identified with the loss of ownership of the means of production. ‘Compound manual labour’ – i.e. undivided working processes identified with the kind of handicraft production in which, as Marx says below, the artificer ‘makes the entire commodity’. The quotation from Schulz introduces a different vocabulary for the division of labour: the phrase ‘compound manual labour’ seems to have no equivalent in Marx.

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hands a given article must pass on its way to completion. A carriage, for example, was formerly the product of the labour of a great number of independent artificers, such as wheelwrights, harness-makers, tailors, locksmiths, upholsterers, turners, fringe-makers, glaziers, painters, polishers, gilders, &c. In the manufacture of carriages, however, all these different artificers are assembled in one building where they work into one another’s hands. It is true that a carriage cannot be gilt before it has been made. But if a number of carriages are being made simultaneously, some may be in the hands of the gilders while others are going through an earlier process. So far, we are still in the domain of simple cooperation,13 which finds its materials ready to hand in the shape of men and things. But very soon an important change takes place. The tailor, the locksmith, and the other artificers, being now exclusively occupied in carriage-making, each gradually loses, through want of practice, the ability to carry on, to its full extent, his old handicraft. But, on the other hand, his activity now confined in one groove,14 assumes the form best adapted to the narrowed sphere15 of action. At first, carriage manufacture is a combination of various independent handicrafts. By degrees, it becomes the splitting up of carriage-making into its various detail processes, each of which crystallises16 into the exclusive function of a particular workman, the manufacture, as a whole, being carried on by the men in conjunction. In the same way, cloth manufacture, as also a whole series of other manufactures, arose by combining different handicrafts together under the control of a single capitalist.17 (2.) Manufacture also arises in a way exactly the reverse of this – namely, by one capitalist employing simultaneously in one workshop a number of artificers, who all do the same, or the same kind of work, such as making paper, type, or needles. This is co-operation in its most elementary form. Each of these artificers (with the help, perhaps, of one or two apprentices), makes the entire commodity, and he consequently performs in succession all the operations necessary for its

13

14 15 16

17

Marx uses the term ‘simple co-operation’ several times in this chapter but does not explicitly define its antithesis – ‘non-simple’ or ‘complex’ cooperation. However, on the basis of the way in which the argument develops, we might surmise that ‘non-simple cooperation’ makes the worker entirely dependent on another worker for their work – as in the factory – and moreover, on the factoryowner capitalist for the production of that cooperation. In this and other ways, social relations in the workplace are also owned by capital. Another metaphor – this time, drawn from the machinic to critique an aspect of manufacturing. And another (cosmological?) trope. A metaphor from mineralogy or geochemistry, which proposes not only a process of becoming fixed, but also connotes – with critical effect – the inorganic. Hence in this kind of manufacture, which constitutes a new ‘mode of production’, the transition from mixed-labour to singular activity involves an artificer giving up the diversity of their trade; i.e. their role in the production of a range of commodities, even if that more often entails the supply of parts rather than the whole artefact.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture production. He still works in his old handicraft-like way. But very soon external circumstances cause a different use to be made of the concentration of the workmen on one spot, and of the simultaneousness of their work. An increased quantity of the article has perhaps to be delivered within a given time. The work is therefore re-distributed. Instead of each man being allowed to perform all the various operations in succession, these operations are changed into disconnected, isolated ones, carried on side by side; each is assigned to a different artificer, and the whole of them together are performed simultaneously by the co-operating workmen. This accidental repartition18 gets repeated, develops advantages of its own, and gradually ossifies19 into a systematic division of labour. The commodity, from being the individual product of an independent artificer, becomes the social product20 of a union of artificers, each of whom performs one, and only one, of the constituent partial operations. The same operations which, in the case of a papermaker belonging to a German Guild, merged one into the other as the successive acts of one artificer, became in the Dutch paper manufacture so many partial operations carried on side by side by numerous co-operating labourers. The needlemaker of the Nuremberg Guild was the cornerstone on which the English needle manufacture was raised. But while in Nuremberg that single artificer performed a series of perhaps 20 operations one after another, in England it was not long before there were 20 needlemakers side by side, each performing one alone of those 20 operations, and in consequence of further experience, each of those 20 operations was again split up, isolated, and made the exclusive function of a separate workman.21 Marx [1867] 1999b The mode in which manufacture arises, its growth out of handicrafts, is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, it arises from the union of various independent handicrafts, which become stripped of their independence and specialised to such an extent as to be reduced to mere supplementary partial processes in the production of one particular commodity. On the other hand, it arises from the co-operation of artificers of one handicraft; it splits up that particular handicraft into its various detail operations, isolating, and making these operations

18 19

20 21

The term underscores the overlap – or ‘elective affinity’ – between Marx and Rancière. Another metaphor taken from physiology – though while ‘ossification’ is predominantly used to denote a pathological process, it can also refer to the natural production of bone. See note 8. So, in this case, the transition from mixed-labour to singular activity also involves an artificer giving up the diversity of their trade, but here they sacrifice their role as producer of a whole commodity and instead become a ‘detail labourer’ either – as Marx later notes – in a factory or as a homeworker. Ultimately, the different ways in which the division of labour emerges reflect the two modes of ‘compound labour’ in handicraft production that assume the artificer’s capacity for complex production (making an entire commodity e.g. a needle or an intricate component e.g. a wheel). Manufacturing, on the other hand, seeks to realize the worker’s productive capacity as non-complex – simple and limited.

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independent of one another up to the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular labourer. Marx [1867] 1999b22

The title to Chapter 14’s section 3 in Capital names the modes of production associated with the two forms of ‘decomposition’ as described above: and it runs as follows (doubling as a section-heading in this chapter):

The two fundamental forms of manufacture: heterogeneous manufacture, serial manufacture This is how Marx elaborates: The organisation of manufacture has two fundamental forms which, in spite of occasional blending, are essentially different in kind, and, moreover, play very distinct parts in the subsequent transformation of manufacture into modern industry carried on by machinery. This double character arises from the nature of the article produced. This article either results from the mere mechanical fitting together of partial products made independently, or owes its completed shape to a series of connected processes and manipulations. Marx [1867] 1999b

In a sentence that is – apparently – the longest one in Capital, Marx supplements his instance of the carriage, discussed in Chapter 14’s section 1, with a detailed account of watch production, to exemplify ‘the first kind of genuine manufacture’: Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg artificer, the watch has been transformed into the social product of an immense number of detail labourers, such as mainspring makers, dial makers, spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers, hand makers, case makers, screw makers, gilders, with numerous subdivisions, such as wheel makers (brass and steel separate), pin makers, movement makers, acheveur de pignon (fixes the wheels on the axles, polishes the facets, &c.), pivot makers, planteur de finissage (puts the wheels and springs in the works), finisseur de barillet (cuts teeth in the wheels, makes the holes of the right size, &c.), escapement makers, cylinder makers for cylinder escapements, escapement wheel makers, balance wheel makers, raquette makers (apparatus for regulating the watch), the planteur d’échappement 22

Whether by the first or second means – whether as the workman brings his trade, in part, into the workshop, or whether as a maker of a whole commodity within the workshop he has his trade reduced to making one of that commodity’s component parts – the worker’s variety of action is diminished.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture (escapement maker proper); then the repasseur de barillet (finishes the box for the spring, &c.), steel polishers, wheel polishers, screw polishers, figure painters, dial enamellers (melt the enamel on the copper), fabricant de pendants (makes the ring by which the case is hung), finisseur de charnière (puts the brass hinge in the cover, &c.), faiseur de secret (puts in the springs that open the case), graveur, ciseleur, polisseur de boîte, &c., &c., and last of all the repasseur, who fits together the whole watch and hands it over in a going state.23 Marx [1867] 1999b To carry on the trade as a manufacture, with concentration of workmen, is, in the watch trade, profitable only under exceptional conditions, because competition is greater between the labourers who desire to work at home, and because the splitting up of the work into a number of heterogeneous processes, permits but little use of the instruments of labour in common, and the capitalist, by scattering the work, saves the outlay on workshops, &c. Nevertheless the position of this detail labourer who, though he works at home, does so for a capitalist (manufacturer, établisseur), is very different from that of the independent artificer, who works for his own customers. Marx [1867] 1999b

And returning to the instance of needle-making, Marx continues: The second kind of manufacture, its perfected form, produces articles that go through connected phases of development, through a series of processes step by step, like the wire in the manufacture of needles, which passes through the hands of 72 and sometimes even 92 different detail workmen. Marx [1867] 1999b The establishment and maintenance of a connexion between the isolated functions necessitates the incessant transport of the article from one hand to another, and from one process to another. From the standpoint of modern mechanical industry, this necessity [i.e. criticality of timings] stands forth as a characteristic and costly disadvantage, and one that is immanent in the principle of [serial] manufacture.24 Marx [1867] 1999b 23

24

This passage shows Marx using the materiality of prose to embody an idea. The syntax communicates a point that the argument only implies: namely, that the labour in watch production is ‘heterogeneous’ in the sense of not entailing the ‘connected phases of development’ of serial manufacture (Marx [1867] 1999b). In their non-conjunctive form, albeit in a line, the noun-phrases intimate the structure of heterogeneous manufacture. The practical logic of the temporality of serial-manufacture translates into a certain kind of tempo; as Marx later says ‘the mechanism of Manufacture, as a whole, is based on the assumption that a given result will be obtained in a given time’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). Experientially, this means the pace is non-negotiable – a pace that, in another of Marx’s striking metaphors, ends up ‘riveting each labourer to a single fractional detail’ (Marx [1867] 1999b).

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Different kinds When ‘the division of labour’ is typically thought to refer to the decomposition of artefact production into its constituent parts, Marx claims its scope is broader; extending to the ‘social division of labour’ when that designates the allocation of different kinds of work to different individuals, which ‘forms the foundation of all production of commodities’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). And he goes on to say: [i]f we keep labour alone in view, we may designate the separation of social production into its main divisions or genera – viz., agriculture, industries, &c., as division of labour in general, and the splitting up of these families into species and sub-species, as division of labour in particular, and the division of labour within the workshop as division of labour in singular or in detail.25 Marx [1867] 1999b Division of labour in a society, and the corresponding tying down26 of individuals to a particular calling, develops itself, just as does the division of labour in manufacture, from opposite starting-points. Within a family, and after further development within a tribe, there springs up naturally a division of labour, caused by differences of sex and age,27 a division that is consequently based on a purely physiological foundation, which division enlarges its materials by the expansion of the community, by the increase of population, and more especially, by the conflicts between different tribes, and the subjugation of one tribe by another. On the other hand, as I have before remarked, the exchange of products

25

Here Marx supplies a footnote that refers to a quote from (Fryderyk Florian) Skarbek which elaborates a three-part typology: Among peoples which have reached a certain level of civilisation, we meet with three kinds of division of labour: the first, which we shall call general, brings about the division of the producers into agriculturalists, manufacturers, and traders, it corresponds to the three main branches of the nation’s labour; the second, which one could call particular, is the division of labour of each branch into species. . . . The third division of labour, which one could designate as a division of tasks, or of labour properly so called, is that which grows up in the individual crafts and trades . . . which is established in the majority of the manufactories and workshops. Marx [1867] 1999b This is much as Marx proposes.

26

27

Once again, Marx’s phrasing implies a judgement – against this practice. However, on this point Marx and Engels are equivocal in variously rejecting and embracing the ‘social’ allocation of working roles. Indeed, on the latter score, note how Marx proceeds to argue that a ‘division of labour’ within the family and tribe ‘springs up naturally’ – which seems to constitute endorsement. And yet in the famous quote from The German Ideology (discussed later in this chapter), they fantasize the absence of such ‘tying down’ in Communist society. The value for Marx of the division of labour ‘in general’ has been much debated. Renzo Llorente proposes that, ‘[i]t was primarily’ ‘the manufacturing division of labour’ that Marx sought to abolish, as that denies ‘what is today commonly called a right to meaningful work’ (Llorente 2006: 242–4, original emphasis). Differences of ‘sex and age’ are naturalized. Needless to say, it might be argued that these natural, ‘purely physiological’ phenomena are actually historical, if outside Marx’s version of history.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture springs up at the points where different families, tribes, communities, come in contact; for, in the beginning of civilisation, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, &c., that meet on an independent footing. Different communities find different means of production, and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence, their modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities come in contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and the consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities. Marx [1867] 1999b [I]n France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different kinds of silk stuffs were woven, and, in Avignon, it was law, that ‘every apprentice should devote himself to only one sort of fabrication, and should not learn the preparation of several kinds of stuff at once’. Marx [1867] 1999b

Marx describes this as ‘[a] territorial division of labour’28 (Marx [1867] 1999b). Moreover: The Colonial system and the opening out of the markets of the world, both of which are included in the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period, furnish rich material for developing the division of labour in society. Marx [1867] 1999b29 [The] division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind. [Unlike the independent artificer] the detail labourer produces no commodities. Marx [1867] 1999b

28

29

But it is also a division of labour in the sense of the second type described above i.e. the ‘division of labour in particular’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). As Chapter 1 proposed, this comment supplies a context from political economy for the production of the Wunderkammer/early collecting. Cited in the setting of this chapter, it underlines the significance of aligning the (de-)diversification of material culture with the growth in the division of labour, though the reference for ‘society’ is not entirely clear. And, very tantalizingly, Marx does not elaborate on this remark. Indeed he closes down discussion by remarking ‘[i]t is not the place, here, to go on to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). Perhaps the draft of Capital published in Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63 provides a clue: there, Marx writes of commentators noting ‘the cheapening of the commodity – the diminution of the labour socially necessary for the production of a particular commodity’ as an aspect of ‘foreign trade’ (Marx 1861–3). In this way the Wunderkammer can be seen to be associated with an emerging economic system that pursued the division of labour abroad as well as at home.

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While division of labour in society at large, whether such division be brought about or not by exchange of commodities, is common to economic formations of society the most diverse, division of labour in the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.30 Marx [1867] 1999b

The division of labour and estrangement in capitalist society The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement [of man from his labour and its products, and himself, nature and his fellow men].31 Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity32 as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species-being.33 Marx [1844] 1932b; original emphasis [T]he collective labourer, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up solely of such specialised detail labourers.34 Marx [1867] 1999b

The division of labour paves the way for mechanization: The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer. It thus creates at the same time one of the material conditions for the existence of machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments. Marx [1867] 1999b

30

31

32 33

34

There is almost a formula in this pronouncement: capitalism ergo the division of labour in the workshop – and vice versa. And indeed, similar formulations occur throughout Marx’s work – especially in the draft version of Capital in the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63. This is a summary of Marx’s observations on ‘Estranged Labour’ in the section of that name in the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx [1844] 1932a). Perhaps this is better heard as ‘but the positing of estranged, alienated human activity’ etc. Here Marx explicitly articulates the link between the division of labour and estrangement/alienation, while also proposing its ideological condition involves mistaking the ‘estranged’ for the ‘real’. This statement precedes a series of quotes that, as Marx says, show that the ‘political economists are very vague and self-contradictory’ on the subject of divided labour (Marx [1844] 1932b). (He seems to be referring to differences between Adam Smith and J.B. Say.) The division of labour creates a new kind of subject: perhaps aptly defined by the oxymoronic ‘living mechanism’. Certainly, this image points to the idea developed in the next quote: that with the division of labour, man becomes machine in advance of the machine proper – when the latter represents a recapitalization of estranged labour.

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The division of labour – as experienced Under this, the second of the two broad headings, I turn to the way in which Marx and Engels address the affective aspects of the division of labour for its worker-subjects; what is, for them, its presence in ‘the sensible’.

Labouring time and diversity of experience An artificer, who performs one after another the various fractional operations in the production of a finished article, must at one time change his place, at another his tools. The transition from one operation to another interrupts the flow of his labour, and creates, so to say, gaps in his working-day. These gaps close up so soon as he is tied to one and the same operation all day long; they vanish in proportion as the changes in his work diminish [. . .] constant labour of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits,35 which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.36 Marx [1867] 1999b

Or as Marx quotes Schulz: ‘[i]t is clear that unendingly monotonous activity [. . .] is as harmful to the mind as to the body’ (Marx [1844] 1932c).

Mechanization of men37 In manufacture [. . .] [n]ot only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation. Marx [1867] 1999b 35

36

37

Cf. ‘springs’ as before; though here what is flowing is nothing short of life-blood. Again, the metaphor endorses heterogeneous labour. This is a key passage for thinking about mixed form, and as such is worth paraphrasing, as well as annotating. So, in discussing different experiences of labour across different modes of production, Marx proposes that manufacturing labour is not just monotonous in quality, but also constant, in voiding the need for breaks – thus doubly homogeneous. And he seems to suggest that any change is preferable to ‘constant labour’ not just the change that is offered by a break (‘gap’). Indeed, the passage might even be seen to propose that man is a ‘multifariously doing being’. Interstitially, it also usefully sets the scene for thinking about the worker’s needs from non-work time, and culture, when that is typically consumed as ‘recreation’ even if the term is not intentionally a prompt, given it appears in translation, and historically, referred to something more than leisure time (i.e. ‘mental or spiritual consolation’). What we might take from this, however speculatively, is that ‘mixed form’ provides the cultural analogue to ‘change of activity’ or it is ‘change of activity’ as cultural experience (in several ways), and is all the more necessary when working life denies that. This passage underlines the double value of mixed form; in itself and when it also compensates for the absence of such elsewhere. (In its entirety, the passage also makes a point about the value of monotonous labour to capital and the ‘expenditure’ entailed by ‘gaps’; this has been omitted in order to emphasize the key idea: that of Homo agens (doing man) as a multifarious actor.) Although this has been flagged already (see footnote 34), it is key to Marx’s conceptualization of the division of labour and its affective aspects, and as such bears further exemplification.

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But whatever may have been [manufacture’s] particular starting-point, its final form is invariably the same – a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings. Marx [1867] 1999b With [the] division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided machine-like labour at that [. . .] he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine. Marx [1844] 1932c

Deformation of being Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole.38 Marx [1867] 1999b While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionises it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Marx [1867] 1999b

The imagery above combines the idea of deformation with the following:

Reduction (including from whole to part)39 [J.B.] Say regards exchange as accidental and not fundamental. [. . .] Division of labour is [. . .] a skilful deployment of human powers for social wealth; but it reduces the ability of each person taken individually. The last remark is a step forward on the part of Say. Marx [1844] 1932b In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers. Marx [1867] 1999b 38

39

See footnote 26, which discusses the different positions Marx, and Marx and Engels together, take on the subject of the social division of labour. Some reduction scales, some does not, and as such involves kinds of amputation.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other [. . .] man becomes an abstract activity and a belly. Marx [1844] 1932c [D]etail work [is] distributed to different individuals [. . .] and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa,40 which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized.41 Marx [1867] 1999b

Limitation (and specialization) If [the collective labourer’s] natural endowments are, on the one hand, the foundation on which the division of labour is built up, on the other hand, Manufacture, once introduced, develops in them new powers that are by nature fitted only for limited and special functions.42 Marx [1867] 1999b [W]here there is considerable division of labour it is most difficult for the worker to direct his labour into other channels.43 Marx [1844] 1932c

The texture of labouring-experience It is clear that [. . .] direct dependence of the operations, and therefore of the labourers, on each other, compels each one of them to spend on his work no more than the necessary time, and thus a continuity, uniformity, regularity, order, and even intensity of labour, of quite a different kind, is begotten than is to be found in an independent handicraft or even in simple co-operation.44 Marx [1867] 1999b

40

41

42 43

44

A fable told by the Roman consul Menenius which allegorized the patricians as the body’s stomach, which its ‘feet’ (the plebeians) refused to feed, deeming the stomach lazy. In the fable, the feet grow weak from lack of nourishment, and come to recognize that they need the stomach as much as it needs them. Marx uses the allusion to suggest that (labouring) men only need patricians as they are consigned to detail work. If the last two excerpts involve the figure of the synecdoche as a whole becomes a part, they also suggest the (related) figure of the fetish. The curse of specialization. So the worker cannot readily reverse the division of labour in respect of their own employment; once a pattern-cutter, always a pattern-cutter, if in work. This passage makes many points. It addresses the issue of cooperation in the capitalist’s workshop and as an aspect of that, the temporality of labour – also considered in the entry for ‘labouring time’, especially as the latter has implications for the texture of experience. The passage also begs the question (noted, for this book) of how culture responds to a working-life characterized by ‘uniformity’, ‘regularity’ and ‘order’.

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Becoming stupid ‘The understandings of the greater part of men,’ says Adam Smith, ‘are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.’45 Marx [1867] 1999b

Note that Marx observes that: ‘[f]or preventing the complete deterioration of the great mass of the people by division of labour, A. Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and in homeopathic doses’ (Marx [1867] 1999b).

Enslavement [The] division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. Marx [1867] 1999b With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other [. . .] [man] becomes ever more dependent on every fluctuation in market price, on the application of capital, and on the whim of the rich. Equally, the increase in the class of people wholly dependent on work intensifies competition among the workers, thus lowering their price. In the factory system this situation of the worker reaches its climax. Marx [1844] 1932c [The] development in man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties [. . .] caused A. Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: ‘We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens’. Marx [1867] 1999b

Death Marx quotes Schulz proposing that the ‘ “disadvantages” ’ of ‘ “mere division of labour among a greater number of hands” ’ ‘ “appear, among other things, in the greater mortality of factory workers . . .” ’ (Marx [1844] 1932c).46 45 46

Ellipses in Marx’s original. Schulz says what Marx implies: one of the dividends of the division of labour is a greater risk of workers dying.

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And later, Marx quotes D. Urquhart: ‘ “To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate him if he does not . . . The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people” ’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). On this apocalyptic note, I turn to Marx and Engels’s description of the revolutionary antithesis of the division of labour:

Un-divided labour in communist society [T]he division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided,47 man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production48 and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.49,50 This

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According to physiology as proposed above i.e. (historically constructed) differences between the sexes etc.? An intriguing idea. There is much to be said about this proposal for an alternative ‘distribution of the sensible’ in relation to labour. First of all, we need to note that the ‘distribution of labour’ that Marx and Engels are discussing here is its ‘social’ form, as the ‘fixation of social activity’; the allocation of different kinds of activity to different individuals. Second: there are lots of questions about what this call for nonspecific, productive activity actually entails, especially as it may or may not be envisaged as wagelabour rather than say, leisure-time activity (see Llorente 2006). And third, when it is conceived as a kind of paid employment, commentators question its practicality: how would a society organized on self-allocated labour actually work? Or in Marx and Engels’s terms: how does ‘society’ ‘regulate’ ‘the general production’? Then again, when this scenario figures working-life as a radically mixed form at least at the level of ‘occupation’ if not the thing produced (which is another matter), there is the question of what this means for culture. Noting that in this utopian scenario anyone can be an artist and thus address their own cultural needs, we might also note that mixed form as an antidote to laborious employment is redundant. Rather, it might take on a reflective role, in serving, for example, to affirm, understand, interpret and assess the experience of work in communist society. This discussion – which is also a discussion about the relationship between cultural and social form as much as it is about particular versions of that relationship – is one that the book continues in relation to historical phenomena, when Marx and Engels are, of course, considering a projection. This implies that being a named professional has to be a full-time commitment or a worker’s soleemployment; a view that has clear implications for part-time workers doing more than one job (see the discussion of precarity in Chapter 7), and which also problematizes Marx’s attempt to valorize multifarious labour.

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fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.51,52 Marx and Engels 1932

And so with the ‘social’ division of labour, presumably too with the ‘particular’ – however that is realized – given that, as Marx later argues, that too operates as ‘an objective power over us’. Thus it might be argued, on the back of Marx and Engels’s final point, above, that any preoccupation with a kind of historical development (of which mixed form is one) must reckon with this topic. I would add that this is even more imperative when, as for this book, there is an overlap at the level of content. The next chapters look at instances of mixed form in (visual) culture that succeed the Wunderkammer and, as noted in the Introduction, consider how they relate to developments in the division of labour. Given that this chapter has revealed that the latter (in its common meaning) is central to the development of capital, and is in turn ‘developed’ by that, such that division becomes more intense, then this relationship is, at root, potentially one of inversion. Mixed form in culture is, in principle, symbolically opposed to the division that characterizes the experience of labour in manufacture (and later, ‘industry’). So in the framework of historical-materialist analysis which assumes some degree of determination of culture (‘superstructure’) by economic ‘base’, there are various questions for the following chapters: for instance, as labour becomes more divided, what happens to mixed form? Does it wane accordingly? Does the book, in short, review a dying fall? Or if mixed form persists at full strength,

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A key idea here is the worker’s lack of agency or autonomy under capitalism. It is however recognized (e.g. by Llorente 2006: 237) that the sentiment expressed here, which favours varied and voluntarily divided i.e. self-elected labour, is atypical in Marx’s engagement with the subject and at odds with the key articulations elsewhere. In a draft version of Capital (Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63), Marx quotes many passages from ‘the ancients’ to underline the disadvantages of undivided labour. So for instance – in advance of Rancière – Marx quotes from Plato: [s]hould our one farmer, for example, provide food enough for four people and spend the whole of his time and industry in producing corn, so as to share with the rest; or should he take no notice of them and grow just a quarter of this corn, for himself, in a quarter of the time, and divide the other three quarters between building his house, weaving his clothes, and making his shoes, so as to save the trouble of sharing with others and attend himself to all his own concerns, . . . The first plan is easier, of course . . . And Marx frequently comments to the effect that ‘[t]he consequence of the division of labour for [‘the ancients’] was that the products of the individual branches of production attained a better quality, whereas the quantitative point of view predominates among the moderns’ (Marx 1861–3).

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under what circumstances? Might it actually serve to mystify the conditions of production? (In so doing, it would emphasize a texture of experience that is not available elsewhere and realize mixed form in the service of false consciousness.) And if not, does it function to protest division in the realm of work? Or does it realize a combination of some or all of these possibilities and perhaps more? And while it has been noted that Marx and Engels record and prospect the intensification of the division of labour, it needs to be remembered that this was just that: a projection. If, as they suggest, the division of labour is inseparable from capitalism, does it necessarily persist in the way that their writing proposes? Is it possible that the conditions of production could somehow change in ways that would mean that mixed form reflected those, recognizing for example, something like the experience Marx and Engels describe for the man of all trades? Might mixed form function to affirm some kind of undivided labour, even as reversal of divided labour in its ‘detailed’ mode?

3

Popular Mixed Forms in a Long Eighteenth Century: From the Broadside Ballad to the Chapbook

In looking at the Wunderkammer, Chapter 1 proposed that its ‘disarray’ is a complex matter: both an aspect of the form at its origin that was rapidly suppressed in the name of taxonomic, scientific order (and another order too) that organized the unfamiliar, and a fantasy of recent times. Certainly, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Wunderkammer had bequeathed ‘a firm base’, as MacGregor puts it, ‘from which further initiatives could be launched that would carry the museum into entirely new territory’; the territory of the specialist, disciplinary collection (MacGregor 2007: 69). So much for the history of high culture and mixed form at this point. And indeed, it might be argued that, in broad terms, this intersection disappears for several centuries – only reappearing with the formal transgressions of modernism’s avant-garde, which Chapter 5 reviews. And yet the story of mixed form continues – in another quarter. I turn now to look at a very different visual culture: printed matter, which might have been encountered by those unable to afford a Wunderkammer; the non-noble, nonmerchant citizen, or in Marx’s terminology: the labourer, the worker or the artificer. ‘Might’ here acknowledges the fact that access to such culture was not guaranteed, for all sorts of reasons including its distribution and affordability. However, in this relatively simple medium, another chapter in the history of mixed form appears. And while this shift in attention should be unremarkable when visual culture studies values ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms equally, it does nevertheless require some comment.1 In particular: this turn to the popular is 1

The high/low culture distinction figures only fleetingly in Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s Introduction to The Visual Culture Reader (Mirzoeff 2013). Rather, he proposes a visual culture (studies) that, in ‘the claiming of a place for those who have no place’, is ‘against visuality’ as ‘a specific technique of colonial and imperial practice, operating both at “home” and “abroad” ’ (Mirzoeff 2013: xxx). This definition chimes with this book’s commitment to a Marxist analysis of political economy, as that informs both working-life and visual culture.

