Special issue on Alexander Kluge

422 Pages·1990·17.807 MB·English

by  Alexander Kluge

Acknowledgments
Starting with the dissertation chapters from which it developed, this
book was written in the cities of Berlin, New Haven, Paris, and London,
between which I moved, following the various steps of a graduate stu-
dent’s, a junior academic’s, also a critic’s and an editor’s trajectory. When
I began work on Toward Fewer Images, these places marked out a zone of A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
intellectual, scholarly, and artistic exchange, a public sphere, which lay
isomorphic to a shared political terrain. Somewhere Alexander Kluge
has said: “I am from Germany. A country that no longer exists.” Taking
in the situation as I am completing the book, I cannot help but wonder
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
whether, while the intellectual community holds strong, that political
sphere does still exist, and what the consequences may be.
In one of his stories, Kluge poses the question of whether there is a
line that separates the ages, eras, periods. Have we crossed one such line
recently? And how wide is the chasm? Just as Kluge’s work produces his-
torical knowledge across disjunctions and temporal caesuras, such as the
one that separates, but also connects, the digital and the analog, the one
that divided the moment before and after cinema, fractures within power,
the beginnings and ends of states, empires too, we will have to measure
and navigate these fault lines. If there is anything to be trusted in the
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Acknowledgments
following chapters, it is that images will be one medium, and certainly
the product, of this probing of chasms.
Unbroken, by contrast, has been the support, encouragement, sym-
pathy, and critique which I have been fortunate to experience from a
number of teachers, colleagues, and friends who have accompanied this
work for more than a good while. I thank Carol Jacobs, David Joselit, and
Christopher Wood, who were part of the team that was there when the
dissertation chapters came into being. And I thank Winfried Menning-
haus, who welcomed my work back to Berlin. Most recently, I cannot
thank the editors of October enough for their endorsement. I am honored
that they should have accepted Toward Fewer Images among the ranks of
October Books. Devin Fore was a kind shepherd in the process, after
David had given me directions more than once, while Adam Lehner kept
an eye on the execution throughout. As at earlier points with his ques-
tions, David gave the project a new and important point of navigation
when he included an essay and a conversation which I conducted with
Kluge in a special issue of October on the implications of digitization.
Frederic Schwartz and Devin were kind enough to invite me to par-
ticipate in a workshop dedicated to Kluge’s work at University College
London: a well-timed invitation, since I was just about to move into the
academic vicinity; and Fred offered encouragement. Christine Mehring,
Noa Steimatsky, and Katie Trumpener were involved in my earlier chart-
ings of Richter, film, and the dissertation. Later on, in Berlin, I thank
Gertrud Koch and Joseph Vogl for dialogue, exchanges, comments, and
encouragement. Along the way, Mike Jennings always had an open ear
and good advice. My thanks also to Isabelle Graw and Andreas Beyer,
who both trusted in me and my work, and who each gave me wonder-
ful jobs.
As a scholar, writer, and former editor, I can say that I have had the
privilege of working with a superb team at the MIT Press: in a veritable
tour de force Victoria Hindley opened the editing process, and made sure
that this book could still appear on time; with great meticulousness and a
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strong vision, Roger Conover watched over the entire production; while
Matthew Abbate and Gillian Beaumont were wonderfully empathic, yet
exact and exacting editors—as careful, supportive, and understanding as
an author could wish for. It was such joy to work with all of them.
Finally, I have to thank Yasuyo Iguchi for listening so attentively to my
thoughts about the visual aspects of Kluge’s work, and then delivering
such a forceful cover design.
Alexander Kluge himself has been extraordinarily patient and gener-
ous with his time and his answers. I am so grateful that he lent me his
ear, responded to my inquiries, and gave his permission to reproduce
the many images in this book. And I do thank his Mitarbeiterinnen and
Mitarbeiter at dctp—first of all Beata Wiggen, who cheerfully facilitates
so much. I also thank Gerhard Richter for very kindly agreeing to have
his works featured in Toward Fewer Images, and the staff at his atelier, in
particular Konstanze Ell, for smoothly handling these communications.
