FREDRIC JAMESON
MARX AND MONTAGE
From New Left Review, 58, July-August 2009
It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies
in store for you. His latest film,
News from Ideological
Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts:
I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are
Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society.
[1] Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s
1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s
Capital,
whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing
matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe
Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on
Capital,
whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a
half-year period.
[2] And at least some of these people know that he was
enthusiastic about Joyce’s
Ulysses during much the same time
and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies
about the
Capital project as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes
for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned
into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is
only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more
like Eisenstein’s notes.
Many important intellectuals have—as it were,
posthumously—endorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derrida’s
Spectres
of Marx and of Deleuze’s unrealized
Grandeur de Marx,
along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world
crisis (‘we are all socialists now’, etc.). Is Kluge’s new film
a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one?
And what would ‘being a Marxist’ mean today? The Anglo-American
reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their
great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of
Capital
reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of
the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter:
‘The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished;
and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be
directly shaped by human consciousness’.
[3] That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in
the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones,
in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a
reconstruction of ‘feelings’ (a key or technical term for him):
this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various
films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as
his
Geschichte und Eigensinn—History and Obstinacy—written
in collaboration with Oskar Negt.
All of these works bear on history; and of few countries can one
say that they have lived so much varied history as Germany. Balzac’s
work would have been impossible without the extraordinary variety of
historical experience encountered by the French, from revolution to
world empire, from foreign occupation to economic reconstruction, and
not excluding unspeakable suffering and failure along with war crimes
and atrocities. Kluge’s stories, or anecdotes, or
faits
divers—some thousands of pages of them—draw on a comparable
mass of historical raw material.
But history is something you have to dig up and to dig in: like
Kluge’s heroine Gabi Teichert in
Die Patriotin, who
literally gets out her spade and frantically excavates, scrabbling
for clues to the past in bones and potsherds. And not necessarily in
vain: in another film, the knee of a German soldier’s skeleton
testifies and tells some ‘useful’ war stories. Indeed,
News
from Ideological Antiquity has its own share of zany or even
idiotic moments—a pair of actors reading Marx’s incomprehensible
prose aloud and in unison to one another, a ddr instructor explaining
‘liquidity’ to a recalcitrant pupil, and even a kind of
concluding satyr play in which the (rather tiresome) comedian Helge
Schneider plays a variety of Marx-inspired roles, complete with wigs,
false beards and other circus paraphernalia. For as Kluge tells us,
‘we must let Till Eulenspiegel pass across Marx and Eisenstein
both, in order to create a confusion allowing knowledge and emotions
to be combined together in new ways’.
[4]
Meanwhile, on a less jocular level, we confront a sometimes
interminable series of talking heads—Enzensberger, Sloterdijk,
Dietmar Dath, Negt and other authorities—as they confront the
typical Kluge interview, part prompting, part leading questions, part
cross-examining his own witnesses. We glimpse a weird project of
Werner Schroeter, in which Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde is
acted out through the conflict on the bridge in
Battleship
Potemkin (‘the rebirth of Tristan out of the spirit of
Potemkin’); along with excerpts from operas by Luigi Nono and Max
Brand, not to speak of the classics. We see a short by Tom Tykwer on
the humanization of objects, sequences on the assassination of Rosa
Luxemburg and, on a lighter note, an evening with Marx and Wilhelm
Liebknecht. Many film clips and stills are interpolated, mostly from
the silent period, and dramatic graphics from both Marxian and
Eisensteinian texts make it clear that the intertitles of the silent
period could be electrifying indeed, if resurrected in bold colour
and dramatic typography. It is Kluge’s own version of the
Eisensteinian ‘montage of attractions’ (this filmmaker might say
‘of feelings’). Viewers unaccustomed to his practices may well
find this an unbelievable hodge-podge. But they too can eventually
learn to navigate this prodigious site of excavation: not yet a
full-fledged and professionally organized museum, this is an immense
dig, with all kinds of people, amateur and specialist alike, milling
around in various states of activity, some mopping their brows or
eating a sandwich, others lying full-length on the ground in order to
brush dirt from a jawbone, still others sorting various items into
the appropriate boxes on tables sheltered by a tent, if not taking a
nap or lecturing a novice, treading a narrow path so as not to step
on the evidence. It is our first contact with ideological antiquity.