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not programmatic, when for reasons of scope, this book can only sample the phenomena of its title. And a note on dates: the period covered by this chapter starts in the 1660s, because, as Margaret Spufford notes ‘[t]he sheer volume of cheap print available after the Restoration was very great’ (Spufford 1981: 2). The date also neatly coincides with that given by historians for the later limit of the Wunderkammer’s influence (see West 2014). And the era ends in the 1830s, to acknowledge innovations on the technological front which significantly changed the character of a print culture otherwise largely static since Gutenberg’s development of moveable type in the middle of the fifteenth century. Hence the period that this chapter spans includes the latter half of the ‘manufacturing’ period, as defined by Marx, and so too, the start of the period of ‘industry’ when that is defined by the mechanization of labour. In other words, this chapter spans a threshold as far as developments in the division of labour are concerned. And then another note: for reasons of its concentration on print-culture, with its language specificity, I focus on the UK, with some extension to similar phenomena in the United States, in which the cultural forms discussed below also circulated, if at a slightly later period. So: why print? This is a question about what form popular visual culture took in a ‘long’ eighteenth century. Discussing the incidence of visual culture at the end of this period in The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860, Patricia Anderson offers an account of two pictures, which she found in an 1808 publication: The Microcosm of London. The first illustration shows the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition which, says Anderson, depicts viewers taking the art on the ‘congested’ walls for granted. The second shows a workhouse interior, in which ‘the walls were completely bare’ (Anderson 1991: 16). And she proposes that ‘[b]etween these extremes of aesthetic abundance and visual deprivation lay the experience of the majority of English working people’ (Anderson 1991: 16). Further, she proceeds to characterize this experience: Those [working people] who managed to subsist outside the confines of the prison, asylum, and workhouse were not entirely without the stimulus of imagery. Nature, architecture, public monuments, and commercial signs were all sources of colour, line, and form. So too were the ornamented stages of travelling puppet shows, the painted posters of fairs and circuses, and the scenes of murder and execution that drew crowds to itinerant peep-shows.

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But the imagery that was part of the environment, or an aspect of entertainment, was not specifically intended to provide working people with either instruction or aesthetic experience. Fairs and shows, moreover, were only occasional, often fortuitous events; and the more constant sights of daily surroundings must, with familiarity, have lost much of their power to stimulate the eye and arouse the intellect. Thus, if most workers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries managed to escape the bleakness of the institution, theirs was still by no means the consistently rich and varied experience of imagery that was taken for granted by patrons of the Academy and others equally privileged. At that time it was the rare worker, if any at all, who had seen an original work of fine art in a gallery or museum. Between 1790 and 1832, then, it was not the establishments of high culture, nor the physical environment, nor even popular entertainment that provided English workers with their most sustained source of aesthetic experience, visual information and pictorial amusement. Rather, such stimulus came mainly from the imagery dispensed through the medium of print. Anderson 1991: 16–17

I quote this so extensively because as much as it describes the period 1790–1832, it equally applies to the preceding period: 1660–1790. Concerned as she is with ‘transformation’, Anderson does not need to cast her net further back, when technologically and formally, the printed image had changed little in the preceding three hundred years or so as already noted. Indeed, as Matthew Taunton writes: from ‘around 1440 [. . .] the basic technology of printing remained fundamentally the same up to the end of the 18th century, requiring two men to manually operate a wooden screw press, producing about 200 impressions an hour’ (Taunton 2014). Such is ‘letterpress’ printing. With Anderson, others also note the importance of print in popular visual culture during this time. Leslie Shepard, for instance writes of ‘sheets of woodcut [i.e. printed] pictures which could be pasted on walls for decoration, or simply used as materials for imaginative reverie, a kind of poor man’s art gallery’ (Shepard 1973: 21–3), and this supplies some idea of the way in which print ‘dispensed’ imagery. This chapter will review others. But before that it is important to remember that, as Anderson has proposed, there is more to visual culture than the image. So in looking at the role of print, it would be possible to consider the visuality of type, not the least when that was often central both functionally and visually to printed matter at the time in question. But that would cast the net too wide – at least for this study. Rather, I do indeed look at printed images when they can be regarded as distinct

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from type in having a ‘motivated’ relation to their referents (with type seen as arbitrarily related or ‘ideal’ in its non-relation).2 In the long eighteenth century which is the period covered by this chapter, visual imagery occurred in different forms of printed artefact. Perhaps the simplest, and indeed, the most visual, was the printed woodcut picture just mentioned. However, it seems that ready access to such was unlikely when, as Anderson remarks, ‘most workers [. . .] could not afford the price required to own any illustrative material other than the odd penny print or picture-book’ (Anderson 1991: 20) – hardly then in Shepard’s terms, a ‘gallery’. Moreover, Anderson contends that the typical encounter with the picture-print would have been on pub walls, or for the city-dweller, additionally, as merchandise in printers’ windows.3 This, it might be argued, is peripheral visuality. There were also ‘advertising bills and cards’, which had the potential to supplement type with ‘the odd asterisk or pointing finger for emphasis’ and on occasion, stretched to include ‘stock images [such] as the horses and riders commonly used to illustrate race bills’ (Anderson 1991: 20); see Figure 3.1, which shows not just a horse, but a tiny pointing finger too. And sometimes, news bills would incorporate an image; see Figure 3.2. But whether via the advertising bill or penny print, this is hardly quantitative visual richness – either in the forms themselves (when the ‘pointing finger’ indexes precisely the absence of the visual thing, both in the flesh and in its image-form, and is supplementary to a largely verbal text), or in the incidence of encounter when such forms appear to have been marginal to everyday experience. (Those who spent a lot of time in pubs or looking into printers’ windows might

2

These are the concepts that Hegel uses to distinguish the differences between the ‘symbol’ (identified with visual representation) and the ‘sign’ (identified with linguistic representation). The relevant passage – quoted by Jacques Derrida in writing on ‘Hegel’s semiology’ – is as follows: ‘The sign is different from the symbol; for in the symbol the original characters (eigene Bestimmtheit) (in essence and conception) of the visible object are more or less identical with the content which it bears as symbol; whereas in the sign, strictly so-called, the natural attributes of the intuition, and the connotation of which it is the sign, have nothing to do with one another (geht einander niches an).’ Derrida 1993

3

With a different geographical focus, Victor Neuburg contends that ‘[p]opular illustrated prints’ – also known as ‘catchpenny prints’, or ‘catchpennies’ – ‘were being widely circulated in Europe very soon after the establishment of the printing press (Neuburg 1983: 46). ‘Widely’, of course, begs the question. He also usefully notes that ‘[t]he literature on the subject is, as one might expect, sparse’ (Neuburg 1983: 46). And almost forty years on that is still true, with Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century (Bowles and Carver 1970) a rare and useful title which reprints a selection of prints from the eighteenth century publisher-printer, Bowles and Carver. This volume proposes that catchpenny prints took two main forms. First: (captioned) pictures on a huge range of subjects, and second: sheets comprising primers; grids of pictured things with their associated words. In essence, both were modes of image-text with images dominant.

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Figure 3.1 Broadside, Northampton, Massachusetts. From the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Published at Portsmouth, England, 1798. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

have had a somewhat richer visual life.) Yet, as Anderson contends, ‘these and other offerings [. . .] provided imagery of secondary importance in the lives of most workers. More central to their experience of printed pictorial entertainment were the woodcut illustrations of the broadside and chapbook’ (Anderson 1991: 21). When ‘illustration’ designates an image in the presence of a verbal text, I review both ‘broadside’ and ‘chapbook’ as mixed forms. And I address the structural affinity that each may have with the emergence of the division of labour during the period that this chapter covers. As Iain Beavan asks in writing on this territory, there is ‘one major question: Which came first, the broadsides or the chapbooks?’ (Beavan 2015: 30). And although he does not answer this, others do (see Spufford 1981: 99), proposing

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Figure 3.2 Author unknown, Broadside: depiction of the Exchange Coffee House Boston, burning, c. 1818. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

that the chapbook evolved from the broadside – with which I therefore start. Additionally, the value of regarding the broadside first is that it raises a consideration that benefits an understanding of both forms.

The broadside In a preface to a reprint of Charles Hindley’s 1871 two-volume Curiosities of Street Literature, Michael Hughes defines the broadside as a ‘single, unfolded’ sheet of paper, ‘printed on one side only’ which ‘originated in the first quarter of the sixteenth century’ (Hughes 1969: 5). (In actual fact, many printed forms were broadsides – or started off as such – including the advertisements, bills and penny prints that Anderson says were less important to workers for visual edification than broadsides-with-woodcut, which raises the question of how

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penny prints were actually distinct from the latter.4) In their form as ‘bills’, broadsides might take a text-only mode (Figure 3.3), which as Hughes notes was ‘[f]or two and a half centuries, at first printed in gothic “black letter” and later in roman’ (Hughes 1969: 5). Broadsides with woodcuts could take several forms – for instance, minimally including just a ‘pointing finger’, but also more elaborate visual imagery. But the form that had extensive circulation, as the subject of Anderson’s remark, was the broadside that used either prose or verse to tell a story, true or fictional or, frequently, a bit of both, which also proposes a distinction between Anderson’s broadside and ‘penny prints’ which often showed images of single things in the world or small tableaux. This is the focus of Hindley’s collection, which shows that, in prose, broadsides as entertainment were frequently associated with one topic, and in verse, a specific form. The former were often ‘murder and execution sheets’ (Hughes 1969: 10) and as such ‘a staple of the [broadside] trade from its beginning’ – fictionalized accounts of crimes, criminals’ confessions and their last moments, all in gory detail and presented as the unadulterated truth. The rest of the broadsides in these two volumes take the form of ballads, reproductions of ‘sheets of verses [. . .] usually decorated with a crude woodcut’ (Shepard 1973: 14); see Figures 3.4–3.7. Across prose and verse, aspects of the layout of these two forms of broadside are both shared and distinct. So prose execution sheets seem to favour portrait form, and ballads often use the landscape format. Almost invariably, the sheet-as-page is bisected, though the rubric differs between prose and ballad, determined by the placing of the picture across both forms. When the picture is almost always placed under the title and other introductory matter, the portrait design involves columns underneath an image that nearly spans the paper’s width. In the landscape version, on the other hand, the page is usually divided, vertically, from the start, such that both the title and the (main) image(s) head the first half-sheet, which often subdivides into further columns. And the second half-sheet may be headed by another image, or two; perhaps more (see Figure 3.6). Content-wise: there is some overlap between the ballad and its prose-counterparts, at least, when some reports of executions were rendered in verse. But distinctively, ballads cover a vast range of subjects: ‘religious, political, criminal, romantic, amatory, bawdy, humorous,

4

Anderson’s discussion suggests that price might have been involved, as indeed, the terminology proposes. ‘Broadsides’ (with woodcut images) distinct from the ‘penny print’ ‘cost a penny or a halfpenny’ (Anderson 1991: 22), making some of them cheaper than the latter. Given that Anderson flags the broadside on account of its prevalence, this would seem to be a convincing argument; broadsides in the sense she uses the term were simply more affordable, and therefore more preponderant.

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Figure 3.3 Jacobite broadside: Proclamation of 1678, reissued 1715 and 1745–6. National Library of Scotland, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 3.4 Broadside ballad: The bleeding lovers lamentation: or Fair Clorindas sorrowful complaint for the loss of her inconstant Strephon, between 1683 and 1696. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2011. Douce Ballads 1, fol. 12v.

Figure 3.5 Broadside ballad: The Easter wedding; or, The bridegrooms joy and happiness compleated, in his kind and constant bride, c. 1685. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2011. Douce Ballads 1, fol. 70v.

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Figure 3.6 Broadside ballad: The passionate damsel; or, The true miss of a man, between 1672 and 1696. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2011. Douce Ballads 2, fol. 176r.

Figure 3.7 Broadside ballad: The noble gallant, or An answer to Long days of absence, &c, c. 1670. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2011. Douce Ballads 2, fol. 162v.

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superstitious, moralistic, and tragic’ (Shepard 1973: 18). Further refining the focus of this chapter, I am concentrating on the broadside ballad, which stakes the greater claim than other forms of broadside to mixed form in visual culture.

The broadside ballad – as mixed form Most basically, it is the ballad’s image-text condition that offers it as a mixed form in visual culture; a cultural entity combining conventionally distinct media, when one of those is clearly visual. However, the status of image and printed word as hitherto distinct forms is not a straightforward matter, and certainly needs to be protected against contemporary projection (bearing in mind the findings of Chapter 1, regarding recent readings of the Wunderkammer). For while some forms of ‘image-text’ today still signify as hybrid (in Fine Art, say, as formalism’s tenacious legacy), there was nothing new in image-text per se; either in the 1960s nor the 1660s. Indeed, before the broadside ballad, image-text was not an unfamiliar sight, in say, religious imagery; many a church mural (or those that had survived the Protestants’ iconoclasm) bore inscriptions – even banderoles (as speech bubbles). Yet ‘sight’ speaks volumes, when words could not, for many viewers ‘speak’, if Latin was the language used. On this basis, it seems safe to say that for most people, image was newly supplemented by (printed) text when, with the broadside, that text was typically vernacular. And yet: it might be noted that the same technology that enabled the illustrated broadside (ballad), equally produced the family Bible which might also have contained images. However, that does not make these forms equivalents in terms of their accessibility, for the development in print-culture during this period was not just about technology. Nor was it only, too, about the rise in literacy, which Spufford discusses in her second chapter. It was also about a mode of distribution which, beyond the printer’s window (itself a symptom of a newly commercial urban environment), favoured bulk distribution of the eminently portable broadside (ballad), as that was disseminated by a system of itinerant salesmen providing ‘an essential link in the distribution to isolated village communities and farms of such articles as pins, needles, ribbons, thread, and many other small items’ which later included chapbooks (Neuburg 1968: 4). Hence, the broadside ballad as a mode of image-text and so mixed form, was new, not only for reasons of the words being English ones, but also in the extent of its distribution, offering a new experience for many ‘working people’ and their families, with access to a huge inventory of titles.

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This aside, there is much that might be said about the way in which the broadside ballad’s media were organized beyond the staples of layout noted above. And little has been said on this subject in the literature beyond the basic observation that the broadside ballad typically includes a woodcut. What is not discussed but is critical for thinking about the particularities and hence typology of broadside ballads as mixed form, are the graphic variables. These come into ready focus when ballads are reviewed en masse as enabled by Charles Hindley’s compilation or, more easily still, in an online archive such as the Bodleian Libraries superlative, extensive pre-1800 Broadside Ballads Online.5 As the latter’s 916 records propose, most ballads during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contained more than one image, with four being common and up to nine possible.6 While logocentrism prevails with typeface dominant, the images are not tokenistic. Rather, they often do service in providing visual representations of the ballads’ chief protagonists – typically presented as discrete figures, in the manner of toy-theatre cut-outs – and/or in situ, and then often in an emblematic scene: ‘the lovers in the garden’, for example. And indeed, there is a sense in which the images serve as a kind of pictorial play, if highly schematic and typically running (only) to a quarter or a third of the overall sheet; a somewhat divergent version of the verbal narrative for people unable to read, and for those that could, another strand of pleasure. Such is the immediate texture of the broadside ballad as an image-text mixed form, when the latter is minimally realized by the involvement of two media. But there is more. While the transformation of the ballads’ font from ‘black letter’ (‘gothic’ type) to ‘white letter’ (‘modern’ type) at the start of the eighteenth century (Palmer 1979: 6) is striking, more relevant to ballads as mixed form is first, the involvement of visual but non-pictorial elements i.e. decorative motifs (as seen in Figures 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6), and second, the occasional inclusion of ‘a few bars of music notation’ (Shepard 1973: 21). This, as Shepard writes, is ‘limited’ because ‘tunes were either established favourites’ or ‘new tunes which would become familiar if one bought the sheet of words to jog one’s memory’ – the memory of the hawker’s singing such. However, the link between the printed words and tune was also indicated on the sheet as the examples above demonstrate: viz. ‘To the Tune of, The Vertue of the Pudding’. Nevertheless, when musical notation is included, it represents another form which is neither visual (‘motivated’) or verbal (‘arbitrary’) but perhaps somewhere between the two

5 6

See: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 28 November 2019). See the Douce Ballads 1(54a): ‘The Debtford Wedding’.

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when a score comprises both such elements. Even when, as Shepard also argues ‘in most instances, [‘music notations’] were meaningless devices of decorative value only’ (Shepard 1973: 21), symbolically at least, here is image-music-text. But still: however extensive, this inventory of the broadside ballad’s varied printed features fails to capture the form’s extended multifariousness. For encountered by today’s researcher in the archive, whether analogue or digital, it is a ghost of its former self. And while the following discussion is informed by Abigail Williams’s The Social Life of Books (2017), it is immediately cued by the comments above, when the printed stave reminds us that the sound of the ballads whether sung by their compositors, hawkers, purchasers or others, is absent. (And here we might note too, that for those who could not read, this broadcast element was crucial, even when the pictures might have provided some entertainment; Shepard 1973: 14.) As Roy Palmer writes, and quotes: ‘without a tune a ballad does not live. “If thou read these Ballads (and not sing them) the poor ballads are undone”, as one editor put it, in 1662’ (Palmer 1979: 9). Absent too is the performance: for instance, the embodiment, the interaction with the audience, as well as the location – be that street, parlour, inn or harvest-field.7 These omissions have, to some extent, been recognized by recent commentators – for instance, Patricia Fumerton, Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In an online video celebrating the ‘multimedia’ condition of the form, she underlines the ‘lived experience of the broadside ballad’, while recognizing that in many contemporary collections (which, until recently, had comprised just transcriptions of the broadsheets’ text), ‘you don’t see the images and you never get to hear the tune’ (Fumerton 2016). (Ironically, the video passes up the opportunity to put the latter right – save for a tantalizing snatch of re-enacted song. It is better on the score of images.) But even Fumerton’s account fails to recognize the ballad’s true phenomenality. Certainly, it is more than text, and more than image-text, in also being song, but it is more than all that too, as I propose above. In the fullest, original, compass of its circulation, the broadside ballad was a multifariously mixed form – belying its appearance, as commonly encountered in contemporary archives, as a modest if engaging kind of image-text. Under close inspection, it expands phenomenally. As such, it amplifies the definition of ‘mixed form in visual culture’ that this chapter first prospected, in looking beyond the binary intermediality of 7

Note that broadsides as ‘proclamations’ or ‘official notices’ ‘were fixed to posts which had been painted and ornamented for this purpose or to the doors of sheriffs and other magistrates’ (Shepard 1973: 14). Here too, the broadside is socially consumed, and in a setting that gives the site a role, arguably extending the form’s mixed-status as it is affected by this specificity.

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image-text to a far more hybrid format, that draws upon a range of cultural practices. The broadside ballad in its richest realization includes not only printed words, but notated music, song and location-specific performance; in short, the text as print, and context as the printed-sheet’s historical dissemination. With this observation, too, an extended definition of ‘mixed form’ emerges which includes the constitutive effect of different contexts of consumption. This proposes that mixed form may be dynamically produced as much as it is also more visibly present or simply immanent in a given artefact.

The chapbook Addressing the historical consumption of the broadside ballad over and above its being in the archive has been seen to diversify its formal being. So, the chapbook is approached likewise to assess its mixed form status – when that in turn enables a comparison with its predecessor as more or less diverse. As its name in part implies, the chapbook, as a form-in-paper, is materially more complex than the broadside. Defining its formal aspects, Leslie Shepard writes: ‘[a] chapbook was a sheet folded in four, eight, twelve, or sixteen, making a small uncut booklet of eight, sixteen, twenty-four, or thirty-two pages, thus described as 4to, 8vo, 12mo, 16mo as in normal book production’ (Shepard 1973: 26). In other words, the chapbook was a pamphlet, or as Spufford’s title has it: a ‘small book’. So much for the term’s back-half. The front is more elusive in its reference; in Victor Neuburg’s words its ‘derivation’ is ‘uncertain’ for, as he continues, ‘it may have been a corruption of the word “cheap”, or it may have derived from the Old English “ceap” (trade)’ (Neuburg 1968: 3). Certainly, chapbooks were sold by ‘chapmen’ – ‘pedlars, hawkers and other itinerant merchants’ (Neuburg 1968: 3) – as well as by printers and booksellers (Anderson 1991: 22). And when the first recorded use of ‘chapbook’ is 1798 (MerriamWebster 2019a), this postdates the earliest known use of ‘chapman’ – ‘before the 12th century’ (Merriam-Webster 2019b), suggesting that the book takes its prefix from the seller, or the terms have the same root. There is little doubt about the period of the chapbook’s heyday. Shepard notes that ‘[i]n the eighteenth century, chapbooks were more popular than broadsides’ (Shepard 1973: 30). And Spufford comments that ‘[Cyprian] Blagden wrote of the slow demise of the broadside ballad, which “guttered out in the stronger light of the eighteenth century chapbook” ’ and then quotes Neuburg observing that ‘it was towards the publication of this kind of material [chapbooks] that a

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number of leading men in the ballad trade had turned towards the end of the seventeenth century’ (Spufford 1985: 99). Elsewhere, Neuburg speculates upon the reasons for this shift in emphasis, suggesting that: [i]t is probable [. . .] that the proliferation of pamphlet literature during the Civil War and during the Commonwealth days had given ordinary men a taste for something more substantial in form than a single sheet with a ballad printed on it; and an even more fruitful line of inquiry would be into the nature of the chapbook as one manifestation of the growing interest in books, with the consequent spread of literacy amongst all sections of society, including the poorest classes. Neuburg 1968: 5

(Men were not the only readers in this period, as other writers note (Spufford 1985: 22). And the chapbook’s waxing fortunes may have been the consequence of rising literacy rather than the latter’s cause.) When chapbooks were extensively distributed – ‘carried in the packs of the pedlars, or Chapmen, to every village, and to every home’ – in Ashton’s hyperbole (Ashton [1882] 2018: v) and, as many commentators note, had a widespread readership, they also covered many different topics. Neuburg, for instance, writes that ‘[t]he overwhelming impression gained from a study of eighteenth century chapbooks is that of an extraordinary variety in their contents. In addition to [. . .] fiction [. . .], there were household manuals, collections of ballads, and a good deal of sensational literature’ (Neuburg 1968: 16). But Neuburg’s list is not exhaustive. While noting that the last entry is standard chapbook content, Anderson, for instance, adds two other categories: religious tracts, and chapbooks related to the ‘culture of radicalism’ (Anderson 1991: 35). Presumably she has in mind the pamphlets associated with the Civil War that Neuburg mentions. And when the latter marks the chapbook’s rise in popularity, the end occurs in very different circumstances. Shepard writes that: ‘in the nineteenth century there was a final outpouring of every kind of street literature, just before the introduction of cheap books and newspapers. Thousands and thousands of broadsides and chapbooks swept like a tidal wave over the streets and market-places’ (Shepard 1973: 30–1) – though Spufford also says that ‘the chapbook is still treated as a largely eighteenth-century development’ (Spufford 1981: 99). Between the two, Anderson cites 1832 as a pivotal year, because it marked the launch of the Penny Magazine; the first of many inexpensive, mass-market publications enabled by a confluence of technological innovation that included steam-powered printing, stereotyping

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Figure 3.8 Chapbook (front page): K. James 1st. and the tinker, 1790(?). National Library of Scotland: CC BY 4.0.

and wood engraving, and also purveyed ‘an unprecedented variety of printed imagery’ (Anderson 1991: 49).8 Noting all of this as an introduction to the largely eighteenth-century chapbook, I now consider its materiality, and whether that is also characterized by ‘extraordinary variety’ in the manner of the publications’ contents. Clearly, on a fundamental level, chapbooks are mixed forms, as broadside ballads are, in being modes of image-text, though by the time of their emergence this was doubtless a more familiar combination, which potentially constrains their contribution to the development of mixed form. For sure, the chapbook’s material-formal quality is rarely addressed in detail in key writing on the subject (for example Anderson 1991; Shepard 1973; Spufford 1981). Indeed, as Beavan contends, ‘chapbook 8

This imagery, in all its textural uniformity would, of course, supply material for the related practice of the scrapbook.

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Figure 3.9 Chapbook (front page): History of John Cheap, the chapman, 1800(?). National Library of Scotland: CC BY 4.0.

images have been relatively overlooked’ in ‘scholarly attention’ – perhaps, I might add, because matters of content and especially, genre, dominate (Beavan 2015: 33). So the following description is unusually expansive: [i]n physical appearance chapbooks were not unpleasing. The woodcut illustrations possessed a vitality which outweighed the undoubted crudity of their execution, and the variety of types used upon the title-pages was appealing to the eye and must have caught the attention of the contemporary purchaser [. . .] Chapbooks usually measured about six inches by four inches (though in the nineteenth century they were often much smaller) [. . .] They were issued unbound, and the title-page referred to above also did duty as a wrapper, nearly always with a woodcut illustration. The coarse rag-paper used in the production of chapbooks did little to enhance their physical appearance. Neuburg 1968: 6–7

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Figure 3.10 Chapbook (front page): Fortunate weaver’s uprise, or, The landlady well pleased, 1802. National Library of Scotland: CC BY 4.0.

Neuburg, however, is not alone in flagging up the character of chapbooks’ imagery – as Beavan notes (presumably excepting this from ‘scholarly attention’): [w]riters and commentators have long drawn attention to the affective qualities of chapbook images. The geologist, writer and newspaper editor, Hugh Miller, described them as ‘delightful’, Wordsworth as ‘strange and uncouth’ and unforgettable, Samuel Bamford, the poet, weaver and working-class activist, found some ‘horrid and awful-looking’, whilst Thomas Carter, trained as a tailor, thought some ‘not a little ludicrous’. Beavan 2015: 34

And yet, for all that the imagery was remarkable, it often comprised a small proportion of the chapbook’s printed area, though the ratio of picture to text seems to be nuanced by content, date and perhaps region of publication. On the

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Figure 3.11 Chapbook (front page): The Lamp-lighter, 1803. National Library of Scotland: CC BY 4.0.

one hand, the McGill Library’s online Chapbook Collection9 proposes that pictures were a central feature of the form – with more than one per title being common. And John Ashton’s 1882 compendium suggests likewise.10 However, the McGill collection is three-quarters composed of children’s books, which might be expected to favour pictures, and most are from the nineteenth century – which, save the first few decades, lies outside the scope of this chapter. On the other hand, the National Library of Scotland’s digital archive11 proposes that the 9 10

11

https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/chapbooks/about.html (accessed 28 November 2019). Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century is full of reproductions that suggest that the subjects of its title were copiously illustrated. However, while the version of the book that I consulted was a recent, digital scan of Ashton’s original, suggesting little scope for slippage, it is not clear that Ashton was as faithful with his facsimiles. An online review of the reissue observes that ‘most of the chapbook texts are edited or summarized [by Ashton] – very well, too’ which lends weight to the suspicion proposed by the layout of Ashton’s text that these are indeed ‘versions’, with perhaps extra pictures (Jocko 2015). https://digital.nls.uk/chapbooks-printed-in-scotland/archive/104184103 (accessed 28 November 2019).

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Figure 3.12 Chapbook (pages 3 and 10) Pilgrim’s Progress, from this world to that which is to come, c. 1840. National Library of Scotland: CC BY 4.0.

image is a marginal entity for its native chapbooks. For instance: in the first fifty entries under ‘Occupations’, none has other than a single image, which is on the title page. And Beavan’s work on Chalmers’ Scottish chapbooks underscores this point (Beavan 2015: 32). Elsewhere in this archive, it seems that only children’s titles offer richly illustrated texts – titles such as Pilgrim’s Progress – in its necessarily abridged form: see Figure 3.12.12 In this brief review then, the chapbook seems to be a logocentric mode of imagetext. Hence, immediately the chapbook (excluding children’s literature) is less visibly mixed form when the ratio of words to pictures is typically much greater than the ballad’s. Moreover, however charming or affective, the imagery in chapbooks often has another kind of tokenistic quality. As Beavan notes, a number of writers question ‘the appropriateness of the image, or its relevance’ (Beavan 2015: 34), noting its lack of illustrative ‘fit’, while recognizing it was ‘obviously limited by an individual 12

Nothing in the National Library of Scotland’s version specifies its status as a children’s abridgement but Pilgrim’s Progress was habitually versioned for the younger reader (see Anderson 1991: 32).

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printer’s stock-in-trade’ (Beavan 2015: 34) – suggesting that it was of secondary importance.13 And while, like the ballad, the chapbook makes use of typographical ornament if more prosaically (Beavan 2015: 22), it has no use for musical notation, even in the ‘garlands’ (anthologies of ballad-texts in chapbook form).14 A more significant distinction between the chapbook and the broadside ballad, formally construed, emerges as the former is approached like the latter, through a version of Reception Aesthetics (Hohendahl 1977); via the way in which the printed-paper text was consumed, as Reception Aesthetics refuses the idea of the autonomous text of Idealist philosophy. When the broadside ballad was originally extended by performance, the chapbook’s formal being is less obviously enriched by its readers in the same way. Or rather: there is a question: how was it encountered in its heyday? Was it read in silence, as today’s researcher reads it in the archive? Or like the broadside ballad, did it have a louder, social being as a text read out to others? Spufford argues that the new prevalence of print instanced by the chapbook was ‘shown to lead not to the introversion of the literate, and their remoteness from the non-literate, but, on the contrary, to feed into the oral tradition’ (Spufford 1985: 68). On some level then, the printed word was read aloud or otherwise relayed; reading was shared. And when the printed word assumes, first and foremost, private reading, this shared reading is transformative; literally: it changes the form of the text. As Spufford also proposes, ‘[i]t is only sensible to suppose that alehouses also acted as centres where [. . .] chapbooks were [. . .] handed around, or read aloud’ when ‘inns formed the distributive centres from which chapmen worked’ (Spufford 1985: 66) while noting ‘[a]s yet I have only one piece of evidence of this’ (Spufford 1985: 66). But when Spufford devotes a whole chapter to matters of the chapbook’s readership, she gives surprisingly little attention to the issue of how chapbooks were read. This is all the more curious given that her preceding chapter looks at ‘Elementary education and reading skills’, charting the growth in literacy ‘between 1500 and 1700’ as a precondition for the chapbook’s popularity (Spufford 1985: 19), and which must have led to less shared reading, when fewer people were dependent on another’s literacy. Indeed, in The Social Life of Books, Abigail Williams writes that ‘literary and cultural historians have identified alongside, and related to, the social changes of the eighteenth century a “reading revolution.” ’ She adds: ‘[t]hey have argued that improving literacy and increased access to a broader 13 14

Broadside ballads also used stock images; in Figures 3.5 and 3.7 the same block appears, top right. A search of ten ‘garlands’ in the National Library of Scotland’s online collection contained no musical notation.