Finally, I thank Tom Tykwer, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Christian Pet-
zold for allowing me to print stills from their contributions to Kluge’s
DVD works. All three did so in the most uncomplicated and friendly
manner—practically overnight.
Jess Atwood Gibson has for many years been a close friend, and a
trusted and trusting, patient and discerning reader who understands
where one’s writing and thinking—in this case mine—needs to be left
as it is, but also when, where, and how it should be different. She saw
the book first, and her comments, critique, corrections, and questions
throughout all its stages have made it infinitely better. I owe her so much
more than better English—or a better book, for that matter. Armen
Avanessian and Florian Klinger have both read chapter drafts, offered
feedback and encouragement, and—unwaveringly—never quit asking
when the book would finally come out. Now that it’s here, I can relax
and so can they: I thank them for their persistence, along our diverging
and shared intellectual paths, within the institution of the university and
beyond. Among the friends and intellectual companions who have shared
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Acknowledgments
the work’s and my own ways are, finally, Heike-Karin Foell, Irene Small,
and Maria Zinfert, as well as Prajna Desai and Alena Williams.
Kluge’s last works for the classical cinema, dating from the late 1970s
and early 1980s, contain a number of scenes filmed in Frankfurt am
Main. When I see these images I sometimes recognize the city, the build-
ings, the light that I first lived in as a child—give or take a few years. Ever
since that moment my parents, and my family, have been there for me.
And then there is the one person without whom this and many other
things quite simply wouldn’t have been possible. I know he’s now happy,
proud—and relieved. And so am I—happiest of all, however, not because
the book is here, but because he is: Jan.
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Preface
The Question of Work
For the critic and scholar, addressing the work of Alexander Kluge poses
a challenge, primarily due to a difficulty in determining what the con-
cept of “work,” as pertaining to all sorts of (artistic) production, might in P r e f a c e
this case precisely refer to. When we speak of somebody’s “work,” do we
mean her or his activity of producing something, as a synonym for their
labor? Do we mean the outcome of that person’s production or labor, the
more or less finished product, i.e., one of multiple individual works—a
P r e f a c e
work among many? Or, do we mean the sum of all of these individual
instantiations, also referred to as an artist’s “work,” her or his œuvre? While
asking such questions may under different conditions amount to little
more than parsing semantic minutiae, in case of Kluge’s work one is
confronted with them in all acuteness and in actuality.
Kluge is a filmmaker and a literary author, a television producer and a
theorist, as well as a digital entrepreneur. Since 1960 he has made four-
teen feature films and twenty short films; authored around thirty volumes
of literary texts, a number of interview books and conversation tran-
scripts; and co-published—with Marxist philosopher Oskar Negt—three
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volumes of theoretical writings. As of the late 1980s, when Kluge first
worked in television, his production company dctp has turned out over
3,000 features, for most of which Kluge converses with real or fictional
experts, or in which he arranges visual material into thematically orga-
nized montages. In recent years, he has also engaged the digital realm: by
maintaining a website on which he reassembles segments from his filmic
and television productions, as well as by publishing three DVD films, two
of which are comprised of three discs, all of which also contain booklets
or pdf files with even more literary stories. To say that Kluge is “prolific”
would amount to an understatement of sorts.