Eisenstein’s version
Among the more recognizable fragments is, to be sure, that ‘new
work on a libretto by Karl Marx’, the ‘film treatise’ which was
supposedly Eisenstein’s next project after
October, the
alleged film of
Capital. As always, Eisenstein’s notes are
so many reflexions on his own practice, past and future;
characteristically, they re-read his own work as a progression of
forms, like progress in scientific experimentation. There is no point
leaving this narcissism unacknowledged—it is the source of much of
the pedagogical and didactic excitement and enthusiasm of his
writings; but we do not necessarily have to accept his own
assessments of his career, especially since they varied greatly
throughout his life.
Here, for example, he will read his work in terms of abstraction:
as the progressive conquest of abstraction from
Potemkin
through
October to the current project. (We might have
preferred him to characterize it as the enlargement of his filmic
conquest of the concrete to include abstraction, but never mind.)
Predictably, we move from the rising lions in
Potemkin to that
‘treatise on deity’ which is the icons/idols sequence in
October.
[5] These moments are then to be seen as essay-like vertical
interruptions in a horizontal narrative; and this is precisely why
the Eisenstein–Joyce discussion is irrelevant here.
Commentators—and not only Kluge himself—have fastened on the
jotting, ‘a day in a man’s life’ as the evidence for believing
Eisenstein to have imagined a plot sequence like that of Joyce’s
Bloomsday.
[6] Later on, they note the addition of a second ‘plot line’,
that of social reproduction and ‘the “house-wifely virtues” of
a German worker’s wife’, along with the reminder: ‘throughout
the entire picture the wife cooks soup for her returning husband’,
the unspecified ‘man’ of the earlier sequence having logically
enough become a worker. This alleged routine cross-cutting—to which
one should probably add the day in the life of a capitalist or a
merchant—is being ruminated at the very same historical moment
when, as Annette Michelson points out, Dziga Vertov is filming
Man
with a Movie Camera.
[7]
It is true: ‘Joyce may be helpful for my purpose’, notes
Eisenstein. But what follows is utterly different from the ‘day in
the life of’ formula. For Eisenstein adds: ‘from a bowl of soup
to the British vessels sunk by England’.
[8] What has happened is that we have forgotten the presence, in
Ulysses, of chapters stylistically quite different from the
day’s routine format. But Eisenstein has not: ‘In Joyce’s
Ulysses there is a remarkable chapter of this kind, written in
the manner of a scholastic catechism. Questions are asked and answers
given’.
[9] But what is he referring to when he says, ‘of this kind’?
It is clear that Kluge already knows the answer, for in his filmic
discussion of the notes, the pot of soup has become a water kettle,
boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in
the exposition (Eisenstein’s notes projected in graphics on the
intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is ‘abstracted’
into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it
demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling
signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the
motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production . . .
Meanwhile, this is the very essence of the language of silent film,
by insistence and repetition to transform their objects into
larger-than-life symbols; a procedure intimately related to the
close-up. But this is also what Joyce does in the catechism chapter;
and
Ulysses’s first great affirmation, the first thunderous
‘yes’, comes here and not in Molly’s closing words: it is the
primal force of water streaming from the reservoir into Dublin and
eventually finding its way indomitably to Bloom’s faucet.
[10] (In Eisenstein the equivalent would be the milk separator of
The General Line.)
The German worker’s wife
It is at this point that we glimpse what Eisenstein really has in
mind here: something like a Marxian version of Freudian free
association—the chain of hidden links that leads us from the
surface of everyday life and experience to the very sources of
production itself. As in Freud, this is a vertical plunge downward
into the ontological abyss, what he called ‘the navel of the
dream’; it interrupts the banal horizontal narrative and stages an
associative cluster charged with affect. It is worth quoting
Eisenstein’s full notation at this point:
Throughout the entire picture the wife cooks soup for her
returning husband. nb Could be two themes intercut for association:
the soup-cooking wife and the home-returning husband. Completely
idiotic (all right in the first stages of a working hypothesis): in
the third part (for instance), association moves from the pepper with
which she seasons food. Pepper. Cayenne. Devil’s Island. Dreyfus.
French chauvinism. Figaro in Krupp’s hands. War. Ships sunk
in the port. (Obviously, not in such quantity!!) nb Good in its
non-banality—transition: pepper–Dreyfus–Figaro. It would
be good to cover the sunken English ships (according to Kushner, 103
days abroad) with the lid of a saucepan. It could even be not
pepper—but kerosene for a stove and transition into oil.