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range of secular works brought about a move from the intensive oral reading of a few books to the extensive silent reading of a wide range [of works]’ (Williams 2017: 6).15 And in Spufford’s study, there are a number of occasions when the reading of chapbooks appears as a solitary activity, and therefore probably ‘interior’, or silent. One excerpt sums this up. Spufford quotes a long passage from Francis Kirkham’s 1673 reflections on his childhood reading experience, which I abbreviate (ellipses outside brackets are in the quoted text): [h]aving heard great Commendation of Fortunatus, I laid out all my money for that, and thought I had a great bargain . . . now having read this Book, and being desirous of reading more of that nature; one of my School-fellows lent me Doctor Faustus, which also pleased me, especially when he travelled in the Air, saw all the World, and did what he listed . . . the next Book I met with was Fryar Bacon, whose pleasant stories much delighted me [. . .] and borrowing one Book of one person, when I read it my self, I lent it to another, who lent me one of their Books; and thus robbing Peter to pay Paul, borrowing and lending from one to another, I in time had read most of these Histories. Spufford 1985: 73

Here books are in private ownership and consumed in solitude: ‘I read it my self ’ says much, when the only communal aspect of this dispersed circulating library and the reading it enables is the process of exchange. If ‘without a tune a ballad does not live’, a chapbook as a silent text clearly did. In its aspect of being read in silence (and diminished incidence of being read aloud) the chapbook implies, quantitatively, less formal multifariousness than the broadside ballad.16 However, consideration of the chapbook’s mixed form status does not end quite here; there is a coda to this analysis – consisting of two parts. First is a point 15

16

It is tempting to propose that in marking a shift from social to individual consumption, the chapbook prefigures, or indeed, parallels, the rise of the novel, which has been linked to the emergence of bourgeois individualism, though the link between chapbook and novel is often resisted. There is much that might be said about the private reading of the chapbook in relation to the latter’s focus (in its fictional mode) on individual characters. In the National Library of Scotland’s chapbook archive, the section headed ‘Occupations’ is mainly populated with stories about individual workers – for instance John Cheap, the Chapman (Figure 3.9). So between the chapbook’s reader as a solitary being, and the focus in the chapbooks’ stories on the individual character, there is a kind of assonance. And on the subject of those characters, it might also be noted that most of the occupations represented are pre-industrial even while the archive’s contents were largely printed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The list of jobs represented (some involving much hardship) includes the following: farmer, weaver, King, cobbler, beggar, chapman, (female) weaver, tinker, plowman, barber, housekeeper, butler, drover, singer, mariner, ‘plou’-boy’, miller, dragoon, watchman, shoemaker, sodger, lamplighter, tradesman, mechanic, knight, tinker, shepherd, vermin killer, minstrel, collier boy, bellows-mender, lace-merchant, friar, beggar girl, and shepherdess. Of course, this archaism might be explained by the fact that chapbooks were reprinted ad nauseam from old ‘chases’ of type and image. But it also points to the way in which the relationship between cultural form (including content) and its related ‘reality’ can be a complicated one – discussed later in this chapter.

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about an interaction needed to make reading possible when ‘chapbooks were sold uncut and unstitched’ such that ‘[t]he purchaser would slit the pages and lovingly stitch or pin them – a kind of do-it-yourself paperback’ (Shepard 1973: 26). Second is a point that notes that if the chapbook was, in part, produced by readers, then they also were involved in the reverse. Writers on the subject comment on the form’s ephemerality connected to its physical fragility. Relatedly, Spufford argues that the chapbook was not worth enough financially to be recorded in probate inventories. But she also surmises that its absence from these might have been because it had ‘a secondary function of supplying the very real social need for lavatory paper’ (Spufford 1985: 48). And yet: these acts of making and unmaking are perhaps the liminal condition of the chapbook as mixed form; at the edges of its being – edges which it has in common with all other cultural forms, if somewhat more vividly. Overall, demonstrably, the chapbook is less mixed in form than its precursor and hardly offering, formally, ‘extraordinary variety’. In some iterations, it is an utterly seductive meld of type and image as many items in the McGill collection demonstrate. Goodes Infant’s Instructor, for example (the casual violence of its contents notwithstanding) is, stylistically, delightful – interweaving bands and blocks of oversize letters forming varied alphabets, with generously proportioned woodcut pictures (some hand-coloured). Almost everything is skew-whiff in one way or another – but the whole is also perfect. But equally, and more often, the chapbook is a visually dreary entity. Aptly perhaps, ‘Mournfull song, upon the breach of national, and solemn league, and covenant’ (1724), offers little visual pleasure besides some restrained ornaments and the satisfaction of regularly laid-out verse.17 Broadside ballads on the other hand are usually more spectacular, and have more varied graphic features. And as already noted, too, broadside ballads were more frequently transformed from a printed text to an oral/aural one; taking shape as song, which was extended further as performance – multimedia before its time, indeed.

Less diverse and more divided The history of the broadside ballad and the chapbook, then, appears as one in which a multifarious form in (visual) culture cedes, in part, to an entity that is less varied and often, less visual. And this, it can be argued, has to do with each 17

https://digital.nls.uk/104184137 (accessed 30 November 2019).

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form’s textual character, and also the way in which they were consumed, when the shift from sociable to individualized consumption restricted the formal diversification entailed by performance. When this shift seems so significant – not the least as it represents a reconfiguration of social life by cultural form, and vice versa – it is important to return to the question of the forms’ significance in society at large. Anderson is not alone in noting the centrality of the broadside ballad and chapbook to cultural life. Here is Ashton, in the late nineteenth century – closer to the time in question – writing that: ‘we, in this our day of cheap, plentiful, and good literature, can hardly conceive a time when in the major part of the country, and to the larger portion of its population, these little Chap-books were nearly the only mental pabulum offered. Away from towns, newspapers were rare indeed, and not worth much when obtainable’. And then he adds: ‘[p]revious to the eighteenth century, [chapmen] generally carried ballads’ (Ashton [1882] 2018: v). Ashton proposes, with Anderson, that these forms constitute the chief source of popular, cultural nourishment in the long eighteenth century. This needs to be remembered, in turning next to look at their connections to the emerging character of working life for many people.

Less diverse and more divided: eighteenth-century cultural form and working life And so I come to the question of how the history of these forms of publication – as consumed at the time – finds an analogy in the idea of manufacture as conceived by Marx and Engels. (When the period covered by this chapter takes in the rise of industry, that is not addressed here because, by then, the broadside ballad was an ageing form, with the chapbook not so far behind.) More specifically, I am concerned with the way in which the history of mixed form, as represented by the shift from the broadside ballad to the chapbook, can be related to the development of the division of labour. In order to consider this, I refer this chapter’s key findings concerning the formal development of the chapbook from the broadside ballad to Marx’s and Engels’s propositions regarding the redistribution of work as reviewed in Chapter 2. When the chapbook represents a shift in popular culture away from the multiform condition of the broadside ballad, the question to be asked is whether this has a counterpart in the reorganization of labour during this period. In addressing this, I digress slightly from the rubric that this book deploys elsewhere: the second half of this analysis, exceptionally, concerns just one specific aspect of the

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broadside–chapbook axis as mixed form – the turn from the social to the individual mode of consumption. This is solely for the reason that this axis constitutes no less than ‘division’ in the social realm, raising the question of how that relates to social experience in the division of labour. So, I start with the reduction in formal heterogeneity that the chapbook represents (on the broadside ballad) at the level of its textual being, and the question of how that is paralleled in working life. And immediately, it is obvious that the division of labour represents an analogous de-diversification of texture no matter whether the artificer is brought into the capitalist’s workshop – as the site of heterogeneous manufacture18 – to continue just one aspect of his trade, or is set to work on serial manufacture, making just one part of something he might hitherto have made in its entirety. Labour, as experienced, is constricted in its qualities. Hence in this regard, as cultural form, so labour form; both ‘breakdown’ compound forms to ‘simple operations’ in Schultz’s phrase, as seen in Chapter 2 as Marx quotes him (and I quote Marx). And this parallel persists in the relationship between the shift to a more individual mode of consumption (that the turn from the broadside ballad to the chapbook represents) and the experience of the division of labour (as communal or otherwise). Indeed, in the abstract, ‘division’ connotes the separation of something that is manifold, into its parts. So ‘division’ results in ‘individuation’ – literally, the ‘not-dividable’, for atomized. In other words: the individuated is isolated (from others). And so it would seem that the very obvious effect of manufacture, through its emerging production lines – whether ‘heterogeneous’ or ‘serial’ – is that the division of labour not only sunders man from himself, as he is alienated from his human potential, but also divides him from his fellow men as he works on his allotted task, alone, even in the ‘communal’ space of the capitalist’s workshop (which becomes less human and communal with the introduction of machinery). And Marx (and Engels) do indeed identify the division of labour with the alienation of man from man, but in doing so, they side-step attribution of the latter to the former. Instead, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, they propose that man’s separation from his fellow men is a consequence of capitalist alienation, of which the division of labour is an effect. This is how they elaborate on that fundamental estrangement, as it concerns labour:

18

The term ‘heterogeneous manufacture’ referring, as it does, to ‘the mere mechanical fitting together of partial products made independently’ (Marx [1867] 1999b) does not negate the claim – which I am making – that such work is, nevertheless, experienced as homogeneous.

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Mixed Forms of Visual Culture In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. Marx [1844] 1932a, original emphasis

And this may explain, perhaps, why there is little reference in Marx’s and Engels’s discussion of the division of labour to its effect on the worker’s experience as a social being: it is addressed as an aspect of the broader condition of estrangement. But then again, as Chapter 2’s introduction notes, Marx also refers to the division of labour as in ‘a certain respect the category of categories of political economy’ (Marx 1861–3). That tension notwithstanding, in manufacture man is fundamentally individualized in being sundered from his species being. The division of labour may exacerbate that individuation and it may also mystify it (for instance, as it generates ‘solidarity’ among collectively alienated workers,19 or as it depends on ‘co-operation’)20 but it is not a primary context for the turn to singular consumption that the chapbook represents. Rather, it is epiphenomenal, when the larger mode of production as estranged, or alienated, supplies the context that, in the instance of the chapbook, offers a correlation between labour and culture as divided forms that are, among much else, divided through their socially isolated subjects. Nevertheless, in summary: it can be argued that there is a parallel between the individuation of popular culture as represented by the relatively private consumption of the chapbook over and above the broadside ballad, and the experience produced by the increasing division of labour, when the two developments overlap in looking to a newly individualized, and relatively solitary subject. ‘Overlap’ and ‘parallel’ may be different terms, describing different relationships but both are neutral in respect of cause and effect. Marxist aesthetics typically

19

20

In Capital, Marx notes the capacity for the division of labour to mobilize the ‘ratio’ of multiplication: ‘the simultaneous employment of many doing the same thing’ (Marx [1867] 1999b). ‘Co-operation’ is a multivalent term in Marx’s and Engels’s writing. On the one hand, it has something of its present – utopian – connotations when it refers to ‘ownership in common of the means of production’ (Marx [1867] 1999a); on the other hand, it has a very different resonance when, for instance, Marx proposes that ‘the co-operation of wage labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them’ (Marx [1867] 1999a). Ultimately, what seems to be at stake is the question of who initiates cooperation and crucially, whether that comes from within the cooperative or without.

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proposes lines of influence between art, or culture more widely, and life (political economy), which supplies a terminology of vectors. And of course, schematically, Marxist aesthetics proposes that culture can reflect the economic (base), while also affecting that. So: the evolution of the chapbook from the broadside ballad and the turn that this embodies from the more to less formally diverse, can be seen from this perspective to mirror changes in political economy, and more particularly the distribution of the sensible as labour at the time. However, the idea of cultural practice as ‘reflection’ of another (aspect of) reality requires some comment, in the context of Marxist aesthetics. While the latter is, itself, multifarious, the reflective work of culture is nevertheless a persistent theme. So, in an essay on ‘The Marxist Theory of Art’, Gordon Graham observes that ‘[o]n the one hand, we do find a reflection of the world in art,’ but, he continues, ‘not as it really is so much as how people take it to be. Art expresses, in part, the historically limited perceptions of each particular society and period. To this extent art is ideological because it disguises reality’ (Graham 1997: 111). (Here ‘art’ does not exclude ‘culture’ in the sense this book uses the term.) In this way, there is nothing necessarily truthful about the presence of ‘representation’ in art, or cultural forms more largely, if therein, ‘men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’ i.e. ‘ideologically’ in Graham’s term, though the previous phrase is Louis Althusser’s (1971). Of course, to say something ‘mis-represents’ (no matter what) is to beg the question: by what measure? So better, it might be asked: what is the reality that is excluded? One way of answering this is to refer to Marx’s understanding of human and social potential as articulated in Chapter 2, if only considered in passing. For it is such – proper ‘species being’ of humankind – that is, for Marxist aesthetics, misrepresented every time cultural practices uncritically reflect the (capitalist), noncommunist status quo. For this reason, art and culture have another, ‘non-reflective’ function (‘differently reflective’ might be better). As Graham writes: [o]n the other hand, art is recognized as art. That is to say, it is understood to be the outcome of imagination, not empirical inquiry, and because it is understood in this way it can also reveal the unreality of the ideological world, showing it to be made up of ideas and images. In this way art inclines to science because it tells us something about the world of capitalism and thereby increases real understanding. Graham 1997: 111, original emphasis

It is this second understanding of culture’s relation to (capitalist) historical reality that gives mixed form an emancipatory potential, in the cultural sphere,

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in the absence of a presence in the sensible elsewhere. This understanding is doubtless better known via Marcuse and, specifically, the passage from The Aesthetic Dimension, in which he writes that ‘the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image (schöner Schein) of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence’ (Marcuse 1979: 6). Pursued through the period of manufacture and industrialization, and then beyond, the history of mixed form is also the pursuit of schöner Schein.

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The following images show pages from scrapbooks in the author’s collection. It has not been possible to trace details of the scrapbooks’ compilers. 102

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Mixed Form and Modernism in the Visual Arts: Assemblage and Assembly Lines

Modernism makes a major contribution to the history of mixed form. This chapter looks at the intersection of the two in the visual arts, and as it does, returns to this enquiry’s engagement with mixed form in what can be described as less-or-more-than-popular ‘high’ culture – last substantially regarded with the Wunderkammer. At least: as the cabinet of curiosities is a rarefied cultural form both at the level of production, (when wealth and often connoisseurship are entailed), and at the level of consumption (with access often socially restricted), then it prefigures the way in which twentieth-century Fine Art practices similarly assume certain kinds of economic, cultural and social capital. In looking at this meeting of mixed form and modernism, there is one respect in which they very clearly do not mix. This non-relation is presented as a preface to a survey of modernism’s hybrid forms, of which the most obvious, because prevalent and, indeed, significant, are collage, montage and assemblage.1 I focus on the latter, providing a formalist analysis of assemblage art, addressing issues of its media, the methods for arranging those, and joining them together, and then the way in which assemblage so construed aligns with different definitions of modernism. Finally, I return to the question that underlies these discussions of mixed form: namely the issue of how such practices offer a structural analogy for contemporaneous workers’ experience of labour as more or less uniform.

Inimical: mixed form and modernism When modernism is regarded as a matter of historiography – the writing of (art-)history – it is a much contested field; such is embodied, for example, in 1

Other hybrid forms in modernism tend to be associated formally with negation e.g. ‘decollage’, ‘disassemblage’; Jiří Kolář’s ‘rollage’ is an exception.

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October writers’ post-structuralist re-readings of modernist art and theory. At the level of the theory of its histories then, modernism is a mixture. It is not paradoxical, however, to find that within that mixture, one of those histories seeks to identify modernism with the quest for art’s essence, immediately defined as singular. This is of course, Clement Greenberg’s ‘formalist’ modernism, which emerges in his later writing, and famously in the 1965 essay ‘Modernist Painting’. And if the essay’s argument is familiar, especially through critique,2 it is nevertheless worth rehearsing now – not the least as it lays out the terms on which hybrid forms are excluded from modernism. As rehearsed by others and, here, Lisa Florman, noting the rehearsals of ‘[Thomas] Crow and others’: Greenberg’s interest in modernism was fueled from the start by a deep anxiety over the fate and identity of art. In the early days, he cast the argument in explicitly Marxist terms: capitalism’s inexorable commodification posed a serious threat to cultural standards and values, and only the radical experiences afforded by avant-garde art offered any real hope of saving painting, for example, from being turned into a form of ‘relatively trivial interior decoration. Florman 2002: 63

Hence, as Florman contends, if Greenberg’s ‘terms are rather less political’ in ‘his later writings’, ‘Modernist Painting’ nevertheless proposes modernism’s ‘resistance to the deadening effects of contemporary society’, staged through ‘processes of “self-criticism” ’ (Florman 2002: 63, original emphasis). In Greenberg’s words: ‘[t]he task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art’ (Greenberg 1982: 5–6). For the visual arts, of course, the essential residue was ‘flatness’, for: [f]latness alone was unique and exclusive to [pictorial] art. The enclosing shape of the support was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm or means shared with sculpture as well as the theater. Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. Greenberg 1982: 6

2

See especially W.J.T. Mitchell’s demolition of optical modernism in ‘There are No Visual Media’ (Mitchell 2013).

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There is, in this well-known statement, something of a sleight of hand: visual art has suddenly contracted to painting, without announcement, even if the logic of the argument permits that move. And the implications for mixed form are clear: modernism realized in ‘pictorial art’ as painting outlaws any kind of mixed-media or intermedial practice,3 when such would dangerously encourage the assimilation of art to ‘entertainment pure and simple’ on the way to ‘therapy’ (Greenberg 1982: 5). And yet: as Greenberg and others in his wake acknowledge (e.g. Rosalind Krauss), painting’s essence cannot be achieved but only asymptotically approached, when ‘[t]he first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness’ (Greenberg 1982: 8). But even so, that adulteration does not admit more formally egregious ones. They are, however, actively embraced by other modernisms; those that valorize ‘disunity, and discontinuity’ (Seitz 1961: 37); and which supply the subject matter of this chapter.

Mixed form – its key forms in other modernisms The claim made above, that collage, montage and assemblage are the most prevalent hybrid forms of (non-formalist) modernism is readily supported by observation – say a quick trawl of national, twentieth-century art collections. (In its online glossary of ‘Art Terms’, Tate (2019) illustrates ‘modernism’ with a Raoul Hausmann collage: The Art Critic, 1919–20 – see Figure 5.1.) And the significance of these kinds of forms in the modernist period (‘Modernist Painting’ notwithstanding) is reflected in a range of pronouncements by key commentators. Indeed, Greenberg himself in an earlier mode, has said of collage in his 1959 essay of that name, that it ‘was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century’ (Greenberg 1965: 70). (He makes a similar statement in the 1958 version of this essay, ‘The Pasted-Paper Revolution’, if it is less forcibly expressed.) However, to recognize a ‘turning point’ is not to validate it as the agent of (r)evolution – but in the collage essays, a description of the practice as a ‘constant shuttling between surface and depth, in which the depicted flatness is “infected” by the undepicted’, does link it to the modernism of (reflexive) representation (Greenberg 1965: 74). Collage seems to be endorsed for its contribution to this dialectic, even when ‘Collage’ – auguring the ‘later’ Greenberg – concludes by praising Gris’s ‘monumental unity’ (Greenberg 1965: 83). In somewhat starker 3

Fluxus artist Dick Higgins published his ‘Statement on Intermedia’ in 1967, just two years after ‘Modernist Painting’ was written (Higgins 1967).

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Figure 5.1 Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic, 1919–20. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2021.

terms, Robert Motherwell called collage ‘ “the twentieth century’s greatest creative innovation” ’ (Gooding 2013: 4). And reflecting this, while citing Richard Kostelanetz and noting that ‘the technique itself is ancient’, Gregory Ulmer writes, in 1983, that ‘[b]y most accounts, collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century’ contending too – when this supports my claim to hybrid forms’ extensiveness – that collage is ‘the predominate, all-pervasive device of 20th-century arts’ (Ulmer 1985: 84). (If ‘allpervasive’ is rhetorical, it is, perhaps a little more excusable when Ulmer’s couplet ‘collage/montage’ tropes the latter with the former, and when he then elides the latter with ‘assemblage’ (Ulmer 1985: 84); elisions which also neatly, by extension, if somewhat insecurely, underscore my claim concerning all three forms’ significance.) However, in ways that I detail later, I distinguish all three terms.

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Curiously, maybe, given the interchangeability of its key terminology, Ulmer’s essay also argues for the value of (photo)montage, possibly above collage. ‘Photomontage’ he writes ‘illustrates the “productive” potential of collage promoted by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht (among others)’ (Ulmer 1985: 86). And while, perhaps predictably, he claims that ‘[t]here is nothing innately subversive about the photomontage principle, or any other formal device’, he has, however, just written that ‘[m]ontage does not reproduce the real, but constructs an object [. . .] in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality’ (Ulmer 1985: 86). And noting that this claim is not so grand as those advanced for collage, it is, however, pointed: not the least as it confers significance on photomontage by referring it to the political project of twentieth century art’s (‘historical’) avant-garde.4 And so to ‘assemblage’ and claims concerning its significance for modernism. Writing in the foreword to the book that accompanied The Art of Assemblage exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961, the curator, William Seitz, borrows from Margaret Miller to argue for the ‘importance’ of ‘the collage method’ realized as assemblage for ‘contemporary art’ (Seitz 1961: 6). He asserts: ‘[i]ntrinsic to the medium of assemblage is an entirely new relationship between work and spectator: a reconquest, but by different means of the realism that abstract art replaced’ (Seitz 1961: 81), while shrinking from the obvious conclusion: that assemblage is not just an alternative (to) abstraction, but implicated in a different kind of modernism. But if ‘modernism’ is mercurial in this debate, so too are the more basic terms, and so some definitions are required.

Collage, montage and assemblage The order in which these terms are presented in this heading can be seen to tell a story that engages notions of their origins, which also inflects the ways in which they are defined. If the sequence above seems unremarkable, that may be because it represents a familiar art-history: one which starts with Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s collages, identifies (photo)montage with Dada as a slightly later phenomenon, and acknowledges the subsequent emergence of assemblage as that which develops Braque’s and Picasso’s innovation. Organized according

4

And speculatively, to the ‘post-criticism’ of the essay’s title when that seeks to admit the ‘collage/ montage revolution in representation’ to ‘the academic essay’ (Ulmer 1985: 86) – a project that is largely unrealized.

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to the concept of mixed form, I propose another line-up which records a vector from the less to more formally diverse. Hence: montage – collage – assemblage. So ‘montage’ is the least multifarious – whether realized as a synonym for ‘photomontage’, or as it designates a composition in another medium likewise synthesized from smaller units. (A much-cited reference in this context is Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera – Figure 5.2.) Indeed, singularity of medium is key; if montage is (seen as) hybrid, this is an effect of imagery, or content, not form. And while many writers use the term in just this way, none appears to recognize – explicitly – the latter point. Referring to John Heartfield’s work, Ulmer, for instance, writes that in photomontage ‘the photographic images are themselves cut out and pasted into new, surprising, provoking juxtapositions’ (Ulmer 1985: 85). A similar use appears as Dawn Ades cites El Lissitzky’s writing on photomontage. She quotes him observing that ‘[m]ost artists make montages, that is to say, with photographs and their inscriptions that belong to them they piece together whole pages which are then photographically reproduced for printing. In this way there develops a technique of simple effectiveness’ (Ades 1986: 84). (However, here it might be noted that as Lissitzky mentions ‘photographs and their inscriptions’, he does entertain the idea of a fissure in the medium – image-text, in other words.)

Figure 5.2 Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (film still), 1929. Courtesy of the BFI National Archive.

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In a twist that further typifies this serpentine terrain, instances of montage (as defined above) are also labelled ‘collage’ and ‘assemblage’. Hence, in commenting on Max Ernst, William Seitz observes that: ‘[t]he collages of the dada period, pasted together from fragments of technical, anatomical, and other illustrations, are assemblages in every sense, as were his objects. In later work, however, especially in the collage “novels” such as Une semaine de bonté, the physical identity and discreteness of the original segments is intentionally lost in a new synthetic representation’ (Seitz 1961: 41). Seitz’s observation on Ernst’s ‘collage’ novels is astute, but in noting their synthesis, rather points to ‘montage’ as the more descriptive term – even in the face of now habitual reference to these works as ‘collage’. If ‘montage’ is a two-dimensional composition made with elements from different (image-) sources, but united by a medium, then ‘collage’ is more distinctly

Figure 5.3 Illustration from Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté, 1933. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2021.

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mixed, in involving different media. This definition is agreed by many writers. For Greenberg, indeed, the role of this diversity in collage seems at times to be its necessary and sufficient definition. In pronouncing that the ‘question’ of ‘[w]ho invented collage – Braque or Picasso’ is ‘less important’ than the ‘motives which first induced either artist to paste or glue a piece of extraneous material to the surface of a picture’, Greenberg seems to see collage as an issue of an othering of art’s traditional matter – a theme to which I will return in detail later (Greenberg 1965: 70). More expansively, and usefully referring ‘collage’ to its specialized relation that is a kind of paper-montage (with sometimes light adulteration), and also addressing Greenberg’s essays on the subject, Lisa Florman writes: [i]t has become customary amongst art historians, especially those concerned with Cubism, to distinguish between the more general category of ‘collage’ and the subset ‘papier collé.’ The latter term is usually reserved for works whose elements are limited, as the name implies, to pieces of pasted paper (often with pencil or charcoal drawing overtop), whereas collages may include a wider array of materials – everything from rope and fabric to pieces of metal or wood. (As a result, collage appears to open out more readily onto practices perhaps best described as sculptural, whereas papier collé seems to maintain a much closer attachment to the field of painting.) [. . .] Greenberg does not distinguish between the two terms, and in fact never employs the phrase ‘papier collé’ [. . .] Nevertheless [. . .] [i]t may even be that we should read the switch to ‘Collage’ [when the earlier version of his essay was titled ‘The Pasted-Paper Revolution’] as an indication of Greenberg’s growing sense that, in the end, collage would prove the more ‘revolutionary’ of the two, or at least the more pervasive and so the more historically consequential. Florman 2002: 61

Occurring in a footnote in an essay which locates the role of collage’s ‘commercial’ fragments in art’s relation to the ‘socially useful’ (Florman 2002: 69), this passage makes two definitional points. First, it proposes that collage’s materials are diverse (implicitly encompassing the ‘found’) though what, exactly, is included between ‘rope and fabric’ or ‘metal and wood’ is unclear; certainly ‘everything’ between those terms is not necessarily ‘anything’. Second, it acknowledges that collage can take a three-dimensional form, with the carefully phrased reference to ‘practices best described as sculptural’ perhaps suggesting that collage stops short of becoming sculpture. Then again, and finally, the passage offers the idea that collage is thought by Greenberg to be ‘more “revolutionary” ’ (or ‘pervasive’) than papier collé. And yet in these definitions and discussions – and indeed, elsewhere – a key aspect of the form is seldom mentioned, let alone discussed (Greenberg is an

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obvious exception). This is the question of the join and its media; glue, paste and more. Precisely, ‘paste or glue’ are media, if by design, invisible. And when the etymology of ‘collage’ gives it as a gluing, and the translation of ‘papiers collés’ is ‘glued papers’, this oversight is odd. Perhaps the matter is more pressing for assemblage, which I consider next. Acknowledging that ‘revolutionary’ is agenda-relative, assemblage, in this trio of mixed forms, sees the greatest revolution in the mixing-up of erstwhile purities: painting and sculpture; the two- and three-dimensional, and so on. It is not irrelevant that ‘revolutionary’ is used by others to describe the broad territory of innovation across montage, collage and assemblage.‘Revolutionary’ is the term that Florman uses to describe Greenberg’s apprehension concerning the potential of collage over papier collé, as too, it is the adjective Ulmer uses of collage per se. And perhaps there is agreement on its meaning in this context, when ‘revolutionary’ seems to describe what Leo Steinberg has referred to as ‘the shakeup that contaminates all purified categories’ (Steinberg [1968–72] 2003: 976); no less than one modernism’s assault on the classical typology of painting–sculpture– architecture, which may belong to other modernisms also. If assemblage contaminates the nineteenth century’s categories of art more than collage, this starts with the fact that it is more voluminous. Something of this movement into mass is captured in Debbie Lewer’s assertion that assemblage ‘most often’ means ‘works of art made in three dimensions using a range of materials’ (März and Lewer 2015: 146) – though the problem with this definition is that it does not exclude the shallow-relief of forms that may be better defined as ‘collage’ (say Picasso’s Still Life of 1914 – a wooden, wall-based relief with textile-fringing.)5 For that reason, I suggest that ‘assemblage’ is used to designate ‘collages’ that cannot be fixed to a wall; everything from Marcel Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? to Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbauten: freestanding artworks in ‘a range of materials’. This resists Seitz’s latitude, when many of the works he cites as assemblage have to be nailed to a vertical surface. But if assemblage surpasses collage, spatially regarded, and logically might therefore turn its back on (largely) two-dimensional media, it does not exclude the latter. Indeed, writing on assemblage, Roland März says: ‘[m]aterial artworks of this kind often appear, [. . .] in combination with the conventional arttechniques of painting and drawing’ (März and Lewer 2015: 147). März’s instances of this, given he is writing of assemblage in the German Democratic

5

‘Most often’ is important here, because, it provides for the possibility that assemblage might not be three-dimensional and might not use a range of materials. I dispute the first provision.

