Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (review)

Toward the end of the introduction to her encyclopedic survey of the urban visual culture of Weimar Germany, Janet Ward makes a provocative observation that transcends the historical objects of her investigation. Citing criticisms by figures such as Terry Eagleton and Bill Readings that postmodernists are simply "selling out to consumerism even as they dare to step out of the ivory tower of Geist" (41) or engage in work that "amounts in fact to nothing more than a servile reproduction of consumerist dictates" (42), Ward takes up Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital to suggest a corrective. She claims that the "'aesthetic disposition' that presupposes a 'sort of withdrawal from economic necessity'" has itself become something of a necessary surface-illusion for academics like Eagleton and Readings, an illusion that fails to acknowledge the "current commodification of intellectual life" (42). Indeed, according to Ward, contemporary scholars are not able to pursue their work outside of political-economic considerations, or, as she puts it, "today's intellectuals are cultural capitalists: this is how intellectual-aesthetic expression is actually valorized" (42).

As a result of the supposed collapse of academic intellectual intervention into commodification—a collapse that might also be defined as the impossibility of the negation of the culture industry's logic of assimilation—Ward's position on contemporary intellectuality and the object of her book converge in an interesting way. She situates Weimar Surfaces as a reflection, not in the sense of a representation, but rather as a "reactivation of ocular cultural memory" (42). Ward's position is that, in regard to contemporary debates over postmodernity, the demand that academic work aspire to political import is based on a fallacious assumption; she refers to such claims as "pseudorevolutionary" (42). Her book, an intervention into the either/or of academic political action, responds to that binarism by outlining a critical history of the origins of postmodernity within modernity; she seeks "to rescue and engage dialogically the traces of modern surface out of their immanent eclipse within the postmodern" (42-43). Following W. J. T.Mitchell, Ward takes the desire that she locates within visuality to be a more interesting constellation for investigation than the attempt to harness, under the auspices of power, the force of a particular image. The focus on the object-cause of desire allows Ward to demonstrate that "modern visual culture needs to be uncovered from its subsumption within postmodernity's totalizing mechanism, which tends to claim modernity's innovations as its own" (42). Aesthetic novelty is both a separate domain of modern experience as well as the origins of the postmodern dissolution of that very distinction.

As a result of her belief in the collapse of the modern aestheticized fascination with the new into a postmodern emphasis on appearance, desire remains an interesting enigma for Ward, and a tension exists in her text between the effort to recuperate lost encounters with surface culture and her explicit denunciation of the political impact of her work. If there is a desire operative within visual culture, the problem that constantly asserts itself in Ward's text is how that desire is not only maintained but also produced. Her focus on material surfaces leads to a gliding on the surfaces of the texts and the artifacts she locates, allowing her to seemingly ignore the desire operative within her own selection of texts and objects as well as her interpretation of commentators both appreciative and critical of Weimar like Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel. We are often left, however ironic it may seem, with simply too much surface. Ward disavows the political fungibility of her investigations of the relationship between, for example, gender, make-up, and the false purity of New Objectivity. For all her provocative musings on visuality and ocular cultural memory, Ward, much like the texts and objects she analyzes, sells herself short by too readily accepting the dictum that postmodernity has proffered forth: [End...