Konstruktion als Bildung: Refashioning the Human in German Constructivism

Abstract

This essay juxtaposes the understanding of Konstruktion developed within German Constructivism to the humanist notion of Bildung that framed debates on the Bildungsroman and the novel at the beginning of the twentieth century. Far from refuting the project of Bildung, Konstruktion actualizes some of its central tenets while grappling with the questions of temporality and futurity that bedeviled the idea of Bildung. After tracing the ways in which Bildung and Konstruktion played out discursively in the early twentieth century, I examine how the two tropes are productively unfolded in One-Way Street (1928), Walter Benjamin's endeavor at grounding and enacting an activist model of literature. At issue is the possibility of grasping literature as a realm for the performative construction of the human outside the historical teleology that rendered Bildung unacceptable.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• Bildung
• Bildungsroman
• Constructivism
• Konstruktion
• Georg Lukács
• László Moholy-Nagy
• Jan Tschichold

Notes

The use of the term Bildung in the early eighteenth century was tied to the Pietist understanding of God's salvific reshaping of a humanity deformed by sin. It thus presupposed Christianity's static, self-enclosed temporality, which neatly bookended human time between Christ's redemptive sacrifice and his second coming on earth. The pantheist strands of moral and aesthetic philosophy that took hold after 1750 reinterpreted the term as an individual's development out of an innate predisposition, which enlists the idea of open-ended time for its unfolding. For a historical overview of the concept of Bildung, see Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt aM: Insel Verlag, 1994); see also the entry “Bildung” by Rudolf Vielhaus in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett, 1994) and W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For a concise survey of the historical entwinement of the discourses surrounding Bildung and the Bildungsroman, see Tobias Boas, “Apprenticeship of the Novel: Goethe and the Invention of History,” Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 43–69. The chapter pivots on a reading of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that incisively recovers its formal indebtedness to divergent understandings of Bildung, namely, an early historicist one and the teleological one that supplanted it in the course of the nineteenth century.

For analyses informed by Max Weber's and Walter Benjamin's theories of the genesis of modern art out of processes of secularization, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1974 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), especially chapters 2 and 3, 15–54. On the paradoxes generated by the modern awareness of contingent time, see chapters 1 and 2 in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 1–50.

Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in Über das Schöne und die Kunst: Schriften zur Ästhetik (Munich: dtv, 1984); see especially the twenty-seventh, final letter in the collection, 222–230.

See Ofterdingen's crucial encounter, in chapter 4, with a hermit living in a cave and subsequent discovery of a mysterious book that appears to contain his life story. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in Gedichte und Romane, ed. Emil Staiger (Zurich: Manesse, 1968) especially 251–253. The novel's projected ending, which was to recount the coming of a mythical golden age in which all of creation would be reconciled and fulfilled through the beauty of poetry, echoes Schiller's vision of an aesthetic state. As for Goethe's novel, see the first chapter of its eighth and final book, which stages Wilhelm's discovery, in the Tower, of his biography along with those of countless others. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Werke, Vol. 7, Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: dtv, 1998), especially 504–505.

See Lukács's discussion of the novel's constitutive “Gesinnung zur Totalität” in Die Theorie des Romans (Munich: dtv, 1994), 47.

On the form of the novel and the symbolic weight that the putative closure of a character's life is made to bear in it, see Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans section 4, especially 70–72.

Lukács uses “Erziehungsroman” as a synonym for Bildungsroman. He devotes to the genre an important chapter in the book's second section, dedicated to a formal typology of the novel, which pivots on a discussion of Goethe's Meister (Die Theorie des Romans 117–128).

Walter Benjamin seizes on and even sharpens Lukács's criticism in his essay on “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” in Gesammmelte Schriften, Vol. II. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1991), 438–465, especially 454–455.

Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 47. Translation modified.

See Tschichold's extensive discussion, replete with concrete examples, of the functionalist typographic practice he promoted (The New Typography, 64–106).

See the much-quoted, programmatic section on “Produktion-Reproduktion” in Moholy-Nagy's path-breaking survey of old and new visual technologies, Malerei Fotografie Film, 1925–1927 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1986), 28–29. For Moholy-Nagy's modular understanding of an individual's capabilities, see the section “Tafelbild, Architektur und ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ ” 14–17. See also Moholy-Nagy's essay “Theater, Zirkus, Varieté,” which appeared in 1925 in Die Bühne im Bauhaus, ed. Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnar; here quoted in the facsimile reprint edited by Hans Wingler (Mainz/Berlin: Kupferberg, 1965), 45–56, especially 48–50.