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Republic, may be less familiar than, say, Rauschenberg’s Monogram, or in more recent times, some of Rachel Harrison’s works. But either way: assemblage so defined and practised – as the two- and thoroughly three-dimensional – represents the most mixed form of those considered by this chapter. Assemblage’s ‘contamination’ is the most wide-reaching as it more substantially confounds classical distinctions identified with media-specific practices. However, in order to preserve the status of assemblage as, potentially, more formally varied than its two-dimensional relatives, then two other definitions need to be addressed, and parried. Seitz is involved in both, when both are entailed by a single phrase. Quoting from an unattributed source while writing on Louise Nevelson’s work, Seitz proposes assemblage as ‘ “the fitting together of parts and pieces” ’ (Seitz 1961: 118). There is nothing in this image to preclude the possibility that all parts might be identical, in the manner of a certain type of tessellating wooden puzzle. And indeed, tessellation aside, some assemblage art comes very close to realizing this option – for instance, much of Arman’s work, with Martèlement répétitif (1968)6 a good example. (The work consists of over fifty hammers grouped together in a grid-formation; ‘repetitive pounding’ indeed.) In this mode, ‘assemblage’ is hardly mixed in form, as physically identical components are brought together. Equally, there is nothing in this definition that precludes ‘assemblage’ being realized as a single-medium entity, and thus realizing certain ideas of modernist ‘purity’. Indeed, this is seen in The Bathers (1956) by Picasso (see Figure 5.4); as MoMA curator Ann Temkin observes, the figures ‘are all made with wood elements’, adding that ‘[i]t could be scraps of lumber, it could be bits of twig or sticks’ (Temkin n.d.). (Constructions by Louise Nevelson, to which this observation – minus ‘twig or sticks’ – applies, exceed singularity of medium because she paints her wood-scrap structures.) Assemblage, in this way, emerges as the three-dimensional cousin of montage, pointing to a poverty of terminology in respect of ‘sculptural’ hybrid forms, and the need for the qualified descriptor ‘mixed form assemblage’ to describe my focus in this chapter. This said, there is, on the other hand, nothing in Seitz’s quoted definition to exclude assemblage as accretion of the different, and it is probably also the version that is more readily encouraged by the phrasing. But as it so happens, Seitz does – elsewhere – problematize that second understanding, in seeking to limit the range of materials involved in a very particular way. As Anna Dezeuze writes in an essay that usefully draws upon unpublished archival documents: ‘[i]n his correspondence about The Art of Assemblage, Seitz emphasized that the 6

Sometimes given as 1978.

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Figure 5.4 Pablo Picasso, The Bathers, 1956. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2021.

works in the exhibition should not only juxtapose at least two different materials, but that these materials should be “discarded or purloined” “rather than new” ’, and although she does not quite make this point, it can be argued that the first insistence facilitates the ‘recognizability’ of assemblages’ constituent parts, and so, assemblage qua assemblage (Dezeuze 2008: 31). This proscription, which is also a prescription, and as such a kind of definition, makes a nuanced point about assemblage’s (proposed) material form. On the one hand it prohibits all but second-hand materials, and so commands a kind of singularity of medium (even when the details of that are not clear). And on the other, in insisting that such practice involves ‘at least two different materials’, raises the idea that medium-specificity may be dependent on matters of focus, both as a question for the level of the artwork that is regarded (individual parts, its whole – or both) and what kind of definitional system is employed, when the two are also intertwined. This is an important point for understanding differences of media, and therefore the ‘mixture’ of assemblage, that reappears later on. Meanwhile, we might also note that Seitz’s definition here is significantly at odds with other understandings of assemblage which, following the pattern of collage, acknowledge the form’s capacity to include materials drawn from both ‘art’ and ‘life’. It is salient for instance, that in full, Lewer’s definition of assemblage gives the latter as ‘works of art made in three dimensions using a range of

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materials and “reality fragments” ’ (März and Lewer 2015: 146). In scare quotes because it is a phrase from März’s essay, this last clause seems to designate found objects. This suggests that Lewer is at pains to underscore the art/life compass that März himself makes much of, when ‘a range of materials’ in retrospect excludes the ‘found’ and is differentially defined, perhaps, as ‘art-materials’ (as those, in turn, are seen as ‘not-found’). And if, as already noted, assemblage is not more ‘revolutionary’ than collage as mixed form, at least as that also uses art and non-art forms, it is, however, wider-reaching overall – considered in the round. So attempting to reduce its compass in respect of (art-)materials puts it on a level with its more two-dimensional cousin. But Seitz himself, in published form, retreats from his hard line. In the exhibition catalogue, he says of assemblages that ‘entirely or in part, their constituent elements are preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials’ (Seitz 1961: 6). Perhaps through gritted teeth, ‘in part’ admits the latter – ‘art materials’ – and aligns better with the definition that I use, as far as that concerns assemblage’s components. In Seitz’s formulation, the ‘either/or’ construction serves as a reminder, if required, that when assemblage is defined as especially multifarious (relative to collage), then that designates the form’s potential, not its actuality in every or indeed even one (exemplary) instance. And the same goes for collage. And yet, for ‘mixed form assemblage’ (as for its equivalent in collage), some degree of media-difference is required, however minimal.

Writing on assemblage7 Claiming assemblage as modernism’s most mixed form (at least in principle), I take this as the focus for the rest of this chapter, when that looks in detail at this mixture especially in its early instances, along with the methods for producing

7

Despite enthusiasm for Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘assemblage’ in recent decades, I resist that here. This has less to do with ‘D&G’ fatigue and more to do with the fact that it has been argued that ‘assemblage’ does not represent the best translation of ‘agencement’ which is Deleuze and Guattari’s original. In ‘Agencement/Assemblage’, John Phillips writes: many (though by no means all) translators and commentators [of Deleuze and Guattari] have agreed, in a loose consensus, to keep to [the] early translation of agencement by assemblage, while acknowledging that the translation is not really a good approximation. Agencement is a common French word with the senses of either ‘arrangement’, ‘fitting’ or ‘fixing’ and is used in French in as many contexts as those words are used in English And then turning to the English term, he says:

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that, and joining differences together. However, as far as this focus involves writing on the subject, it is somewhat hindered by the absence of obvious literature. There is little directly on the concept, over and above monographs on assemblage artists – George Herms, for instance (Herms 2002) – or particular works, with key texts limited to those already mentioned (Seitz; März, with Lewer’s introduction; and Dezeuze’s essay – which is also about bricolage). The relevance of Essays on Assemblage, edited by John Elderfield, is largely titular; on the first page of the Preface he writes that ‘[i]n effect, assemblage is collage in both two and three dimensions’ (the Contents suggest a preference for the former) and indeed, as he continues: ‘[c]onsequently, we do include here discussions of works considered to be collages’; something of a missed opportunity, perhaps, to focus on an under-written subject (Elderfield 1992: 7). Then there is Diane Waldman’s Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object (1992), which likewise prefigures an emphasis on collage in its introduction with assemblage only addressed in passing. This focus on collage typifies much of the seminal literature on the hybrid forms of modernism, when that also includes more recent writing, for instance, by October writers such as Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. (There is a moment in Krauss’s key essay on collage – ‘In the Name of Picasso’ – which seems to promise a kind of formalist analysis that might port to assemblage, namely in the declaration that ‘[t]he aesthetics of the proper name [what is also known as ‘biographical criticism’] is erected specifically on the grave of form’ (Krauss 1981: 10). But, in resisting readings of Picasso’s work as autobiographical, Krauss’s concern with form turns more to the form of a ‘signifying system’: ‘collage as a system of signifiers’, which is rather the ‘formalism’ of ‘French theory’ (Osborne 2013); in other words, more, perhaps, a focus on the signifier’s form as a relation to the signified, than on the signifier’s form per se.) Something of an explanation for the paucity of writing on assemblage is provided by Dezeuze, who proposes that ‘assemblage’ as a term and a practice was short-lived. At the time of Seitz’s exhibition, she contends, ‘[t]he word “assemblage” itself would be quickly superseded – by the end of the decade – by new terms such as environment, performance, and Conceptual art’ (Dezeuze [a]lthough it designates a collection of things in English too (as one of the noun forms of assemble), it is conventionally restricted to more technical terminology: as the collection of remains found on an archeological site (in a French pronunciation: a-sā-bläzh); and in art theory (in both French and English) it is a term associated with collage and other avant-garde or pop art styles, designating works assembled out of diverse objects (like Jean Arp’s Trousse d’un Da, an assemblage of driftwood nailed onto wood with some remains of old painting). Phillips 2006: 108–9

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2008: 31). And in case this appears to be a succession in name only, with ‘assemblage’ reappearing under new terminology, she adds ‘and this moment in the history of twentieth-century art remains to this day largely eclipsed by these subsequent developments’ (Dezeuze 2008: 31). I am less convinced that assemblage was such a brief phenomenon. But rather than perceiving its extended being in an afterlife, I propose the compass of assemblage is extended back in time, which for reasons I give below, inscribes a date nearer to the start of the twentieth century as an origin. There is, perhaps, another reason for the absence of assemblage literature, related to the form’s accessibility to producers which in part concerns two aspects of its material being. As Seitz writes: ‘[n]o mode of creation is more direct or naturally arrived at than the accumulation and agglomeration of materials found close at hand’ (Seitz 1961: 72). Here, ‘accessibility’ is enabled by the ready availability of ingredients plus a method for their combination that is seen as non-exclusive – ‘natural’. And Seitz cites the example of ‘Simon Rodia, an immigrant tile-setter living in Watts, a slum section of Los Angeles’ who transformed ‘the copious waste of an industrial society into structures of soaring magnificence’ and for whom, in a third enabling factor, ‘a knowledge of cubist papiers collés, the collages of Schwitters, or surrealist objects was, to say the least, unnecessary’ (Seitz 1961: 72). In light of this, it is not surprising that Seitz is able to propose that ‘some of the finest assemblages are the work of primitives and folk artists’ – not the least because in this account, assemblage is, precisely, open to the amateur. And for all that certain kinds of modernism made commitments to the fusion of art and life and the emancipation of the proletariat, it seems possible that the relative poverty of interest in assemblage might come down to a squeamishness – even snobbishness – concerning its availability to non-artists. Squeamishness is also spawned, perhaps, by the very matter of assemblage, which, more so than collage’s materials, is, literally, the stuff of life, which, when more accessible as waste, is especially the stuff of stench, disease and ugliness. Seitz is good at acknowledging this, even if he defers to Apollinaire’s pronouncement (for another medium) that ‘ “[y]ou may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oil cloth, collars, painted paper, newspapers” ’ – then going on to note that the poet ‘cites the use of blood as a painting medium by someone during the French Revolution, and mentions an Italian artist who painted with excrement’ (Seitz 1961: 14). But as Seitz also notes of Dada, it ‘discovered beauty and worth in what was commonly held to be distasteful and valueless’ (Seitz 1961: 35).

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The beginnings of (heterogeneous) assemblage in modernism Much has been made of the way in which the exhibition Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2019) recognized a long prehistory of Fine Art collage in amateur practice,8 though this is nothing new: Eddie Wolfram opens History of Collage with the point that its subject did not suddenly emerge with Braque’s and Picasso’s papiers collés, but has precursors in ‘primitive as well as ancient or sophisticated cultures’ (Wolfram 1975: 7). And a parallel case can be made for assemblage. Mentioning ‘primitive’ precedents, Seitz refers to ‘[c]onstructions of shells, seeds, the wings and bodies of birds and insects, human skulls, and other striking natural objects’ (Seitz 1961: 73). Nevertheless, he locates the origins of modernist assemblage art in Cubism. Discussing Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (Figure 5.5) as a pioneering work of collage, Seitz suggests that:

Figure 5.5 Pablo Picasso, Nature morte à la chaise cannée, 1912. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2021. 8

See Kristen Treen’s 2019 review in Apollo magazine, for instance.

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Figure 5.6 Pablo Picasso, Guitare, 1912. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2021.

[i]t could even be said that this “recklessly adulterated” work,9 which (at least as far as the main stream of modern art is concerned) began the development of collage, also initiated three-dimensional assemblage;10 Picasso’s colored-paper Guitar [Figure 5.6] was constructed during the same year, 1912, and the Mandolin [Figure 5.7], described by Alfred Barr in 1935 as “neither painting nor sculpture, nor architecture,” was put together two years later from scraps of discarded wood. Seitz 1961: 1011

While not exactly saying so, the logic of Seitz’s argument proposes that he has Guitar and Mandolin/Mandolin and Clarinet in view as assemblages. And indeed, 9 10 11

Is seems that Seitz is quoting from Alfred H. Barr (1939), Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. Perhaps less a tautology and more a clarification. The Tate’s website gives this as ‘Mandolin and Clarinet’ and its date as 1913.

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Figure 5.7 Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Clarinet, 1913–14. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2021.

both semi-three-dimensional forms involve a range of media across more and less traditional art materials: Guitar is constructed from (coloured) paper, cardboard, string and wire (a scrap of newspaper is also visible), and Mandolin and Clarinet from ‘[p]ainted wood and pencil’ (art.picasso.com: n.d.).12 Nevertheless, when both are also wall-based works, and in this way, dimensional representations from the front and side alone, they fail to meet the definition of assemblage as an art-form in the round. So I turn to the idea that assemblage has

12

It is important that the ‘painted wood’ is artist-made, not found. See Jackie Heuman (2009) ‘A Technical Study of Picasso’s Construction Still Life 1914’.

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another origin – if nearly synchronous – in a very different kind of art and another mode of modernism. A year before Guitar and Mandolin were made, Duchamp had produced Bicycle Wheel, his ‘first readymade’ albeit not named as such until several years later. When physical descriptions of the work typically refer to Duchamp’s reminiscence of the time when he ‘ “had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn” ’ (Elderfield 1992: 135), they tend to simplify the work. The wheel lacks a tyre,13 and is supplemented by a bikeframe’s fork for its fixing to the stool, which ‘happily’ provides the hole for such. These adulterations serve to underline my case: that whatever else this work may be it is also an assemblage. Others make this point: Seitz, by including it in his book if not naming it as such (Seitz 1961: 46), and Wolfram, for example (Wolfram 1975: 68) – but perhaps because this work has been captured for the history of the readymade, no one seems to want to claim it as the first modernist assemblage. And yet exactly as it can be seen as such, or just as an assemblage, Bicycle Wheel is also not the first readymade, properly speaking, when the term refers to manufactured artefacts presented as artworks without artist intervention; found objects that the artist simply ‘chooses’ in Duchamp’s terms, writing as Richard Mutt (Duchamp [1917] 2003: 252). Rather: Bicycle Wheel is an ‘assisted readymade’, when that is ‘made by combining more than one utilitarian item to form a work of art’ (MoMA 2019).14 And in that designation, while it may retain its other identity as ‘assemblage’, it is less obviously a mixed form one, when the issue of system-specific difference re-emerges, with the question of whether Bicycle Wheel requires distinctions to be made between kinds of utilitarian objects. Ultimately, this is a matter of the distribution of the sensible. If a securer intersection of mixed form assemblage and the readymade is sought, even if that seems to be impossible by virtue of the latter’s (necessary) singularity, it is nevertheless provided by Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). While at first glance, this is doubtless odd, it is not perhaps surprising that Fountain’s ‘reckless adulteration’ (of art by plumbing, for example), should also involve

13

14

The significance of this could only be addressed if it were possible to establish how bicycle wheels were supplied at the time. Habitually, Bicycle Wheel is introduced as: ‘the first of Duchamp’s Readymades’ (see MoMA 2019). Hence the history of the readymade is complicated, with these manoeuvres suggesting that it would have been better if Duchamp had started with the readymade proper.

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mixed form. For this is what it is – despite being persistently designated as a ‘readymade’. This (re)designation is made on the basis of nothing more or less than a close inspection of the work’s materiality, which reveals it to be a threedimensional ceramic artefact to which paint has been applied.15 While much might be said about the ceramic form in all its specificity, it is sufficient to note, for this argument, that it serves as the three-dimensional ground for a twodimensional medium. Black paint is used to sign the work ‘R. MUTT’, and to date it ‘1917’. In capitals, the signature is somewhat gauche; perhaps less a proper signature and more the kind of thing that is written on another kind of form, in another of the work’s willed confusions. And the signature is also, famously, a fiction, given that R. Mutt is a pseudonym. But no matter: save for its location on the object’s left-hand side, the ‘signature’ signs the work as if it were a painting. For it is painting that is at stake, and combines with the three-dimensional, in the fragment that is supposedly the guarantee of authorship. Hence the designation of Fountain as mixed form assemblage – and more visibly and demonstrably than Bicycle Wheel – as modernism’s first.

Mixed form assemblage as a form of kinds: a summary So far, this version of assemblage has emerged as a practice in which individual instances involve two or more different materials selected from a range. As I have suggested, the range that any artwork might draw upon is paradigm-specific; dependent on views about art, and its media – and, in the case of mixed form assemblage, non-art – held in a particular time and place. And as much as this determines the possibilities for individual works, it also determines the overall range of combinations. So, within an early twentieth-century, Fine Art setting that acknowledges distinctions between painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and perhaps, photography, and which also recognizes that found objects might divide into the ‘natural’ and the ‘manufactured’ (perhaps as a more common typology than the ‘discarded’ and ‘purloined’), and given the requirement that one of these components is drawn from the three-dimensional realm (sculpture/natural or manufactured found objects), then fifteen combinations of mixed form assemblage involving two components are possible.

15

The materiality in this case is that of a replica – Tate’s 1964 version.

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Of course, many hybrid-form assemblages involve far more than two components. Even a (conservative) typology of just ten media, in three-part artefacts, produces the potential for much variegation. A glimpse of the condition of this terrain is seen both in, and in between, say, Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–9) and the various iterations of Schwitters’s Merzbau (Figure 5.8), when each artist’s work is materially diverse in its own right and distinct from the other in the character of its diversity. Moreover, to complicate the numerical aspect of this scene still further, assemblage – like any form of representation – has the potential to include itself, in theory, if not practically, ad infinitum. It is tempting to propose that this is what is recalled, among other things, by the documentary photographs of the First International Dada Fair of 1920 (see Figure 5.9). Here, Dada, as a movement committed to the unseemliness of the seam, realizes that as curatorial practice; the exhibition as assemblage, in turn including such. Here, at least, is one of the most ‘combinatory’ forms of assemblage, in modernism’s early years.

Figure 5.8 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau in Hanover. Photograph by Wilhelm Redemann, 1933.

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Figure 5.9 Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 1920. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Assemblage as the outcome of assembling If the idea of combination is vital to mixed form assemblage, and this is embodied in its visuality via different media, then that also has a less visible but equally important aspect. This is ‘combination’ as it indexes an action (combining). Dezeuze addresses this idea in noting of The Art of Assemblage exhibition that, ‘[w]hen Helen Franc, editorial consultant to the MoMA director, complained to Seitz that the exhibition’s title placed “emphasis on the act rather than on the finished product,” she in fact provided one of the most lucid insights into the implicit performative dimension of assemblage’ (Dezeuze 2008: 32, original emphasis). Franc’s analysis is indeed lucid (while ignoring the title’s double meaning) but perhaps less for reasons of flagging the ‘performative’ aspect of assemblage and more for pointing up the labour of the artist, which nevertheless, does not necessarily entirely represent the labour that produces assemblage’s materiality. For

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‘assemblage as assembling’ ignores the labour reified in the forms’ components, which is often the labour of those other than the artist. And while this sets in train a line of enquiry that is beyond the scope of this book to pursue, it needs to be noted that when mixed forms in visual culture involve one artist or author, they frequently involve many makers. In various respects, this is a consequence of both the social division of labour, and the division of labour ‘in particular’, as laid out in Chapter 2. At the same time, it could also be argued that such mixed forms are the fruits of those divisions, though the metaphor does not seek to excuse the latter.

Methods for arranging the components As the introduction to this chapter noted, there is more to assemblage, formally construed, than just the matter of its parts. There is also the question of the latter’s combination – i.e. beyond the aspect just discussed, as an issue for artistic method. In Chapter 1, ‘combination’ was described as the syntagmatic axis of language, distinguished from the paradigmatic, as the axis of selection (of components). It is also the territory of authorship as kinds of agency; different productive forces that the author/artist mobilizes in the making of the artwork. And the writing on assemblage (and sometimes collage too) supplies a range of observations on the agencies at stake. I start with those that resist the artist as an intentional-expressive humanist subject, conventionally committed to the classical ideal of consistency, when such resistance might be seen to be imbricated with the emphasis in some assemblage on found materials. For Dada, as many commentators note, the role of chance and randomness, as two distinct agencies,16 is key, and for its hybrid forms as much as others. Indeed, in somewhat hyperbolic terms, Seitz links the three (Dada, the aleatory and assemblage). ‘The method of assemblage’ he writes, ‘is inconceivable without Dada’s negativism, for the precondition of juxtaposition is a state of total randomness and disassociation’ (Seitz 1961: 38). And later, he cites Max Ernst’s famous definition of collage as ‘the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities’ (Seitz 1961: 40), which equally describes, perhaps, the aggregation in Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine, Monogram (1955–9). In this second formulation, the aleatory agency is, of course, ‘fortune’. But if it is linked to

16

On this distinction see Antony Eagle: ‘a number of technical and philosophical advances in our understanding of both chance and randomness open up the possibility that the easy slide between chance and randomness in ordinary and scientific usage [. . .] is quite misleading’ (Eagle 2018).

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Dada in its congruence with chance and randomness, and Ernst’s associations with the movement, it is actually identified with Surrealism when Ernst is referring to Surrealist collage. This segue into Surrealism is itself fortuitous, if not coincidental, when that is associated with another kind of agency productive of non-consistency. For if the Surrealist project was committed to the role of chance (Seitz mentions the Exquisite Corpse), it was also, via André Breton’s ‘psychic automatism’ pledged to the role of the unconscious in cultural production. And in Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, the latter is aligned with the former, in a kind of dictionary-style entry: ‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’ (Breton [1924] 2003: 452). However, as Seitz is at pains to point out, this does not specify discontinuity, and indeed he proposes that ‘automatic expression’ moves out from the ‘centre of consciousness’ and is ‘continuous’ hence ‘opposite’ to assemblage identified with ‘unrelated fragments’ (Seitz 1961: 39). And yet in the flesh (see Figures 5.10 and 5.11) Surrealist assemblage proposes otherwise: that a commitment to psychic automatism results in ‘discontinuous’

Figure 5.10 Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936. © DACS, 2021.

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Figure 5.11 Jean Miró, Object, 1936. © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2021.

artefacts: no less than what Roland Barthes describes in fact as the ‘surrealist “jolt” ’ (Barthes 1977: 144). But if, by implication, Seitz refuses the unconscious as an agent in assemblage’s (dis-)order, this leaves a role for more intentional processes (along with chance). Hence he writes, for instance, that ‘[t]he method of assemblage [. . .] is that of juxtaposition’ and quoting Roger Shattuck, says that it involves ‘ “setting one thing beside the other without connective” ’ – when the latter, I would add, is only guaranteed by design (Seitz 1961: 25). Along with Seitz, Robert Motherwell problematizes the role of the unconscious in hybrid practices. Writing on the artist’s collages, Mel Gooding offers a detailed account of the way in which Motherwell took a pragmatic, not so say extractive, approach to ‘psychic automatism as the “original creative principle” ’ (Gooding

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2013: 12, original emphasis). As Gooding quotes Motherwell writing on ‘ “what a Freudian would call free-association [. . .] doodling” ’, ‘ “it can be modified stylistically and in subject matter at any point during the painting process [. . .] according [to] the aesthetic, ethic, and cultural values of [an] individual artist” ’ (Gooding 2013: 12, original emphasis). This, Motherwell declared, in a further act of modification, was ‘plastic automatism’, a ‘weapon with which to invent new forms’ (Ashton with Banach 2007: 34–5). The ‘plastic’ aspect notes another kind of agency which Motherwell applies to painting, but may be applied as Gooding does, to collage and, by extension, also to assemblage. The agency is complicated – often seen as ‘formal’ (Gooding), but in Motherwell’s phrasing, emerging as more multiform, when ‘ethic and cultural values’ are at stake, besides the ‘aesthetic’. If under-discussed in the literature, the writing that there is on the combinatory methods in assemblage proposes that not only are they varied for the practice as a whole, but potentially multifarious in individual instances. Perhaps this is not surprising, when linguistics proposes that matters of paradigm and syntagm are interrelated.

. . . and glue As already noted, in the medley of concerns for a formalist analysis of mixed form assemblage, glue, as a substance and a metaphor for sticking, or the join, is often also overlooked. And yet as noted too, glue is at the origin of collage; in its etymology and early practice. Indeed, of the glue in assemblage, and in a point that both unmakes and makes my point, März declares that ‘the technical methods [. . .] of juxtaposing materials – such as sticking, bonding, nailing, or welding – are of only secondary interest’ – in relation to ‘the overall design principle of material montage17 [i.e. assemblage] as a particular method of thought and action’ (März and Lewer 2015: 147–8). Arguably, however, the join in all its methods, is as vital to assemblage as the ‘overall design’, precisely as it makes the latter possible. And as März’s list proposes, forms of join – its media, no less – are also numerous. If glue is, equivocally, important to a formalist analysis of collage, then less so, its equivalents as they support assemblage, when as März’s list proposes too, they can be conspicuous. Indeed, the ‘fixings’ of assemblage could comprise a separate study.

17

A phrasing that has not been discussed, if first and foremost for the reason that März’s text is published in translation.

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Mixed form assemblage and other modernisms At the start of this analysis of mixed forms in modernism, I discussed the way in which those concepts do not mix. Having now reviewed the sense in which assemblage is profoundly multifarious, I turn to look at ways in which this mixed form is accommodated by modernism. There are several modernisms that embrace mixed form assemblage. One, for instance, is queer modernism, albeit a retrospective designation, that values an aesthetics of hybridity. When queer theory, influenced by post-structuralism, recognizes the possibility of sexuality as a multivalent, not monolithic, identity, it likewise supports a cultural practice of the multifarious; the realm of flux and fragments that acknowledges the dynamic in difference (Richards et al. 2017). Its modernism therefore readily includes mixed forms, and indeed, in an extended analysis of Rauschenberg’s ‘Queer Modernism’, which focuses on the Combines, Tom Folland has written of their ‘radically disjunctive collage aesthetics’ (while acknowledging ‘assemblage’ as a descriptor for the work), which makes the Combines ‘seem particularly hostile to an iconographic decoding of meaning, whether it be one pertaining to identity or some other kind of strictly referential viewpoint’ (Folland 2010: 359). And yet for another modernism that espouses mixed form, hybridity is equally associated with conjunction (though the two concepts are, perhaps, the different sides of the same coin). This is the modernism of the avant-garde, which as theorist Peter Bürger argues, is committed to the fusion of art and life as a protest against bourgeois art’s autonomy – and hence, proleptically, Greenberg’s ‘autonomous’ modernism. This fusion, which also threatens to sublate its constituent distinctions, is enabled by mixed form assemblage in two ways. First: on the model of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, as art uses everyday items (if debatably, distinct); and second, on the model of Fountain, as art uses those and conventional art materials. At the same time, as the avant-garde realizes art’s ‘self-criticism’ when that is, now, criticism of the ‘social subsystem’ or institution that is art (Bürger 1984: 22), it could be argued that this is enabled by the seams of assemblage; as those denaturalize any one (or more) component(s) of art practice. Hence as Fountain juxtaposes (Fine Art’s) painting and the everyday/ urinal, it relativizes the naturalness of painting as an art-form and aestheticizes the (unnaturalness of) the urinal. What art is, is what is put at stake. It is hard to think about the avant-garde – Dada, Surrealism and beyond – without thinking too of the technics of assemblage.