[11]
Eisenstein proposes to do here what Brecht tried for in the coffee
debate on the subway in
Kuhle Wampe: to trace the visible
symptoms back to their absent (or untotalizable) causes. But the
dramatist’s attempt is hijacked by our inevitable attention to the
characters arguing, whereas Eisenstein aims, however crudely
(‘completely idiotic’, but just a first draft), to draw the whole
dripping complex up into the light as a montage of images. (The more
appropriate cross-references were always Benjamin’s omission of
commentary in the Arcades constellations, and even Pound’s
ideograms—both of them also projects of a kind of synchronic
historical representation.) Eisenstein’s inevitable theorization of
what he calls ‘discursive film’ centres on ‘de-anecdotalization’
as the central process here, and then finds its analogy in ‘the
working theory of “overtones”’
[12] which he was to develop a year later in his essay, ‘The
Filmic Fourth Dimension’, in which a formulation in terms of
‘physiological stimuli’ will seek to displace the widely accepted
Russian Formalist doctrine of the renewal of perception, of
aesthetics’
ostranenie, ‘making strange’. Here there
would be not only a conflict between the temporality of film
(montage) and the simultaneity of the causal links or associations,
but also a tension between the affective and the cognitive. Thus he
writes of
The General Line:
This montage is built, not on particular dominants, but
takes as its guide the total stimulation through all stimuli. That is
the original montage complex within the shot, arising from the
collision and combination of the individual stimuli inherent in it.
[13]
The theory of ‘overtones’ tended not only to foreground the
bodily nature of sheer feeling—‘the
physiological quality
of Debussy and Scriabin’—but also, by way of technical musical
terms like ‘dominant’ and the contrapuntal, along with ‘visual’
overtones and undertones, to stake out the complexity of this whole
‘fourth dimension’ itself, which has inspired so much
contemporary activity in so-called affect theory. It seems probable
that the old myth of the ‘persistence of vision’—the previous
image subsisting briefly on the retina as the new perception comes to
overlay and then replace it, a conception which has its musical
analogue in pedal points—suggests a possible synthesis between the
temporal succession of cinema and the contents of the individual
images. But it does not resolve the tension that the most highly
developed models of affect entertain with the cognitive content of
these complexes; or in other words the Marxian attention to the
production, distribution and consumption at work behind the
phenomenological surface of everyday life and experience—going
behind the scenes, as Marx describes it in
Capital. The old
problem of didactic art is not solved here, unless we are to think
that knowledge of capitalism is at one with rage (
Potemkin) or
that the construction of socialism is at one with a sublime joy, as
in the transcendental vision of the milk separator in
The General
Line.
Kluge does not try to reproduce the pepper sequence; but he does
do something with another Eisensteinian motif:
woman’s stocking full of holes and a silk one in a
newspaper advertisement. It starts with a jerky movement, to multiply
into 50 pairs of legs—Revue, Silk, Art. The fight for the
centimetre of silk stocking. The aesthetes are for it. The Bishops
and morality are against.
[14]
But Kluge’s rather decorative rehearsal of this
multi-dimensional social object—he might also have included
Kracauer’s Busby Berkeley-like ‘mass ornament’—scarcely
reaches the allegorical complexities Eisenstein himself ultimately
glimpsed:
On this level, one could solve:
Ein Paar seidene
Strumpfe—art.
Ein Paar seidene Strumpfe—morality.
Ein
Paar seidene Strumpfe—commerce and competition.
Ein Paar
seidene Strumpfe—Indian women forced to incubate the silk
cocoon by carrying them in their armpits!
[15]
This final detail leads us back to the anecdotal level, which was
supposed to have been neutralized in the new ‘discursive’ film
language: yet it is surely what gives its piquancy to this vertical
montage, just as Devil’s Island and Dreyfus lend the pepper
sequence its bite. And in fact, the notes are already full of
anecdotal detail, of ‘believe-it-or-not’
faits divers that
lead us to the very heart of capital. I like this one: ‘Somewhere
in the West. A factory where it is possible to pinch parts and tools.
No search of workers made. Instead, the exit gate is a
magnetic
check point.’
[16] Chaplin would have liked the spectacle of nuts and bolts,
hammers and wrenches, flying out of the workers’ pockets.
