Balancing acts: The acrobatics of form and force from 1900 to 1930.

摘要

"Balancing Acts" presents a modernist notion of form conceived of as the site of contest between force and counterforce as it unfolds in German aesthetics, art criticism, and literature between 1900 and 1930. Central to texts examined here is the thought that all corporeal forms, including human subjects and artistic artifacts, are subject to mechanical forces that ceaselessly challenge their equilibrium. This notion of form emerges as a descriptive register for the visual arts, a foundation for anthropological inquiry, and an ambition of modernist narration. A study of the variegated aesthetic and social semantics across these registers unmasks the corporeal, heavy, and heroic aspects of German Modernism.;The project's historical and conceptual starting point is Theodor Lipps's aesthetics of empathy (Einfuhlungsasthetik). Chapter 1 explores Lipps's argument that we make sense of forms in space through an embodied, prediscursive sense of force acquired from corporeal experience, a mode of sense-making he and the other authors discussed here refer to as "empathy." As a means of historically contextualizing Lipps's aesthetics, chapter 2 considers Wilhelm Worringer's argument that such an empathic relationship to forms is contingent on a culturally shared attitude toward space. Chapter 3 takes up the reviews of Rodin's sculpture by Carl Burckhardt and Georg Simmel, who read the disequilibrious sculptural bodies as allegories for how the modern individual fashions her form of life. My analysis of their "aesthetics of heaviness" shows how the materiality of form is imagined to shape artworks and human life alike. The subject of chapter 4 is Paul Klee's lectures at the Bauhaus school, which I interpret as experiments in building a mechanically sound narrative structure. Narrative form as a contest between force and counterforce is again of concern in chapter 5, where I show that Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz renders the heavy body the focal point for understanding the human experience of the world and its objects. This reading of the novel demonstrates that it is organized as a corporeal struggle against gravity and thereby explores the dynamics between a physical space of matter and force, and a social space of meaning.