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Mixed forms of modernism – and modernity Continuing this book’s address to the relationship between mixed form in culture and in working-life, I now consider the conditions of labour that characterized Anglo-American and much of European society during the period of modernist assemblage i.e. in the first half of the twentieth century. While schematic, this analysis nevertheless seeks to understand the probable experience of the latter (modernist assemblage) in the context of the former. If labour history in the years in question has to be defined by one thing, then that is Fordism. This takes its name from the mode of production that motor-car manufacturer, Henry Ford, developed in his factory at Highland Park in Michigan, which opened in 1910. Aimed at optimizing mass production, ‘Fordism’, Daniel Watson writes, refers to ‘the blend of new industrial technologies, efficient work organisation, and modern managerial practice realized within Ford’s factories’ (Watson 2019: 144), which, as he goes on to note, was not only ‘instrumental in popularizing the automobile’ but also ‘the development of present-day mass production methods, and the emergence of Western consumer capitalism’ (Watson 2019: 144).18 And noting the congruence between ‘modern media’ and the ‘organization known as the factory system’, Lev Manovich all but identifies Fordism with the assembly line, when the latter ‘relied on two principles’.‘The first was standardization of parts, already employed in the production of military uniforms in the nineteenth century. The second, newer principle was the separation of the production process into a set of simple, repetitive, and sequential activities that could be executed by workers who did not have to master the entire process and could be easily replaced’ (Manovich 2001: 29) – though how ‘new’ that was then, is doubtful in the light of, say, Marx’s comments on the manufacture. Defined in this way there is little sense, however, of Fordism as experienced by its workers, though the words ‘efficient’ and ‘managerial’, and the link to militarism, do chilling, connotative work. When Fordism itself seems to be neglected in the literature, it is not easy to source detailed descriptions of the Fordist assembly line, never mind workers’ accounts of that. For as Watson notes: ‘there are few major works solely dedicated to Fordism, with many works relegating discussion of Fordism to a single chapter or infrequently using the term’ (Watson 2019: 144).

18

Watson notes that this is often seen as ‘maximal production at a minimal cost, achieved by creating high volumes of a limited series of standardised products’ (Watson 2019: 145).

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Figure 5.12 Workers on the first moving assembly line put together magnetos and flywheels for 1913 Ford autos, Highland Park, Michigan, 1913. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

(The parallels with writing on assemblage are interesting.) There is, for instance, Antonio Gramsci’s seemingly seminal essay ‘Americanism and Fordism’ (Gramsci 1971), which nevertheless manages to avoid any definition of the phenomenon in question focusing rather on its social affects. But little writing on the subject is not ‘nothing’ and in ‘the first critical overview of the historiography of Fordism’, Watson addresses a wide range of literature, some of which touches on worker experience of assembly lines, and the latter’s qualitative aspect (Watson 2019: 144). So, for instance, he registers the way in which commentators ‘hold Fordist management responsible for a deskilling and homogenisation of the workforce, reducing workers to cogs in the well-oiled machine that was the assembly line’ (Watson 2019: 145). Here the metaphor of ‘cog’ implies that the worker’s task is both repetitive and singular, even more so than Marx and Engels countenance, when, as was seen in Chapter 2, their image of the worker’s ‘reduction’ remains at the level of ‘machine’. As cog, the worker has

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been likened to a ‘trained gorilla’ as described by Frederick Taylor (Gramsci 1971: 302), who also lent his name to another practice of industrial efficiency: Taylorism, and whom Gramsci quotes, in discussing Fordism’s repercussions – on no less than sexual behaviour (Gramsci 1971: 299–301). But the passage that is crucial for thinking about the worker’s experience of Fordism (and indeed, Taylorism) occurs in Watson’s commentary on David Nye, whom, he notes, ‘emphasises the concerns of postwar commentators that the assembly line subjected workers to a mentally deadening homogenisation of work to a low skill level with little to no hope of advancement’, then adding that ‘Meyer also notes [. . .] [such] work no longer required mental acuity, only the stamina to withstand physical monotony’ (Watson 2019: 148).19 While, by definition, Watson’s review covers an array of views on Fordism, this scene is nevertheless often underscored as writers either report on managers’ administration of monotony or workers’ resistance to its pernicious effects. So Watson writes, for instance, that ‘Cooper and McKinlay’s study’, ‘illustrates the centrality of control and discipline to the Fordist system throughout the early twentieth century, demonstrating how Ford’s initial vision was processed and carried out by foremen with a brutality likely unintended by Ford himself ’ (Watson 2019: 150). And that: ‘Davis asserts that Fordist mass production “[set] the stage for the emergence of the CIO [the Congress of Industrial Organizations] and the rebirth of industrial unionism” ’ i.e. platforms for resisting – among much else – the worst of industrialized monotony (Watson 2019: 152). In this brief discussion of Fordist labour, various similarities and differences with Fine Art’s production in assemblage have implicitly emerged, which can now be made explicit. And here it could be noted too, that Watson points more briefly still to the ‘cultural’ consequences of Fordism, acknowledging how various writers note its aesthetic analogues and antitheses (Watson 2019: 148–9). For my part, I start with the lexical overlap between ‘assemblage’ and ‘assembly line’ which, sharing the same linguistic stem, are united by the concept of ‘adding together’. The overlap continues, in some degree, as art assemblage-of-the-same echoes the factory worker’s repetitive task, thematized in Arman’s Martèlement répétitif, mentioned earlier. (In this discussion I am ignoring the fundamental difference between art and factory-work as that concerns the ownership of labour and its products.) But beyond the motif of repetitive accretion, there are clear differences between assemblage in its mixed form mode, and the assembly line.

19

‘Postwar’ is ambiguous in the original text (Nye 2013: 135).

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Figure 5.13 Raoul Hausmann, Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head, 1919. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2021.

For a start, they are distinguished in comprising multifarious and uniform phenomena respectively. So, art makes up for what work lacks – at least symbolically when the likelihood of the (Fordist) labourer having the opportunity to enjoy the formal diversity of say, Raoul Hausmann’s Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head 1919 (Figure 5.13) or later, say, Edward Kienholz’s John Doe, 1959, was slim. (My choice of examples underlines the irony of this, with both selected to indicate artists’ concern with the plight of the ‘ordinary man’, when Hausmann’s piece in particular confronts such with his own machinic zombification.) For when the avant-garde’s project of merging art and life paradoxically can be seen to underline the former’s autonomy in respect of viewers, perhaps the factory worker’s most accessible experience of phenomenal diversity was no less than the complex commodity rolled off the assembly line. A

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car would be a case in point, which Ford workers could readily purchase given relatively high wages and (Ford) cars’ relatively low cost. (Indeed the idea of realizing producers as consumers of their products was also key to Fordism.) But for a factory worker (improbably, so hypothetically) face to face with either John Doe or Mechanical Head, material diversity might figure less as a compensation, and more as a critique of ‘constant labour of one uniform kind’ in Marx’s phrase (Marx [1867] 1999b). If this observation recognizes that the two roles imply one another, it might also recall Marcuse’s articulation of art’s function under capitalism. Certainly, mixed form assemblage, in all its variations, offers an effect for the viewer that is demonstrably at odds with the affective texture of Fordist rationalization as monotonous, and dehumanizing in its singularity. This proposes that assemblage is anomalous in terms of other forms addressed so far, excluding perhaps the broadside ballad. Whether or not antagonism continues to characterize the relationship between mixed form culture and labour is a question for the next chapters, looking at the artist’s scrapbook, and then mixed form in the very different realm of the digital, and labour in the very different context of post-Fordism.

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Visual Essay: The Artist’s Scrapbook: A Material Analysis

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The Artist’s Scrapbook

A Material Analysis

Using a form of colour coding, this analysis of the artist’s scrapbook concentrates upon the different materialities present in a range of sample spreads. While much could be said about this as a new way of doing art-history – which is of and in the visual – this is less the place for words beyond some basic notes. So a few practicalities: • Where not included, photographic versions of the scrapbook pages can be found online, with some at: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/artistsscrapbooks/ • The key works best as a free-standing chart; ideally it would be available as an insert or bookmark; in the absence of this, readers – or viewers – may wish to print out a copy. • In the context of the overarching need to generate a set of differences, which becomes increasingly difficult as more samples are involved, the colours have been chosen also to avoid indexicality.

Key to use of colours black and white photograph with text sepia photograph with text black and white photograph duotone photograph with text sepia photograph white paper (not scrapbook ground) coloured paper tape black and white magazine or book page parcel tape gaffer tape masking tape colour photograph printed plastic sheet black and white text leaf newspaper coloured etching black and white etching print of coloured drawing with text colour postcard b&w reproduction of artwork with text painting comic wallpaper coloured text colour swatches sellotape ledger paper black and white photo with handwriting

Julian Trevelyan, from Scrapbook, 1931–9

© The Estate of Julian Trevelyan/Bridgeman Images

Julian Trevelyan, from Scrapbook, 1931–9

Eduardo Paolozzi, title not known, page from a scrapbook, 1950s

© The Paolozzi Foundation, licensed by DACS, 2021

Eduardo Paolozzi, title not known, page from a scrapbook, 1950s

from Hannah Höch, Album, 1933

published as Album, 2004, by Gunda Luyken, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag

Eddie Squires, Book No. 7, c. 1968–76

collection: V&A museum and viewable on the V&A collections website

Jean-Michel Wicker, Novolino, 2003–5

Isa Genzken, Mach dich hübsch!, 2015

7

Digital Culture as Wunderkammer

In seeking to understand the presence of mixed form in contemporary visual culture, this chapter reckons with the digital, when the digital arena hosts or otherwise impacts most cultural practices today. A photograph, for instance, might be digitally presented – as an on-screen image – or it might take the form of a print, digitally processed. And when the digital is mediated by a screen – for instance, on a phone, laptop or projected image – it is inevitably visual. For reasons soon to be divulged, and the focus on the present notwithstanding, it is tempting to refer this final chapter’s focus via the motif that the first supplies: the Wunderkammer, or the cabinet of curiosities. If that is tempting, then that is, in part, because it supplies a framework that encourages an awareness of the history and perhaps the shape that this book has laid out – from the cabinet of curiosities to digital diversity as instances of mixed form. That shape – if such it is – will be addressed in the Conclusion. But as much as the motif of the Wunderkammer provides this investigation with a pair of bookends, that is not to assume a return of history. Nor does it function only as a skeuomorphism, presenting the new in the reassuring guise of the familiar-if-now-redundant, fittingly often exemplified by the wastepaper basket icon on a computer-screen. And however usefully the figure of the Wunderkammer may function in this narrative to interrogate the mixed form condition of the digital realm, it is Robert Gehl’s appropriation, which he applies to YouTube to describe an ‘uncurated’ archive in which the ‘overwhelmed, lost or wandering visitor’ might ‘move from a music video to a webcam confessional to a reckless teenage stunt’ (Gehl 2009: 50).1 (That Gehl’s analogy presumes a certain reading of the Wunderkammer – perhaps the contemporary projection I discussed in Chapter 1 – is a point to which I shall return.) In looking beyond Gehl, to ask how the digital really does accommodate mixed-cultural-form, ‘culture’ once again refers to representations or ‘images’, 1

It was subsequently the title of a book by Hubert Burda et al. (2011).

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Figure 7.1 Graham Harwood, Mongrel, My Dad, Hogarth, for Uncomfortable Proximity, Tate, 2000. © Graham Harwood, 2000.

excluding natural ones, and ‘digital’ refers to computer-based artefacts. Hence, I exclude the idea of entities that have been processed by a computer but are not sustained by that: the print photograph mentioned above, for example. But even so defined, ‘digital culture’ is too loose, requiring further scrutiny; a scrutiny that determines the focus of this chapter.

The distribution of the digital In its relatively short history, the digital has been organized via a range of distributions of its qualities, and perhaps most obviously, in recent times, via the distinction between the offline and the online, with the first referring to the status of a computer or other digital entity not connected to a(nother) computer, and the second, the opposite. But of late, this distinction – between two states of digitalbeing – has been superseded, and overlaid by another way of partitioning the digital, even as that extends to include its other: non-digital reality. (I unpack this use of the latter term below.) This paradigm concerns the digital invasion of (‘real’) life, often referred to in anticipatory terms as ‘ubiquitous computing’ as well as ‘the internet of things’ (‘IoT’), and in Ulrich Ekman’s phrase, a ‘physical turn’ (Ekman 2013: 12). In some senses, this development may seem counter-intuitive; less an extension of the digital and more its dilution in ‘a historical shift from the 1990s, which were oriented towards virtuality, to the 2000s, which are arguably preoccupied with physical space filled with electronic and visual information’ as Ekman paraphrases Lev Manovich (Ekman 2013: 12). But on closer inspection,

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the logic of extension holds: the ‘virtuality’ of the last century was relative; confined to the domain of the desktop screen or laptop in the corner of the room. One of the better-known manifestations of pervasive computing is ‘augmented reality’ (also known as AR), which ‘superimposes a CG [computer-generated] image on a user’s view of the real world. Unlike virtual reality, where everything a user sees is generated by a computer, augmented reality keeps the real-world focus, but just adds elements that aren’t really there to enhance the user’s experience’ (INAP n.d.). A much-cited instance of this hybrid is Pokémon Go which, as ‘explained’ to parents, takes the form of ‘a free smartphone app that combines gaming with the real world. The game uses location tracking and mapping technology to create an “augmented reality” where players catch and train [digital] Pokémon characters in real locations’ (Webwise n.d.). Other instances include IKEA’s room planner which, in its current form, ‘offers customers the ability to experience Ikea’s products in a 3D virtual rendering which can be mapped to any room in their own home, from their own home’ (Stevens 2018) – though the ‘room’ that is ‘mapped’ is a plan, or outline version, not a real or indeed, even photographic one (see Figure 7.2). And then, in a very different vein, there are military AR applications currently in development, which would, as INAP’s website claims, ‘help soldiers distinguish between enemies and friendly troops, as well as improve night vision’ (INAP n.d.). Defined in this way, AR is distinguished from VR (virtual reality) as the latter’s ‘reality’ is purely digital, at least as that reality is seen. But AR is also distinguished

Figure 7.2 Screenshot from IKEA Planner, author’s design, 2019. Used with the permission of Inter IKEA Systems B.V.

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from another term in this schema – ‘Augmented Virtuality’ or AV. (Schematically, indeed, this is not surprising, when the logic that extends the real with the virtual might also envisage its reciprocal condition as a hybrid of the virtual extended by the real.) Hence AV can be seen as a reverse AR, when it typically comprises a digitally simulated representation with which a user can interact. That is to say: if AR overlays the real with the digital, AV superimposes the real on the digital, when the former is often realized as users’ physical responses to a virtual environment. (From a visual culture perspective, it can be useful to see this as a matter of figure and ground.) As one definition of the term proposes, AV is a ‘situation in which a virtual world is augmented with real-world objects or information’ (IGI Global n.d.), and examples that are often given include kitchens that are designed by users moving items around a digitally designed space (their physical interaction comprising the ‘real’), and in gaming, the projection of objects and even the gamer, into the digital space of the game. The interior-design reference that is typically provided nicely points to the difference between AV and AR when IKEA’s planner enables projection of the digital onto the real – even if in plan form – in contradistinction to its AV equivalent, which does not involve a (kitchen) referent. Demonstrably, AR and AV are hybrid forms, which combine the real and the virtual in different degrees, even if all the results are often less than helpfully referred to as the former.2 As kinds of hybrid, AR and AV comprise points on a line that is flanked by their constitutive binarism with an invisible x axis in the middle, and which has been mapped by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino (Milgram and Kishino 1994) as seen in diagram A.

Source: adapted from Milgram and Kishino 1994.

(And if these terms might also be represented as a Klein group, the value of a linear depiction is that it readily provides for the possibility of an infinite number of subdivisions.) But there is more to the line. Milgram and Kishino designate its midsection i.e. excluding all but the ‘pure’ poles of the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ environments, as the territory of ‘mixed reality’ (Ekman 2013: 45), visualized as seen in diagram B. 2

Sometimes, ‘VR’ is also used to describe AR – as for instance in Christiane Paul’s Digital Art (Paul 2008: 125).

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Source: adapted from Milgram and Kishino 1994.

The term is complicated both because its ‘reality’ is not the existent per se, which would comprise the entire contents of the line, but rather, the non-digital part of that, and also because it is not this ‘more real’ reality that is ‘mixed’ but instead it is that which is mixed with the less ‘real’ reality of the digital. In other words: this terminology rests on a tacit materialism; the idea that what is real is the substantial world.3 A better way of describing what is at stake might be the phrase ‘digital and non-digital reality’, though that does not provide this book with the otherwise productive overlap of phrasings. But then – to protract this aside – the term is complicated in another way, which concerns its application. While citing Milgram and Kishino’s schema, and endorsing its application, Ulrich Ekman also notes that there is little agreement as to what ‘mixed reality’ means, which he attributes in part to the absence of a ‘sufficiently differentiated conceptual apparatus’ (Ekman 2013: 44). Six years later, not much seems to have changed, when ‘mixed reality’ is also used to designate something apparently separate from AV and AR. For instance, the Wikipedia entry on the term claims that ‘[m]ixed reality is different from virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)’ (Wikipedia, n.d.) – next to a reproduction of Milgram and Kishino’s diagram, saying more about the lexical confusion in the area than much else. In the following discussion, I agree with Ekman, endorsing ‘mixed reality’ as signifying AR and AV and anything in between. But if there are issues with terminology, the phrase ‘mixed reality’ also immediately proposes that the digital, in its expanded field, is mixed form – at least in large swathes. Radically, representation and reality are held together in cultural space, if uneasily, in a way that parallels and quantitatively exceeds the 3

Even so, from this point of view, digitality is (also) ‘real’. As Stephanie Bailey notes, the internet is ‘a physical thing’; ‘satellites and fibre optic networks are but some of the necessary technologies facilitating the transmission of data between people and places’ (Bailey 2014: 129).

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historical avant-garde’s aim of merging art – broadly conceived – and life. And when the digital is often fundamentally visual in being mediated by a screen, ‘mixed reality’ typically realizes the screen as more than just a computational interface but as the portal to an often highly visual realm. If ‘there are no visual media’ in Mitchell’s phrase (Mitchell 2013) then with digital media it is also hard to escape visuality. Mixed reality readily provides visual culture with mixed forms that, in various ways, combine the virtual (which is often visual) with material existence. For reason of its coupling with the visual-digital, that material existence is also often realized first and foremost as the seen: a spectacle. In saying more about mixed reality as mixed form in visual culture, this chapter loosely follows Chapter 5’s approach to analysing assemblage. Following the bifurcation that the terminology implies, it looks first at the scope of the two entities at stake (‘reality’ and ‘digitality’), including the character of their visuality and/or other sensory dimensions. These divisions are referred to AR and AV usually in turn. Then, taking AR and AV together, it looks at the way in which ‘reality’ and ‘digitality’ combine, technically and grammatically. But before it proceeds to consider mixed reality’s relation to contemporaneous forms of labour following this book’s basic method, it pays particular attention to the role of the screen in all of this, when that is often overlooked.

Mixed reality’s materials – a note Fittingly perhaps, when the digital is underlaid by binary code – ‘zeroes and ones’ in Sadie Plant’s version of the phrase (Plant 1997) – mixed reality is typically conceptualized dualistically, as something that occurs across the digital and real. In the literature on mixed reality, it is addressed in just such terms (see Ekman 2013; Kholeif 2014; Manovich 2001). This is not inevitable. Equally, it could be seen, for instance, as a meshing of the digital, the human and the built environment, and then again, in other ways that pluralize its being further. But if that much is simple, then less so the detail of Mixed Reality’s constituent entities. I start with the back-end of the term: ‘reality’.

The scope of mixed reality’s ‘reality’ As already noted, ‘reality’ for ‘mixed reality’ is the material world: i.e. excluding non-substantial entities – thoughts, emotions and abstractions, for example.

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(Further, this material world is also often visible – but not inevitably.) However, even when restricted in this way, ‘reality’ is not comprehensively available for the digital realm, noting that AR and AV call upon the real in different ways. Hence if, in principle, for instance, the visible-material world could be completely overlaid with AR, in the manner of the ‘perfect’ map of Borges’s story, ‘that was as the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point’ (Borges 1975: 131), this is less likely to occur in practice. At least, when AR requires a sophisticated assemblage of hardware and software, a power supply and, often, connectivity, never mind other kinds of digital capital such as IT literacy, this is some way off – for reasons that include but exceed technical and economic factors. And this constraint applies to AR even in its ‘simple’ form – as that involves a oneway trajectory between the digital and real as the former overlays the latter. (An instance of this would be Tamiko Thiel’s AR art, which, as the artist says of Reign of Gold, offers viewers ‘all over the world’ the chance to engage with ‘the piece on their smartphones’ to ‘see an animated rain of gold coins superimposed over the live camera view of their surroundings’ (Garrett 2012) – see Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3 Tamiko Thiel, Reign of Gold, augmented reality installation, 2011. For AR Occupy Wall Street at the New York Stock Exchange, New York City. © Tamiko Thiel, 2011.

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Inadvertently perhaps, Thiel’s commentary exactly makes my point as the figure of speech ‘all over the world’ reminds us that, in fact, not everyone can access the artist’s work, unless ‘viewers’ designates the already-enabled.) With AR in its two-way mode, in which the digital overlays the real and is modified by that, as deployed by Pokémon, additional technical infrastructure is required, and in particular, a connection to the GPS (Global Positioning System). Dialectically, this extra affordance is equally a liability in depending on an infrastructure that is not always universally accessible: GPS signals can be obstructed by structures such as buildings and natural features and, when they belong to a system owned by the US government, are subject to politically motivated denial of service. (The same goes for alternative provisions such as the Russian GLONASS and the European Galileo.) So, in all sorts of ways, AR’s reality, considered as a visual entity, is in practice, partial. The same can be said of Augmented Virtuality, when its digital dimension is supplemented by a limited reality. By definition, AV’s recourse to the material world is premised on a prior digitality, which, as described above, is circumscribed by issues to do with access. Hence in order to intervene in a digitally created room and move its contents around, a user needs the kinds of capital already noted, and if this is not such a great demand across large portions of the globe perhaps, then that is not the case with more specialist AV. AR that uses haptic gloves enabling two-way tactile feedback is now available as a consumer item at the price of an expensive phone. But that does not make it readily available, even in relatively wealthy countries. And further limitations to AV’s reality relate to the nature of the body that instructs the digital (via touch, gesture and voice): as Luís Miguel Alves Fernandes et al. note of ‘gesture-control and somatic interaction’ in this domain, that often involves ‘high levels of artificiality’ (Alves Fernandes et al. 2016: 907). And then again, to refocus on the visuality in this: the gestures entailed in AV typically involve hand–eye coordination though the hand is only registered via its effects. Which is to say: AV’s reality involves the looking body, but that cannot see itself. This, it might be said, is indeed estrangement of the human from itself. To note the limitations in mixed reality’s reality – both in its form as AR and AV – is salutary, when the digital realm (including its non-digital extensions) is often thought to be ‘to hand’, perhaps on account of the former’s often easy (re)producibility. To recognize this is to take note from the similar warnings that accompanied the adoption of Open Source both in computing and beyond, as those pointed out that ‘freely available’ code did not mean that ‘anyone’ could ‘inspect, modify, and enhance’ it, as Opensource (n.d.) proposes. Rather, as Toni Prug contends, enjoyment of the ‘freedoms’ of Open Source is culturally specific,

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often excluding the already dispossessed (Prug 2006). When ‘open’ is utopian or falsely absolute in this regard, so too the ‘everywhere’ implied by ‘ubicomp’ as ubiquitous computing is often known.

The sensory dimension of mixed reality’s reality Beyond the issue of the scope of mixed reality’s materiality is the question of the kinds of sense-experience that it draws upon, over and above the visual as an aspect of the screen-as-interface. If, in the context of an address to mixed reality in visual culture this appears to be digressive, Mitchell’s point persists: that the visual is always imbricated in the other senses (if to varying degrees), so ‘all media are mixed media’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). Or to put this somewhat differently: mixed form in visual, digital, culture is augmented by other sense-based media just as much as it potentially consists of different visualities. (The point is demonstrated in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6 which, as a kind of AV art, invites members of the public to use their bodies – via their sense of sight and proprioception – to reveal and produce projected imagery – see Figure 7.4.)

Figure 7.4 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6, 2001. Williamson Square, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, United Kingdom, 2002. Photo by Antimodular Research.

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Some of mixed reality’s other recourses to different sensory aspects of reality have been indicated in the instances discussed above. Variously, these show that AR and AV engage – beyond the ocular – with the sense of touch in particular: ‘haptics’, and relatedly, ‘kinesics’. But as Ekman notes in his introduction to Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing there is also nothing to preclude the inclusion of auditory reality (Ekman 2013: 23). So, as the aural might be digitally augmented, it also might augment the digital. An instance of the former would be Janet Cardiff ’s artwork Missing Voice (Case Study B), an audio-walk which invites users to stream or download a sound track for listening to while following a ‘route beginning at the Whitechapel Gallery London’ (Artangel n.d.) offering, in the vein of much augmented reality, a site-specific text. (The work also draws upon the visual through the aural and equally, perhaps, allows the real-aural to extend the digital.) And a clear instance of the latter (as AV) would be the voice-command facility on virtual media. As Microsoft says of HoloLens, its mixed reality smartglasses, ‘[v]oice is one of the key forms of input [. . .] It allows you to directly command a hologram without having to use gestures. Voice input can be a natural way to communicate your intent’ (Microsoft 2019). Beyond Ekman’s understanding of mixed reality phenomena, Helen Papagiannis has noted that ‘[t]he human sensorium is not limited to vision, touch, and sound. If we are to engage Augmented Reality (AR) with all of our senses, we can’t forget smell and taste’. And she mentions Google Nose that in 2013 was launched to smell in both senses of the verb.4 No matter that, as Papagiannis proceeds to note, Google Nose ‘was an April Fool’ (Papagiannis 2016). In another article, she mentions ‘projects exploring taste and smell in AR, like Meta Cookie from the University of Tokyo’, which overlaid a plain biscuit with a virtual flavour (chocolate is the one demonstrated in a video) chosen by a volunteer consumer (Papagiannis 2014).5 The ‘flavour’ was produced by two means: first an air-pump which puffed taste-specific aroma towards the eater and, second, an image of the chosen cookie, overlaid by means of a VR headset onto the plain biscuit in the eater’s hand. With cookie-eaters satisfied that their choice of flavour had been realized, the project mobilized AR in combination with the power of expectation and the brain’s capacity to taste what has been smelled to propose that the digital might pass for the real. But the point of this example is that it shows that taste can be involved in mixed reality’s materiality – even as it has been partially digitized. This, along with other

4 5

See https://archive.google.com/nose/ (accessed 17 December 2019). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GnQE9cCf84 (accessed 17 December 2019).

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Figure 7.5 The Manus VR Glove, 2016. Manus VR, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

instances discussed above, affirms AR’s capacity to involve a range of senses – including the visual. With AV, the sensory dimension of reality (beyond the visual) is realized as the user’s sense-based faculties command the digital (in AR, they function foremost as receptors). Thus AV utilizes gesture, touch and voice as interfaces, with the first two instanced in the haptic glove (Figure 7.5), and the last already mentioned. Hence with AR, AV has the capacity to engage reality both in and via a range of sense-related modes – if only the former includes a seen reality. Via both, however, visual culture’s ‘mixed reality’ is multisensory.

The scope of digitality in mixed reality I now turn to look at ‘mixed reality’s’ first term, as it designates the digital (as that which makes the second ‘mixed’). I look at its scope at the fundamental level of its technology, and its field of view, recognizing in respect of the latter, that the terminology associated with the representational aspect of mixed reality is tricky, as previous equivocations have sought to indicate. In particular,

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‘representation’ is a problematic term if it rules out the idea of a simulated reality without original. Or then again: as William Vaughan writes: ‘[i]t should be remembered that [. . .] the digital image is not a “reproduction” in the way that an analogue image is’, and he notes, though this is not the only explanation, that the digital image ‘translates’ its ‘original’ by encoding it (Vaughan 2005: 6). When not all digital technologies involve a display screen – think of virtual assistants such as Echo Dot – screens are nevertheless widely involved in mixed reality, if not technically necessary. (In its original form, Janet Cardiff ’s Missing Voice was presented on a CD player.) With AR, screens are likely to be portable i.e. on phones, tablets and, perhaps, laptops. For visual mixed reality, this enables a digital image to be placed over a portion of the real via specific software. (In this respect, AR superannuates the desktop.) A greater degree of fit between the image and the real is provided by various kinds of digital eyeglass and headsets. Representing something of a step-change in this domain because the digital is coincident with the field of vision, these devices presage innovations such as the digital windscreen, which incorporates driving-related data including say, a satnav (also known as a ‘head-up display’; see Figure 7.6). In AV, the ‘screens’ are also worn – as VR headsets, linked to other wearables such as haptic gloves. And while it has been argued that the screen disappears in an interface which overlaps precisely with what is seen, the disappearance is

Figure 7.6 Head-up display in a 1994 Pontiac Bonneville SSE, 2005. Digitaloutsider CC BY 2.5.

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perceptual, not ontological. Indeed, it should be noted that for AV and AR, and visual digitality beyond, the (display) screen is a near-constant element, only absent in projected images, though present as a metaphor or as a non-digital bespoke surface. And the role of the screen is important in thinking about the mixture, or otherwise, of visual digitality, which will be discussed later on.

