Multiplication: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender in the United States, 1910-1933

This project explores US-American mass culture of the early 20th century with a close attention to its trans-Atlantic circulation and repercussions. It responds to the fact that the big dance revues of the 1910s and 20s gained emblematic significance for industrial modernity at large. The correspondences between these hyper-organized entertainment formats and the system of Taylorized mass-production are obvious, and constituted an apt point of departure for numerous theoretical approaches to mass culture from the 1910s onward, culminating, arguably, in Siegfried Kracauer’s compelling concept of the ‘mass ornament’ formulated in 1927. What Kracauer and other critics before and after recognized as a core signature of modernity, is addressed by this project as the aesthetics of multiplication. This means to regard mass culture not primarily as the engine of transformation and outbidding that it indubitably also is, but to focus on a mass-cultural productivity that seems purely mechanical and imitative. In contrast to seminal recent theories of mass culture that emphasized pluralization and diversity as its core principles (Makropoulus), this project aims to valorize and reassess the creative potential of multiplication. In doing so, it also responds to the tendency to juxtapose a ‘good’ (subversive, diverse, plural) popular culture and a ‘bad’ (repetitive, mindless, complacent) mass culture and to tacitly assign this juxtaposition with gendered attributes. Significantly, together with its attendant factors of excess, accrual, and growth (rather than progress), multiplication is often characterized as a feminized quality. It perpetuates and simultaneously complicates the assessment of mass culture ‘as woman’ (Huyssen). The project will branch out in three subprojects. SP1 will be concerned with the manifestation of the aesthetic of multiplication in the overlapping creative spheres of variety and film in close recourse to female agency—dancers, actors, directors, writers, and characters who all make use of ornamentality in ways that both implement and appropriate techniques of multiplication. SP2 will look into the multiplicatory agency of modernist body cultures and trace them from their unfolding in the arena of sport, gymnastic and dance into modernist experimental poetry. SP3 will engage with the evocative potential of body images in photography and graphic culture on the one hand and the medium of the modernist scrapbook on the other. All three subprojects wil explore material that has up to now been afforded little scholarly attention and correlate these readings with reassessments of seminal texts of mass-cultural criticism of the early 20th century.

该项目探索了20世纪初期的美国大众文化，并密切关注了其跨大西洋圈子和影响。它回应了这样一个事实，即1910年代和20年代的大舞蹈对整个工业现代性具有象征意义。这些超组织的娱乐格式与泰勒批量生产系统之间的对应关系是显而易见的，并且是1910年代从1910年代开始进行大众文化的许多理论方法的恰当的出发点该项目将现代性作为乘法的美学来解决。这意味着将大众文化视为不可避免的转化和超越的转型和超越的发动机，而是专注于似乎纯粹是机械和模仿的大众文化生​​产力。与强调多元化和多样性作为其核心原则（Makropoulus）的第二种大众文化理论相反，该项目旨在重新评估和重新评估乘法的创造潜力。这样一来，它还回应了将“好”（颠覆性，潜水，复数）流行文化和“不良”（重复，无意识，复杂）大众文化并置的趋势，并与性别属性默认分配了这种并置。值得注意的是，以及其超出，准确和增长（而不是进步）的随之而来的因素，繁殖通常被称为女性化的质量。它永久化并简单地使大众文化的评估“像女人”（Huyssen）。该项目将分为三个主题项目。 SP1将关注与女性代理的重叠创意领域相关的乘法的体现，即与女性代理 - 伙伴，演员，导演，作家和角色，他们都以实施和适当的乘法技术的方式利用了装饰性。 SP2将调查现代主义身体文化的多种机构，并从体育，体操和舞蹈中的舞台上展现出他们的发展，进入现代主义实验诗。 SP3一方面将与摄影和图形文化中的身体图像的命令潜力，另一方面是现代主义剪贴簿的媒介。 Will探索的所有三个主题都没有得到科学的关注，并将这些读物与20世纪初期大众文化批评主义的第二文本的重新评估相关联。