Antiquities
Elective affinities: Kluge’s own work is very much anecdotal in
this sense, the narrative double-take, the unexpected punctum at the
heart of what looked at first like a banal occurrence, a taste for
the incongruity that is abstracted into his dealings with the great
ideas. Deleuze’s magnificent formula—‘a clean-shaven Marx, a
bearded Hegel’—would not be alien to him, as he tirelessly
suggests new recodings of the stereotypical heritage on his own
terms: the future reconstruction of experience, binding affects and
knowledge together in new ways.
It is a future which demands the constitution of an antiquity
appropriate to it. Yet is this ‘ideological antiquity’ not simply
another way of saying that Marx, and with him Marxism, is outmoded?
The comic sequences of Kluge’s film, the young couple at various
moments in history tormenting each other with a koranic recital of
Marx’s abstractions, might lead us to think so. Nor is Eisenstein
non-outmoded either, with his baggage of old-fashioned melodrama,
old-fashioned silent film, old-fashioned montage. Lenin and
intertitles! Itself a seemingly dreary prospect for a digital
postmodernity . . .
Yet one dimly remembers Marx’s own feelings for antiquity:
Prometheus and Aristotle’s theory of value, Epicurus and Hegel’s
thoughts on Homer. And then there is the question with which the
great 1857 draft introduction to the
Grundrisse breaks off:
‘the difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic
poetry are bound up with certain forms of social development. The
difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in
certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable model.’
[17] Marx was anything but nostalgic, and he understood that the
polis was a limited and thereby contradictory social formation to
which one could scarcely return; and also that any future socialism
would be far more complex than capitalism itself, as Raymond Williams
once observed.
For the concept of antiquity may have the function of placing us
in some new relationship with the Marxian tradition and with Marx
himself—as well as Eisenstein. Marx is neither actual nor outmoded:
he is classical, and the whole Marxist and Communist tradition, more
or less equal in duration to Athens’s golden age, is precisely that
golden age of the European left, to be returned to again and again
with the most bewildering and fanatical, productive and contradictory
results.
[18] And if it is objected that it would be an abomination to
glamorize an era that included Stalinist executions and the
starvation of millions of peasants, a reminder of the bloodiness of
Greek history might also be in order—the eternal shame of Megara,
let alone the no less abominable miseries of slave society as such.
Greece was Sparta as much as Athens, Sicily as much as Marathon; and
the Soviet Union was also the deathknell of Nazism and the first
sputnik, the People’s Republic of China the awakening of countless
millions of new historical subjects. The category of classical
antiquity may not be the least productive framework in which a global
left reinvents an energizing past for itself.
[1]
Alexander Kluge,
Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike
(News from Ideological Antiquity), 3 dvds, Frankfurt 2008.
[2]
These are published as Eisenstein’s ‘Notes for a Film of
Capital’, translated by Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda and
Annette Michelson, in
October: The First Decade, Cambridge, ma
1987, pp. 115–38; they first appeared in
October 2, 1976;
hereafter nfc.
[3]
Kluge,
Nachrichten, p. 4.
[4]
Kluge,
Nachrichten, p. 16.
[5]
nfc, p. 116.
[6]
nfc, p. 127.
[7]
nfc, p. 127, fn 19.
[8]
nfc, p. 127. This enigmatic reference is itself referenced in the
longer quote from p. 129 given below.
[9]
nfc, p. 119.
[10]
See ‘
Ulysses in History’, in
The Modernist Papers,
London and New York 2007.
[11]
nfc, p. 129. Of the soup-cooking, Eisenstein has noted: ‘the
“house-wifely virtues” of a German worker’s wife constitute the
greatest evil, the strongest obstacle to a revolutionary uprising. A
German worker’s wife will always have something warm for her
husband, will never let him go
completely hungry. And there is
the root of her negative role which slows the pace of social
development. In the plot, this could take the form of “
hot
slop”, and the meaning of this on “a world scale”’: nfc,
p. 128.
[12]
nfc, pp. 116–7.
[13]
Eisenstein, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, in
Film Form,
New York 1949, p. 67.
[14]
nfc, p. 129
[15]
nfc, p. 137.
[16]
nfc, p. 121.
[17]
Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 28, New York 1986, p.
47.
[18]
Something like this is what Peter Weiss’s
Aesthetics of
Resistance can be said to be attempting.
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