Mixed reality as digitality: the media Excluding, for now, the mediation of the screen, there is the issue of the range of sense-based media that mixed reality’s digitality involves. In its visual mode, it encompasses the still and moving image, and in between (the animated GIF) and also for AV, specifically, simulated three-dimensional imagery. Moreover, that visuality takes different forms – realized as the photographic, graphics (e.g. the cartoon figures of Pokémon), and infographics (see the AR windscreen), for instance. But the digital media of mixed reality also include the aural, across recorded speech, music and other forms of sound, in basic terms either overlaid (for AR), or diegetic (as in AV). Then again, as indicated above, AR and AV between them have the potential to deploy the media of digital touch and taste. And more exotically, engaging an extended range of senses, the recently developed ‘e-tongue’ enables artificial tasting, which presumably will have a future in a more elaborate mixed reality. Further, text is another medium that AR employs – in informational applications such as satnav systems, for example. All this points to an array of possibilities for mixed reality as mixed form in visual culture. The question then is how the means of joining these components, and the grammar of their combination, enables further mixture.

The means of mixing digital and real The integration of the digital and real takes different forms in AR and AV respectively. With AR the figure of the ‘overlay’ or ‘superimposition’ (to take the term Thiel uses for her AR work) captures the spatial relationship between the two entities, if not the vector between the two, when it is the digital (cultural) that is laid upon the ‘natural’, even if through interfaces such as GPS that can then inflect the digital. (The trope of overlay is useful too if it relates AR to other mixed form practices, for instance, collage.) But as with all such concepts,

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‘overlay’ excludes, as much as it includes. So, in its literal sense, the term would not encompass what Ekman describes as ‘the navigationally aware GPS system in your car’ when that functions as a sideshow to the roadscape. However, when as Ekman goes onto note, satnav also has a ‘capacity for leading you astray or making you forget to watch the real environment around you’ (Ekman 2013: 10), then it is more than marginalia; rather it becomes the mainframe, even as a more conceptual than material overlay; in essence, a digital windscreen. In this way, then, the join in AR is either one of palimpsest or parallel. With AV, the figure that describes the interaction of the digital and real is something more intrusive, if immaterial in its effect. The real ‘pokes’ the digital (think Pokémon – although its etymology is not related); hands and fingers gesture and manipulate a virtual entity, and voice instructs. This is less the interface of overlay than of intervention. And so, because of this – as AV’s ‘join’ is of a different order to AR’s, mixed reality is further mixed in means for joining elements, the more so, when the two modes of Mixed Reality in certain situations combine, compounding the capacity for mixture.

The rules of media-combination That said, while visual mixed reality collectively considered clearly draws upon a range of media, the scope for individual instances (notwithstanding the AR/AV divide) to vary from each other, and to represent that range, depends upon the grammar of the form-at-large. For now, while this issue is approached from a different angle later on, some basic observations will suffice. First: that this grammar is dependent on the relevant technology’s affordances – an obvious fact, perhaps, when that goes for all media. Second, as an aspect of that point, and as already noted, most forms of mixed reality involve a screen, when that habitually entails the visual too. The screen’s ubiquity in visual, mixed reality means that individual instances are thrice-determined formally, when components must include the digital, a screen and (whatever passes for) reality. In this regard, mixed reality contrasts with assemblage, which stipulates nothing more than the presence of a three-dimensional entity and offers more scope for instances to differ from each other in formal terms. Which is to say: if the terminology of mixed reality embraces formal mixture, that is somewhat compromised in aspects of its practice. In the not-so-distant future, it may be reduced further, if the ‘real’ becomes increasingly marginal on its way to disappearing altogether – a prospect I consider next.

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The provisionality of mixed reality In Milgram and Kishino’s schema, mixed reality does not include purely ‘virtual environments’; in terms of their line, ‘MR’ is an intermediate term, which also excludes the purely ‘real’. ‘Mixed reality’ may also be associated with (historical) intermediacy in referring to phenomena that are on the way to being purely digital: the empire of ubiquitous computing. For, technically, ubiquitous computing leaves no space for the real. This looks to Nick Bostrom’s provocative ‘simulation argument’ which claims that it is likely that ‘we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation’ i.e. a completely digital, or virtual world. Its abstract asserts: [A]t least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. Bostrom 2003: 2436

And although it is tempting to pursue this proposition, here is not the place for that, other than to note that the possibility of computers replacing humans has been presaged to a significant degree by the technologies mentioned in this chapter.7 However, the argument urges a renewed attention to the digital, and for such purposes, a focus on the screen (image) as a kind of texture, which has not yet been addressed, and which mediates differences of digital media, and their visual languages. Hence the question for the screen, in its various modes, is: how does it mediate or constitute those differences? Or: what is the nature of its mediation? When the following discussion acknowledges that screens take different forms (on a laptop or mobile phone, or as a pair of VR glasses, for example) and that those affect how on-screen images are viewed, it focuses upon the formal space that screens enable. For reason of this focus, it is not concerned with the differences between an on- and offline screen even though as Manovich

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Bostrom’s website – https://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html – includes the full paper as well as much discussion and a page of FAQs, which includes a response to the obvious objection that we might be the simulated humans’ originals (see FAQ 7). Perhaps substantially diminished since the paper’s publication by the enhanced likelihood of the first proposition being true.

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notes, ‘[e]very visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom version of the site created on the fly from a database [of previous browsing]’ (Manovich 2013: 42) – not the least as that often has more to do with content than with form.

The screen and its ‘computer layer’ In order to assess the screen as a texture it is useful to borrow Manovich’s distinction between the ‘cultural layer’ of the digital (which he refers to as ‘new media’), and its ‘computer layer’. He defines these via examples, with the former comprising ‘categories’ such as ‘the encyclopaedia and the short story’ among much else, and the latter, for example, ‘computer language and data structure’ (Manovich 2001: 46). Manovich identifies five ‘principles’ involved in ‘computerization’ while noting that ‘[n]ot every new media object obeys these principles’ (Manovich 2001: 27) and also proposing that ‘we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer’; ‘in short, what can be called the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics – influence the cultural layer of new media’ (Manovich 2001: 46). I now address those principles that affect the visual texture of the screen.

Digitization: ‘discretization’ ‘In “Principles of New Media” ’ Manovich writes, ‘I showed that numerical representation is the one really crucial concept’ (of his title’s ‘principles’), and indeed, he puts it first. ‘Numerical representation’ is another term for ‘digitization’ which in turn refers to the process of assigning numerical values to bits of information. As Manovich observes: ‘[d]igitization consists of two steps: sampling and quantization. First data is sampled [. . .] The frequency of sampling is referred to as resolution [. . .] Second, each sample is quantified, that is, it is assigned a numerical value drawn from a defined range’ (Manovich 2001: 28, original emphasis). And as Manovich is quick to note, these actions – of the digital – are not without consequence. Especially: ‘[s]ampling turns continuous data into discrete data, that is, data occurring in distinct units: people, the pages of a book, pixels’ as opposed to, say, the ‘old media’ of ‘photography and sculpture’ that have no internal units (Manovich 2001: 28, original emphasis). This process has been described by Bernard Stiegler as – perhaps predictably – ‘discretization’, which, as John Tinnell notes, is part of

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Stiegler’s concept of ‘grammatization’ when the latter refers to the basic production of ‘writing technologies’ from the ‘alphabetic’ ‘to ubicomp’ (Tinnell 2015: 136). But for Manovich, when ‘old media’ often ‘involve the combination of continuous and discrete coding’ (Manovich 2001: 28), it is only the digital that deploys the latter. Certainly, discretization in the digital realm has a very particular effect on visual media, most notably resulting in the pixelation of all imagery. Or: as a coding website reassures its programmers: ‘[a] digital image is nothing more than data – numbers indicating variations of red, green, and blue at a particular location on a grid of pixels’ (Shiffman 2008). (Indeed: it is hard to imagine any other way of realizing the visual, digitally.) And while advances in screen technology, with developments such as Retina Display,8 mean that pixels are less visible than previously,9 if at all, the pixelated condition of digital imagery nevertheless gives it a particular character. Perhaps the most salient aspect of pixelation at the moment is the way in which the pixel is realized by the screen. Pixels are illuminated by electronically generated light, but that happens in different ways, according to the various technologies currently in use. Screens – or monitors – that enable the electronic display of pixelated data might use, for instance, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), LCD (liquid crystal display) or plasma display – to name three of the more obvious options. While all – to varying degrees – have different visual properties, and are often marketed on just such a basis, it is debatable, however, that those constitute significant distinctions in the viewing experience (though gamers might argue otherwise).10 In other words: the electronic display screen that serves most visual imagery in the digital realm represents something of a homogeneous entity, texturally. (Or at least, its similarities outweigh its nuances.) Clearly, digital display provides a unified surface on a screen-by-screen basis, which has significant implications for the way in which the next principle on Manovich’s list affects new media as cultural form.

8

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‘Retina Display is a marketing term developed by Apple to refer to devices and monitors that have a resolution and pixel density so high – roughly 300 or more pixels per inch – that a person is unable to discern the individual pixels at a normal viewing distance’ (Stroud 2019). In 2001 Vaughan proposed that while the digital image comprises ‘distinct units’, ‘these are perceived by the spectator as an integrated whole’ – suggesting that a kind of will-not-to see (the pixel) was at work (Vaughan 2005: 6). ‘Current virtual reality headsets are pretty good at the “virtual” bit but tend to fall down on the “reality” side of things. It’s all too obvious that you’re looking at a screen, albeit a screen held very close to your face, and a lot of screens just aren’t meant to be looked at that close’ (Bright 2019).

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Digitization: modularity This also plays a part in the texture of the screen and its potential for diversity of effect. Manovich proposes that new media ‘objects’ consist of modules within modules, if of different kinds, meaning that when ‘all elements are stored independently, they can be modified at any time’ without having to change the overall form (Manovich 2001: 30). For the purpose of thinking about the texture of the screen-as-seen, modularity defines ‘the structure of an HTML document’, for instance, such that, ‘[w]ith the exemption of text, it consists of a number of separate objects – GIF and JPEG images, media clips, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) scenes, Shockwave and Flash movies – which are all stored independently, locally and/or on a network’ (Manovich 2001: 31). As this description eloquently demonstrates, the modularity of screen-space enables mixed form. The digitality of objects, framed by the digitality of HTML, means that different media can coexist in space and time, on the operating table (grid, as much as plane) of the screen. This, as a ‘cultural’ consequence of digitality, has already been acknowledged – in discussing the character of mixed reality. Or as Manovich writes: new media is/are ‘graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts’ (Manovich 2001: 20). The phrase ‘is/are’ is more than just a passing nicety. Rather, it strikes at the heart of the question of the identity and difference of digital media. To return to the focus of this book: if different visual media are presented in a space which functions as a medium (the screen), are they really non-identical? And if they are, to what extent? How much does digitality mediate?

The digital as Wunderkammer? Various responses to the question posed in the preceding section have been suggested though it is more often passed over in the writing on digital media. One invokes the emergent condition of the phenomenon/phenomena in question to defer resolution of such issues. So, when William Vaughan looks to Lyotard to propose that the ‘IT revolution’ represents a ‘change in “narrative knowledge” ’ and potentially, a ‘new mode of thought’, he implies that understanding may not yet be possible (Vaughan 2005: 4). And another response to the ‘medium or media’ conundrum appears to be proposed as the on-screen environment is defined as a ‘meta-medium’, delivering ‘multiple media’ (Stafford 2000: 2157). However, this does not explain how those ‘multiple media’ are not mediated by the ‘meta’ in a way that undermines their distinctiveness as media.

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Here, it is useful to return to W.J.T. Mitchell’s discussion of the subject. ‘A medium’, he writes, ‘as Raymond Williams [. . .] puts it, is a “material social practice,” not a specifiable essence dictated by some elemental materiality (paint, stone, metal) or by technique or technology. Materials and technologies go into a medium, but so do skills, habits, social spaces, institutions and markets’ (Mitchell 2013: 9). But as he warns against defining media just via their materiality, he does not, on the other hand, exclude consideration of the latter. So, the question that presents itself is then: can media distinctiveness, in part, fall to non-material (and non-technological) considerations? Would it be possible to distinguish media on the basis of, say, ‘skills’, such that the on-screen moving image is distinct from its still counterpart, by virtue of the competences required to produce both, matters of motion aside? If this is what is at stake in thinking about medium on-screen then it certainly proposes that ‘new media’ suggest a new idea of ‘medium’ that does not depend on phenomenal difference. Or perhaps we should, instead, search out the residual material distinctions that obtrude through the otherwise unified material substrate of the screen-medium. Here, the distinction between ‘motion’ and ‘stillness’ is a case in point. For the time being, it does not seem unreasonable to propose that on-screen, visual media – if not all media – are relatively homogeneous, if according to definitions of ‘medium’ that may, in future, need revising. So, if the Wunderkammer offers an analogy, in the wake of Gehl, that is not by virtue of its meaning as a thing of motley but rather, in the wake of Chapter 1’s conclusion, as a collection of motley things submitted to a will to order as the same. (Such is, perhaps, the digital Wunderkammer that is indexed in My Dad, Hogarth, by Graham Harwood, Mongrel, Figure 7.1.) However, it is not, now, taxonomy that is at work, but rather the ironically material surface of the screen. And yet, precisely for that reason, the screen is less like the Wunderkammer than, perhaps, the pastime-scrapbook shown in Chapter 4. The latter, with its fragments, also seems, at first glance, to offer an array of forms, which nevertheless often rely on a limited range of materials (even commercially produced ‘scraps’) – making for a uniform texture on the page. (This is in contradistinction to the artist’s scrapbook, which more often constructs a raucous spread of surfaces – if less so, in the hands of artists such as Hannah Höch and Ray Yoshida.) Something very similar to this argument has been articulated by Sean Cubitt, if in rather different terms. ‘Multimedia products in the commercial sphere are characterised’ he writes, ‘by their holistic vision of the product [. . .] the hierarchically focussed unity of the product.’ And he notes how ‘designers’ ‘accentuate the coherence of their sites’ as a way of mitigating the effect of ‘plug-ins’ that mean that files arrive as ‘discrete packages

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of text, image, movie and sound.’ Further: ‘[s]earch engines and infobots [. . .] attempt to construct coherence about a hierarchy centred on the hyperindividuated user [. . .] The net is effectively organised around this socially engineered hyperindividual, for whom all variety can be resolved into self and other, with the self in imperial mode, click by click assimilating the alien into the longed for stability of the same’ (Cubitt 1998: 140). When Cubitt’s vision is related to just one aspect of the online realm (its ‘commercial sphere’), it also describes by analogy the screen’s relation to its contents. Or: the curious relationship between the screen as a medium, and a medium for media. In recognizing that this will-to-coherence (only) defines the space of the screen, and not mixed reality, it is nevertheless useful to remember that the latter may be a transitional state on the way to a more pervasive absorption of the different, i.e. ‘reality’, as computing becomes ubiquitous. When that is probable, this history of mixed form ends by looking to the mediation of a range of cultural media by one, and consequently, a significant reduction in phenomenal diversity. But if that is the case, this discussion of that history is not finished.

Divided labour in the digital age As Chapter 5 proposed, Fordism was a central form of labour in Western economies during the era of modernist assemblage. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the digital age has been associated with a ‘post-Fordist’ political economy, which defines much employment under neoliberalism. Many commentators place its inception at the point when Fordism, combined with ‘Keynesian “effective demand” ’ which underpinned ‘a stable welfare regime and system of social production’, went into ‘irreversible crisis’ in the 1960s (Neilson and Rossiter 2008: 56).

Post-Fordism Contrary to the connotations offered by the prefix ‘post-’, Fordism is not the standard condition of capitalist employment that makes post-Fordism exceptional. As the title of their 2008 article proposes, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, this is Neilson and Rossiter’s position. Or, as Dave Beech in Art and Value paraphrases Bifo (Franco Berardi): Fordism is ‘anomalous in securing non-precarious labour for a brief historical period.

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Before Fordism, and not only after it, precarity is the condition of the majority’ (Beech 2015: 317). Moreover, ‘ “[w]ith the decline in the political force of the workers’ movement” ’,‘ “the natural precariousness and brutality of labor relations in capitalism have re-emerged” ’ (Beech 2015: 317). But if, in this account, ‘post-’ might also signal ‘pre-’, that is clearly not the case as Beech and others see things. There is no return to a pre-Fordist state of affairs. To understand why this is so, a definition of post-Fordism is needed, which Beech supplies in useful detail. Noting that ‘the Italian Marxists coined postFordism’ in the wake of Gramsci (whose work on this account was noted in Chapter 5), he continues: ‘[b]y the time that Gramsci wrote “Americanism and Fordism,” the standardised mass production of automobiles had already been successfully challenged by a new focus on consumer choice by General Motors’ such that: by the 1930s, Ford’s standardised product and his direct planning and control system had been superseded by innovations in marketing and organisation [. . .] under the leadership of Alfred Sloan. Instead of the standardised and uniform production line, Sloan devised a multi-product, or M-form, organisation of a company made up of separate divisions serving distinct product markets. But what contemporary post-Fordist theory has its eye on is [. . .] the flexible production system known as Toyotism or lean manufacturing. Stock is purchased little and often; products and parts are produced on demand rather than mass produced and stored. The labour of the Toyota Production System is based on multiskilling, worker flexibility, and nurtures a bond between educated and motivated employees and the company. The key elements of post-Fordist economic theory have their roots here. Beech 2015: 320

Here is not the precarity of pre-unionized factory work in industrial society, which among other things, was defined by attrition linked to a key feature of the mode of production when ‘[w]orkers hated to work on assembly lines which meant that retention rates for employees [e.g.] at Ford were extremely poor’ (Beech 2015: 319–20). Rather, this precarity is associated with the ‘assemblyisland’ (as Beech notes via Mario Tronti), and which, as Wei Qin and George Q. Huang propose, designates a manufacturing system which brings ‘machines, materials and workers’ to the product – reversing the motion associated with assembly lines which brought the product to the worker, materials and machines (Qin and Huang 2010: 17). The assembly-island, over the assembly-line, enables stop-start production – determined by the capitalist, if often responding to consumer demand.

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Post-Fordism as mixed form In this fundamental sense, then, precarious labour is mixed form: on, off, or in or out of work, when being ‘off work’ and ‘out of work’ are not the same as not being a worker. At the same time, post-Fordist labour is mixed in other ways: in being ‘based on multiskilling’ as another consequence, it seems, of the worker moving to the product, or Toyotism (Beech 2015: 320). Or, as Beech elsewhere paraphrases Paolo Virno, the ‘principal qualities demanded of wage-labourers today’ are ‘habitual mobility, keeping pace with rapid change, adaptability and flexibility’ (Beech 2015: 316). And then he quotes Mark Fisher’s observation concerning the psychological demands of this: ‘[t]o function effectively as a component of justin-time production’, ‘you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability’ (Beech 2015: 317). ‘Total instability’, it could be said, is mixed form as pathology. There is another aspect to precarity that again intensifies its character as a mixed form. And this is the way in which ‘flexible contracts’ compound the ‘multiskilling’ entailed in any given employment in being associated with the socalled ‘portfolio career’ – derived from Charles Handy’s discussion of the ‘portfolio life’ in The Age of Unreason (Handy 2012). Often an euphemism for a sequence or a simultaneous clutch of low-paid jobs which the worker puts together to make ends meet, the glamorizing metaphor conceals the human costs involved, which as Rosalind Gill observes ‘include poverty’ (when such work is often subject to fewer workers’ rights such as sick-pay), ‘isolation, and above all, insecurity’ (Gill 2011: 74). And the metaphor also obscures the fact that often, such ‘portfolios’ (now more financial than artistic), comprise a range of ‘investments’ across different areas of labour. So, although Neilson and Rossiter do not dwell on this aspect of precarity, they do, however, mention a protest by taxi drivers in Melbourne, Australia, which included ‘international university students’ i.e. students also working as taxi drivers (Neilson and Rossiter 2008: 66). This eloquently aligns precarity with multiple employment. Other instances of this number more than two jobs – a BBC report cites a woman juggling five.11 But while there is a fair degree of literature, if more grey than academic, presenting the statistics in this area (see US Census reports, for instance),12 there is little that addresses the kinds of work involved in such employment. 11

12

Felicity Hannah (2019) reported that ‘[m]ore than 320,500 self-employed people in Britain are working two or more jobs’. And in 2016, Barry T. Hirsch et al. noted that ‘[a]bout 5% of US workers hold multiple jobs’ (2016: 1). See Beckhusen 2019.

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Of course, there is Marx and Engels’s vision of a multifarious working life, which as they say ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind’ – as presented and discussed in Chapter 2 – and which, in the context of post-Fordism, now sounds highly fanciful or, at best, describes the licence of a gentleman-farmer (Marx and Engels 1932). But the return to Marx is useful when it encourages a discussion of the counter-intuitive similarities between post-Fordist labour and its wished-for, undivided form in Marxist theory. If superficially, there are indeed overlaps between the farmer-critic and the multiskilling portfolio worker. Both have the potential to experience a diversity of labouring activity, even in the course of one day. In other words: both roles seem to refuse the ‘[d]ivision of labour in society, and the corresponding tying down of individuals to a particular calling’ – and therefore have the capacity to dissolve the stereotypical allocation of work to workers (Marx [1867] 1999b). But when that is the case, one does so contra capital, and the other in its name as a casualized and supremely disenfranchised workforce meets the demands of the gig economy. And the same appearance of refusal of Capitalist structures characterizes post-Fordism’s retreat from the division of labour in its more particular manifestation: as a given job is multiskilled and therefore refuses the monotony of the Fordist production line. For this multiskilling seldom, if at all, gives the worker ownership of the production process (making the commodity in its entirety), the more so when automation is often involved (as the instances from car manufacturing demonstrate). And fundamentally, the post-Fordist worker sells their labour even when self-employed. For as Nicole S. Cohen argues: The labour-capital relations that underscore freelance cultural production are often obscured: because freelancers are not engaged in an employment relationship and are not paid a salary, it appears that they sell simply a finished piece of work, or ‘labour already objectified in the product’ [. . .], not the labour time required to produce that piece. However, Marx argues that piece wages are a form of time wages and that the existence of this form of payment ‘in no way alters [its] essential nature’, which is ‘the general relation between capital and wage-labour’ [. . .]. Freelance cultural work has relations of exploitation at its core. Cohen 2012: 147

So, the mixed forms of post-Fordist work offer diversity of experience, but only within the context of fundamentally alienated labour. While that diversity is clearly an advance on the variety of experience afforded by the Fordist

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production line, its value is ambiguous when it fails to realize the full potential of a human being as Marx and Engels understand that. That understanding – as it concerns labour – is perhaps nowhere better articulated than in the following passage from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Section XXII: Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being.13 Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. Marx [1844] 1932a, original emphasis

As the Fordist worker, so the post-Fordist worker; both realize that they have to work in order to survive. Both Fordist and post-Fordist labour curtails the worker’s capacity to realize themselves through labour that is not divided at the level of ‘detail’ i.e. in Marx and Engels’s third sense of the division of labour. And if post-Fordist labour is diverse (at the level of the ‘division of labour in particular’), it is not, however, a free activity – that would elect satisfying work – and so it does not realize its subjects’ species-being. This, from a Marxist point of view, makes it fundamentally flawed.

Digital culture and labour: relations It is now possible to comment on the relationship between digital, on-screen culture and post-Fordist labour as (potentially) mixed forms. As it so happens, Manovich has written on the subject of connections between cultural form (in ‘media’) and modes of production: ‘historically,’ he says, ‘changes in media technologies are correlated with social change’. And so, he proposes, ‘[i]f the logic of old media corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, the logic of new media fits the logic of the postindustrial society, which values individuality over conformity’ (Manovich 2001: 41).14 And, as he has detailed earlier ‘[t]he logic of new media thus corresponds to the postindustrial logic of “production 13

14

If man is a ‘species-being’ it is, as Marx explains perhaps less gnomically elsewhere, ‘because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object’ (Marx [1844] 1932a). The correspondence Manovich notes between ‘old media’ and industrial society is very similar to the one I see between assemblage as a modular form and Fordism, as that involves the accretion of discrete units.

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on demand” and “just in time” delivery logics that were themselves made possible by the use of computers and computer networks at all stages of manufacturing and distribution’ (Manovich 2001: 36). The last comment is particularly salient, when it is useful to remember that distinct productive spheres (e.g. cultural and non-cultural) can overlap in several ways, and not just at the level of their ‘logic’ (for which, perhaps, read ‘values’, or ‘technology’) but also, as the last term indicates, as one sphere involves the other. In the case of this chapter’s concerns, this entails the overlap between the use of screens in post-Fordist production, and in cultural practice. Technologically, the digital studio and assembly-island may not be so far apart. And the concept of ‘overlap’ holds for the way in which mixed form operates in both these spheres. So, in the cultural realm, the screen, with its huge diversity of content (most of human and non-human life, and possibly the post-human too) seems to offer an extraordinary array of visual media. But that is uniformly glazed and glossed by illuminated pixels. Likewise, in the realm of work, post-Fordist labour often entails much diversity of employment for a given worker, in a range of situations, places and possibly involving very different status in each role. But typically, that labour is still estranged, which unifies an otherwise diverse experience – just as the pixel unifies the on-screen image. In this way, both cultural form and labour form are, to some extent, deceptive in offering diversity at first glance, which disappears upon reflection (the sheen of the screen in the case of cultural form). This parallel itself has parallels with other culture-labour intersections that this book has looked at. It is time to turn to look at how they figure as a whole, mixed or otherwise.

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Conclusion: A Synthesis of Sorts

A conclusion to a book on the subject of mixed form is, in some respects, an irony. At least: in attempting to synthesize, or bring things together into one harmonious understanding that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts, it might be seen to betray the very principles that have powered much of its enquiry; ideas of difference, strands – and mixture, no less. But then again, a synthesis is not inappropriate, in as much as it nods to the Hegelian framework that has informed this book’s conception of form – or, more particularly, Hegel’s dialectics which acknowledges synthesis as the outcome of an interrogation of a thesis.1 Nor is it inappropriate when, as Virginia Woolf insists, that the ‘first duty of a lecturer’ (but ‘writer’ would work as well), is ‘to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece for ever’ – when ‘hour’ could also be a ‘book’ (Woolf [1929] 1977: 5). Except that Woolf – sometimes herself a practitioner of literary mixed form (see The Waves) – was, of course, being ironic. We come full circle. And yet. This conclusion will present a synthesis that is also not a synthesis. First it seeks to distil this book’s understanding of its topic, as pursued in its three main figures (mixed form in visual culture; mixed form in labour; and the relationship between the two) as they have emerged in the preceding chapters. And then, beyond that overview, it indicates aspects of the topic that have not been addressed, either in sufficient detail or at all, which might reward further work.

The shape – or form – of history In Chapter 1, I quoted Jerónimo Arellano writing that the ‘story of the Wunderkammer’ ‘takes the shape of a bell curve’ (Arellano 2010: 377); an image 1

Not to be confused, with, if related to, Hegel’s conception of art’s form-content dialectic.

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that eloquently articulates particular kinds of intensities in the development and decay of the form he is discussing. However, if shapes are useful and, moreover, pertinent in figuring the form of histories, and the relationships between those, then their deployment in the discussion that follows comes with some cautions. First, in respect of mixed form in visual culture, it should be remembered that the history that this book has traced is identified with different social groups as consumers. The Wunderkammer and the broadside ballad were experienced by very different sections of society, even if, as Patrick Mauriès notes, John Tradescant’s Ark was open to ‘the public’ – as also were some others (Mauriès 2011: 142). Likewise, much separates the pastime scrapbook and modernism’s assemblage art, which across their production and consumption were, broadly, associated with very different socio-economic constituencies. This introduces a degree of unevenness when it comes to comparing the experience of cultural form with a form of labour. Second: in respect of the histories that this book has reviewed (the history of mixed form in visual culture and in labour), it should be noted the instances discussed are relatively few and far between. This is especially the case on the cultural front, when phenomena reviewed represent odd moments. (As the famous set of squiggles in Tristram Shandy indicates (Sterne [1759–67] 1967: 453) a line of any shape can be inscribed between two points of storytelling.) And if the history of divided labour seems less fragmentary, then it should be noted that this book has paid scant attention to the epoch of ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ i.e. Chapter 15 in Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital (Marx [1867] 1999c). The overview that follows is offered with these caveats.

