Subject to a Vital Machine: The Political Ambivalence of Avant-garde Aesthetics

Technology occupies a prominent position in László Moholy-Nagy’s art and writing. In Painting, Photography, Film (1925), he maintains that technology may extend human perception. In art, he argues, technology facilitates research into the unseen forces of the natural world and the “creation of elemental optical relationships.”¹ New technologies could also structure the psychological experience of the modern mass.² Technology holds a particular power over the subject, insofar as it expands its optical and rational capacities. Of various modern technologies, photography occupied a central position in his artistic program. It offered the prospect of an objective view, one that mechanically and supposedly without subjective biases presents that which exists in the world beyond human vision. Moholy-Nagy’s writing and art, and his photographs in particular, articulate his project for a Neues Sehen (New Vision), a means for engineering a subject amenable to modern technologies.

The Neues Sehen expands the definition of photography to encompass non-mimetic forms and functions. Moholy-Nagy offers a definition of photography not dependent upon any supposed naturalism of the final image, but rather upon the production process. He stresses that the “main instrument of the photographic process is not the camera but the light-sensitive layer, and the specifically photographic rules and methods arise from the behavior of the layer with respect to the light effects that are produced by different materials.”³ Given that he regards the photogram as a material and theoretical distillation of photography, it serves metonymically as a foundation for his investigation of light through other new media technologies of film and lens-based photography. During the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy’s photograms gradually shifted from the use of rectilinear forms constructed from cut pieces of paper and exposed in daylight to compositions produced in a darkroom that incorporate a range of objects, such as flowers, clothes pegs, and wires (fig. 1).⁴ The darkroom setting, light-sensitive papers, developing chemicals, and assorted objects constitute the key elements of photographic technology for Moholy-Nagy.

Against the limited optics of the eye, the photogram offers the possibility of modulating light, and thereby expanding the sensory perception of the viewer. He treats light as both a medium and an object. As Devin Fore writes, “Moholy-Nagy climbs into the dark interior of the camera itself and rearranges its component parts, proposing new configurations of the photographic apparatus from the inside.”⁵ Referring to the eye as an “optical instrument,” the subject interacts with technology and light, becoming a node connecting these other components (Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 28). Despite claims for an expansion of biological limits in the interest of social renewal and the production of a “new life,” he positions the photograms as tautological images referring only to their internal relations of light (45).⁶ Similarly, when discussing his manuscript for the film Dynamic of the Metropolis (1921–22) he insists that it “is meant to be visual, purely visual,” rather than an exploration of social, political, or other aspects of urban experience (Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 122, emphasis in original).⁷ Only through technologically-augmented exposure to the “constantly refining effects of the optical” can the spectator adapt to the modern culture of Weimar Germany.⁸ The capacity to view relationships of energy and light unseen by “normal” human vision offers the possibility of “perfecting the eye by means of photography.”⁹ Moholy-Nagy’s program for photography entails a contradiction between hermetic form and expanded vision, a contradiction resolved through the merger of the machine and the eye. Photography functions as a vital machine to remodel the subject.

Accounts of Moholy-Nagy’s Neues Sehen tend to elaborate upon his preoccupation with technology, often in relation to progressive politics. Moholy-Nagy’s interest in Russian Constructivism and involvement with the Bauhaus, working there between 1923 and 1928, have been well documented and thoroughly examined.¹⁰ Throughout his work he stressed the need for collective action based upon objective facts and laws.¹¹ Nonetheless, he asserts that “in the last analysis” class struggle never sought to...