In the face of the sheer numerical magnitude and medial diversity of
this output, the perspective of having to attend to its manifold individual
constituents is intimidating. Any attempt at mastering the immensity of
the material seems to risk losing sight of the specificity of its compo-
nents. The vastness of the work potentially swallows the discreteness of
the works that comprise its body. The situation is complicated even fur-
ther when one realizes that Kluge frequently reprises his material: he
reuses themes, ideas and formal components, visual clips, segments from
earlier films, images, entire short stories, literary and filmic characters,
interviews, shots, etc., in later contexts. In these later (re-)assemblies they
figure partly identically, partly in altered fashion. The challenge thus lies
not only in mediating the relation between the work and the works in
an assumed synchrony. Rather, it becomes clear that later works in part
function as reworkings of earlier ones. Instead of amassing an artistic life-
time’s worth of production through accumulating a more than impressive
quantity of individual creations, Kluge seems to be permanently rework-
ing what he has done before. This erodes both the monumentality of the
œuvre and the distinctness of its individual constituents, as both become
subject to an ongoing process of revision. In this activity, the generation
of new material is interwoven with the alteration of older material.
One thus has to address what now looks more like a permanent imma-
nent activity of artistic, filmic, and literary production. When speaking of
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Kluge’s “work,” one seems to be talking about the activity of production
as much as about its results. And this activity seems to no small extent
to consist in recalibrating and altering its previous results, in the form
of new instantiations. But how would one address “work” that realizes
itself to equal degrees as an activity, as its individual products, and as the
entirety of these products: as labor, works, and œuvre, while traversing a
whole set of different media?
This book offers the first scholarly and critical account of Alexander
Kluge’s production that is based on such a problematized understand-
ing of the concept of “work,” which his practice, if scrutinized closely,
ultimately demands. In discussions of Kluge’s output, the position that
his texts, films, and clips constitute “genres of their own” has become
a topos.1 While this formulation captures the stylistic distinctness of his
productions, this uniqueness is intertwined with and results from a no
less unique production method. This is one reason why Kluge’s work is
exemplary. There is, quite simply, no comparable case in which a prac-
titioner—be it a filmmaker, clip artist, literary author, or thinker—has
achieved a similar virtuosity working across media, while also giving rise
to reflections about the very concept of work itself in a comparable
way. As a consequence, the following analyses thematize Kluge the film-
maker, the maker of television, the author, the digital entrepreneur, and
the theorist in an attempt at understanding him generally in his function
as a producer.
In doing so—i.e., in understanding Kluge as a model for thinking
production as a general rather than as a particularized activity—one also
approaches two of the aspects that give his practice a certain timeliness at
our particular moment. The first pertains to the question of media. The
debate regarding whether artistic production in general, and its results
in particular, should be reflexively bound to the various media in which
they are situated, is ongoing. Defenders of the ideal of medium speci-
ficity are set against advocates of postmediality.2 In a different vein of
thinking—as in the primarily German schools of media archaeology and
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media philosophy, especially as developed in the wake of Friedrich Kit-
tler’s writing—all sorts of articulations, not just artistic ones, are under-
stood to be framed through the a priori of the (media-)technological
states that enable them.3 While it is in touch with both trajectories of
thought, Kluge’s practice presents an example in which the continuation
of production takes primacy over questions of mediality. In Kluge’s case,
different media function as different habitats that need to be respected in
terms of the distinct conditions they each present, but ultimately exist as
vessels for an ongoing activity of production, which settles in them, but
also traverses them. Grouping himself with none of the three factions
(medium specificity, postmediality, or media archaeology), Kluge, rather,
presents a case where production takes up and leaves its media, in a mode
of temporary mediatization.
The second point at which the perspective of Kluge’s production
acquires a certain timeliness is the way it relates to the overall mode of
production that characterizes our present. Already in 1981, in his joint
theoretical work with philosopher Oskar Negt, Geschichte und Eigensinn
(History and Obstinacy), Kluge offered an implicit answer to this question
by introducing the term “permanent accumulation” to revise the Marx-
ian understanding of capitalism as deriving from a set takeoff point, a so-
called phase of originary or primary accumulation/expropriation, after
which it then purportedly leads a more or less stable existence. Rather,
Kluge and Negt hold, permanent accumulation refers to a state in which
the activities of accumulation, expropriation, and production are perma-
nently and immanently inherent, i.e., a state that perpetually (re)gener-
ates its own beginnings. One could call this, paradoxically, an inherently
dynamic state. With this in mind, the Klugean practice of a permanent
(re)actualization of older instantiations of his work, as well as a shift from
work as an entity (or a set of entities) toward work as an activity—or,
more precisely: toward work as an entity that is constantly reconfigured,
because it is also an activity—appears to be a logical response. (Chapter
10 examines this question.)4 The timeliness of his work, therefore, derives
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from the fact that Kluge offers analyses and proposals for work under the
condition of permanent accumulation.