Mixed forms in visual culture – as a field of study As Mixed Forms of Visual Culture has pursued a formalist analysis in offering, via the focus of its first term a new purchase on the second, a number of notable outcomes have emerged. Most basically, it has established the legitimacy of the first term as a field of enquiry in the broader context of the second, in collecting together hitherto dispersed phenomena that seem to bear the application of the term ‘mixed form’. To enumerate: across its introduction and seven chapters, the following practices have been identified with mixed form in visual culture, in order of appearance, by name: motley; patchwork; the fair; carnival; overpainted photographs; mixed-media; the cabinet of curiosities; assemblage; post-modernist architecture; collage; hybrid cultural practices; bricolage; installation; image-text; cartoons; diagrams; the Wunderkammer; the broadside

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ballad; the chapbook; the pastime scrapbook; the artist’s scrapbook; digital culture; opera; theatre; cabaret; film; music videos; Gesamtkunstwerk; the Wonder Room; rariteitenkabinet; Kunstkammer; the antiques fair; the car-boot fair; penny prints; picture books; (some) advertising bills and cards, and news bills; catchpenny prints; broadsides (with images); magazines; decollage; disassemblage; rollage; intermedial practices; papier collé; the readymade; the Combine; augmented reality; augmented virtuality; mixed reality; and the digital Wunderkammer. This list, in emerging from a focus on particular examples of the topic, only represents its subject partially; a systematic inventory would doubtless extend the field. Moreover, beyond collating phenomena, this enquiry has also suggested that the topic bears sustained analysis from a variety of perspectives, which, as I will argue below, have not exhausted it. And when the idea of ‘mixed form’ has a partial existence in other areas of culture (literature, as noted, but clearly, music too, via the medley and the mash-up), it might also constitute a topic in cultural studies more largely, distinguished from ‘cultural hybridity’ by its emphasis on form.

Mixed forms in visual culture – the formalist analysis: some trends Analysis has focused on two distinct but related outcomes, qualitatively and quantitatively inflected. The first concerned the question of the composition of the mixtures of mixed forms: matters of the materiality of components (and the systems for differentiating these); methods for selecting the materials involved (or the conditions that have affected selection), and various issues to do with what happens at the join (from the frisson of the ‘jolt’ to the means for sticking differences together: glue as a material and metaphor). When different practices of mixed form have brought these more or less to the fore, this elaboration of the qualitative condition of mixed form has also, necessarily, not been systematic. For instance: ‘mixture’ in the cabinet of curiosities was approached as an issue for the organization of components, whereas for assemblage, with typically far fewer parts, it was rather considered as an issue of the range of kinds of things (found/ made etc.), which in turn was seen to be bound up with systems for producing difference including modes of authorship. Which is to say: the understanding of mixed form that this book has produced has been led by the specifics of examples, rather than an abstract matrix overlaid on each instance. Nevertheless, one general observation on the qualitative aspect of mixed form is obviously proposed by the book’s discussion. This notes that the variety

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of materialities identified with mixed form across the seven chapters of this book is extensive; from taxidermied crocodiles to cars and cardboard; from woodcut illustrated ‘bills’ to on-screen image-text. But – moving into issues that are more to do with quantity – seldom is great range materialized in any single instance. (The Wunderkammer is a qualified exception, in involving a relatively copious array of artefacts but often restricting their potential for radical mixture, as Chapter 1 proposed, at the level of their ordering.) On the whole, the number of mixed form’s components is seen to be restrained, relative to any given form’s capacity, with no less than a dualistic structure seeming to prevail at times. This is certainly the case with the image-text condition of the chapbook, and appears as well, in certain Dada and Surrealist assemblage (Duchamp’s Fountain, and, arguably, Oppenheim’s Object) and Richter’s Overpaintings, for example. Though perhaps that is enough. In all of this, it might be noted that what is, logically, at stake for mixed form’s quantity of mixture is the work of combination and permutation. So, from this perspective, the difference between the Wunderkammer and assemblage is less their reservoir of possible materials, though those are historically distinct, but more a grammar that allows the former to use many items from the stock of forms, and assemblage, often, fewer, in a given instance. However, as the rules additionally insist upon a certain order – permutation – for the first’s display, this means that (ironically perhaps), cabinets of curiosities might show less variation in their mixtures, collectively considered (see the images in Chapter 1), than assemblage art, again, considered as a whole. In the line-up of mixed forms that this book has presented there is one in which the range of forms – the number of materialities with different qualities – is at best minimal or at worst chimerical (and not as that term designates a kind of hybrid). This is the pastime scrapbook, which is included for reasons of its promise, and its popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In offering comments on this subject, which Chapter 4 presents via solely visual means, it might be objected that when the function of a visual essay is to suspend the author’s words in order to allow the reader’s ‘reading’ as a viewer, that is betrayed. And perhaps it is. But these words substantially post-date the chapter’s appearance, and the observation that I wish to make is too significant to the book’s preoccupations to be omitted. The point is this: in theory, the scrapbook insists that its components are realized as a mixture. In part, this seems to be denoted by its name (typically emblazoned across the cover as seen in Chapters 4 and 6), when ‘scraps’ might refer to leftovers collected by the indigent; ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. And if the absence of choice does not guarantee diversity of parts (as Chapter 5 noted) it

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usually makes it more likely. (The name might also point to the scrapbook’s relation to the commonplace book when that, in turn, involves a similar form: a ground for diversity as miscellaneous ideas are documented in one common’ textual-venue, sometimes across words and drawings – see Figure C.1.) Moreover, the scrapbook’s neutral surface (sugar-paper, for example), facilitates the maximum array of other kinds of surface (as a spread of fragments), in minimizing the clash of ground with figure. So it is surprising – in some respects – that so few pastime-scrapbooks realize this potential – the more so when, unusually, in the line-up of mixed form that this book considers, they are made by their consumers. Rather, as Chapter 4 suggests, and Chapter 7 has briefly noted, many embrace a textural – and textual – uniformity. In the latter instance, pages, and moreover often double spreads, commit to a particular motif (the bird, the robin, the film star, the dog, and so on). And realizing the former (textural uniformity), they often have recourse to the mass-produced printed image, which as Chapter 3 noted, was made possible via various technologies associated with the Industrial Revolution. Further, with the production of mass-produced, preformed ‘scraps’, the form was indelibly

Figure C.1 Pages from a commonplace book, 1843–4. Photograph: Mary Anne Francis.

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identified with singularity of surface – and relatedly, banality of content, as seen in Chapter 4’s first inside page.2 The scrapbook, which as Chapter 4 also demonstrates is not entirely singular in its pasted surfaces, is nevertheless, often a disingenuous form when its fragments and their distribution across the page suggest a multifariousness which dissolves on close-inspection. Something very different is encountered in the artist’s scrapbook, which by and large embraces the form’s capacity for multifariousness, sometimes riotously so, as in Isa Genzken’s hands. But the pastime scrapbook may not be anomalous in this book’s selection of mixed forms. In many regards, it merely prefigures the lure of digital culture, with its promise of multifariousness which, as Chapter 7 argued, is ultimately subject to the unifying tendencies of its first term. And both underscore the point that forms can masquerade as mixed, further adding to the sense that the practice does not realize its potential. Certainly, when that is so, the better representatives of mixed form in visual culture emerge as the Wunderkammerof-contemporary-phantasy, the broadside ballad, modern art’s assemblage and its artist’s scrapbook. So what transpires by way of narrative, or nugget, thus far, from this motley sample of mixed forms is that there are two strands to this story; perhaps appropriately enough, it is divided. On the one hand, mixed form has a presence in popular, everyday visual culture, in which its mixtures seem to contract in range over time – as emblematized in the turn from the broadside ballad to the chapbook that Chapter 3 narrates. On the other hand, it figures in less popular culture or the culture of the wealthy and more affluent, and here it more obviously realizes its capacity for multifariousness, finding perhaps its fullest expression with the emergence of an avant-garde (art) practice in the twentieth century. Arguably this never makes a truly heteroclitic practice – but perhaps that is impossible. For, as Max Ernst’s description of collage suggests, which was quoted in Chapter 5, and borrows from the Comte de Lautréamont,3 ‘mutually distant realities’, like the sewing machine and umbrella, have to share a plane (even as it is ‘non-suitable’/or a ‘dissecting table’), and as they do, the heteroclite disperses. Which is Foucault’s insight in The Order of Things (Foucault [1966] 1994: xvii).

2

3

Such scraps, which can be seen to represent the management of leisure time by commodity culture via their form and content, also supported découpage – the practice of decorating objects by covering them with cut-out bits of paper. The original phrase is: ‘the fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!’ (Comte de Lautréamont [1943] 1966: 263).

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Labour and mixed form If the narrative around mixed form in visual culture is complicated, as an effect of the different modes involved, then the story around its counterpart in labour, understood as the experience of variety at work, is less so. At least to begin with. For as it appears in Chapters 3, 5 and 7 (informed by Chapter 2), labour, as commodity production, is divided, (or is becoming so, in Chapter 3), to varying degrees; degrees that seem to become greater as time goes on and the dominant experience of work in industrialized societies becomes increasingly estranged around the allocation of more and more singular tasks to individuals.4 In this context,‘the division of labour’ designates its most narrow sense – the distribution of distinct parts of commodity production among different workers. But as Chapter 7 argues, something else happens with the rise of precarity. As the division of labour continues in its ‘detailed’ sense, it starts to disappear at its ‘social’ level. And from a Marxist point of view, which largely holds the social division of labour inviolate, this represents a development that, in some respects ironically, might be just as deleterious as the imposition of the division of labour in the factory. As with culture, so with labour; the outcomes are mixed – and in labour, as in culture, as a matter of degree and quality.

Mixed form in culture and in labour: the relationship In figuring this, or giving the relationship between outcomes described above some kind of form, as a further and near final outcome, there are some hesitations. The conclusions that inform this figure are already nuanced, and the question of how culture, and labour as an aspect of political economy interrelate is a matter of debate in the framework that informs this synopsis: Marxist (aesthetic) theory. This analysis proceeds on the basis of observation: looking at the outcomes from the overviews so far, and comparing them, referred to the breadth of Marxist thought on culture-and-society (when ‘society’ includes political economy) relations, which is schematized in Figure C.2. On which point, a note: this analysis of the relationships between cultural form and forms of labour does not assume that they are consciously wrought by cultural producers, though this qualification may be form-specific. So, it is probable that the ‘choice’ of the chapbook as a form was no such thing on the

4

Fordism may be ‘exceptional’ as a less precarious mode of capitalism, but this does not make it any less estranged.

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part of those who published stories; rather, that it represents a culture’s appropriation of a technological-productive apparatus for the purposes of meeting consumers’ perceived needs. And it is equally probable that Jimmy Durham chose to use assemblage in Still Life with Spirit and Xitle (see Figure I.2) – if not necessarily with any thought of the division of labour. Which prompts another prefatory remark. When the following discussion seeks to understand mixed form as a relationship to particular conditions of labour, it does not assume either that the latter exhausts the signification of the former. As Still Life with Spirit and Xitle might suggest, mixed form signifies in other arenas, such as debates about identity, nationhood and much more.5 And so to the overview of culture–society relations in Marxist theory – at least as this book has mustered those. For the sake of succinctness, I detour via two reviews of books on Marxist aesthetics; reviews that, for reasons of their form, offer pithy summaries of the issues at stake here. So writing on Dave Laing’s The Marxist Theory of Art: an Introductory Survey, Carol C. Gould proposes that Marx’s concept of ‘objectification’ – ‘the distinctively human activity of forming objects in accordance with one’s purposes’ (Gould 1979: 202), allows us to see ‘art’ (and ‘culture’ works as well) as an ‘expression of society and social forces’ and as having a ‘transformative power’, ‘introducing new and imaginative ways of understanding and acting’.6 (In offering the latter, she critiques Laing’s focus on the former.) And this aligns with Gordon Graham’s account of Marxist art theory, also elaborated in a book review (first cited in Chapter 3), which, in introducing other ideas, expands on the terms in Gould’s binary to propose both in their negative, or critical condition. First, Graham allows for the possibility that ‘new and imaginative ways of understanding and acting’ also critique the status quo. (This recalls Marcuse’s idea of art’s ‘better reality’ having both the ‘dimension of affirmation and negation’ such that ‘the world formed by art is recognized as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality’ (Marcuse 1979: 22, 6).) Second, Graham writes that art (and by extension, culture) ‘can also reveal the unreality of the ideological world, showing it to be made up of ideas and images’, so: ‘[i]n this way art inclines to science because it tells us something about the world of capitalism and thereby increases real understanding’ (Graham 1997: 111). This can be seen in those practices that emphasize the representational 5

6

In the light of disputes surrounding Durham’s Cherokee identity, the self-portrait aspect of Still Life with Spirit and Xitle takes on added meaning. Gould then proceeds to complicate this analysis by proposing that ‘even as an expression of society, art is not determined by it, but rather is an imaginative response to it’ (Gould 1979: 202), which seems to look to the idea of relative autonomy, but via terms that, in borrowing from those she uses to describe the ‘other’ to art as an ‘expression of society’, threaten to negate the latter.

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Figure C.2 Diagram showing the possible relationships between culture and ‘reality’ in Marxist theory.c Notes: a As experienced; ‘scientific’ reality is, of course, communism. b Exemplified by, say, Raoul Hausmann’s Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head (see Chapter 5). c Perhaps it goes without saying that this takes Rosalind Krauss’s representation of sculpture in the expanded field as model and for ease of understanding, uses the same terminology (Krauss 1985: 37).

condition of art (e.g. Picasso’s and Braque’s synthetic cubism). Across all these accounts what is constituted is no less than a semiotic square of Marxist cultural critique, which can be laid out as seen in Figure C.2. Such are the possibilities for relations between mixed form in culture and in labour. Preambles over, there is now the matter of the outcomes for this heading: how cultural form relates to labour form around the issue of mixture (and division). In the Wunderkammer, the turn from the broadside ballad to the chapbook, the pastime scrapbook and digital culture, this book has identified a group of practices that in various ways retreat from formal diversity; the Wunderkammer as it seeks to order multifariousness (whether by Renaissance, or more modern means); the chapbook as, in folding up the broadside ballad’s sheet of paper, it cuts the latter’s media in half; the pastime scrapbook as it promises diversity which it seldom offers or, in doing so, in much attenuated form, and in on-screen culture which seems to repeat the scrapbook’s ruse. In each case, the retreat as a refusal of (a broader) heterogeneity can be seen to parallel the reduction that occurs in the individual’s range of labour under manufacture and beyond, though in the case of digital culture this is complicated by the convoluted

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condition of precarious labour. That aside, culture – in the form of its form(s) – replicates (‘presents’) a central feature of the status quo without challenge. Which is to say: it occupies the top-left corner of Figure C.2. And when form (unlike content), often functions below the threshold of the visible, it does powerful, naturalizing work. (Arguably, that is not the case with avant-garde practices in which ‘art is recognized as art’ (Graham 1997: 111).) Indeed, to pursue the instance of the pastime scrapbook, as its superficial diversity aligns the fragment with the homogeneous, it offers a perfect image of the division of labour, tacitly reconciling workers (‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ i.e. persons of all genders) to the rhythm of the same. But as the discussion above notes, there is another trajectory, which consists of a different set of practices, actively embracing the multifarious. These include, in order of encounter, the Wunderkammer in its version as a wish-image, the broadside ballad, assemblage and the artist’s scrapbook. In their formal diversity these counter the increasing singularity of labour as experienced by the worker and effected by capitalism’s ‘rationalization’ of successive modes of production. Formally, they present a ‘better reality’, which also (necessarily, if more implicitly) critiques the status quo – the world in which the opportunity to realize oneself as Marx understands the human is a luxury; thus ‘that revolutionary daring which flings at the adversary the defiant words: I am nothing but I must be everything’ (Marx [1844] 2009, original emphasis).7 And ‘luxury’ perhaps describes the cultural forms – considered as commodities – that recognize this aspect of the human; at least with the exception of the broadside ballad. Cultureas-critique in this regard is identified with practices that do not circulate widely in society, and which as Chapter 5 contended, makes them invisible to those who might find succour in their visions. And this peripheral condition says much about the status of mixed form. (With the broadside ballad, on the other hand, a richly mixed-mode form had mass appeal, and anomalously, in this set of multifarious forms, offered, by analogy, a parallel to less-divided labour – as a lived reality.)

7

Here too, Marx’s much-quoted text on capital as not-being might be cited to make a slightly different point: The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Marx [1844] 1932b, original emphasis

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In all of this, mixed form emerges as both vital and fragile; vital as an analogue for aspects of being-human, and fragile in a world that, in putting profit before people, insists on the monotonous, repetitive and uniform. But if labour in its hegemonic forms in capitalist economies marginalizes non-estranged diversity, culture preserves a sliver of a space for it – for instance in the artist’s scrapbook, especially as that flourishes a rich riot of surfaces conjured from what are often the margins of material–cultural life.

Beyond a synthesis At the start of this Conclusion I stated that the overview just presented would be both a synthesis – and not. In respect of the latter that is not because I aimed to fail; indeed, quite the contrary: I am hoping that the synthesis has some value in a Hegelian sense of offering an integration of two strands of analysis: the discussion of mixed form in culture, and in labour, to produce another figure, as the relation of the two. However, for reason of also seeing a value in moving away from Hegel, I also foresaw that it would not succeed as a ‘synthesis’ construed from another perspective. In the post-Hegelian tradition of dialectical materialism, this point of view is offered by Theodor Adorno’s reworking of Hegel’s dialectics as ‘negative dialectics’. For Adorno, when ‘[t]he name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy’ all syntheses must fail, in a Hegelian sense (Adorno 1973: 5). In other words, the preceding overview is not to be considered as a thesis in a new round of dialectics, but rather seen as a necessarily partial representation. But when this is the case, a larger and more pressing version of this figure looms. For as the overview stands to the book’s content, so the book stands to its subject as a whole. This means there is a question concerning what the remainder to Mixed Forms of Visual Culture comprises, even as that remainder informs another concept which does not completely grasp its object. In other words: what has this book not addressed, which others usefully might?

The remainder In listing the different instances of mixed form in visual culture mentioned by this book, over fifty kinds were noted. Of those, only eight have been presented in

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any detail, suggesting, as already indicated, that as this compilation offers a new focus on aspects of visual culture, only a fraction of the territory has been explored so far. And then, for many of the reasons mentioned in the Introduction (including the idea of ‘sensory ratio’), mixed form is clearly not specific to the visual realm and therefore provides an approach to analysing all cultural practices. This substantially increases the reach of the concept – and of further work that might be done. As discussion above has suggested, this research could take a more systematic turn, in being concerned with a typology of mixed forms; no less than questions of how different kinds of matter and its structuring are distributed in the various signifying axes of cultural practice, which as Chapter 1 proposed, are axes of selection and combination. In detail, this might consider, for example, questions of the join – as the point where mixture (really) signifies, and such work would be well resourced by a theoretical literature that includes Roland Barthes (1975) on the seam, Gayatri Spivak (2012) on the copula, and Gilles Deleuze (1993) on the fold. Equally, if turning away from the emphasis on formalist analysis that has dominated this book, further work could concern itself with the intersection between mixed form and content, enabling a richer engagement with issues of cultural diversity and cultural hybridity, and the understanding of practices in which such forms thematize content and vice versa – as happens in Fred Wilson’s art, for instance. And finally, there is the issue of form–content relations as they might be realized by the very texts discussing such. This is a question of poetics, or aesthetics (noting that they are not the same);8 something that this book has sought to invoke in involving the visual essay as well as other formal interruptions such as a chapter comprising largely quotations; thereby offering itself as an (academic) instance of mixed form in visual culture. The richness of mixed form is also that its forms collectively comprise a mixture. And if the mix is sometimes strange, as well as rich, that is no less vital to the projects that this book has indicated, not the least of which is realizing the variousness, in cultural form and work, of being-human.

8

In The Resistance to Theory (de Man 1986: 9–10) and building on Hegel’s theory of art, Paul de Man argues for a distinction between ‘aesthetics’ as ‘motivated’ and ‘the poetic function’ as unmotivated i.e. oriented to the material and ideal respectively. The tension between the two – aesthetics and poetics – comes into play especially in relation to mixed forms that involve the visual and the verbal.

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Index Page references for images are in italics. abstraction, 119 accessibility of assemblage, to producers, 128 of culture, 73–5, 83 of digital culture, 175–7 of diversity, 144–5 of mixed form, 196 Ades, Dawn, 120 Adorno, Theodor, 205 aemulatio (likeness through reflection), 32 aesthetics, 206 of form, 7–9 Hegelian, 7–10, 9n.4 Marxist, 98–100, 201–5, 203 primary, 53 Reception, 93 agency, 136–9 of workers, 70–1 Age of Discovery, 24–5 alienation, 176 and labour, 65, 65n.31, 65n.33, 191–3, 201, 201n.4 Alves Fernandes, Luís Miguel, 176 analogy, 32, 44 See also metaphor Anderson, Patricia, 74–5, 76, 77, 78–9, 79n.4, 87–8, 96 apportionment, 53–4 AR. See augmented reality architecture, 14–15 of Wunderkammer, 38, 46–7 archives, 86, 91–3, 169 broadside ballads, 84, 85 chapbooks, 91, 92–3, 92n.12, 93n.14, 94n.16 Arellano, Jerónimo, 20–1, 24, 25, 30–1, 195–6 Aristotle, Poetics, 2 Arman (Armand Fernandez), Martèlement répétitif, 124, 143

Arnold, Joseph, The Cabinet of the Dimpfel Family in Regensburg, 33 art under capitalism, 145 life, fusion with, 128, 140, 173–4 painting, 5–7, 8, 9, 12, 116–17 photography, 9, 9n.4, 12, 169 reality, reflection of, 99–100 self-critical, 116, 140 See also assemblage; collage; culture; digital culture; modernism; montage; print culture; visual culture art brut, 128 artist’s scrapbooks, 21, 149–68, 200, 204 Genzken, Isa Mach dich hübsch!, 166–7 Höch, Hannah, Album, 160–1 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 156–9 Squires, Eddie, Book No. 7, 162–3 Trevelyan, Julian, 152–5 Wicker, Jean-Michel, Novolino, 164–5 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition, MoMA NY, 1961), 119, 124–5, 127–8, 135 Ashby, Jack, 30 Ashton, John, 87, 91, 91n.10, 96 assemblage, 18, 117, 118, 119–45, 196–8 accessibility of, to producers, 128 arrangement methods in, 136–9 and the avant-garde, 140 vs. collage, 125, 126 combination in, 133, 135–9 component forms in, 133–4 definitions of, 123–6, 126n.7 dimensionality of, 123–4 diversity in, 124–6, 204 Duchamp, Marcel Bicycle Wheel, 132, 132n.13–14, 140 Fountain, 132–3, 140, 198 Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy, 123

219

220 early works of, 128–33 exhibition as, 134, 135 glue and joins in, 139 Hausmann, Raoul, Spirit of the Age, 144, 144, 145, 203 Kienholz, Edward, John Doe, 144, 145 labour of, 135–6 materials of, 124–6, 128 as mixed form, 126, 132–4 vs. mixed reality, 182 modularity, 192n.14 Picasso, Pablo The Bathers (1956), 124, 125 Guitare (1912), 130–2, 130 Still Life (1914), 123 Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), 129–30, 129 and queer modernism, 140 scholarship on, 126–8 Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau, 123, 134, 134 singularity of medium in, 124, 125 Surrealist, 137–8 assembly islands, 189, 193 assembly lines, 141–3, 189 augmented reality (AR), 171–9, 171, 172, 173, 180, 181–2 augmented virtuality (AV), 172–9, 172, 173, 177, 180, 181–2 automatism, psychic, 137–9 autonomy, 71n.51, 140, 144, 202n.6 textual, 93 AV. See augmented virtuality avant-garde, 119, 140, 144, 174, 200 Bailey, Stephanie, 173n.3 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 14 Barthes, Roland, 138, 206 beauty, 100, 128 Beavan, Iain, 77, 88–90, 92–3 Beech, Dave, 188–9, 190 Benjamin, Walter, 3 Berger, John, 50 Ways of Seeing, 21 Besler, Basilius, 36, 40–1, 41, 45 blends. See mixtures bodies deformation of, through division of labour, 67

Index digital culture, involvement with, 176–7, 177 extremities of, 24 metaphors of, 68, 68n.40 wearable technology, 176, 178, 179, 179, 180–1, 185n.10 workers as parts of, 57, 57n.6 boredom. See monotony Borges, Jorge Luis, 30–1, 175 Bostrom, Nick, 183 Braque, Georges, 119 Breton, André, 137 broadside ballads, 18, 79–86, 93n.13, 95, 203–4 The bleeding lovers lamentation, 81 The Easter wedding, 81 The noble gallant, 82 The passionate damsel, 82 Broadside Ballads Online (Bodleian Library), 84 broadsides, 77–83, 77, 78, 79n.4, 80, 85n.7 Brueghel, Jan (the Elder), The Sense of Sight, 33, 34 Bryson, Norman, 17 Bürger, Peter, 140 Bürgi, Marlene A., 32–3 Burke, Peter, 15 cabaret, 18 cabinet of curiosities. See Wunderkammer Calzolari, Francesco, 36, 42–5, 43 capitalism, 15, 16 art’s function under, 145 mercantile, 24–5 through division of labour, 65, 65n.30 See also labour Cardiff, Janet, Missing Voice (Case Study B), 178, 180 carnival, 3, 18 Carrier, David, 29 chance, 30, 136–7, 136n.16 change of activity, in labour, 66, 66n.36 discontinuity, 15, 16, 117, 137–8 social, 190 through digitization, 186–7 chapbooks, 18, 77–8, 86–97, 198, 203 Fortunate weaver’s uprise, 90 Goodes Infant’s Instructor, 95

Index History of John Cheap, 89 K. James 1st. and the tinker, 88 The Lamp-lighter, 91 Pilgrim’s Progress, 92, 92n.12, 92 Cherchi, Paolo, 14 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 3 choice. See selection Cohen, Nicole S., 191 collage, 14–15, 117, 121–3, 127, 129, 139 vs. assemblage, 125, 126 definitions of, 121–2, 136 diversity in, 121–2 Ernst, Max, Une semaine de bonté, 121, 121 Hausmann, Raoul, The Art Critic, 117, 118, 118 papier collé, 122–3 revolutionary quality of, 122–3 colonialism, 20–1, 24–5, 50, 64 and division of labour, 64, 64n.29 colour, 150, 151 combination, 206 in assemblage, 133, 135–9 digital/real, 181–2 grammar of, 198 See also joins commonplace books, 199, 199 conjunctions. See joins consciousness, 137–9, 192 consistency, 3, 136, 137 consumption of print culture individual, 94, 95–7 social, 85, 85n.7, 93–4 of visual culture, 196 content of chapbooks, 94n.16 diversity of, 193 form, relationship with, 2, 7, 206 of print culture, 87 See also imagery continuity, lack of, 15, 16, 117, 137–8 convenientia (likeness by virtue of adjacency), 32 co-operation, 59, 59n.13, 67, 68, 98n.20 Cospi, Ferdinando, 24, 37, 42, 44–5, 44 Cubism, 117, 129 Cubitt, Sean, 187–8 culture

221

accessibility of, 73–5, 83 definitions of, 18 and division of labour, 19 high, 73, 73n.1, 115, 200 individuated, 97–8 liberating possibilities of, 99–100 political work of, 202–3 popular, 73–7, 96, 97–8, 200 reality, relationships with, 202–3, 203 Western, 20–1 See also art; digital culture; literary culture; print culture; visual culture curiosities, cabinet of. See Wunderkammer curiosity, 24 Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage (exhibition, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2019), 129 Dada, 119, 128, 134, 135, 136–7, 198 Defehrt, A. J., 55 Deleuze, Gilles, 126n.7, 206 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 4, 76n.2 de Sepi, Giorgio, Das Kircher-Museum, 37, 47, 49, 49n.6 desire, 50 detail labour, 57–70, 57n.6–7, 58n.9, 60n.21, 62n.24, 68n.40, 72, 192 details, 28, 33, 35 Dezeuze, Anna, 124–5, 127–8, 135 dialectical materialism, 7, 205 dialectics, 7, 58n.8, 195 aesthetic, 117 negative, 205 Diderot, Denis, Encyclopédie, 55 différance, 4 difference, 4, 12, 16, 140 and order, 50–1 in production, 64, 66n.36 See also diversity; multifariousness digital culture, 18, 35, 169–93, 200 accessibility of, 175–7 Apple Retina Display, 185, 185n.8 augmented reality (AR), 171–9, 171, 172, 173, 180, 181–2 augmented virtuality (AV), 172–9, 172, 173, 177, 180, 181–2 cost of, 176