For instance, a crucial argument that drives Malerei Fotografie Film portrays the technologies of painting and photography as framed by disparate material conditions—the one operates with pigment, the other with light. This disparity makes it impossible to theorize an unbroken temporal becoming of the humans whose perceptual coordinates these media help to shape. To be sure, Moholy-Nagy assumed a biological predisposition of the individual as an anthropological given but avoided determinism by taking into account the accidental development of technology. Technology thus opens up a realm of freedom by making it possible to amplify the human perceptual apparatus in imponderable ways. Artistic practice serves to create unison among the disparate elements produced by this accidental development. In his later Von Material zu Architektur (1929), which forms a sequel of sorts to Malerei Fotografie Film, Moholy-Nagy reverts to a more traditional, teleological account in presenting humans’ involvement with disparate technologies as a progression from the obdurate solidity of volumetric materials to the spatialized, three-dimensional abstraction of visual perception within the medium of light. In so doing, he falls in line with the more traditional Constructivist narrative of art's tendency to abstraction and dematerialization. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Munich: Gebrüder Mann, 2001).

A characteristic example for the Constructivist understanding of a linear development of styles can be found in Jan Tschichold's teleological narrative, in The New Typography, that directly ties the rise of functionalist typography to the tendency toward abstraction that animates contemporary painting. See the section on “The New Art,” 30–51.

On Benjamin's interest in, and contacts to, the avant-garde, and Constructivism more specifically, see Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18–34. See also the section on “Benjamin und die europäische Avantgarde” in Detlev Schöttker, Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus: Form und Rezeption der Schriften Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1999), 148–172.

Siegfried Kracauer inaugurated this line of interpretation in his conjoined review of Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels and Einbahnstraße, which were both published by Rowohlt in 1928. Siegfried Kracauer, “Zu den Schriften Walter Benjamins,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 July 1928; reprinted in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963), 249–255. For a comprehensive discussion of One-Way Street that situates the issue of allegorical signification within a larger analysis of its formal feature as well as the broader context of Benjamin's work and its reception over time see Gérard Raulet, “Einbahnstraße,” Benjamin Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011).

For an illuminating discussion of the Denkbild as a small form that distinctively hovers between philosophical critique and aesthetic production, see Gerhard Richter, “Paleonomies of the Thought-Image,” Thought-Images. Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1–41. See also the next chapter in Richter's study, which is specifically devoted to Benjamin's practice, “A Matter of Distance: Benjamin's One-Way Street through the Arcades,” 43–71. On the relation between the form of the Denkbild and modern urban experience, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Urban Miniature and the Feuilleton in Kracauer and Benjamin,” Culture in the Ante-Room: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, ed. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 213–224.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1. 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 445.

Benjamin, One-Way Street 445, translation modified.

Though the narrator's gender is never made explicit in this segment, various elements in the passage indicate that he is male.

The sentence reads in the original German: “In einer Nacht der Verzweiflung sah ich im Traum mich mit dem ersten Kameraden meiner Schulzeit”—that is, “In a night of despair I saw in a dream myself with my first school comrade” (my emphasis). Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. IV. 1, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1991), 86.

In keeping with this understanding of constructed subjectivity, the following dream revolves around the speaker's discovery, in the “Fremdenbuch” or visitors’ book of Goethe's house, of his name scribbled in his own childhood handwriting. Whether he had forgotten having visited the site as a child or not, the speaker's befuddlement in discovering his name leaves the reader wondering whether he winds up signing again or not, that is, whether he holds himself to be a different person from the child who once signed (“Vestibule,” One-Way Street 445).

Benjamin, One-Way Street 449–450.

For a discussion of Benjamin's multivalent notion of the German word Spiel, which in his work brings together the concepts of “play,” “game,” “performance,” and “gamble,” see Miriam B. Hansen, “Play-Form of Second Nature,” Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 183–204.

Benjamin, One-Way Street 448.

Ibid., 459.

Ibid., 483.

See, for instance, “This Space for Rent,” which intervenes into contemporary debates revolving around a presumed crisis of criticism, understood as a desirable mode of writing predicated on finding the appropriate distance to one's object. The insert juxtaposes this understanding of writing, which the speaker finds anachronistic, to the impact of advertisement, which completely elides its distance to the recipient: “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt” (Benjamin, One-Way Street, 476). In other words, what makes advertisement effective is its direct, material impact on the recipient's body (the perceptual effect of the red light reflected by the wet asphalt of the street) rather than the conceptual or rhetorical/discursive means it may deploy (“what the moving neon sign says”). For a discussion of Benjamin's approach to writing as a material practice, see Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” Assemblage 6 (June 1988), 6–23.

For the complex relation between Benjamin's understanding of temporality and the notion of innervation that appears in his later writings, see Miriam Hansen, “Mistaking the Moon for a Ball,” Cinema and Experience, 132–162. See especially 146–155 for Hansen's reading of the role of mimesis and innervation in relation to the model of writing developed in One-Way Street.