The Fate of Montage
And yet, for all of its inherently revisionist activity, Kluge’s practice has
nothing to do with propagating paradigms of flexibility, let alone pro-
grammatic inconsistency. Rather, a set of consistent themes and proce-
dures runs through it, from its inception to its most recent articulations,
and this book analyzes these as well. A central concern here is what
Kluge has termed still images, a goal which in his system carries a number
of implications. It is bound to the ideal of an exercise of the faculty of
discernment, also and particularly on the level of affect. It is connected to
an artistic politics of temporality. And it plays an essential part in renego-
tiating the strategies of montage that derive from the cinematic tradition
of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard. All three direc-
tors serve as important reference points for Kluge, and in a number of his
filmic, visual, literary, and theoretical works their positions become sub-
ject matter. Another important source for the Klugean notion of mon-
tage is the theoretical writings of his teacher Theodor Adorno, as well as
Bertolt Brecht.
Montage in this tradition functions as a cardinal technique for the
realization of an aesthetics of discontinuity, which is bound to the pre-
dicament of criticality. (Chapter 2 provides an analysis of this tradition,
and the various ways Kluge engages with it, charting both the common
ground and the divergences between him and his precursors.) As con-
sidered through its afterlife in Kluge’s work, one fundamental aspect of
montage’s critical impetus lay in the rupture which it was seen to inflict
on the false re/semblance of “continuous” methods of (pictorial) rep-
resentation, primarily the techno-ontologically stabilized type of imag-
ing that characterized photographic and filmic recording, and with it all
sorts of artistic programs of surface realism.5 To put it differently: across
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various arts, montage was positioned against a type of representation that
privileged seamless description and intactness on the level of artistic rep-
resentation itself. While it inherits this position, Kluge’s practice pairs it
with montage’s assumed suitability for depicting and generating what
resemblance-based modes of representation cannot depict or generate in
the first place, namely context and relationality, which are encompassed
in his use of the German term Zusammenhang. Both the interruption of
semblance and the creation and representation of context rely on the
moment of caesura for their realization: To do montage is to “break”
resemblance, and to combine image components across a moment of
rupture, a negation of continuity, in order to articulate contexts and rela-
tions, rather than to duplicate surfaces.
Deriving from the photo-filmic paradigm, the landscape of external
(technological and mediatic) conditions in which montage came into
being has in the meantime changed, not least through the advent of
electronic image production and digitization. Over the course of its by
now more than five decades of existence, Kluge’s work has, accordingly,
become the site for a recalibration of the practice of montage itself. Kluge
implicitly proposes, first, a generalized notion of montage that coincides
both with his practice of general production and with an understanding
of the essence of “the filmic” as not inherently tied to the epoch of cin-
ema; the latter position is succinctly summarized in his dictum, prompted
by the emergence of digital technology, that “the principle of cinema
[das Prinzip Kino]” is “older than the art of the movies [älter als die Film-
kunst].”6 But what would this general activity of montage, which finds
in film something like a focal point, but not its defining medium, look
like? Is there a way of thinking such a general image strategy beyond
the confines of the filmic dispositif? Chapters 6 and 7 form an excursus
whose partial function is to probe this Klugean predicament. They do
so by exploring two image contexts, established through Kluge’s own
work, in which his production intersects with the historical and contem-
porary image works of German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich
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