222

Index

digitization, 184–6 discretization, 184–5 distribution of, 170–4 diversity, retreat from, 203–4 division of labour in, 188–93 Google Nose (April Fool), 178 haptic gloves, 176, 179, 179, 180 head-up display, 180, 180 and labour, 192–3 layers, cultural/computing, 184 as medium/media, 186–8 Microsoft HoloLens (smartglasses), 178 mixed form in, 169–70, 172–86 mixed reality, 172–84, 173, 188 vs. assemblage, 182 digitality in, 179–82 joins in, 181–2 and materiality, 174–9 media of, 181 provisionality of, 183–4 scope of, 174–7 sensory dimension of, 177–9 modularity, 186 non-digital reality, 170, 173 Open Source, 176–7 overlays in, 181–2 as pastime scrapbook, 187–8 physical turn of, 170–1 pixelation, 185 technical infrastructure of, 173n.3, 175, 176, 180–1 ubiquitous computing, 170, 177, 183, 185, 188 virtual reality (VR), 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 180, 183 wearable technology, 176, 178, 179, 179, 180–1, 185n.10 as Wunderkammer, 169, 186–8, 200 digitality and augmented virtuality (AV), 176 cultural consequences of, 186 and mixed reality, 179–82 reality of, 173n.3, 174 dimensionality of assemblage, 123–4 of form, 116–17, 122, 123 of ground, 133 disarray, 30–1, 35, 38, 39–42, 73

discontinuity, 15, 16, 117, 137–8 disorder, 30–1, 35, 38, 39–42, 73 display digital, 180, 180, 185, 185n.8 in Wunderkammer, 27–31, 28, 40–4 mixed systems of, 45 shelves, 38, 39, 41, 42–3, 45 distribution of digital culture, 170–4 in division of labour, 60 of print culture, 83, 86 of the sensible, 53–4, 54n.1, 57n.4, 70n.49, 99, 132 disunity, 3, 4, 117 diversity, 4, 16 accessibility of, 144–5 in assemblage, 124–6, 204 in collage, 121–2 of content, 193 in digital culture, 203–4 embrace of, 204–5 of experience, 144–5 experiential, 66 of labour, 70–1, 70n.49–50, 190–3 loss of, 60, 60n.21, 61, 61n.22 of materials, 124–6 reduction in, 188 through division of labour, 60, 60n.21, 61, 61n.22 through form, 95–6 through individuation, 98–9 retreat from, 203–4 of skill, 191 in Wunderkammer, 26–7, 31, 204 See also hybridity Douglas, Mary, 4 Dronke, Peter, 14 Dryden, John, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, 3–4 Ducasse, Isidore Lucien (Comte de Lautréamont), 200, 200n.3 Duchamp, Marcel Bicycle Wheel, 132, 132n.13–14, 140 Fountain, 132–3, 140, 198 Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy, 123 Durham Jimmie, Still Life with Spirit and Xitle, 5, 6, 9–10, 10n.5, 202, 202n.5

Index Ekman, Ulrich, 170, 173, 178, 182 Elderfield, John, 127 Endt, Marion, 31 Engels, Friedrich, 19, 54, 55, 72, 97–8 The German Ideology, 54, 56, 63n.26 on labour, 70, 70–1, 191 metaphor, use of, 57n.6 English Broadside Ballad Archive (University of California at Santa Barbara), 85 engraving method, 49 episteme Classical, 32, 33 organization of, 32–3 Renaissance, 32–3, 38, 44 Ernst, Max, 121, 137, 200 Une semaine de bonté, 121, 121 estrangement, 176 and labour, 65, 65n.31, 65n.33, 191–3, 201, 201n.4 exoticism, 24 fairs, 3, 18, 74–5 figure in engraving, 49 and ground, 49, 172, 199 in scrapbooks, 199 film, 18, 120, 120 Fiori, Cesare, Galleria Settala, 36, 41–2, 42 First International Dada Fair (Berlin, 1920), 134, 135 Fisher, Mark, 190 flatness, 116–17 Florman, Lisa, 116, 122, 123 folk art, 128 Folland, Tom, 140 Ford, Henry, 141 Fordism, 141–3, 145, 188–92, 201n.4 form content, relationship with, 2, 7, 206 diversity restricted by, 95–6 Hegel’s philosophy of, 7–9 of history, 195–6 ideal, 2 medium, relationship with, 8–10, 11, 12 meta/containing, 9, 26–7 naturalizing work of, 204 political economy, relationship with, 50–1

and production, 192–3 pure, 11, 12 and screens, 182–6 selection, 201–2 three-dimensional, 122, 123 two-dimensional, 116–17 typologies of, 8, 133–4 See also mixed form Foster, Hal, 50, 127 Foucault, Michel, 30–3, 200 The Order of Things, 31–3 found objects, 126 Fra’ gli Accademici Gelati il Fedele, Museo Cospiano, 37, 44 fragmentation and collage, 121, 122 of order, 30 of reality, 126 through division of labour, 67–8, 196 See also scrapbooks Franc, Helen, 135 freedom, 176–7 lack of, 69, 192 Fumerton, Patricia, 85 Gehl, Robert, 169, 187 gender, 56 Genzken, Isa, 200 Mach dich hübsch!, 166–7 Gill, Rosalind, 190 Global Positioning System (GPS), 176, 181–2 glue, 122–3, 139 Goltz, Hubertus, 27–8 Gooding, Mel, 138–9 Gould, Carol C., 202, 202n.6 Goussier, Louis-Jacques, 55 GPS. See Global Positioning System Graham, Gordon, 7, 99–100, 202 Gramsci, Antonio, 142, 143, 189 Greenberg, Clement, 116–17, 122–3, 140 Gris, Juan, 117 ground and figure, 49, 172, 199 in scrapbooks, 199 three-dimensional, 133 Guattari, Félix, 126n.7

223

224

Index

handicraft, 57–61, 58n.12 Handy, Charles, 190 Harper’s Bazaar (journal), 2–3 Harwood, Graham, Mongrel, My Dad, Hogarth, for Uncomfortable Proximity, 170, 187 Hausmann, Raoul The Art Critic, 117, 118 Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head, 144, 144, 145, 203 Heartfield, John, 120 Hebb, Judith, 14 Hegel, G.W.F., 7–10, 76n.2, 205, 206n.8 Lectures on Aesthetics, 7–10, 9n.4 Herms, George, 127 heteroclite, 30–1, 40, 200 heterogeneity embrace of, 204–5 of manufacture, 61–2, 62n.24 retreat from, 203–4 of Wunderkammer, 50–1 See also diversity; multifariousness heteroglossia, 3, 14 Hindley, Charles, 78, 79, 84 Hinsley, Curtis M., 3 Höch, Hannah, 187 Album, 160–1 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 93 Hollein, Hans, 14–15 homogeneity of labour, 142–3 of screen media, 187, 193 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 43–4 Huang, George Q., 189 Hughes, Kathryn, 30 Hughes, Michael, 78 hybridity cultural, 15, 197 digital forms of, 172 material, 5 modernist, 115–16, 115n.1, 127 IKEA room planner, 171, 171 imagery, 16, 18 in chapbooks, 89–90, 90–2 deprivation of, 74–5 in digital culture, 177–8, 181, 185 in discourse analysis, 31 pixelation, 185

in print culture, 76–7 religious, 83 See also metaphor Imperato, Ferrante, 29, 37, 45, 46 Dell’Historia Naturale, 37, 46 imperialism, 20–1, 24–5 and division of labour, 64, 64n.29 individuation in digital culture, 184, 187–8 diversity, reduction of, 98–9 through division of labour, 97–8 industrialization, 100, 199–200 labour in, 141–5, 142, 189, 201 production in, 54, 57, 58–61, 59n.17, 61–2 Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, 15, 16 Johnson, Samuel, 4 joins, 13, 122–3, 197, 206 in assemblage, 139 glue, 122–3, 139 in mixed reality, 181–2 seams, 134, 140, 206 juxtaposition, 120, 136, 138 Kienholz, Edward, John Doe, 144, 145 Kircher, Athanasius, 37, 46–7, 47, 49, 49n.6 Kirkham, Francis, 94 Kishino, Fumio, 172–3, 183 knowledge, 38, 44 organization of, 32–3 (see also taxonomy) Krauss, Rosalind, 12n.7, 127, 203 Kunstkammer/Kunstschrank (art chamber), 23 labour of assemblage, 135–6 compound manual, 58, 58n.12, 60n.21 and digital culture, 192–3 diversity of, 70–1, 70n.49–50, 190–3, 205 division of, 18–19, 51, 54–72, 201 being, deformation of, 67 and colonialism, 51, 64, 64n.29 definitions of, 57–8, 57n.2, 63–4

Index detail labour, 57–67, 57n.6–7, 58n.9, 60n.21, 62n.24, 68n.40, 72, 192 in digital culture, 188–93 diversity, loss of, 60, 60n.21, 61, 61n.22 emergence, 58–62 and enslavement, 69 estrangement, 65, 65n.31, 65n.33, 191–3, 201, 201n.4 as event, 57n.4 experience of, 66–70 individuation, 97–8 kinds of, 63–5 as limitation, 68 mechanization of men, 65, 65n.34, 66–7 as mixed form, 17, 54, 71–2 and mortality rates, 69 reduction in, 67–8, 142–3 as specialization, 68 stupidity, productive of, 69 and time, 66, 68 uniformity, 145 value of, 63n.26 flexible employment, 190–2 Fordism, 141–3, 145, 188–92 homogeneity of, 142–3 industrial, 141–5, 142, 189, 201 and modernism, 141–5 multiskilled, 191 portfolio careers, 190–1 post-Fordism, 188–92 precarious, 70, 188–90, 201 productive vs. unproductive, 18n.10, 70–1 rights, 190 undivided, 54, 70–2, 70n.49 Laing, Dave, 202 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), 200, 200n.3 Lewer, Debbie, 123, 125–6, 127 likeness. See similitude linkage. See joins Lissitzky, El, 120 literacy, 83, 93–4 literary culture mixed form in, 14, 195 poetics, 2, 206 poetry, 4, 14 prosimetra (mixed prose and verse), 14

225

reading, 83, 93–4, 94n.16 See also broadside ballads; broadsides; chapbooks Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6, 177, 177 MacGregor, Arthur, 27–8, 30, 35, 39, 43, 73 Man, Paul de, 206n.8 Manovich, Lev, 183–6, 192–3 manufacture, 50–1, 54–5, 55, 57–64, 58n.8–9, 59n.17 heterogenous, 61–2, 62n.23 serial, 61, 62, 62n.24 Marcuse, Herbert, 100, 145, 202 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 20–1, 30–1 Marx, Karl, 19, 54–72 Capital, 55, 56 dialectical materialism, 7, 205 on division of labour being, deformation of, 67 definitions of, 57–8 and enslavement, 69 estrangement, 65, 65n.31, 65n.33, 191–3, 201, 201n.4 experience of, 66–70 individuation, 97–8 kinds of, 63–5 as limitation, 68 manufacture in, 58–63 mechanization of men, 66–7 and mortality rates, 69 reduction in, 67–8 as specialization, 68 stupidity, productive of, 69 and time, 66, 68 uniformity, 145 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 56 The German Ideology, 54, 56, 63n.26 on luxury, 204, 204n.7 on manufacture, 50–1 on mercantile capital, 24–5 metaphor, use of, 57n.6, 59n.14–16, 60n.19, 62n.24, 66n.35, 67–8, 68n.40–41 on multifarious labour, 70, 191 and Rancière, Jacques, 54n.1, 60n.18 on undivided labour, 70–1

226

Index

März, Roland, 123–4, 126, 127, 139 materialism, dialectical, 7, 205 materialism, historical, 55 materiality, 197–8 of chapbooks, 88–90 hybrid, 5 of mixed form, 197–200 and mixed reality, 174–9 of prose, 62n.23 and the Wunderkammer, 25 materials of assemblage, 124–6, 128 diversity of, 124–6 waste, 128 Mauriès, Patrick, 196 McGill Library Chapbook Collection (online resource), 91 McLuhan, Marshall, 11–12, 13 mechanization of men/workers, 65, 65n.34, 66–7, 142–3 medium/media definitions of, 10–11 difference between, 12 digital culture as, 186–8 form, relationship with, 8–10, 11, 12 of joins, 123, 139 meta-medium, 186, 188 mixed-media, 9–10, 11, 117 of mixed reality, 181 multimedia, 11, 85, 95, 186–7 paint, 5–7, 9, 12 post-medium, 12, 12n.7 power relations between, 11–12 pure forms of, 11, 12 singularity of, in assemblage, 124, 125 typologies of, 133–4 visuality of, 10–13 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 14 metaphor of the body, 68, 68n.40 Marx & Engels’ use of, 57n.6, 59n.14–16, 60n.19, 62n.24, 66n.35, 67–8, 68n.40–41 methodology, 17–21, 206 content analysis, 35–8, 46, 49 discourse analysis, 29–31, 35, 38 formalist analysis, 197–200 quotation, 19, 56 visual essays, 21, 101–14, 147–68, 198–9

Milgram, Paul, 172–3, 183 Minelli, Laura Laurencich, 43 Miró, Jean, Object, 138 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 17, 73n.1 Mitchell, W.J.T., 116n.2, 174, 177, 187 ‘There Are No Visual Media’, 10–13 mixed form accessibility of, 196 assemblage as, 126, 132–4 categories of, 17, 205–6 definitions, 5–7, 9–10, 12–13 in digital culture, 169–70, 172–86 and division of labour, 66, 66n.36, 71–2, 201–5 existing scholarship on, 13–17 as field of study, 196–7 and high culture, 73, 115 illusory, 200 literary, 14, 195 (see also broadside ballads; broadsides; chapbooks) materialities of, 197–200 and modernism, 115–19, 126, 132–4, 140 in order/disarray, 39–42 post-Fordism as, 190–1 print culture as, 77, 83–6, 92–5 screens, enabled by, 186 syntagmatic expression of, 27 typologies of, 84, 206 See also assemblage; digital culture; print culture; scrapbooks; Wunderkammer mixed-media, 9–10, 11 mixed reality, 172–84, 173, 188 vs. assemblage, 182 digitality in, 179–82 joins in, 181–2 and materiality, 174–9 media of, 181 provisionality of, 183–4 scope of, 174–7 sensory dimension of, 177–9 mixture, 1–5, 12–13, 197–9, 206 combination in assemblage, 133, 135–9 digital/real, 181–2 grammar of, 198 form’s relation to, 13 grammar of, 181

Index motley, 2–3, 187 negative reception of, 1–4 positive qualities of, 4 theory of modernism as, 116 See also diversity ; hybridity ; multifariousness modernism, 115–45 autonomy of, 140, 144 avant-garde, 119, 140, 144, 174, 200 Cubism, 117, 129 Dada, 119, 128, 134, 135, 136–7, 198 definitions of, 115–17 forms, distinction between, 133–4 hybrid forms in, 115–16, 115n.1, 127 and mixed form, 115–19, 126, 132–4, 140 as mixture, 116 and modern labour, 141–5 in painting, 116–17 postmodernism, 14–16 queer, 140 readymades, 132, 132n.14, 140 revolutionary quality of, 122–3 See also assemblage; collage; montage modularity, 186, 192n.14 monotony, 66, 66n.36, 142–3, 191 montage, 117–21 photomontage, 119, 120 Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera, 120, 120 Motherwell, Robert, 118, 138–9 motley, 187 in costume, 2–3 multifariousness of action, 66n.36 criticism of, 3 embrace of, 204–5 of form, 133–4 of labour, 70, 70n.49–50, 190–3 retreat from, 203–4 of scrapbooks, 200, 204 of the Wunderkammer, 29, 41, 49–51 multimedia, 11, 85, 95, 186–7 Museum of Modern Art New York, The Art of Assemblage (exhibition, 1961), 119, 124–5, 127–8, 135 museums, 30, 45, 46, 73 See also Wunderkammer music video, 18

227

National Library of Scotland chapbook archive, 92–3, 92n.12, 93n.14, 94n.16 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1 Neilson, Brett, 188, 190 Neuburg, Victor, 76n.3, 86–7, 89, 90 Nevelson, Louise, 124 Nye, David, 143 October (journal), 17, 116, 127 opera, 18 Oppenheim, Meret, Object, 137, 198 order, 31–3 vs. disarray, 39–42 in labour, 68 permutation, 198 of Wunderkammer, 31–2, 48–51 absence of, 30–1, 38, 39–42 attempts at, 39, 41–2 Classical, 45 and difference, 50–1 micro-symmetry in, 43–5 perspective, reinforced by, 50 practicalities, contingent on, 39–41 varieties of, 44 visual patterns of, 43–5 visual representations of, 49–50 See also taxonomy outsider art, 128 Paik, Nam June, 16, 16n.8 painting, 5–7, 8, 9, 12, 116–17 Palmer, Roy, 85 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 156–9 Papagiannis, Helen, 178 pastime scrapbooks, 21, 103–14, 187–8, 196, 198–200, 203–4 Paston Treasure, 28, 28 Paston Treasure, The (anonymous painting), 28 Penny Magazine, 87–8 performance, 85 permutation, 198 perspective, visual, 49–50 Phillips, John, 126n.7 photography, 9, 9n.4, 12, 169 photomontage, 119, 120 Picasso, Pablo, 119, 127, 203 The Bathers (1956), 124, 125

228 Guitare (1912), 130–2, 130 Mandolin and Clarinet (1913-14), 130–2, 131 Still Life (1914), 123 Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), 129–30, 129 Plato, 2, 54–5, 71n.52 play, 40–1 poetics, 2, 206 poetry, 4, 14 See also broadside ballads; chapbooks Pokémon Go (game), 171 political economy cultural form, relationship with, 50–1 on division of labour, 18–19 See also labour pollution, 4, 5 post-Fordism, 188–92 Post-Lauria, Sheila, 13, 14 post-medium, 12, 12n.7 postmodernism, 14–16 precarity, 70, 188–90, 201, 204 print culture, 18, 73–100 advertising bills, 76, 78 broadside ballads, 18, 79–86, 81–2, 93n.13, 95, 203–4 archives, 84, 85 The bleeding lovers lamentation, 81 The Easter wedding, 81 The noble gallant, 82 The passionate damsel, 82 broadsides, 77–83, 77, 78, 79n.4, 80, 85n.7 catchpenny prints, 76n.3 chapbooks, 18, 77–8, 86–97, 198, 203 archives, 91, 92–3, 92n.12, 93n.14, 94n.16 Fortunate weaver’s uprise, 90 Goodes Infant’s Instructor, 95 History of John Cheap, 89 K. James 1st. and the tinker, 88 The Lamp-lighter, 91 Pilgrim’s Progress, 92, 92n.12, 92 consumption of individual, 94 social, 85, 85n.7, 93–4 cost of, 79n.4 decorative motifs, 84–5, 93, 93n.14 distribution, 83, 86

Index ephemerality of, 95 illustrations, 75, 77 layout/design, 79, 86, 89 magazines, 87–8 manicules, 76, 77, 79 as mixed form, 77, 83–6, 92–5 murder and execution sheets, 79 musical notation in, 84–5, 93, 93n.14 narrative in, 84 news bills, 76 penny prints, 76, 78–9, 79n.4 and popular culture, 74–7 race bills, 76, 77 technology of, 75, 83, 87–8 text/image ratio in, 79, 83, 84, 90–2, 198 variable content of, 87 woodcuts, 75, 76, 78–9, 84 Wunderkammer in, 26, 28–9, 31, 33–5, 49–50 production, 203–4 and chapbooks, 94–5 and cultural form, 192–3 difference in, 63–5, 66n.36 industrial, 54, 57, 58–60, 59n.17, 61–2 labour-capital relations in, 191 mass, 141, 189, 199–200 means of, 58, 58n.11, 191 non-specific, 70–1 social, 63–4, 63n.26, 67 vs. unproductive labour, 18n.10, 70–1 prosimetra (mixed prose and verse), 14 Prug, Toni, 176–7 Qin, Wei, 189 queer theory, 1n.2, 140 Quiccheberg, Samuel, 30 Rancière, Jacques, 53–4, 54n.1, 60n.18 randomness, 30, 136–7, 136n.16 rariteitenkabinet. See Wunderkammer Rauschenberg, Robert Combines, 136, 140 Monogram, 124, 134, 136 Read, Jason, 54n.1 reading, 83, 93–4, 94n.16 readymades, 132, 132n.14, 140 reality art’s reflection of, 99–100

Index auditory, 178 ‘better’, through culture, 100, 202, 203, 204 culture, relationships with, 202–3, 203 of digitality, 173n.3 metaphysical vs. material, 14 mixed, 172–86, 173, 188 vs. assemblage, 182 digitality in, 179–82 joins in, 181–2 and materiality, 174–6, 178 media of, 181 provisionality of, 183–4 scope of, 174–7 sensory dimension of, 177–9 non-digital, 170, 173 See also augmented reality; virtual reality reflection, 193 aemulatio (likeness through), 32 cultural practice as, 70n.49, 99–100 of status quo, 19, 50 Remps, Domenico, Cabinet of Curiosities, 33, 34 Renaissance episteme, 32–3, 38, 44 repetition, 124, 143 representation, 202 of order, 49–50 of status quo, 99, 204 of surface, 49 of workers, 94n.16 of Wunderkammer, 26, 28–9, 31, 33–5, 49–50 reproduction, 79, 91n.10, 120, 180, 199 resemblance. See similitude Richter, Gerhard, Overpainted Photographs, 5–7, 6, 9, 9n.4, 12, 198 Robertson, Bruce, 30 Rodia, Simon, 128 Rose, Gillian, 29 Rosler, Martha, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 5 Rossiter, Ned, 188, 190 Rubens, Peter Paul, The Sense of Sight, 33, 34 Rugoff, Ralph, 5 sameness. See homogeneity

229

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 27 Schatzkammer (treasure chamber), 23 Schulz, Friedrich Wilhelm, 58, 69 Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau, 123, 134, 134 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage (exhibition, 2019), 129 scrapbooks, 18, 88n.8 artist’s, 21, 149–68, 200, 204 Genzken, Isa Mach dich hübsch!, 166–7 Höch, Hannah, Album, 160–1 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 156–9 Squires, Eddie, Book No. 7, 162–3 Trevelyan, Julian, 152–5 Wicker, Jean-Michel, Novolino, 164–5 ground in, 199 multifariousness of, 200, 204 pastime, 21, 103–14, 187–8, 196, 198–200, 203–4 surface in, 187 See also commonplace books screens, 169, 174, 180–1 and form, 182–6 as medium/media, 186–8 mixed form, enabled by, 186 and pixelation, 185 texture of, 185–6 Screti, Zoe, 2 Seitz, William, 119, 127, 135 on assemblage methods, 124–5, 126, 136–8 on Dada collages, 121 on materials, 128 on Picasso, 129–30 selection, 27, 136, 189, 197–8, 206 of examples, 17–18, 200 of form, 201–2 self-criticism, 116, 140 senses in digital culture, 176, 179, 179 hearing, 85, 178, 181 mixed reality and, 177–9 sensory ratios, 11–12, 206 smell, 178 taste, 178, 181 touch, 176, 179, 179 See also visuality

230

Index

sensible, 100 distribution of the, 53–4, 54n.1, 57n.4, 70n.49, 99, 132 factory of the, 54 sensory ratios, 11–12, 206 Settala, Manfredo, 36, 41–2, 42, 46, 49n.6 Shepard, Leslie, 75, 76, 84, 86, 87 signifier/signified, 32, 127 similitude, 4n.3, 32–3, 38 aemulatio (likeness through reflection), 32 analogy, 32, 44 convenientia (likeness by virtue of adjacency), 32 sympathy, 32 simulation argument, 183 singularity of medium, in assemblage, 124, 125 of surface, 199–200 slavery, 28, 28 smell, 178 Smith, Adam, 55, 56, 69 sound, 85, 178, 181 spectators, 16, 74, 119, 144–5, 175–6, 185n.9 speech, 178 Spivak, Gayatri, 206 Spufford, Margaret, 74, 77–8, 83, 86, 87, 93–5 Squires, Eddie, Book No. 7, 162–3 Stafford, Thomas F., 186 standardization, 141 status quo cultural critique of, 19, 50, 202, 203 representation of, 99, 204 Steinberg, Leo, 123 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 14 Stiegler, Bernard, 184–5 Stirn, Georg Christoph, 26–7 subjectivity, 65, 65n.34, 66–8 surface, 9 and flatness, 116–17 representation of, 49 in scrapbooks, 187 singularity of, 199–200 See also screens Surrealism, 137–8, 198 Miró, Jean, Object, 138 Oppenheim, Meret, Object, 137, 198

sympathy, 32 synthesis, 195, 205 taste (sensory), 178, 181 Tate Gallery, 117 Taunton, Matthew, 75 taxonomy, 30, 31, 39, 40, 50, 187 Classical, 38, 45 Taylor, Frederick, 143 Taylorism, 143 technology infrastructure, 173n.3, 175, 176, 180–1 of print culture, 75, 83, 87–8 wearable, 176, 178, 179, 179, 180–1, 185n.10 Temkin, Ann, 124 text autonomy of, 93 image, relationship with, 79, 83, 84, 90–2, 120, 198 materiality of, 62n.23 texture, 9 of broadside ballads, 84 diversity, loss of, 97 of experience, 45, 72, 145 and pattern, 45 of screens, 183, 184, 185–6, 187 uniformity of, 199 theatre, 18 Thiel, Tamiko, Reign of Gold, 175–6, 175 Tinnell, John, 184–5 touch, 176, 179 Tradescant, John, 26–7, 28–9, 196 Trevelyan, Julian, 152–5 Troschel, Hans (the Younger), Fascicvlvs Rariorvm, 36, 40–1, 41 truth, 14, 79, 99 typologies aesthetic, 123 of division of labour, 63–4, 63n.25 of form, 8, 133–4 of media, 133–4 of mixed form, 84, 206 Ulmer, Gregory, 118–19, 119n.4, 120 unconscious, 137–9 uniformity, 68 in division of labour, 145

Index of texture, 199 See also homogeneity unity, 2, 3 lack of, 3, 4, 117 University of Tokyo, Meta Cookie, 178 Vaughan, William, 180, 185n.9, 186 Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera, 120, 120 viewers, 16, 74, 119, 144–5, 175–6, 185n.9 Virno, Paolo, 190 virtual reality (VR), 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 180, 183 visual culture definitions of, 17–18, 18n.9 details, 28, 33, 35 flatness in, 116–17 and pleasure, 95 workers’ experiences of, 74–6 See also digital culture Visual Culture (journal), 17 visual essays, 21, 101–14, 147–68, 198–9 visuality of digital culture, 174, 181 of medium/media, 10–13 perspective, 49–50 voice, 178 VR. See virtual reality Waldman, Diane, 127 Warburg, Aby, Mnemosyne Atlas, 21 Watson, Daniel, 141–3 West, Eliza, 24, 31 Wicker, Jean-Michel, Novolino, 164–5 Wilde, Jacob de, 37, 47, 48 Wilde, Maria de, Peter the Great visiting the Museum Wildianum, 47, 48 Wilks, Timothy, 28 Williams, Abigail, 85, 93–4 Williams, Raymond, 10, 11, 18 Wilson, Fred, 206 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 2 Wolfram, Eddie, 129 woodcuts, 75, 76, 78–9, 84 Woolf, Virginia, 195 workers agency of, 70–1 as body parts, 57, 57n.6 cultural experience of, 74–6

231

detail, 57–67, 57n.6–7, 58n.9, 60n.21, 62n.24, 192 diversity, access to, 144–5 division of labour, experience of, 66–70 Fordism, experience of, 142–3 representation in print culture, 94n.16 subjectivity of, 65, 65n.34, 66–8 World’s Fair (Chicago 1893), 3 Worm, Ole, 28, 29, 35, 36, 39–40, 40 Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), 18, 20–1, 23–51, 115, 197, 198 accessibility of, 196 architecture of, 38, 46–7 curating of, 26–7 and curiosity, 24 digital culture as, 169, 200 display in, 27–31, 28, 40–4 mixed systems of, 45 shelves, 38, 39, 41, 42–3, 45 diversity in, 26–7, 31, 204 evidence of, 27–9, 33–5 heterogeneity of, 50–1 loss of, 28 materiality of, 25 mercantile imperialism, symptom of, 24–5 as mixed form, 25–6, 48–9 multifariousness of, 29, 41, 49–51 order, 31–2, 48–51, 203 absence of, 30–1, 38, 39–42 attempts at, 39, 41–2 Classical, 45 and difference, 50–1 micro-symmetry in, 43–5 perspective, reinforced by, 50 practicalities, contingent on, 39–41 varieties of, 44 visual patterns of, 43–5 visual representations of, 49–50 origins of, 24–6 in print culture, 26, 28–9, 31 scholarship on, 29–31 Wunderkammer, examples and depictions, 26, 28–9, 31, 33–5, 36–7, 49–50 Arnold, Joseph, The Cabinet of the Dimpfel Family in Regensburg, 33 of Basilius Besler, 36, 40–1, 41, 45

232 Brueghel, Jan (the Elder), The Sense of Sight, 33, 34 of Francesco Calzolari, 36, 42–5, 43 of Ferdinando Cospi, 24, 37, 42, 44–5, 44 de Sepi, Giorgio, 37, 47, 49, 49n.6 of the Dimpfel family, 33, 38, 45 Fiori, Cesare, Galleria Settala, 36, 41–2, 42 of Ferrante Imperato, 29, 37, 45, 46 of Athanasius Kircher, 37, 46–7, 47, 49, 49n.6 Paston Treasure, 28, 28 Remps, Domenico, Cabinet of Curiosities, 33, 34

Index Rubens, Peter Paul, The Sense of Sight, 33, 34 of Manfredo Settala, 36, 40–1, 42, 46, 49n.6 of John Tradescant (“Ark”), 26–7, 28–9, 196 Troschel, Hans (the Younger), Fascicvlvs Rariorvm, 36, 40–1, 41 of Jacob de Wilde, 37, 47, 48 of Ole Worm (Museum Wormianium), 28, 29, 35, 36, 39–40, 40 Yoshida, Ray, 187

233

234

235

236

237

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